There's a tremendous amount of pressure on people to find their passion, you know, and follow their passion, and so on and so forth. And I know for me, I would, as a young person, I would go, what the fuck is that? I don't know what it is that I want to do, you know.

I'm lost. I'm just, you know, struggling. But I do think that we are all born with some sort of a, at least one, a kind of a calling of some kind. And it may not be the arts, you know. It may be helping other people through some kind of a nonprofit or something or like what you're doing, Andrew, you know, where you're bringing neuroscience and the scientific, you know, to personal development and so on and so forth.

I think we do all have some sort of calling. And like, we know it. Like, if we could somehow put somebody in here and say, I'll give you three seconds, tell me what you should be supposed to be doing, it will pop into somebody's head. You know, they go, oh, you know, I know I've always wanted to do, to be a motorcycle, whatever, you know.

So, but then that sort of whisper urge to do this thing is immediately countered by this force of resistance, you know, because it's trying to stop us. It's the devil. It's trying to stop us from being our true selves and becoming self-realized, self-actualized or whatever. So resistance will immediately say to us, like if you were to say, oh, I want to have a podcast and I want to talk about, you know, science, da, da, da, da.

Immediately resistance would say, who are you, Andrew, to do this thing? I mean, you're a professor, you know, at Stanford, you know, we don't have any experience doing this. Not to mention it's been done a million times by other people. They've done it a thousand times better than you.

Nobody's going to give a shit. You're going to put this out or you're going to embarrass yourself. You had a certain level of prestige at Stanford. Now you're an idiot. You know, it's going to be that voice, right? Some people actually said Stanford's not going to like it. Why would you do this?

You're tenured at Stanford. What are you doing? You're funded. Your lab's publishing well. One of those people was my father, who's also a scientist. My process of pushing back on that. I rest my case. Yeah. And the true part here, the really kind of interesting part is a lot of times those voices will be the voices closest to us.

Our spouse, our father, you know, because, well, I can get it. I'll get into that if we want to continue. But in any event, so that voice of resistance will come up. In addition, resistance will try to distract us. You know, it'll try to make us procrastinate. It'll try to make us yield to perfectionism where we noodle over one sentence, you know, for three days, you know, or fear.

All of the other things will stop us. So many people live their entire lives and never enact their real calling, you know. But we were talking about the more important to the growth of your soul. That was what we started with this, right? So that calling, whatever it is, to be a writer, a filmmaker, whatever it is, if we don't do that in our life, that energy doesn't go away.

It becomes, it goes into a more malignant channel, right? And it shows itself in maybe an addiction, alcoholism, cruelty to others, abuse of others, abuse of ourselves, porn, you name it. Any of the sort of vices that people have, because that originally creative, divine energy that really wants to be the odyssey or something like that.

If we yield to our own resistance and don't evolve that, then bad things happen. On the other hand, if we do follow that, we kind of open ourselves up to, you know, to becoming who we really are. And, you know, a lot of people in the podcasting and in the human development or whatever they call it, personal development world, they sort of promise like some sort of nirvana is going to happen if you do X, Y, Z.

But what I'm, what I'm promising is a fuck of a lot of hard work that's probably never going to be rewarded, but you'll be on the track that, you know, your soul was meant to be on. And God bless you. You can't ask for any more than that. And sometimes it works out at spectacular levels of whatever, income, fame, whatever it is that people think they might want, but that's not really the thing to chase.

We'll talk about that. Yeah, we'll talk about that. Sometimes it's the lottery of life. Yeah, sometimes, yeah. Sometimes, but that absolutely should not be the thing that people are chasing. Yeah. Yeah, I only know my own experience and I couldn't help but reflect a little bit on, you know, when I was deciding to do the podcast and I did get some voices back like, hey, like maybe that's, you know, what are you doing?

I had not clinically diagnosed with Tourette's or anything like that, but I felt at that point that I had a certain amount of knowledge in me based on 25 years of studying and research in neuroscience and related fields. And I felt like if I didn't let it out, I was going to explode.

And so Rob, my producer and my bulldog, Costello, and I went into a small closet in Topanga and set up some cameras and I exploded onto the camera. I just like, it just poured out. I think for the entire first year we were doing almost all solos, hardly any guests because it was pandemic and we weren't quite sitting down with guests.

Oh, I didn't know. And I don't even remember thinking about the hundreds of hours of preparation. We did hundreds of hours of preparation for each episode, but the just, I just feel like it was kind of like geysered out. So I think there's some benefit to having something build up so much within us that it has to come out.

And I can certainly relate to the dangers of suppressing something. And how old were you when you started that? 45 years old. 45, huh. Yeah, so I was going to relate to it. No, I lectured in front of students and given seminars and lectured in front of donors, which is in some way similar to the podcast in the sense that you're teaching science often to non-scientists or diverse fields.

But for me, it was just inside, I couldn't help it. There was, my only answer was I couldn't help it. And to his credit, by the way, my dad has been immensely supportive of the podcast. He actually was on the podcast and gave us a chance to bond and learn about it.

Great. Him and he's a scientist, so I got to learn some physics. The audience got to learn some physics as well. But yeah, when you take on something that people are not familiar with you doing, or they are projecting onto you the sense that they want you safe and secure, because sometimes it's a real, it's a genuine feeling of support for somebody.

You know, a mother or a father or siblings, like, hey, so you're going to give up your job as a lawyer to go write movie scripts? Yeah. And you got three kids and like, they're scared for you because they don't want to see you take your life off a cliff.

Yeah. What's your response to that? I mean, there's validity to that, obviously. Yeah. But I think what happens is that each person is dealing with their own resistance, their own calling, their own, that they know that they really should be doing. And 99.999% of them are not doing it or are unconscious of it, right?

It's sort of a niggling thing, but they don't know about it. So then when they see you, Andrew, starting your podcast, that's a reproach to them. And they say, well, if Andrew can do it, why can't I do it? And so then it becomes kind of malicious. And I don't think it's deliberately malicious a lot of times, but people will then try to undermine you and say, and under the guise of, we're only looking out for you.

We don't want your children to be starving and in the street. They will try to undermine you and stop you from doing it and make fun of you or ridicule you. Like the filmmaker, David O. Russell, I don't know if you know who I'm talking about. He did The Fighter with Mark Wahlberg.

I love that movie. He did Silver Linings Playbook with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. I did not see that one, but I did see The Fighter. And Joy about the lady who invented the miracle mop, which was Jennifer Lawrence. And all of these stories are about sabotage by the people closest to you, your family.

Like in The Fighter, Mark Wahlberg is this boxer, right? And he's got seven sisters, and he also has an older brother. And they're like, and his mom is his manager. And she's like booking him fights where he's outweighed by 20 pounds and he gets massacred, you know? True story of Mickey Ward.

Yeah. Right. And the story is, you know, he finally meets a girl who's like really supportive of him. But anyway, it's a real theme that the people closest to us will try to – they don't want us – they're happy the way – you know, we like you, Andrew, the way you are.

You know, our son, we know he's working at Stanford. He's doing his thing. We don't want to see him. It may be unconscious. I'm not knocking your dad. We don't want to see him suddenly burst out of the cocoon and become a butterfly and wing away from us, you know?

So they like you the way they are, you know, the way you are. We don't want to see him anymore.