I've been spouting off on social media and podcasts for a while now that any big inflection in dopamine that isn't preceded by a lot of effort to generate that dopamine inflection is very dangerous. Think drugs, think pornography, think highly processed foods, think anything that, you know, creates this big sense of indulgence and pleasure without any effort is running countercurrent to our evolutionary wiring.

Now, you could say, well, okay, so what are we supposed to do, move into caves? No reward without commensurate sacrifice. That's right. Of some sort. Yep. Yep. Yep. And the other issue, and it's coming up again and again today, and I love that it is, is this notion of the temporal domain 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, you know, a project could take a year, then you have to restart because that project went nowhere. And then you finish the project, you submit a paper, the review, I mean, the reward schedule in science could take four years.

It's not just about getting a degree, like getting papers through sometimes took a year, sometimes took two years, you know, sometimes things didn't go well and you had to publish in a journal that you wouldn't have wanted to, or sometimes you had to abandon projects altogether. So my reward system was trained up on lots of timescales, short, medium, long timescales.

As I've moved into podcasting, the temporal loops are shorter, they're faster. But you know, nonetheless, you know, we do long form content. But you know, I think platforms like X I think are wonderful if used appropriately. I think it's especially great nowadays, frankly, and Instagram, et cetera, they're very useful.

But they train us and I imagine they've trained the young brains that were weaned on them, because I wasn't, but that were weaned on them for fast temporal 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, yeah. - And then of course, we have this notion in this country that, you know, in any moment it could be a rags to riches or a, you know, some, you know, overnight fame type thing that exists as a possibility in our culture that in a way that it hadn't prior.

So I think that one of the things that could be useful, just venturing a hypothesis here is that young and older people could take a look at their life and ask, you know, over what variation of timescales do I derive reward? - Yeah, definitely. - You know, training for a marathon is a longer timescale of reward and death.

- Well, that's also a hallmark of maturity. - Yeah. - Right? - 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, 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, that 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 because 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.

This is part of becoming an adult, if you will. - Okay, so 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. You're not going to know exactly how to do that, but that could be your goal.

Okay, now that's going to inform your perceptions and your perceptions of pathway, but it's also going to modify your reward system, because now every proximal step forward is an indicator of entropy reduction in regard to that meta-goal. Well, there isn't any, by definition, there isn't anything you can do that's more exciting than that.

See, that kind of explains why your friend was able to pop out of his addictive frame, because now he's doing something that's so worthwhile that the temptation of alcohol, let's say, pales in comparison. It's a rewriting of the reward contingencies. Yeah, right, exactly. And now you can imagine a situation where a culture explores across time to find out how to characterize that goal such that if that goal is pursued, people integrate psychologically in a manner that integrates them socially across large spans of time.

I think that's what happens when the monotheistic revelation emerges. That's what's happening from a biological perspective, is that we're starting to characterize the longest-term goal. Yeah, something like that.