- 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 discuss today, due to the activity of specific brain circuitries, including the hypothalamus, the prefrontal cortex, and others, we each and all can adopt different states of mind that powerfully influence our emotions, our thoughts, and our actions.

And in so doing, we are different people depending on those states of mind. Today's discussion is both an intellectual one and a practical one. You will learn where and how to place your thoughts. You will learn the relationship between the call to adventure and responsibility. And as Dr. Peterson emphasizes in his new book, "We Who Wrestle With God," he emphasizes the use of story, in this case, biblical stories, to understand oneself and to best guide one's actions towards the most positive and generative outcomes.

We discuss the self, romantic relationships and commitments, the family, community, and culture. We also discuss the media, politics, cancel culture, things like social media and pornography, shifting masculine and feminine roles, and the innate human drive to create action at a distance, both in space and in time. Today's discussion is both intellectual and practical.

Dr. Peterson emphasizes how to use different sources of story, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to understand and best guide one's decision-making process. Indeed, he discusses the tight relationship between the call to adventure and responsibility as a trustable framework 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're 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.

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Again, that's levels.link, spelled L-I-N-K/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, 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 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, et cetera.

That's all in there like it is in other angles. - We should talk about the idea of impulse in relationship to that characterization. - Okay. - 'Cause 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 'cause 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. - Yeah. - So circuitry that's devoted to our ability to self-inhibit the desire to reach for something or to avoid something.

We can push ourselves into things that would otherwise be aversive, we can avoid doing things that would otherwise drive us to quote unquote, just do it anyway. And then we have what I think of as our default settings, kind of how we're operating in the world with respect to food, other people, ourselves, our thoughts, if we don't intervene with ourselves.

And these default settings are of course established by both nature, a genetic program that wires up circuitry, but also 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, 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 just step back from all of that and ask, is part of the reason that we have a concept of God that there are multiple religions, is that the consequence of some humans at some point realizing, or perhaps God himself realizing, that what we are equipped with as humans, which we just described, is insufficient to allow us to evolve as a species and be the best version of ourselves.

I think this for me really is like the central question of at least my life, which is, to what extent do I need to intervene with my default settings, rewire them, engage that prefrontal cortex and push down on some appetitive or aversive behaviors? And to what extent can we do that?

Maybe- - And to what end? - And to what end? And maybe we need a rule book. You know, I am starting to believe, and I'm now 49 years old, that we need a rule book, that the neural circuitry that's encased within our skulls is not sufficient to allow us to navigate through life 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.

'Cause 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 child when he was two. - I'm wondering where he got it from. - Yeah, well, fair enough. And my father was a formidable character.

And so my son liked to do what he liked to do. And it took him 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's 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, 'cause I said I would return to that, I spent a lot of time walking through the behavioral literature, right? And a lot of that was derived from animal experiments and it was predicated on the idea that if you could explain something on the basis of a deterministic reflex, you should.

And there's 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's gone a long way. They couldn't get to the highest strata of human endeavor with a chained reflex theory, but there was a lot of things they did that were very good.

But one of the things they made a big mistake about was to conceptualize motivational states, let's say, as impulses or drives. That's not sufficient because it fails to take into account the effect of those states on perception. So it's much better to think of a motivated state. This is what helped me integrate behavioral theory with psychoanalytic theory, especially the 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 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, superego regulation, he believed that a healthy personality would have the impulse of aggression and the impulse of sexuality to take two major, lower-order motivational states into account, would have them integrated into the functioning ego.

The issue is integration. And so what you're doing when you're social, like, okay, when my son, for example, would become willful in a manner that I regarded as counterproductive for him and the household, 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 control that because it's not gonna 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, right? - 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 gonna 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 is now able to be a social creature again, instead of falling prey to his whim, I'm reinforcing the cortical integration of those underlying motivational states.

Now, you might think the human organism comes into the world with a warring battleground of primordial motivational states. That's a perfectly reasonable view. We know a lot of that is mediated by the hypothalamus, for example, and 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 hone the manner in which those systems make themselves manifest.

But I think the best way to conceptualize that is that it's the hierarchical integration of the motivational states within an overarching superordinate personality. And that personality is not bound to the moment. It takes the medium and long-term into account. And it's not self-serving, like a two-year-old would be, because you have to take other people into account if you're going to be successful.

So, 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. - Right, 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. - Exploration. - 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 a 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 wanna have friends.

And so the reason you're disciplining your child isn't to teach them that what they're doing is bad, you know, 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, 'cause 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 wanna, 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, because religious thinking is the attempt to formulate something approximating an ideal personality, right?

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 changes the way you view the brain. Look, a lot of archaic deities are motivational systems.

- Could you give me an example? - Well, the god of war, Mars, that's rage. That was a god that the Vikings invoked before they went into battle. They would use aminita muscaria, and they imitated predators from an early age. - This is acetylcholine, by the way, folks, has two general receptor systems, the nicotinic system, which is a stimulant, but also relaxes you, 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'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. - Hard to describe. - 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 that. - 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 their, the aggressive impulse, the strategically aggressive impulse could be channeled.

- Right, and give full rein, give full rein, 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. You would give you nightmares to think about it deeply. - Yeah, 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, 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 hypothalamus has these neurons basically interspersed with other neurons that, when stimulated, suppress rage and activate copulation. Incredible, right? Within the same structure, you have these mutually exclusive sets of 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, but 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, okay?

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, the future.

Autonomic activation, stress, panic, fear, anger, tend to make us lose sight. - Shrink. - We get blinders on, lose sight of the fact that there was a past, there's a present, and there's a future. - Yes, well, that's because they're collapsing 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 you don't want to underestimate the sophistication of the hypothalamus. And this is partly why conceptualizing its various states as subpersonalities is so useful. I mean, it's 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 do cat things and live. Now, and it's hyper-exploratory. Now, that's a very strange thing, where it's a cat with no brain, it's 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 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 gonna be tension, and that is something like the tension between the individual and the group, you might say. That's how the Russoians 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 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. And it's like, it's an unsophisticated strategy.

- They want what they want now. - Regardless, yeah. - And they don't care about the we. - Or the future. - Or the future. - See, see, this is one of the ways I caught on to this relationship was, 'cause 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, toddler. - Well, so here's something I learned in Montreal. I worked with a man named Richard Tremblay there, and Richard, I think Richard's lab used up 1/3 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 moved towards was that, one observation was that if you take two-year-olds, if you take kids at different ages, you could imagine you made a group of two-year-olds, three-year-olds, group of four-year-olds, all the way up to 15.

You just let them interact. The two-year-olds are the most aggressive, 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 this circuit. - Right, right, or integrate it. - 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.

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, exactly. It's the indication of a virtual absence of sophisticated socialization. - They are truly in their hypothalamus. - Yeah, yeah, right, exactly, and that's, well, especially if you have a hypothalamus that's tilted towards rage, let's say, and defensive or predatory aggression, that's bad news. Now, so what's the upshot of that?

Well, the upshot is that there is a, that's right, there's a subset of kids whose default reactions aren't socialized, and we associate that with psychopathy and long-term criminality. It'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 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 'cause we don't know exactly what the perception would be.

But then you see, then it's the perception driving the behavior. That's not an impulse, right? That's more like a strategy. 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 gonna pause you there 'cause I think this is extremely important. - So the god of war. - Or the god of love. - The gods of love. - Exactly, exactly that. - So the idea that the different gods are the reflective of different, we'll just say it as neuroscientists, as 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 literature of rage.

There's a culture of rage. There are patterns of rage that are played out in drama and literature. Like, it's not only that the motivational impulse is a personality. It's a personality with a history and a philosophy. And if you don't think it can possess you, you don't know very much about possession.

So like, for example, if you're fighting with someone and you 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 wanna 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 gonna be an endless stream of sophisticated intellectual rationalizations that come along with that possession, right? It's full-fledged personality, and it's... One of the things you see with people who are psychotic, you know, who drift off into the landscape of their imagination is that they dwell on such states of possession.

So for example, these kids that shoot up high schools, like they're fantasizing under the influence of rage and resentment for thousands of hours. That just takes control of them. And it's not a simple impulse. It's like, no, 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 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, et cetera.

In any event, there are certain conditions, including depression, where the direction of flow between the prefrontal cortex and the insula literally reverses. It's like running against the typical traffic. This is a very different example, because here you're presenting it in the context of rage, or 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 neurological 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 they grew it, and it grows because it's reinforced with dopaminergic hits, and as it grows, its capacity to dominate increases.

And so when there's a cue for the addiction, this is why people relapse when they get out of a treatment center. They'll go back to their normal environment after having dealt with the physiological withdrawal, let's say, and a cued craving will make itself manifest like a friend they freebase with, and it's all of a sudden, whoom, that monster is alive, and it just shuts everything else down.

And it's got a personality. It can lie. You know, one of the hallmarks of addictive behavior is lying, and the lies are the rationalizations of that 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- - 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. AG1 is an all-in-one vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink with adaptogens.

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Again, that's R-O-K-A.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. One of the most remarkable real life examples I've ever witnessed of the power of belief in God, I'm just gonna say it as it 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 at 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, "This is it. You've got to solve this or we just can't be with you." A very scary situation for everybody involved, including him who absolutely adored his family. He told us, his friends, that he was going to go to 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. And you can imagine we all thought, including myself, like, okay, dude, like, good luck. I hope this works. But like, I would say zero minus one confidence in his ability to get and stay sober.

He just had not succeeded prior to this. He's been sober more than four years now. He got out of there and never looked back. And I wonder now whether something, something must've 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 got another prefrontal cortex, a more powerful prefrontal cortex. So maybe we could talk about that. - Well, that's not a bad way of thinking about what it is that people are trying to do when they say pray.

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's a pretty good anxiolytic drug, but it's also, for people who are prone to alcoholism, it's a good incentive reward source, like cocaine. If you're going to, you can't get rats addicted to cocaine if they live in a natural environment.

They have to be isolated in a cage before they'll bar press to their own death for cocaine. So one of the things you want to do when you treat addiction is you want to substitute a new incentive structure, right? Because the part of the addictive process is you fall into a false incentive pattern, right?

'Cause 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. - And I'll just say, 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. 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. 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 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 can think of our perceptual systems and our emotional systems, for that matter, as navigating tools.

Right, so now the addiction, the addicted brain, like they say, the aim is possessed by the substance of addiction, right? So now the highest god is cocaine, let's say. And so now all pathways in the world are pathways to cocaine. All objects in the world are markers on the pathway to cocaine.

'Cause it just dominates, but it's not just an impulse. It dominates the perceptual landscape as well. That's makes it, and the emotional landscape. And it comes with all these rationalizations. That's all those lies, right? The whole thing, it's a whole personality. Yeah, brutal, brutal. Nowadays, I get a lot of questions about pornography.

And the discussion around pornography is always related to the discussion around masturbation. But let's just talk about pornography for a moment in this context of these primitive drives and these circuits within the hypothalamus, which we were all born with, that clearly some of them are devoted to our progression as a species through reproduction.

Zero question about that. Sexual behavior being linked to reproduction. Not always, but certainly we can all agree on that. It's a necessary precondition. I hope we can still all agree on that. But 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. And we could think about two ways to attack this if one believes it's a real concern, and they certainly do, so I do.

I don't, I would be open if I had or do. Pornography has not been my thing, and I don't struggle with it. 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 as you're acting.

What the dopamine does is increase the probability that the circuits 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, there's been work done with generally simpler animals on these phenomena called super stimuli. I think it's stickleback fish where this was first observed. So males, I hope I get this right, but I've got it approximately right.

I believe it's male sticklebacks will, they're very aggressive towards other male sticklebacks. And the reason they're aggressive is because the other male sticklebacks have a red dot on their bellies. So they don't like red dots at all. And so you could really enrage a stickleback with a red dot.

And if you use a red dot that's a little bigger and a little brighter than the typical red dot, you get a super stimulus. It's virtually irresistible to the stickleback. And it's weird because the maximal activation is produced by a stimulus that they wouldn't see in nature. It slightly exceeds, that's exactly what pornography does.

It's a super stimulus, right? And it's not surprising that young males in particular are susceptible to that because male sexuality in human beings is very visually oriented. Very, and a lot of our brain is visual, way more than virtually every other animal. Certainly every other primate and 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 like an evolutionary, ecological, radical ecological transformation.

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 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 'cause I was traveling home for Thanksgiving and I looked around and I thought this isn't a convenience store, this is a pharmacy.

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. Then 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 gonna 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?

I eat 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 elements that we have- - Explain why you think that 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 wanna 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 package of Skittles, which I'm guessing there's very few of them, if any, you're gonna 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. - Right, multiple pathways to satiation, one dependent on taste, - Of course. - one dependent on actual nutrient content. The mouth can only learn taste association. The mouth can't actually learn nutrient content.

The gut knows nutrient content. The problem is you take a food that is low in a micronutrient or macronutrient or essential amino acids or essential fatty acids. After all, there are no essential carbohydrates. There are only essential amino acids and essential fatty acids. - Right, right, right. - And it will keep you eating and it will keep the appetite system revving until you get enough of those.

Now, here's the issue, if you've ever done this, it's probably been- - So that's empty calories. - Empty calories. - Yeah, oh yeah. - So in some ways, this, again, is an analog to the whole discussion around pornography, masturbation, 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 situation with food is the following. If we are eating without any gut-level understanding of 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 rib eye 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, you're loosing threshold, you've reached that, et cetera, all of 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 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 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, right? 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 'cause there's also a novelty kick in dopaminergic striving, right? I mean, so with any basic appetitive pleasure, there's a dopaminergic kick. But with any novelty, there's also a dopaminergic kick. So there's an optimized threshold for novelty and appetitive striving that plays out in pornography. So 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. Right, 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 gonna order a steak, order a Pittsburgh char.

The char on the outside is incredibly tasty. - Right, right. - We love that, the umami taste, we should have a devoted taste receptor. - It's complex. - Yeah. So, and if they don't know what a Pittsburgh char is, then maybe you're in the wrong restaurant or you need to educate them, but incredibly satiating, delicious, right?

But if you were to slather those steaks in a bunch of things, I would suspect that after a while, your plain steaks wouldn't taste as good. - Oh, 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, all the condiments, et cetera, would start to become aversive.

I do believe that when we return to the sort of most naturally satisfying mode of engaging 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 it's 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, to go out and find a real relationship, a real sexual relationship or a relationship of any kind.

- Well, it's also, there is some evidence suggesting too that if you've been socialized into pornography sexuality, it's actually quite difficult to establish a sexual relationship with an actual partner. Now, I would say to some degree, that's always been difficult because it's a complex form of behavior. But the introduction of pornography, well, it sets up a whole landscape of expectation, for example, that's not necessarily gonna play out that well in the real world, let's say.

- And there's also a learning of those biological systems in the brain to evoke arousal by observing sex as opposed to participating, right? 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 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 looks at the stars and thinks I wanna go up there.

I might if I'm 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 liked- - Targeted.

- Dirt clod wars, right. - Targeted impact at a distance. - 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 cache of action at a distance, that's unbelievably deeply embedded in us. That's why I made that throwing gesture. Like human beings throw, that's our physiology, right? We can throw something at a distant target. Well, that's structured our 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 wanna participate in vicariously, even vicariously, they're target hitting games. Like our gaze specifies as the center of a target.

There's targets everywhere. And we're unbelievably focused on bridging the gap between where we are and where we're going. Yeah, that's the whole perceptual landscape. - I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function. I recently became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing.

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Most technologies are about that. In fact, if you think about social media, somebody tweets something and when people react to it, maybe positively or negatively, the school shooter in a very dark example, a sad or tragic example, right? Action at a distance. Then you think about pornography and masturbation, and I'm not passing any moral judgment here.

It's like the ultimate form of creating action at a distance would be to create a new human being with somebody, right? I mean, you're propagating it in physical distance, creating a new being, and in time, right? I mean, incredible. And then you think about masturbation and you think about pornography, and there is no action at a distance.

And I'm not just punning here. I mean, literally, there's not much action at a distance. It's all up close to oneself, but there's no impact on anybody. It's almost as if the energy that we're born with to be able to create positive things, to evolve our species through action at a distance, through creation of knowledge, technology, children, communities, culture.

- It's the ultimate 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 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, what the language for it is only like the diminished souls of these people who are coming to me saying like, help, and I'm thinking, okay, listen, I'm a podcaster, I'm a scientist.

I know some things about the dopaminergic system, but 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 reflex, but there's no action at a distance for them.

This is the same thing I see with the failure to launch kids who are still living at home, who are not having any action at a distance. I think we were designed to disperse from our families and to create action at a distance up until a certain age. But I see so many of the problems that we face as failure to find a productive way to have action at a distance.

- Well, that's a failure venture, I would say, in the terminology that I've been developing. So, for example, in this book, in We Who Wrestle With God, 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 and tell me what you think about it.

So, 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. So an ambition will seize you, and then you'll aim at fulfilling that ambition, but once the ambition is fulfilled, a new ambition makes itself manifest, which might be a greater ambition, let's say, if your personality's 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, 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 imbursed 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 that you don't have everything you need when you're being delivered everything you need. That isn't how life works. So God says, "You have to leave 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. And Abraham agrees, and he does so in two ways. He builds an altar signifying his aim, that he's going to abide by the command of this voice or the invitation of this voice, and that he'll make the appropriate sacrifices.

It's a crucial, it's a crucial, it's a crucial point to understand because the process of transformation requires sacrifice. To be more than you are means you have to let go of that which you were. You have to make sacrifices. Now, Abraham's life is punctuated by a sequence of reaffirmations of his upward aim and declamations of his willingness to sacrifice.

Every time he finishes an adventure, he reconstitutes 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? And maybe there have been people like Csikszentmihalyi who've characterized that as the attractiveness of flow, and maybe it's associated with the exploratory circuit in the hypothalamus that's mediated by dopamine. Okay, but it's 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 gonna be better than you are.

And that's a better win than merely being good like you are now. So that would be participation in that transformative process is a higher form of attainment than mere attainment of any specific goal. Okay, so that's the call to adventure. That's the call to a quest. That's what Gandalf offers Bilbo, for example.

Okay, God characterizes the consequences of that. And this is so cool. When I figured this out, it just flattened me. It's so interesting. God says, okay, if you, God is defined as that which says this, by the way. If you push yourself beyond your zone of comfort, even if it's functioning for you, that's Abraham's situation, here's what'll happen.

You'll become, you'll live your life in a manner that's a blessing to you. So that's a good deal, 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.

So that's a good deal, because we know that people, men in particular, are very status-oriented, partly because their reproductive success is highly correlated with their social status, and the psychopaths game that, but still, it's like, renown is crucially important. You wanna be the quarterback on the shoulders of your teammates, you know?

So that'll be the second thing that happens, and then the same voice says, and that's not all. You'll be a blessing to yourself and be renowned in a manner that will maximize the probability that you will establish something of lasting value. That's a good deal, so that's 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 maximize the success of his offspring in the longest possible run, 'cause 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, and you do that voluntarily, so you put yourself on the edge of adventure, you will be following the instinct that has already evolved to make your life a blessing to yourself, to make you successful among other people, to maximize your probability of long-term success, and to do that in a way that brings abundance to your community.

And then you think, look, let's take the contrary hypothesis. The contrary hypothesis would be twofold. There is no compulsion to adventure. It's like, that seems highly improbable. Or that the compulsion to adventure isn't aligned with psychological and social well-being. Well, what's the 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, right?

It's failure to hit the proper target, you might say. But that central drive to integration across time and communally, why wouldn't that be an instinct? And then we could cap that with an observation that I also think is self-evidently true once you understand it. So imagine that you're a father.

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

And I would say, insofar as you encourage that, you are a good father. And that would mean that you're the embodiment of that spirit that calls to adventure. That's why Abraham is characterized, for example, in this story as forging an alliance with the spirit of his ancestors, with the deity of his ancestors.

He's embodying the call to adventure, and that's what makes him the father whose reproductive enterprise is successful across the broadest possible span of time. I think that's, I just can't see how that can be wrong. And that's a characterization of the divine. 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. Trouble's coming. Okay, so here's the hypothesis. The hypothesis is the voice that calls to the wise to prepare in times of trouble is a manifestation of the divine, and it's the same as the voice that calls the unwilling to adventure.

That's the monotheistic hypothesis, and so you can see what the imagination is doing is agglomerating these different characterizations of high aim, insisting that there's an integrated unity behind them, and then trying to conceptualize that integrated unity across time. And so, and I think that's done, I think that's done with radical success in the biblical library, that the culmination of the library of stories is the impressionistic representation of this integrating pattern, and I think that's what people call on when they're engaging in a religious enterprise that is radically successful, like that happened in the case of your friend, right?

So he got a new personality, and that new personality had different incentive structure, and so that just superseded the addiction. It's almost as if, I mean, I realize that for people listening, it might not seem like this, but to us, his friends who had seen him try so hard in the context of people he truly, deeply cares about, more than anybody in the world, his children, his wife, it was almost like he got a brain transplant.

It was 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's love for him, and he saw an image of who he could become.

This was important, perhaps, no doubt, and 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, but what's remarkable is that he was able to take that outside of this place.

It was a residential facility, out of this place. - And carry it with him. - And 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.

You know, extremely successful as a commercial artist, and 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?

And then most, so I think one of the best ways to understand a motivational drive is that a motivational drive grips the target. It establishes the target, right? And it may increase the probability that certain action patterns will make themselves manifest. That would be 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. - Which is why it can be gamed 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 wanna make sure people understand that as that dopamine increases, the probability that your perception will go to something other than the target decreases exponentially.

As you get closer and closer, you get more and more dopamine. The greater the elevation in dopamine, the lower the probability that you'll engage in any other pattern of self. It's like it's almost, or personality type, other than the one that you're engaged in in pursuit of this behavior will emerge.

- Not least because as you approach successfully, the probability of ultimate success is obviously increasing. So it makes perfect sense that you would narrow in focus. You run faster as you see the finish line. - Right. - Faster and faster. This concept of sin as missing the target or this definition of sin, I think is incredibly important.

- Hamartia is the Greek word and it's literally an archery term, but it's also the word for sin in ancient Hebrew is also an archery term. And there's other languages where that's the case, but it's really important to understand that that notion is predicated on this target seeking psychophysiology.

And that that's unbelievably deeply built into us as you pointed out, 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. - Oh, 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 wanna look it up, it's superior colliculus. It's also called the tectum. In other species, it means roof. It's the roof of the midbrain, et cetera, that generate reflexive eye movements. You stimulate in there, it's like a machine. In fact, a colleague of mine who's now retired at Stanford, Eric Knudson, 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 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. - Right, right. - 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 hyper-exploratory.

- Right, everything's a target. - Everything's a target. - Everything's a target. - Everything is a target. - And there's no context-dependent learning, 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. - Yeah, right? It is amazing. - 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, 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. - 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. - Right, exactly. So humans have a massively expanded notion of what gaze is and our ability to control gaze and understanding of gaze.

So when you raise this idea, that when you raise this fact, rather, about gaze defining the target and that looking at others' gaze allows us to understand what they are defining as the target, we started 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 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. - Yeah, and then turn. - 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 bodily posture by those underlying.

- Yeah, this is a superior colliculus. 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, right? Okay, so that's an activation of the eye fields, let's say, by these underlying motivational systems that have this personality-like autonomy.

But you can orient your, part of the religious enterprise is to orient your eyes heavenward. Well, what does that mean? Well, you can think about it. It means to search out the North Star that navigates for you unerringly, regardless of the situation at hand. Imagine you could progress towards a target in a manner that made all the potential targets that you could progress toward more likely.

It's a meta-target. You said that's what happened to your friend, right? Is not only did he dispense with his addiction, but all of the other enterprises that he was associating, 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 he's different. - Yeah. - And I thought, you know, like most people would, you know, perhaps would think like, all right, let's see. Let's see, but this has been four years now.

He's very consistent with his program. He, 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. - Yeah. - And even his text messages are very much of like, what's going on today? You know, asking questions that are very much of the now. - Yeah. - And it's been a remarkable thing to observe. - Well, so- - 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 gonna 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 can say this without revealing, 'cause no one knows, I'm godfather to his son. And his son is thriving, which is wonderful to see. And I just think of sometimes about how badly it could have gone the other way.

- Yeah. - And it's fantastic. It's like, he'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, it's a meta-goal strategy.

It's very practical. It's very, very practical. And it emerges out of the biblical tradition in a very grounded manner. It's a logical extension of the biblical ethical precursors. So what Christ says to his followers in the course of the Sermon on the Mount is, first, orient your eyes upward.

Okay, so that's in alignment with the notion that the firstborn is to be consecrated to God. There's a meaning to that. And the meaning is something like this. Imagine that your life consists of a sequence of episodes. Okay, an episode has a beginning and a middle and an end.

The beginning sets the frame for the episode. So at the beginning of an enterprise, you want to 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 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, and 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 wanna solve is what your goals should be.

But a much deeper problem would be how do you conceptualize your goals in relationship to one another across the broadest span of time and person so that every goal has the highest probability of succeeding? So that would be like the pursuit of a metagoal. 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 metastrategy, 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 the particulars of what someone is afraid of. That turns out to be somewhat irrelevant. You teach people to voluntarily confront what they're avoiding, and that doesn't make them less afraid. It makes them more competent and braver, and that generalizes, right? And so, yeah, the religious pursuit is the pursuit of meta goals in relationship to positive and negative emotion.

That's a good way of thinking about it. - I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the correct ratios, but no sugar.

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If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com/hubermanlab to claim a free Element sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com/hubermanlab to claim a free sample pack. - I love this idea of looking upward and defining, or at least having a sense that there's a internalization of the greatest possible outcome.

And when I say greatest, both for oneself, but also for the community, right? - Yeah, that's life more abundant, or that's the symbolic terminology, or life in eternity, both of those are the same thing. So imagine you're fighting with your wife. Okay, now you're dominated by rage. Now, the advantage to that is you're ready.

But the disadvantage is you're going to strive for proximal victory. Okay, now, you don't wanna be a pushover. That's a mistake. So then what could you do instead? You could pause, and you could remember, okay, if this could rectify itself in the best possible manner, what would that look like?

Well, it's complicated, right? You don't want your wife to be defeated, and you don't want to be defeated, and you wanna solve the problem, but you don't wanna sweep it under the rug. You wanna 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. - If you don't alter your aim, you will be, because you need to substitute. You gotta 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 wanna win, and then you might say, well, why?

It's like, 'cause it's a better deal. So there's one of Christ's parables where he talks about a pearl of great price, which is the pearl that a rich man would sell everything he owns to possess, and it's 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 forego the ultimate game, that's not a victory, that's a defeat, obviously.

It might even be a worse defeat than if you lost. - Absolutely. I'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 creates this big sense of indulgence and pleasure without any effort is running counter-current 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. And the other issue, and it's coming up again and again today, and I love that it is, is this notion of the temporal domain of rewards that exist over multiple 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, a project could take a year, then you have to restart 'cause that project went nowhere, and then you finish the project, you submit a paper, the review.

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. Sometimes things didn't go well and you had to publish it 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 nonetheless, we do long-form content. But 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, 'cause I wasn't, but that were weaned on them for fast temporal timescales. 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, yep, yep. - And then, of course, we have this notion in this country that in any moment, it could be a rags to riches or some overnight fame-type thing that exists as a possibility in our culture 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, over what variation of timescales do I derive reward? - Yeah, definitely. - You know, training for a marathon is a longer timescale of rewarding death.

- Well, that's also a hallmark of maturity. - Yeah, yeah. Yeah, school, a degree, et cetera. In business, the timescales 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?

'Cause 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, right, 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. And I'd figured out a few years ago with a couple of my students that anxiety signifies the emergence of entropy, like technically, which I was really thrilled about because it gives emotion a physical grounding, like a real physical grounding.

And Friston surprised me because he said he has a theory of positive emotion that's analogous. He also knew the negative emotion. He'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 related to entropy is 'cause with each 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, you need to be able to, I love this entropy argument. It makes total sense that you want to be able to withstand the periods of time when you don't know whether or not things are becoming more or less uncertain.

- Yeah, yes. - This is part of becoming an adult, if you will. - Okay, okay, so yeah, that was exactly the thread. So 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 gonna know exactly how to do that, but that can be your goal. Okay, now that's gonna inform your perceptions and your perceptions of pathway, but it's also gonna modify your reward system because now every proximal step forward is an indicator of entropy reduction in regard to that meta-goal.

Well, there isn't any, by definition, there isn't anything you can do that's more exciting than that. See, that kind of explains why your friend was able to pop out of his addictive frame because now he's doing something that's so worthwhile that the temptation of alcohol, let's say, pales in comparison.

Right, right. - Right, it's a rewriting of the reward contingencies. - Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. And now you could imagine that, you could imagine a situation where a culture explores across time to find out how to characterize that goal such that if that goal is pursued, people integrate psychologically in a manner that integrates them socially across large spans of time.

I think that's what happens when the monotheistic revelation emerges. That's what's happening from a biological perspective is that we're starting to characterize the longest-term goal. Yeah, something like that. - This is why I believe that pornography is potentially so poisonous because the level of uncertainty is basically zero. - Yeah.

- People can access what they want to see. They can keep foraging until they find it. - Yeah. - And that's not the way that relationships work. The way relationships work is I ask somebody out, they might say yes, they might say no. You go out on a date, they might not want a second date.

- Well, and that's all very- - Things could progress. You might think that you're on the path to one thing and it turns out it doesn't work or you're not compatible. 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 an actual life. - No action at a distance.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 'cause as you said, you have to chase that novelty edge.

- Otherwise dopamine is driven down further. - Well, and that means what? It's gonna 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 that's a bottomless pit and in the most pernicious possible manner because sexuality can definitely twist itself into pathological forms that undermine psychological integrity and demolish society. - No, we see this with people who are highly successful who seem to have lots of areas of their life regulated and then, you know, they collapse their lives.

And we sometimes see it with drugs of abuse as well. Although unless those drugs of abuse are dopaminergic and people have them in check, 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. Okay, Revelation is a vision of the eternal pattern of the end.

So here's an element of the vision. It's so remarkable. I figured this out with my friend Jonathan Paggio. 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 gonna 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? 'Cause whatever united it has vanished. That's like the death of God. It's vanished. And so now it's got heads in every direction. So it's confused. And it's red, scarlet, because that 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 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 will 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 gonna 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 was it was hard for me to know to what extent that was part of the whatever-- - The performance?

Probably hard for everyone to do. - 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 onto 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, 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 people, 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. Just like seeing somebody-- - Pushing the envelope. - Just like seeing somebody murder somebody in cold blood. We could talk about that recently, a video of an assassination. Those had been available before, but those two things kind of leveled up or leveled down, one's idea of what humans are capable of by allowing so many people-- - And what's acceptable.

- What's acceptable. - Or desirable. - That's right, the threshold shifted. - That's for sure. - Maybe that's what I'm looking for, the threshold shifted. - Yeah. - 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 commoditizes when the masculine state degenerates. That's a sign of the end of things, and that makes perfect sense, because 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 sacrifice-less sexual satiety is that sexuality itself is destroyed.

And I think we're seeing that in our society now. 30% of Japanese under the age of 30 are virgins. Right, it's about the same in South Korea. Right, the birth rates in those countries have plummeted. Like, they're way, way below replacement. And increasingly, 50% of women in the West are childless at 30, 50%.

- Yeah, 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 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 person that you love, you know, you find someone else you can love.

He explained to me that's not what that was about. That was about the wildness of the '70s. - Right, right, that promise. - Yeah, that was about the sort of the, just 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. And 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, sure, sure. It's a feedback. - 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. Like 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 Mark 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 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 highest form of potential satiation is risky romantic adventure. It's not satiation, right? That's the wrong frame, right? 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 3,000 or 4,000 people. And there's one place I go that always reduces the audience to like dead silence. The audiences are usually quiet in the events. That's one of the ways, I'm sure you know this, is you wanna listen to the audience, you wanna stay in that zone where no one's moving, right?

'Cause 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, 'cause they don't know this. Conservatives talk about responsibility, but they're conscientious, and so for them, responsibility is dutiful, orderly productivity. It's conscientiousness. Responsibility is a conscientious duty. What they fail to understand is that there's no difference between responsibility and adventure.

They're the same thing. And you can tell young men in particular that. Say, look, you wanna have an adventure, 'cause you definitely want an adventure. You're 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. 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. 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 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 gonna do when I woke up. I made my bed, and then I went and fixed the garage for like 10 minutes. - And you get the brain into this, into what I call linear operations.

Like the ability to carry out something linearly when there's 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 target. 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 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? It means the outcome matters. What does that mean? It means it's a life and death situation. Like, none of that makes itself present without the hoisting of a burden.

And here's something else I figured out, so remarkable. So I went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, which is the first 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. Like, 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 gonna integrate you psychologically, it's gonna integrate the society and make it productive. And it's so interesting that we acted that out for, that proposition out for, well, the whole, at least insofar as you're talking about Christian-oriented civilization for the last 2,000 years, without ever really noticing that we were dramatizing the proposition that sacrifice is at the center of the community.

It's like, well, obviously. - Well, what are we to make of cities like San Francisco, which I grew up just south of, and by any standard, it's a beautiful city. I know people are gonna roll their, some people will 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 afternoon hours, let alone at night. So that, at this point, you wonder, 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, it's sad. - Yeah, well, the question is. - It's tragic, it's tragic. - 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 around, mere chaos is set upon the world. I haven't got the quote precisely right. That was T.S.

Eliot. He knew that when 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.

There's an insistence on the postmodern side. So the postmodernists, they figured out that we see the world through a story, and they were right. And that's a devastating blow to the empiricists and the rationalists 'cause they were wrong. We do not build our knowledge in consequence of an aggregation of facts.

That's not how it works. And a story is something like the prioritization of the world of facts. - I heard recently 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 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 wanna understand more about the human psyche. Well, why? Well, I wanna be of aid to the human enterprise. I wanna make things better. That's the story. I wanna pursue truth in a manner that makes things better.

That's the story part. And you might say, "Well, that's self-evidence." Like, it's only self-evident when it's working properly. When it's not working properly, things get bad quick. So there were scientists in Unit 731 when the Japanese invaded China, and you cannot read about what they did without traumatizing yourself permanently for the rest of your life, right?

What happened with Unit 731, it's the worst human atrocity I've ever seen by a lot, and that was the scientific enterprise gone astray, let's say. It has to be encapsulated within a value structure, and the question is, well, what's the appropriate value structure? We're starting to figure that out, 'cause you know, I talked to Richard Dawkins about this a little bit.

One of the things that disheartens Dawkins is that as the humanistic enterprise has progressed, and as the atheistic impulse has made itself more manifest, the assault on science and logic at the universities has intensified. 'Cause his notion was, if we could just free ourself from the superstitions of the past, everyone would become like a hybrid between, let's say, Newton and Bacon and Descartes.

It's like, no, it turns out that when you destabilize the underlying story, everybody becomes a narcissistic, immature psychopath, and they don't make good scientists. And 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 within and across lineages was to seek out new territory.

I could tell a lot of stories that would take up hours about great advisors telling their students to move into new territories, which sounded like, get out of my field. I'm gonna demolish you. But instead, what they were encouraging them to do was to go on, let's use your language, new adventures of responsibility.

- On a new frontier. - But instead, what's happened is that 95% of the scientists in a given subfield all work on similar problems, pin metals 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 it and you go, how the hell did this progress for 15 years where everyone was, 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, but-- - Yeah, yes and no. They're a little bit intense on the career formulation side of things. - Well, so-- - Right, the careerist aspect as opposed to the scientist aspect.

- Well, we-- - Yeah, that exists too. - 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 gonna take a while and it's not certain. - Right. - It's not at all surprising that people would subvert an enterprise that difficult to the narrow demands of career enhancement. It's exactly what you'd expect unless there was a stunningly powerful 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, 'cause that's what a serious scientist does.

And so it's not surprising that it would degenerate into something like dynasty and nepotism. That's exactly what you'd expect. That's the historical norm. So then you might think, well, what are the preconditions that have to be in place as narrative foundation for there to be at least some people that are prioritizing the truth?

- I think one needs to reward true adventure and novelty, taking on novel problems. And 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, and being willing to stake their careers on it. And we need to actually reward failure if it involved effort to solve things correctly. In other words, give young scientists funding and encourage them to go after novel problems, and understand that most of them will fail.

And that doesn't necessarily mean that they have to be exited out of the university, give them a new novel problem to tackle. Problem is there's so much pressure, and you know, because you're 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, 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 stake 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'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, 'cause you will talk yourself into belief that your falsifications are true.

And then you'll warp the whole field. As you said, you illustrated that in relationship to Alzheimer's disease. Like you can instill love of the truth in 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 than that. Or I could just say, we're gonna follow the thread wherever it goes, and I'm gonna accept the outcome. And I'm gonna presume that the outcome is the best outcome that could possibly have been, even if I don't see why.

Okay, why is that an adventure? 'Cause if I let go of my predetermined goal, I don't know what's going to happen. And that's exciting. That's right, 'cause you don't know. Well, that's the essence of adventure. It's like you're bounding over the uncharted sea, let's say, and you don't know what's gonna happen next.

Well, why would you exchange that for like a kind of banal predictability? Well, to build your career, just, I mean, I understand why, but you're foregoing what's truly valuable for something that's second rate, for something that's secure. That's what Abraham did. It's like, 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. Like he ends up as a warrior. At one point, he has to raise an army to rescue his nephew from the hands of tyrants.

It's like, 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's 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 proximal. And I just believe in, I know my deep, deep, deep love of finding, organizing, and disseminating information that I hope will be useful to people. - Okay, so why- - And that's it.

- Okay, okay, so- - That's the driving force behind all of it, really. - Okay, so great. So I would say, I don't think that that proclamation, I don't think is any different from the notion of identity with the redeeming word. That's the same idea. 'Cause you said generated, generating ideas, right?

Information, and disseminating it, right? So that's like, it's valid inquiry and dissemination of the consequences. Okay, your claim is that that's highly intrinsically motivating. - Oh, yeah. - Right, okay. So then- - 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 the basis for that intrinsic pleasure? We think about that biologically. Well, you could imagine it as a manifestation of the instinct that integrates, right? It integrates you across time. It integrates you with other people across time, right?

And there's a marker for that. Why wouldn't you find your, how could it be otherwise than you would find your deepest satisfaction in pursuing the course of action that integrates you psychologically and integrates other people socially? Like, that would assume that there's a concordance between your deepest self-interest and the interest of your society.

And it better be that way, because otherwise you couldn't thrive as an individual in society. So 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. So, also because the contrary hypothesis is absurd. It's like you're gonna find deep satisfaction, what, rejecting knowledge. And if you do happen to stumble across a nugget, you're gonna hoard it for yourself. Right, well, right, right, exactly.

It's laughable. It's clearly laughable. No one believes that. - Earlier, we were talking about operationalizing the effort, the calling to move from potential chaos to order starts with organizing one's physical space. If we were to extend the rings of the bullseye out a little bit further for people listening who are trying to figure out like 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. You could think about those as integrated manifestations of positive and negative emotion.

So imagine there's a pathway forward to your aim, okay? Your negative emotion tells you when you deviate from the pathway and your positive emotion tells you when you're progressing along the pathway. Okay, now imagine that there's a voice of your integrated positive emotion and there's a voice of your integrated negative emotion.

Calling, that's what fills you with enthusiasm. And that root word of that is theos, right? Deos, that's God. Calling, conscience. Okay, so now that beckons you forward. So how do you find that? Some things bother you. Those are your problems. And you might think, I don't wanna have any problems.

It's like, no, you've got some problems. You can tell that 'cause those things bug you. That's your conscience calling you to your destiny. Those problems, okay? Calling, there's some things that interest you, right? And you don't get to pick them exactly. They just sort of make themselves manifest like the burning bush did to Moses 'cause that's an example.

That's the symbolic representation of calling. It's the dynamism between calling and conscience that orients people upwards, right? That's the pillar of flame and the pillar of darkness that guides the Israelites across the desert when they're lost. Calling beckons. Conscience provides disciplinary limitations. That's a good way of thinking about it.

So you can see that some things are good. You ask yourself, what bothers me about me? Okay, now you have a domain. You think, well, man, some of those things, I just, I don't know how to fix them. Fine, don't fix them. Fix some of the things you could fix.

That's, 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 'cause what'll happen is now you got a little corner of order and now you're a little more well-situated and then you'll be able to see what's the next step. And you might think, well, it looks hopeless 'cause there's just chaos everywhere.

It's like, it's okay because the process is exponential. So even if you start nowhere, if you keep doubling, you're gonna get somewhere and faster than you think. And, well, the same thing applies when you're plummeting into the abyss, unfortunately. - The degenerative stuff. A colleague of mine who studies, he's a geneticist, said 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 and 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 and he grew up in a lot of, surrounded by a lot of political chaos, came to the country, became a physicist, probably 'cause he likes order. He's a very orderly guy.

And it was probably in the early '90s that we went, I was born in '75, so probably, yeah, early '90s, that we went to a movie theater together to see a movie. And he said it as we were walking in. He said, "Look." And I said, "What?" And he said, "This is the beginning of the end." And I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "We're degenerating as a society." And I said, "Why?" And he said, "There are people here in their pajamas." - Right, right.

- And obviously, they weren't in their pajamas, but they'd come in in kind of like bathroom slippers. And they weren't slovenly, but they weren't taking care of themselves. Clearly. - Worse, worse. - They didn't care what other people thought, right? They didn't care. - That's right. They were making a public display of their lack of care.

- Right, exactly. - Right, right. - Exactly. - That's a narcissistic aspect to that, too. Yeah, he's right about that. - Yeah, and I thought at the time, like he's being judgmental. I was a teen, right? He's being judgmental, et cetera. 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, 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 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, you know, these social media posts recently.

We just had a public display of an assassination. - Maybe, you know, 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's last tweet was a podcast cover of my episode with Jonathan Haidt.

And some media outlets tried to make something of that. 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 in that direction. He seems to not want the police to go investigate anybody else, you know, because he claims there's no one else acting with him, et cetera.

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 Unabomber 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 to hazard a 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 disciplined, striving in a highly intellectual atmosphere, for example. - Yeah, he was a valedictorian. He went to Ivy League school and graduated. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I'd 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 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 onto himself the role of ultimate judge. And that's what the kid who shot up Columbine did too and said in his own writings.

He's the judge. And that's like narcissistic beyond comprehension. And the fact that he's being celebrated, well, that's an echo of that moralizing narcissism that's deeply embedded in our culture, deeply embedded. And so, yeah, it's a very ugly, it's very ugly. I see, so we're going to what? We're now vigilantes in relationship to the corporate world, judge, jury, and executioner.

And the reason we've taken on that role is because we, unlike, let's say, the people who run healthcare enterprises, we truly care for the sick and oppressed. It's like, do you now? Do you now? There's so much moralizing in our culture. It's beyond, it's really beyond belief. - I was 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 show 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.

- 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. - And it's hard to do good things over long periods of time. - Right? - It's not hard to be good.

It's just hard to do, it's hard to do good things. It's hard to do big things. I mean, I think that's one reason why I'm very happy that Elon is being celebrated. You don't have to agree with him politically, but the rockets going, the idea of going to Mars, trying to make sure that our species replaces itself.

I mean, these are big, important endeavors. I mean, I, the reason- - Well, and he can clearly do them. I mean, he's- - Well, Neuralink, Neuralink. - He's been insanely successful doing five impossible things simultaneously. Right, that's not fluke. - No. - Right, once, probably not fluke even once, but the probability that it's fluke once is higher.

Five times, no, that's a reputation. Right, and so, and he's a from first principle sort of guy. So yeah, I wouldn't bet against Elon Musk. So, and that is independent of his political stance. And is it difficult to do good things? - Well, it's hard, it's hard. It's hard to do long-term good things 'cause they're long-term.

That's what I was trying to say. - Right, but it's also intensely, the thing is it's also, this is that back to that issue of the relationship between responsibility and adventure. It's like, if the aim is true, the voyage is worthwhile. And so, and that happens right away. Like, you know, you're very successful with your podcast, but my suspicions are you've deeply enjoyed it since its onset.

Well, so, well, that means that some of your pleasure is satiation related. You've become successful, but if that was your aim, you would have failed as a podcaster. Because a podcaster-- - Definitely, I definitely would have failed. - Oh, definitely. - Right, right. - Oh, absolutely, 100%. - 'Cause 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 actually dissolving as you go.

- Right, right, right. Well, that's the prioritization of the short-term over the long run. I mean, Rogan's a perfectly appropriate example 'cause he's sort of like the archetype of the successful podcaster. It's like, what's Joe doing? Well, he's doing what he's always done. He sits down with his producer, one guy, and he talks to people he wants to talk to about things he wants to talk to them about.

That's the whole thing. The whole, and it's, you know, the lefties who refuse to talk to people in the podcast world for 10 years are now proclaiming to everyone who will listen that they should have built their own, you know, alternative media apparatus, and they could have participated in the one that exists now at any time had they shown the least proclivity to do so.

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, 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 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. - And he's been unerring in that. - Yeah, yeah, and I think that that's deep. Yeah, and he doesn't claim to always be right, but his pursuit of the truth has been a driving force for the podcast.

- He claims consistently to not be sufficiently right. That's why he listens and asks questions. You don't ask genuine questions if you believe that you already know everything. You only ask real questions if you don't think that you know enough. And Joe wouldn't be perennially attractive to his audiences if he wasn't asking the same questions that the audience would like to have answered.

- Right, he's genuinely curious. - Absolutely. - I mean, you said it. - Well, Musk himself said, when I interviewed him, he talked about a terrible existential crisis that he had when he was 13, 14, which is not atypical of people with outstanding intellects, let's say. And he resolved that by recognizing that the quest is the source of meaning.

And so he took it upon himself to confront difficult problems and try to solve them. And he found that to be sufficiently gratifying, so his existential crisis resolved itself. And that's very much the same pattern that Rogan is exemplifying in you, in your pursuits. And you can see what impact it has on the public, you know?

And I was talking with one of your staff members before this podcast about your lectures, say, in Australia. And so you're in the weird position where 5,000 people come and listen to a biologist lecture spontaneously for, what, 90 minutes? Like, what the hell? Well, that's just an indication of how compelled people are by anything approximating a genuine quest.

It doesn't even matter the direction, right? It matters the commitment and that capacity to explore and transmit. And that is a manifestation of the word that redeems. - I love this idea, or what you just said, that it doesn't even so much matter the direction as much as the commitment.

A colleague of mine at Stanford who I respect tremendously, Anna Lembke, who wrote the book "Dopamine Nation," she's the head of our Dual Diagnosis Addiction Center. She was the one who really truly deserves credit for bringing dopamine into the public discussion over the last few years. She initiated that, talking about how big inflections in dopamine that are very fast, that aren't preceded by effort, aka drugs of abuse, behavioral addictions, et cetera, leave us below baseline with our dopamine.

And then people will engage in more of the behavior that drives us further and further and further. That's kind of the 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 onto 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, you don't- - Or it reveals itself to you. - It reveals, yeah. - And this is the same thing. - Right. - Yeah, yeah.

- So I think you two would enjoy a conversation at some point. - Well, well, yeah. - I think you're very aligned. - 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. And he leaves his home and the perverse influence of his mother and his criminal betraying past behind.

And he decides that he's going to aim up. And that night, he makes an altar and he makes a sacrifice. And that night, he has a dream of a staircase that reaches up to heaven, which is now what he's walking up, right? And so he finds his purpose. He finds his adventure as a consequence of his decision to be better.

Okay, so now you wanna find your purpose. Okay, first thing you have to do, you have to review how wretched and miserable you actually are. And you have to face that. And then you have to think, I'd rather not have that. And it has to be true. And then you have to aim up.

Now, you don't know what that means because you're pretty scattered and dissolute, but at least you got the damn intent in mind. And then you have to be willing to make the sacrifices, right, along the way. Okay, then what happens? Well, then the pathway will reveal itself to you in increments, calling.

Is there something around here that I could fix, that I would fix? That's a great question. Is there something at hand that I could fix, that I would fix? It might be something low, 'cause especially when you first get going, you're not good for anything. So you might have to start with something pretty trivial, but it doesn't matter 'cause you start getting better.

Is there something that bothers me, that's conscience, that I could set right in some small way? Well, that's there for everyone, right? In the midst of the most catastrophic mess, that pathway, you might even say, look, the more mess around you, the more unstructured possibility you have at hand.

And it's true, you know, it's like, I'm not trying to be a Pollyanna about this. I know how difficult that is, but it is the case that the more mess at hand that you can see, the more opportunity that's there, 'cause, well, if you can see that it's a mess, then you can see the pathway to cleaning it up.

Well, so do it, do it, see what happens. That's the adventure. What's gonna 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 try to take on the role of mother, you know, be responsible for the household operating. Well, it grew him up like mad, as you can imagine.

He ran into all sorts of weird resistances, right? 'Cause his family was upset that he was doing what mom used to do. And like, he just had a tremendously complex adventure as a consequence of his willingness to pursue this. It was obviously necessary 'cause the alternative was that his family was gonna fall apart.

It's like, that's there for everyone. You say, well, my circumstances are so difficult. It's like, fair enough. So are everybody else's, by the way. But that means there's a lot of mess, fix it a bit. And that's ridiculously entertaining and unpredictable. And that in itself is a great deal.

You have no idea what's gonna happen. Just like you didn't know what happened when you started the podcast. Why'd you start it? - I had a, for me, I felt a compulsion 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 gonna be indoors this much, get some sunlight in your eyes in the morning, or else you're gonna have trouble sleeping. Trouble sleeping equates to mental health issues. Stress, uncertainty. My lab was working on ways to regulate stress through deliberate breathing, through other mechanisms.

It was like, well, I want people to have tools, zero cost tools to deal with their stress, to help them regulate their circadian biology, because those wick out to countering the negative forces that were on us, which are social order was disrupted, people are at home. So it was the desire to give people tools that I knew existed, that I was knowledgeable about.

And I had a longstanding 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. - There was a lot of energy behind the mission, but then there was a calling. The calling was from hearing about people's 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? That's like, what good is that? And 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. It's like, well, looks like you could do that on a broader scale, and the technology's there. Why not explore that? That's a perfectly reasonable, and you can see the interplay of calling and conscience there. That's a lovely way of characterizing the voice of the divine, which is how it's characterized, repeated.

Elijah, Elijah's the prophet who appears with Christ when he's transfigured on the mount in the New Testament. It's Elijah and Moses. Elijah is the first person in human history who identifies the divine with conscience. That's his contribution. That's a major psychological revolution, right? It's an unheralded transformation in understanding.

It's like, it's not the storm, it's not the forest fire, it's not the earthquake, it's not the god of nature. He's the originator of the phrase, the still, small voice. Right, it's like that's a, that the notion that your conscience is the voice of the divine, my God, there's virtually 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 I'm now very much a devotee of prayer. I pray before this podcast. - What do you pray?

- Well, before this podcast, I prayed for 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 sacrifice, yeah, yeah. - 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 a little over a year. I always quietly, secretly. - 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, 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 and 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. And for- - 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 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 'cause it has some aspect of neuroplasticity in there.

Non-sleep-depressed, which is a thing that was 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 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, it 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 still myself, that I wouldn't hear.

And sometimes I'll go to sleep and then the next morning something will come to mind. It's not always immediate, yeah. - Well, 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. I mean, look at it's historic, 'cause when did we start to think?

That's not so obvious, you know? I mean, we started to think in words after we developed the ability to use language. What's that, 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. That, it's not even magical. It's how your perception works. Now, there's a magic to it, because I suppose the magic is that you can think up something you never thought up before.

How the hell do you do that? It's more like you experience it, right? You set your aim, you have a question. So you're on your knees, hoping for an answer. The light bulb goes on. Well, if that's not revelation, then what the hell is it? It's the same thing.

Having spent a good portion of my career digging around in brains, recording from neurons, slicing up brains, staining brains, and from my understanding of neuroscience, and I think by now in 2020, almost 2025, we have a fairly good understanding of what different brain areas do, how different circuits interact.

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, 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 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 'cause I don't deserve it, but I'm putting in, I'm showing up to practice, you know, this kind of thing.

So I'm just curious to what extent you see consistent themes across religions, and maybe even to atheism too. Like atheism, it's been argued as its own form of religion perhaps, right? And for anyone listening, I mean, I wanna make clear, like the, there's, I don't have any pushback on atheism.

It's just that for me, adopting, really coming to terms with a real belief in God, and adopting a prayer practice every single night, and also during the day, many times, and always before a podcast, has been just tremendously beneficial to my life. So that's why I'm gonna continue to do it.

Why wouldn't I? But that's the question. To what extent do different, the way that different religions represent God, you think across religions converge on common themes? - Well, I think they converge substantively. I mean, I think the best, I talked to Camille 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? - 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.

It's just, it's not. 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, "Will You Wrestle With God?" Eric Neumann, Carl Jung, Mircea 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 one example, the ancient Egyptians worshiped a god, Horus. Everyone knows the god Horus, because his emblem is the eye, the open eye. Well, what does that mean? But it means in part that the ancient Egyptians worshiped attention, and they felt that the god of attention was the antidote to the pathological state.

And they were right about that. They had a god of the pathological state. That was Seth. The god Seth, the name Seth, became Satan through the Coptic, through the Coptic Christians. So they believed that the degenerate state had a spirit, and the antidote to the spirit of the degenerate state was the all-seeing, the all-seeing, upward-striving eye.

And that's right. It's like they'd nailed that. - That sounds like what you were saying before. Where you set your sights. Where you set your sights. - Yes, exactly. - High and to the heavens, and then to the most proximal thing that's gonna 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 eye is the gateway to that.

And it's the antidote to the degenerate state because the degenerate state, the totalitarian state, insists and tyrannizes, and the open eye seeks. Well, the Egyptians figured this out, and the Egyptian theology had a walloping impact on Jewish theology. I mean, the Jews came out of Egypt. Like, that's a conception.

There are consequences of that conceptually as well as historically. 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 Jungian school did that brilliantly, brilliantly, and biologists should know it in far more depth.

The best neuroscientists of emotion and motivation that I knew, and that includes Joachim Panksepp, they knew the work of Iliad, 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 Iliad.

And also Eric Neumann's book, "The Origins and History of Consciousness." That's a harder one because it's, unless you know the lingo of that school, it's hard to understand what he's aiming at. If you understand that he's aiming at, 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 Iliad, "Sacred and the Profane." Short book, 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 had tracked that in multiple cultures. And that's very, it's very much worth knowing. Because it explains, it explains the symbolism of the emergence of the integrated literate human psyche across tens of thousands of years.

That's captured in story. So imagine this, here's a way of thinking about it. So tribe A, tribe B, tribe C. Now they all have their highest deity or their panoply of deities. Now they unite. Okay, so as they unite, they fight, they compete, and they cooperate. They kill each other, they cooperate and trade.

At the same time that's happening, there's a war in the space of ideas between their respective deities. And you could think about the human beings acting out that war just as you could think about the war, the abstraction reflecting the conflict on earth. Well, there's a pattern to that conflict.

That pattern is quite stable across cultures. It tilts towards a monotheistic unity in so far as the multiplicity of cultures unifies. Well, obviously. Like, what are they gonna 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 Paglia, who understands this quite profoundly, and went in the direction of Foucault. - These are these lineages that we were talking about before.

It's 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 the people that advised me as a graduate student, even those who had my best interests firmly in mind, told me to never talk about my interest in Jungian psychology.

- Really? - Yeah, yeah. - Sorry, I'm laughing 'cause 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.

And so, 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 gonna 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 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, right.

- And 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 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 like, 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. And 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 riposte to Freud in exactly the way you described.

If you like that book and you're interested in all three of them, let's say, there's a great book called "Discovery of the Unconscious," which was written by a man named Henri Ellenberger who was the foremost exponent of existential psychology in the 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 'cause they wouldn't have come to him otherwise. And there's also people for whom sexual dysfunction and trauma are the primary, what would you say, the 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. But 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-- - I mean, it's just not out there. I mean, there are textbooks on neuroscience.

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 there isn't really a satisfactory book about the brain, the mind, and psychology. This just doesn't exist. - Yeah, the closest one I ever encountered probably is "Affective Neuroscience," Panksepp's book.

- He's, I'm so, I must say, you've mentioned Panksepp a few times and Jaak 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 Jaak Panksepp and I thought, "Okay, 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.

Such a-- - 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." Was perfect. Yeah, so that was lovely concordance. - Youngsepp would have been 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 neuroscience at that time, but-- - Yeah, I don't know how he was as a lecturer. He's a great writer. And man, he had an unerring eye for the right problems in terms of psychological investigation.

And very brave in that regard. I mean, he studied laughter in rats. And you think, "Oh, of all the absurd things to focus on." It's like, "No, you just don't understand where the goal is "or play among rats. "Who cares that rats play?" Well, that would be the sort of research proposal that would be pilloried by sensible Republicans looking to trim government waste.

It's like, "No." That was the heart of the matter, right? Rats organize their social hierarchy through play, not through force, right? That's a big discovery. Like that's, I think he should have won a Nobel Prize. - I do too. - Yeah, he should have won a Nobel for a variety of his discoveries, but that one in particular.

Like rats have an implicit morality. That's a major league, and it's based on play. Wow, stunning. - And we see the same thing in kids, obviously. - And well, we see the same thing in chimpanzees. Like, it's pretty strange to understand that dominance hierarchies, if they're functional, are often organized in consequence of play, not force.

Like, so much for 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. Like, Panksepp showed, for example, that play wouldn't emerge among animals if they were possessed by any other motivational state. Things have to be set up very carefully before play will emerge.

Your house is optimally structured if your children can play. Your marriage is optimally structured if you're playing house with your wife. And I think that that reality of the, what would you say, the optimally superordinate nature of play, that makes itself manifest when you're watching someone who's a master at their task.

And Musk is playing. And hopefully that will, you know, and Trump plays too. It's one of the things that made me less uncertain about him. He's deadly funny. Now, it's rough. He plays rough, no doubt about it. But he's ridiculously, he's got a ridiculously comic touch. And that's not something that's generally characteristic of, you know, psychopathic dictators.

Hitler wasn't known for his sense of humor. - Let's talk about sense of humor, if you don't mind, 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 kind of worst of ways by not treating each other with respect. Occasionally, you'd see a discourse that felt 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 degenerated into things that are so nasty.

And it's sort of like people are entering the game, if you could even call it that, with a refusal to shift. Like, that's not a debate. - That's what happens. - 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 gotta be really discouraging. It's like you either dunk on somebody or get dunked on. - You know, I guess the optimistic riposte to that would be the fact that the people that you're pointing to, like Rogan, who is a comedian, like many of the people who've become extremely successful as podcasters, Constantine Kisson, Russell Brand, Dave Rubin, um, 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, I'm quite certain of it. I was part of that, Shapiro was part of that. This was a genuine invitation, which was extended many times in serious ways by people who are very well-connected among the Democratic elite.

And that came to nothing. - They 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. They try and, you know, manosphere, bro, whatever. It doesn't, the reality falls so far from that.

- Yeah, it's just not true at all. - That's not true. - Yeah, so there is plenty of play, and so I think we can be positive about that. 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 are not. It's still a stunning phenomenon and a stunning accomplishment, and a very positive one as far as I'm concerned, and hopefully it will continue.

- Yeah, the power pendulum has definitely swung. - Yeah. - In a different direction. - Yeah, well, that became stark, starkly obvious when Rogan interviewed Trump. That was the death knell of the legacy media. - It certainly elevated podcasts and their impact and significance across the board. - Well, I think it demonstrated the fact that they had been elevated, right?

It was evidence of that 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, and it was interesting because Rogan's conversation with Trump was a serious one.

Theo's conversation with Trump was a mixture of serious and less serious. And 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, I know, it's so funny.

Good for Theo, it's so funny. - Yeah, I'm yet to meet him. I hear he's a very nice guy. - Oh, I really like Theo. 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. It's not a persona 'cause it's actually him too. I can relate to that to a large degree because 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 very funny to watch. It's very funny to see him do this successfully. It's ridiculously and preposterously comical that he got to sit down with Trump. I mean, I just thought that was, that's so funny. And that it was successful and playful.

You know, that's great. And there's plenty of play in the Republican renaissance at the moment, whatever that is. I mean, Republican, to call it that, is like that's whatever the hell's happening. It's not conceptualizable in terms of our normal political dichotomy, right? I mean, we're in uncharted water. Now, hopefully, this is why I hope the Democrats get their act together 'cause every administration needs an opposition.

And if the Democrats continue with this woke idiocy, they're not going to be able to serve as the proper corrective to the excesses that will definitely emerge in the Trump administration, especially if they face no credible opposition. 'Cause that always happens. - Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt. Before we started, we were touching on this a little bit.

And you said something, which was that you're hoping for a really formidable, strong Democratic Party to counter the Republican Party. And you are, and you're saying it again now, you're concerned that if there isn't one, that power- - Corrupts. - Might run amok. - Oh, yes. Well, of course it will.

It always does. You know, and that the Republicans themselves, who might wish well, this remarkable group of people that's aggregated around Trump, it's like they should hope for themselves that they have an effective opposition because someone's gotta be telling you where you're stupid. And if the Democrats, so this is another public invitation to the Democrats, which is like, must be the 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 will 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 gotta be somebody in the Democrats who's got enough courage to forge a new direction.

And if they wanna continue with this same old pattern of woke idiocy, well, go right ahead. It's not gonna work. The tide's already turned in that regard. - I think that judging from some of the 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 one. Don't even try. The whole point is to create.

Well, why would you? - You also can't. - Yeah, right. It's impossible. - 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, and what sort of vision could be put forward that would be attractive. You know, I read today some Democrat claiming that the Democrats are the true 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.

- Yeah, that's absolutely true. Podcasting is real. Even for, 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 a, 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 is 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. Like in anything. You're not.

- Well, you can't. 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 make tremendous allowances for ignorance that's voluntarily admitted to.

- I've certainly made mistakes publicly, apologized for the ones that I felt I should apologize for. There's a slip of the tongue and make it, said something, went back and correct. It was embarrassing, but the ability to laugh at oneself is tremendously powerful. Genuinely laugh. It's just thinking like, oh God, where was I thinking?

I understand this, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, sometimes we err, you know. I have a couple of questions about you. - Uh-oh. - I know you're the clinician, but 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 mind land most mornings? First thing. - Well, I've suffered from a proclivity towards depression my whole life, I would say. And I would say the roughest part of the day for me is morning, although it's way better than it once was.

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. But psychologically, my life is ridiculously, it's absurdly interesting. It's crazily and absurdly interesting all the time. And so anyone with any sense would be like open-mouthed in amazement and gratitude for that. It's preposterous. And I have this tour that's going, well, it's been going for like six years, really.

And it continues. - 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 wanna give too much away, but it's not planned in the sense that there's a script or something.

It's very open and, but-- - It's a quest. - It's a quest. - An intellectual quest, right? - It's a real experience. And men, wear your jacket and tie because everyone else there is gonna be wearing a jacket, at least a jacket. - Dress up, 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. And going there to speak is a privilege and an honor. And so that's ridiculously exciting. And people can find more out about the tour at jordanbpeterson.com, the dates and so forth.

They're 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.

And people are using it like mad. And it's 100% positive. It's philosophically oriented. It's mutually encouraging. We threw four people off the platform out of 40,000. Well, three, 'cause we put one guy on probation 'cause he said he'd improve. And we established a positive culture. There's no bots, there's no trolls.

No one's playing games and we watch. And now, you know, the community has settled into a, it's got an ethos already. And I think that'll be self-sustaining. - So people are there to learn. - And to support each other learning. - Got it. - It launched out of the gate better than we thought it would, even though we were optimistic.

And I would say the quality of what we're offering exceeded, it certainly exceeded my expectations. It's, well, we showed Michael Malice. Michael Malice did a course for us on totalitarianism. And he takes that rather personally, given his family background. And he said that the trailer brought him to tears.

And that's my, now I can be easily brought to tears. So I don't know if I'm the best. - Same, like around certain topics. - Yeah, yeah. - I've cried a few times on this podcast this year and a few others. So that was a vulnerability I'd never expected, but.

- Yeah, well, it's good to know I'm not alone in that. - You're not alone. - 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 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. - Wow, 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 hope, and I do, I do appreciate it. And I know it's unlikely, so. - A long way from posting lectures on YouTube, which is where most people originally found you, if they were listening about that. - Yeah. - That's certainly how I learned about you.

I thought this guy's talking about really interesting things in the fields of psychology. He knows who Jock Panksepp is. And he's posted it 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, you know, when it was mostly cat videos. I thought, might as well put my videos up there and see what happens. And so, see what happens, right? That's an adventure. And so, I did that for maybe six years. Maybe seven years, somewhere between five and seven years before things exploded around me.

And that was also extremely helpful, because when I opposed the Trudeau government's attempt to compel my speech in the form of Bill C-16, 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 accusations.

And so, that was a breaking point in some ways for council culture, because there were very forceful attempts to counsel me. And so, people went and checked me out, and they thought, huh, nothing he says falls into alignment with what he's being accused about. Well, you know, that, what would you say?

That was part of the dam breaking with regards to the corruption of the legacy media. So, not only was what I was accused of a lie, it was exactly the opposite of the truth, which is the most profound kind of lie. So, YouTube helped me out a lot there.

- Well, you've certainly prevailed. And we're all-- - So far. - Well, 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 gonna assume one way or the other, but the fact that you are intentionally inviting and hoping for opposition so that power is checked and things continue in the right direction, I think that's really beautiful because what you're asking for is more balance as opposed to more skewing of knowledge and power.

And I think 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. - Yeah, well, it's been unbelievably rewarding. I mean, part of the reason that my wife and I keep touring is because we meet all these people and they put their lives together.

It's thousands and thousands of people. It's so gratifying. Wherever we go, the probability that someone will come up and say, "Thank you." But then when I ask, like, "For what? "What do you mean exactly? "What changed?" They tell me. And there isn't anything better that can happen to you than to travel around the world and have perfect strangers come up to you as friends and tell you that their lives are far better than they would have been because of their efforts and because of their encounter with what you've been doing.

Like, if you could pray for anything to happen to you, there's not a possibility that you could come up with a better wish than that. And so it's great. It's great. And it's fascinating to explore its continuation and to observe the consequences. And it's a privilege to be in that.

It's an immense, what would you say? It's unspeakably immense privilege to be in that position. And it's so great to see people like you and Friedman and Chris Williamson and all these other podcasters who are pursuing the same vision and so successfully, and to see the massive effect that's having on people.

That's such a good deal. So, and I do believe it's the sort of thing that's in a deeply personalized way, available to anyone who follows their calling and conscience. - Thank you for those words. I also agree it's freely available by people being themselves and as you said, following their curiosity and conscience.

Thank you for coming here today and sharing with us where you're at now, your knowledge, and please come back again. I really enjoyed this. - Hey, anytime. I appreciate the invitation very much. And 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, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel.

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