Dr. Jordan Peterson: How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path

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 and author and one of the most influential public intellectuals of our time.

Today, we discuss the human animal, what it means to be a human being at the level of psychology, at the level of neuroscience, and indeed at the level of expression of different personality types within us. Most of us don't think about having different personalities, however, as we discussed today, due to the activity of specific brain circuitries, including the hypothalamus, the prefrontal cortex, and others.

We each and all can adopt different states of mind that powerfully influence our emotions, our thoughts, and our actions. And in so doing, we are different people depending on those states of mind. Today's discussion is both an intellectual one and a practical one. You will learn where and how to place your thoughts.

You will learn the relationship between the call to adventure and responsibility. And as Dr. Peterson emphasizes in his new book, We Who Wrestle With God, he emphasizes the use of story, in this case biblical stories, to understand oneself and to best guide one's actions towards the most positive and generative outcomes. We discuss the self, romantic relationships and commitments,

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

Dr. Peterson emphasizes how to use different sources of story, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to understand and best guide one's decision-making process. 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 are going to have a number of different tools and frameworks with which to apply all that knowledge toward the best possible outcomes. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is David. David makes a protein bar unlike any other. It has 28 grams of protein, only 150 calories and zero grams of sugar.

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I first started using levels about three years ago as a way to understand how different foods impacted my blood glucose levels. And it's proven incredibly informative for determining my food choices, when I eat specific foods, and how I time eating relative to things like my workouts, both weight training and cardiovascular training, things like running, and when to eat before I go to sleep to allow for the most stable blood sugar throughout the night.

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Dr. Jordan Peterson, welcome. Thank you, sir. Delighted to have you here and want to talk about elements within your new book. Yeah. Also some elements within your previous books and within that mind of yours generally. As a framework for that, I'm wondering if you would tolerate or permit a little bit of a discussion about sort of brain and psychology, just kind of lay the groundwork for where we might

prod some of the themes that you bring up related to the book. So I view the brain as obviously a bunch of cells and parts, et cetera, but I distill it down to some sort of basic features. First of all, we have an autonomic physiology. I think we 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.

competitive 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 animals. You should talk about the idea of impulse in the relationship to that characterization. Okay. Because there's an important point to be made on the... You pay a price for characterizing that as impulse, and I'd like to explore that with you because it's crucial. Great. We'll circle back to impulse. I'd like to do that.

And then we have a lot of circuitry. People will hear about it as executive function, prefrontal circuitry, which does many things, but I like to think of.

as a circuit that can say, and here I'm borrowing from a previous guest who uses a neurosurgeon, it can say shh, or exert what's called top-down suppression on these, what I'm calling impulses. It can- Mr. Talk about that too, the suppression idea, the inhibition idea in general. Great. Because there's, I think there's a parallel problem there to the notion of impulse that's very much worth delving into.

Great. So circuitry that's devoted to our ability to self inhibit the desire to reach for something or to avoid something. We can push ourselves into things that would otherwise be aversive. We can avoid doing things that would otherwise drive us to quote unquote, just do it anyway. And then we have what I think of as our default settings, kind of how we're operating in the world with respect to food, other people, ourselves, our thoughts,

if we don't intervene with ourselves. And these default settings are of course established by both nature.

a genetic program that wires up circuitry, but also nurture because of the immense neuroplasticity that occurs in the first 25 years plus of life, but especially those first years of life. And then, of course, we have neuroplasticity, this incredible gift that humans have more of than any other species as far as we know, which is we can decide to make changes. Now, the reason I lay out this framework as opposed to starting with a question is because there are so many amazing questions that you ask in this book,

you know, we who wrestle with God. I mean, 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, you know, push down on some competitive 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. I'm starting to believe, and I'm now 49 years old, that we need a rule book, that the neural circuitry that's encased within our skulls is not sufficient to allow us to navigate through life to our best outcome. Well, we kind of know that we need a rule book. Even you admitted that in some ways implicitly when you discussed the fact that we have a 25-year socialization window.

And what that means is that we have to interact with other people and our traditions in order to set us right. And that's so complex. It takes 25 years. And so we're learning something from that. And that's indication that our, let's say default biological settings are insufficient to guide us into the future. Right. And so then the question is, well, what is it that you're learning as a consequence of that socialization process? And you can think about it.

And people have thought about it as a series of complex inhibitions of lower order motivational states impulses. But I'm not very happy with the inhibition model because inhibition is unsophisticated socialization. Integration is sophisticated socialization. So here's a way of, I really learned this I think from contrasting Freud with Piaget. Because Freud's model super ego 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 inevatory 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. 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 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 integrations are better. Like a very sophisticated athlete, a team athlete in particular, isn't not aggressive and they're not inhibiting their aggression on the playing field. They may now and then when they're provoked, let's say, but all things considered what they've done is

subordinate their aggression to a higher order goal that enables them to be more successful, but also to be successful in a maximally social and sustainable way. And Piaget's point, and he's absolutely right about this, is that that's much better conceptualized as integration. And then with regard to impulse, because I said I would return to that, I spent a lot of time

walking through the behavioral literature. 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. There's something to be said for that hypothesis. Don't make your

theory any more complex than it needs to be. How far can you get with a theory of chained reflexes, a deterministic theory? The behavior has gone a long way. They couldn't get to the highest strata of human endeavor with a chained reflex theory, but there was a lot of things they did that were very good. But one of the things they made a big mistake about was to conceptualize motivational states, let's say, as impulses or drives. That's not 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 their 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 subpersonalities. That's what a two-year-old is, right? And so you have to build an integrating personality on top of those subpersonalities, but not in a manner that inhibits them. That means your socialization is unsophisticated. Even Freud knew this, because even though he had basically an inhibitory model of, say, super eagle 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 going to work out well for you if you don't. OK, so I use timeout. Now, timeout is an effective disciplinary strategy for social creatures, because we don't like isolation. And so timeout basically takes a child, puts the child in isolation. That produces a pain-like response, because social isolation produces. It's pure inhibition. Well, that's the question. You see, that's the question.

he had to inhibit his immediate desire to say to run around because he was going to sit on the steps but see the i put a rule in place there and the rule was 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 courtically, 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, Nehemig Dalal and these lower order biologically

what pre-program to some degree pre-program 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.

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. Right. That's a crucial issue. And you mentioned hypothalamus. It's basically the size of 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 is stimulated, neurons in a little sub-area of the hypothalamus, you get

either rage or sexual appetite or mating with an animate 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 there like switches and prefrontal cortex has direct access to it to the hypothalamus. And prefrontal cortex is context dependent learning, context dependent decision making. And I love that you brought in this notion of

Changing an impulse, an example that you gave in your son's impulse to be aggressive or wild in some way that was inappropriate for the home environment at that moment.

And two things that you said really resonate, the prefrontal cortex, his prefrontal cortex had to learn that whatever he was feeling for himself, his own desires needed to be placed in the context of other people's wishes, desires, and needs as well. So there's even for him to thrive, right? It's not merely a sacrifice of his own desire for the sake of others. It's like, no, no, look, kid, if you're, we know this.

If you have the same orientation towards other people at four that you did when you were two, especially if you're tilted a little in the aggressive direction, you will not make friends and you will be isolated and alienated for the rest of your life. So that two-year-old impulsiveness that has its place.

two, it starts to modify radically at three and it better be fixed by four. And the reason for that is that you have to integrate yourself into the social world, which means in the case of children, it means you want to have friends. And so the reason you're disciplining your child isn't to teach them that what they're doing is bad, you know, in that simple

in that simple sense that you might interpret punishment. It's like no, you need to be more sophisticated. Well, why? Well, you have to be able to take turns. Well, why? Well, because no one like you otherwise. Well, what's the problem with that?

First of all, we're hyper social like you can punish psychopaths by putting them in isolation That's how social human beings are you take the most Anti-social human beings there are and you can punish them by making them be alone Right, so that's how social we are so you want to you you're you're modeling for your child a strategy of

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 attributed, 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. That could be given 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 amniated Mascaria and they imitated predators. This is a pseudo calling, by the way, folks, as to 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. I would veer towards almost like a psychedelic or it has an effect of

making us less fearful and intrigued. It's radically atypical psychedelic. Yeah, it's hard to describe. Yeah, yeah. It's outside the LSD, psilocybin, mesclin domain. So people would take this as an agent. The Vikings would take this as an agent before going into. Sure, because what they were trying to do is make the personality of rage superordinate with no pain.

Right, and they practiced that from a very early age, so the Vikings worked themselves up. They went berserk. That means to wear the bear shirt. Right, they transformed themselves.

so to speak and predators. They would narrow the context within which they're, I'm calling them impulses, but you're giving a more sophisticated explanation for them, within which they're the aggressive impulse, the strategically aggressive impulse could be channeled. Right. Because they're full rain, given full rain, 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, 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. 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, Dai Yulin, 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. Or 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 has come. 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. But in any event,

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 two-shell pass, the past, the present, the strategic tense, autonomic activation, stress, panic, fear, anger, tend to make us lose sight. We get blinders on lose sight of the fact that there was a past, there's a present and there's a future. Well, that's because they're collapsing, they're collapsing your domain of

of apprehension to the moment so you will act. You have to collapse to the moment to act, right? And so we should also point out for everyone that

The other, you don't want to underestimate the sophistication of the hypothalamus. And this is partly why conceptualizing its various states as 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. And it's hyper-exploratory. Now that's a

That's a very strange thing, where he's a cat with no brain, is hyper-exploratory. It's not what you'd think at all, but it shows you how sophisticated the hypothalamus is. It can run these programs, but they're programs of personality because they have perceptions. It can run them, and it can do that quite successfully. Now, all the higher order

sub-cortical and cortical systems are, well, I think they are, to your point, there are 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. 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 forgo gratification.

Actually, what's happening is that as you mature and your cortex comes online, let's say, you're able to regulate your behavior with more and more other things taken into account. Right. Right. And, you know, that there has to be some war there, which is why you're wrestling with God. Let's say there has to be some war there because

It's also the case that you do have to satiate yourself in relationship to your basic biological needs, or you die. And so there's going to be tension. That is something like the tension between the individual and the group, you might say. That's how the Rousseauians or the Freudians would think about it. So the weird thing about that is that it's not useful to identify your individuality with the dominion of a whim

And that's what hedonists do. And that's what immature people do. They think, well, why shouldn't I get what I want? It's like, I see. So your claim is that the you that's superordinate is what you want. That 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. If it's all about you and your immediate gratification,

Well, first of all, you're rather psychopathic because you could think of psychopathy as the extension of immaturity into adulthood. That's a pretty good default way of conceptualizing it. It's an unsophisticated strategy. They want what they want now. Regardless. And they don't care about the we. Or the future. See, one of the ways I caught into this relationship was, because I studied antisocial behavior for a very long time,

Psychopaths in particular are notorious for their inability to learn from experience. Okay, so what does that mean? It means that

If they do something impulsive that causes them trouble in the future, the fact of that future trouble has no bearing on their continued behavior. 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 betraying someone else. It's exactly the same mechanism. Very much a toddler.

So here's something I learned in Montreal. I worked with a man named Richard Trumblay there and Richard, I think Richard's lab used up one third of all social science funding for Quebec at one time. He was a radically successful researcher and he was really interested in anti-social 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 euros 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 are some kids who's default.

Their rage circuits are a little bit more dominant than the typical kit. They're often bigger physically. Yeah, especially the biting, forgive me for interrupting, but there's a very interesting paper published about two years ago showing that there's a specific circuit from the hypothalamus to the neurons that control jaw closure that are independent of the neurons that control jaw closure for eating and for drinking.

that are specifically for aggressive biting. I mean, I hope people understand the significance of this because what this means is there are dedicated circuits for aggressive biting in your hypothalamus. We all learn to suppress these except probably under conditions where our life is endangered, in which case you'd probably bite like hell in order to try and get out of that circumstance. But we are all born with this circuit. We die with this circuit.

Most of us, apparently not these kids, learn to suppress the circuit. An eight-year-old biter is a scary thing. 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. It's the indication of virtual absence of sophisticated socialization. They are truly in their hypothalamus. Yeah, right, exactly. Well, especially if you have a hypothalamus that's tilted towards rage, let's say, and defensive or predatory aggression, that's bad news.

So, what's the upshot of that? Well, the upshot is that there is a subset of kids whose default reactions aren't socialized, and we associate that with psychopathy and long-term criminality. There's a really useful thing to understand that much of what we see as pathology, and I would say the same thing about narcissism and 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 it a glove and that's now perceived as defeatable enemy or perhaps threat because we don't know exactly what the perception would be. But then you see, then it's the perception driving the behavior. That's not an impulse.

Right. That's more like a strategy. And 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 Mercier Elia. 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 Iliad had documented across the world was the pattern by which polytheistic belief systems turned into monotheistic belief systems. That parallels maturation. It's the same thing. And so the polytheistic gods tend to be representations of motivational states. I'm going to pause you there because I think this is extremely important.

So the God of war. Or the God of love, the gods of love. Exactly, exactly that. So the idea that the different gods are the reflective of different, well, let's just say it as neuroscientists, as different hypothalamic and related circuits. Why wouldn't they be gods? You know, 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 want to defeat them or even hurt them independently of the fact that you actually love them. Well, then you think, well, you're gripped by these impulses. No, no, you're inhabited by the spirit of rage. And if you're a sophisticated person, there's going to be

an endless stream of sophisticated intellectual rationalizations that come along with that possession. It's full-fledged personality. One of the things you see with people who are psychotic, who drift off into the landscape of their imagination, is that they dwell on such states of possession. 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, it's not a simple impulse. It's like, no, they've, they've inverted the, you could think they've inverted the neurological order and the God of rage is now the, what would you say, the leading personality of integration or the God of resentful rage, even worse,

And the circuit may run in reverse. My colleague David Spiegel, who's our Vice Chair of Psychiatry at Stanford, has done some beautiful experiments examining the relationship between prefrontal cortical areas and the insula, a brain area that has a map of our internal body state, interoception, 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 in the context of rage and sociopathy and these kids who shoot up schools. But I do absolutely subscribe to what you just said, that if one drops into one of these more primitive states and emotions and all the things that go with it for a very long time,

It's almost as if the governor, which is the prefrontal cortex, starts to become the governed. The whole circuit starts to run from bottom up as opposed to top down. And I think there's good neurologic evidence. That's what happens in addiction. So you hit that circuit that's seeking the drug with repeated doses of dopamine.

You know, people say they have a monkey on their back. It's like, no, they have a monster in their brain. And it's, and they grew it. And it grows because it's reinforced with dopaminergic hips. 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 acute craving will make itself manifest like a friend they free base with. And it's all of a sudden 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 dope and meningic hits. It's like there's multiple people in there, you know, in everyone, one of the most incredible, it's a polytheistic. Yeah, that's the default condition. Right. Right. That's the condition of the two year old.

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If you'd like to try ROKA, go to ROKA.com. That's ROKA.com and enter the code Huberman to save 20% off your first order. Again, that's ROKA.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 going to 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 to beautiful children, multiple relapses, crashed his truck at seven in the morning after getting intoxicated at 6.30 in the morning, got out of that one, happened again and again, multiple rehab centers of the sort of standard treatment, et cetera.

And then ultimately enough happened within that whole set of circumstances that his wife said, you know, this is it. You've got 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 Sunday's he attended church and things of that sort. And you can imagine we all fought, including myself, like, okay dude, like good luck. I hope this works, but like, I would say zero minus one confidence in his ability to get and stay sober. He just had not succeeded prior to this.

He's been sober more than four years now. He got out of there and never looked back. And I wonder now whether something must have changed in his brain by adopting what was essentially a different incentive structure. Right, different incentive structure, but fear wasn't doing it before, fear of extreme consequences, which were on the table at that time when he went in, weren't enough.

something about going there and the work that he did there allowed him to then, it's almost like he 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.

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 to be 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, alcohols are pretty good at an anxiolytic drug, but it's also for people who are prone to alcoholism. It's a good incentive reward source, like cocaine. If you're going to, you can't get rats addicted to cocaine if they live in a natural environment. They have to be isolated in a cage before they'll bar press to their own death for cocaine.

So one of the things you want to do when you treat addiction is you want to substitute a new incentive structure, right? Because the part of the addictive process is

You fall into a false incentive pattern, right? Because cocaine makes you feel like you're doing something useful in respect to an important goal, even though you're not. It mimics that. Even if you know you're not. Even if you know it. I've never done cocaine. I would be open about it. If I had, I think I liked dopaminergic states enough that I've been very scared of doing it. Also, it wasn't around much just because of when I went to college. It just wasn't a drug that was around much.

It's a remarkable drug in the sense that people who take cocaine seem to be excited about everything. There is 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 spiked dopamine somehow manage. Yeah, sure. Sometimes they find a path. That's a lie cheat and steal. That's extremely interesting. But they'll do other things too, right? They'll socialize with people that have it so they don't have to lie cheat and steal. It's incredible to see that drug and things like methamphetamine take over people's

minds. And now I'm thinking the pathway appears when the aim is firmly in mind. Right. See, this is another, this is another insistence that's derived from the religious literature. So because the idea there is that if your aim is upward, the pathway forward to that will make itself manifest. And that's true. You just pointed out that it was true in relationship to addiction. Right. Is that if once that, once you're in that realm of possessed personality,

the pathway forward will show itself to you even under straightened circumstances, right? And it's partly because you could think of our perceptual systems and our emotional systems for that matter as navigating tools, right? So now the addiction, the addicted brain, let me 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, because it just dominates, but it's not, it's not just an impulse. It dominates the perceptual landscape as well. That's makes 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 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, you need to sort of, 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, if I had or do a pornography has not been my thing and I don't struggle with it. But, but when I hear from these people, it's so clear that they're asking, is it the prevalence of pornography out there?

Or is it something really broken in them? Like, are they broken? But I don't know that I would say after having the discussion we've had thus far that they're broken. It seems to me that it's like the, as you said, it's the manifestation of one part of their, it's one personality within them. One, it's been, it's been compulsively rewarded. So, you know, when, when a,

When you see yourself moving towards the culmination of a desired goal, adopamine, 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

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. I hope I get this right, but I've got it approximately right. I believe it's male sticklebacks. They're very aggressive towards other male sticklebacks. The reason they're aggressive is because the other male sticklebacks have a red dot on their bellies. 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 and human beings is very visually oriented, very, and a lot of our brain is visual, way more than virtually every other animal, certainly every other primate and every other mammal. And so we have a situation where any 13-year-old boy can see more hyperattractive, super stimulus women

in one day than the most successful man who ever lived 100 years ago would have ever seen in his whole life. Yeah, well, that's like an evolutionary ecological radical ecological transformation and the and it's worse because it's easily accessible so it takes no work, right? So not only is it a super stimulus. It's one that's at hand so to speak and the and the

the analog in the food world would be highly palatable, highly processed food. Yeah, sugar fat combination. You go into it, the other day I went into a gas station to use the restroom because I was traveling home for Thanksgiving and I looked around and I 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 that 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, infrequent use, et cetera, but maybe sugar being the one that clearly, I think, deserves deeper investigation, right?

But it just occurred to me that the difference between manufacturing sugar and manufacturing cocaine, I mean, you take something that's available in its natural form in relatively low concentrations and purify it. I mean, coca leaves, the natives used coca leaves forever as mild stimulant didn't seem to cause them any trouble, but that's way different than cocaine, right? And sugar has the same

arguably the same pathological properties. Well, I didn't think we were going to go here, but I think it's extremely appropriate and important that we do. So I know that you followed what is essentially an elimination diet for a number of years. You eat meat, right? I eat meat, vegetables, fruit, and some starches, unrefined starches in any event. One thing that I 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 will eat until we get enough of the essential amino acids.

And we correlate that with taste, but that the gut has neurons, we know the gut has neurons that signal through the vagus, up through a little relay, called the no-dose ganglion, if you want to look at it, fun name. And then up to the dopaminergic centers of the brain, which make us, oh, when we eat something that has a high essential amino acid content, like a steak, like a really tasty steak.

the neurons in the gut in a way that is independent of taste are signaling to the brain, ah, I'm getting essential amino acids. You should eat more of this thing. If those, let's just say a small fraction of those amino acids that are present in a candy bar and a, you know, a package of skittles, which I'm guessing there's very few of them, if any, you're going to continue to forage for food.

because those neurons will also respond to sugar. Basically, it will keep you eating until you get enough of those amino acids. In other words, there are two parallel tracks, one within multi-system. Multiple pathways to satiation, one dependent on taste, one dependent on actual nutrient content. The mouth can only learn taste association.

The mouth can't actually learn nutrient content. The gut knows nutrient content. The problem is you take a food that is low in a micronutrient or macronutrient or essential amino acids or essential fatty acids. After all, there are no essential carbohydrates. There are only essential amino acids and essential fatty acids. And it will keep you eating.

And it will keep the appetite system revving until you get enough of those. Now, here's the issue. If you've ever done this, it's probably been... Empty calories. Empty calories. 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.

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. Let me give you an example. You probably haven't done this experiment in a while. But if you've ever just had ribeye steak or two, it's pretty satiating. Maybe you also have a salad if you're me or some broccoli or something like that.

If one takes, then even after you've eaten all that, one bite of pasta, one bite of pasta, the next impulse is more. Even though you already have enough essential amino acids from those steaks, you're loosing a 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, you know, anything but modern in the sense that it's worse for us than the more primitive foods, but highly processed foods, pornography, any drug that spikes dopamine dramatically, like methamphetamine, for instance.

any behavior that spikes to open mean dramatically, that very quickly hijacks these circuits. And to me, the way to teach those circuits a calmer, more prudent version of themselves, to enter a different hypothalamus.

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. Yeah, that's because there's also a novelty kick in dopaminergic striving, right? I mean, so with any basic, repetitive 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 a pedative 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?

That is schistic. 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 going to order a steak, order a Pittsburgh char.

The char on the outside is incredibly tasty. We love that the umami taste is that we should have a devoted taste receptors. That'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.

incredibly satiating, delicious, right? But if you were to slather those steaks in a bunch of things, I would suspect that after a while, your plain steaks wouldn't taste as good, but 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 most naturally satisfying mode,

of engaging with these circuits, here we're talking about food and sex and parallel, that they become especially satiating. And I think that, you know, in hearing from all these people that are addicted to pornography, and they're not addicted like they tell 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 you to go out and find a real relationship.

a real sexual relationship or relationship. Well, it also, 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 going to play out that well in the real world, let's say. And there's also a learning of those biological systems in the brain to evoke arousal by observing sex, as opposed to participating. Completely different. So some of these... Right, that's voyeur. 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 want to go up there.

I might, if I'd 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 in a distance. When we were kids, we liked dirt, dirt clogged wars, right? Targeted, right. Targeted, right. What an incredible display of funneling the laws of physics and engineering into something that can have enormous action at a distance and perhaps even take us into new galaxies. Amazing, right? The word sin in many languages means to miss the target.

Right. And it speaks to exactly what you're describing.

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 want to participate in vicariously, even vicariously. They're target hitting games. Like our gaze specifies is 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.

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Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman lab listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com slash Huberman to get early access to function. So this thing about action in a distance to me feels like so inherent to our progression as a species. Most technologies are about that. In fact, if you think about social media, somebody tweets something and when people react to it, maybe positively or negatively,

the school shooter in a very dark example, a sad, a tragic example, right? Action at a distance. Then you think about pornography and masturbation, and I'm not passing any moral judgment here.

It's the ultimate form of creating action at a distance would be to create a new human being with somebody. You're propagating it in physical distance, creating a new being, and in time. 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 in 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 just looped expression. It's just looped back into oneself. It's as if, and I don't know what language there is for this in biology, but it's as if like all that dopaminergic drive is just kind of looped back into oneself and it goes nowhere. And I think when I hear about the incredibly like what the language for it is only like the diminished souls of these people who are coming to me saying like, you know, like help.

And I'm thinking, OK, listen, I'm a podcaster. I'm a scientist. I know some things about the dopaminergic system. But there are ways that they can get help. I think they're 12-step programs for this and so forth and other things. But I think what they're saying is that they're just kind of dissolving in their own

in their own 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.

I see so many of the problems that we face as failure to find a productive way to have action. That's a failure to venture, I would say, in the terminology that I've been developing. So, for example, in this book, and we who wrestle with God, I'm

one of the stories I analyze is the story of Abraham. And it's 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 is expansive. And then if you fulfill that, the same thing will happen. So then you could imagine that there's a meta ambition behind all proximal ambitions. OK, now the divine

Characterization of the divine is a characterization of that meta ambition. That's a good way of thinking about it. So it's something that recedes as you approach it, but it's also the thing that all ambitions have in common. And we know there is such a thing because otherwise we wouldn't have a concept of ambition, right, which speaks to a commonality among ambitions. Okay. In this story of Abraham,

The divine is characterized in relationship to something like ambition. So Abraham has the, he's already immersed in a situation that's a kin in a way to the scenario of a wealthy and a person in the modern world who is in a situation of abundance. Abraham's parents are wealthy and they provide for him. There's nothing he needs to do.

And in consequence, so he's attained the socialist utopia or the consumerist utopia. You can look at it either way. And there's no reason for him to move forward. So he doesn't. He doesn't do anything till he's 75. And then the voice comes to him, which is the voice of adventure. And it's God in this story. That's how God is defined, right? And God says to Abraham, you have to leave

all this comfort, which is a very interesting proposition to begin with. It's like, why the hell would you leave that when you have everything you need? Well, the implication is, is that you don't have everything you need when you're being delivered, everything you need. That isn't how life works. Okay. So God says, you have to leave your, your father's tent. You have to leave your tribe. You have to leave those who speak your language. You have to venture out into the world.

So God is conceptualized in this story as the impulse, the voice that compels you out into the world and that encourages you to do so. So that's a hypothesis about what the ultimate up is. 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 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 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 Chick-Scent, Mahayu who've characterized that as the attractiveness of flow, and maybe it's associated with the exploratory circuit in the hypothalamus that's mediated by dopamine. Okay, but it's got its character. Now, the character of that instinct in this story is

the way it's characterized is as the voice of adventure. So it's the thing that asks you to move beyond your zone of comfort and go into the foreign world. Now the advantage to that is that you fortify yourself and you develop, right? So no matter how good you are now, if you push yourself to the edge, you're going to be better than you are. And that's a better

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

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

So that's a good deal, because lots, the miserable people you're talking about, the depressed people, the trapped people, their life isn't a blessing to themselves. So what's a pathway to blessing? Well, it's not satiation, not in this formulation. It's voluntary, it's the voluntary quest and it's characterized by adventure. So that's deal number one. You'll live in a life that'll be a blessing to you. Okay. And then God says, that's not all that'll happen.

You'll be a blessing to yourself in a manner that will make you renowned among other people, justly. That's a good deal because we know that people, men in particular, are very status oriented, partly because their reproductive success is highly correlated with their social status. And, you know, the psychopaths game that, but still it's like, renowned is crucially important. You want to be the quarterback on the shoulders of your teammates, you know?

That'll be the second thing that happens. And then the same voice says, and that's not all. You'll be a blessing to yourself and be renowned in a manner that will maximize the probability that you will establish something of lasting value. That's a good deal. So that's, that's stretching across time. Multi-generationally, because God tells Abraham that if he follows the pathway of adventure, he'll be the father of nations. So what that means is that he'll establish the pattern of paternal conduct that will maximally

that will maximize the success of his offspring in the longest possible run. So that's so cool. This is success at a distance. Right. 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 harken 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. That's what pornography is. It's a false adventure. It's failure to hit the proper target, you might say. But that central drive to integration across time and communally, why wouldn't that be an instinct? And then we could cap that with an observation that I also think is self-evidently true once you understand it.

So imagine that you're a father. Now this spirit of adventure is often characterized internally, right? And so far 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, in so far 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, 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, baton down the hatches, they're made, 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. 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, um, uh, Christian

religious language. He said that he felt Jesus' love for him, and he saw an image of who he could become. This was important, perhaps. Not no doubt, just perhaps, but no doubt, of who he could become.

Not 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.

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 doubt 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 and that's kind of threefold. One is

Um, 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 cache to you than if you're possessed by sexual desire. Obviously, right? So the idea that a given stimuli produces a given motivational response is incorrect because that's framework dependent.

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 dopaminerically 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 dopamineergic 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 game by cocaine. Which is why it can be game by cocaine or most anything that can, you know,

you know, 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 and root to that target. I'm rephrasing what you said before. You said it.

wonderfully, I just want to make sure people understand that as that dopamine increases, the probability that your perception will go to something other than the target decreases exponentially. As you get closer and closer, you get more and more dopamine, the greater the elevation dopamine, the lower the probability that you'll engage in any other pattern of self. It's like it's almost or these or personality type other than the one that you're engaged in in pursuit of this behavior will emerge.

Not least because as you approach successfully the probability of ultimate success is obviously increasing. So it makes perfect sense that you would narrow and focus. You run faster as you see the finish line. Right. Faster and faster. This concept of sin as missing 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 so, 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. You know, our eyes are target-established. Well, it's so important to us that we infer aim from gaze, right? And it's more than that. Not only do we infer aim from gaze,

we mimic the psychophysiological state of the target that we're watching as a consequence of our inference of aim from gaze. So if I can see what you're looking at,

then I can occupy the same psychophysiological state that you do, and that's the basis of my understanding. This is so important, and there's something that I've never talked about on this or any other podcast, which is that in humans, we have a massive expansion of an area of the frontal cortex called the frontal eye fields.

So there is circuitry deep in the brain. If you want to look it up, it's superior colliculus. It's also called the tectum and 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

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. 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. Everything is a target. Everything is a target. Everything is a target. And there's no context dependent learning.

I love that you gave the example of the de cerebric cats. They even can do fictive motion. They can walk on a treadmill and it's like it with no cortex. It's amazing. It makes you rethink the cortex. 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?

Um, well, then maybe I'll activate my aggression or maybe I'll brace my defenses or, wow, she's, uh, 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? You know, right? The famous, the famous look over the shoulder meme that seems to have taken over the internet from time to time. With the appropriate facial response. Exactly. So humans have an

massively expanded notion of what gaze is and our ability to control gaze and understanding of gaze. So when you raise this idea, when you raise this fact, rather, about gaze defining the target.

It'll end that looking at others as gays 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 courtically dominant, the targets of your gays 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.

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 it's a curl up? Yeah, and then turn. And you turn to the place where your stereoscopic audition has indicated that the noise emanated from, right? And so, and that's automatic.

That's the control of the eye gaze and bodily posture by those underlying... Yeah, this is a superior collective. It has a map of auditory movement. So when you hear something that you're right, you turn to your right. Right, right. And you do that before you think. 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. That's a meta target. You said that's what happened to your friend.

Right is not only did he dispense with his addiction, but all of the things and other enterprises that he was associated that that that he was pursuing in his life became more effective. It's almost like and 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, he's different. And I thought, most people would, perhaps, would think, all right, let's see. But this has been four years now. He's very consistent with his program. He's involved in a program that keeps him on track. But he's elevated.

And he's not talking above people. It's like he's elevated, but he's grounded. When you talk to him, he's not kind of off some other place. He's actually very, very present. And even his text messages are very much of like, what's going on today? You know, asking questions that are very much of the now. And it's been a remarkable thing to observe because he was about as down in his addiction and had so much to lose and had essentially risked over and over and over to the point where

you know, I didn't think it was ever gonna turn around. And most, and all of his friends thought the same. And his wife of course is delighted and his kids are delighted. Of course. And I could say this without revealing, cause you know, 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. And it's fantastic. It's like, he's nothing short of a spectacular. Okay. So, so let me, let me put that into,

a context of, let's say, an archetypal story. Okay, so I did a course for Peterson Academy on the Sermon on the Mount. And the Sermon on the Mount is a, it's a, it's a metagol 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. 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. 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 first born should be consecrated to go out. So for example, in, to think about it proesically, before we sat down for our podcast, because we've done many podcasts, we, we strive to inhabit the framework that will make the podcast most radically successful. Now you could imagine that that could be subordinated to either of our

proximal desire for an increase in short-term personal fame, right? Or we could try to dominate each other in the conversation. Or we could orient ourselves properly, and we could do what we could to pursue the track towards revelation, so to speak, and we could elevate our conversation in that manner. Okay, and that would set the frame for the conversation. And the good podcasters always do that.

Right. They're not playing games or if they're playing games, it's of the highest possible order. It's a quest. Yeah. Okay. Quest for what? Enlightenment for truth, right? For mutual understanding and then maybe for the education of those who are participating. All right. So Christ says, first, orient your eyes upward, right? That's to love God above all. So whatever that upward divinity is, you establish an allegiance with that and you allow that to determine your perceptions and your motivations. Next,

operate under the assumption that other people like you participate in that nature of that utmost aim and treat them that way. Next, concentrate on the moment. Right. Right. And that's exactly right because it's exactly right because

When you specify your aim, the pathway makes itself manifest. Otherwise, you could never use your senses to orient. You'd never get anywhere, right? So if you aim upward to the best of your ability, then the pathway upward is what will make itself manifest in front of you. Then you have to attend to it. And so then you get this weird perverse optimality, which is you're focused on the

longest temporal scale and the highest possible elevation and you can make most use of what's right in front of you and that the implication in the

Sermon on the Mount is that there's no difference between that and participating in life eternal as it unfolds in the moment. And I think that seems to me to be exactly right. It's exactly right. And so, you know, I was thinking of that because you said your friends, all of your friends' endeavors had become elevated. So imagine that

one probably might want to solve is what your goals should be. But a much deeper problem would be how do you conceptualize your goals in relationship to one another across the broadest span of time and person so that every goal has the highest probability of succeeding. So that would be like the pursuit of a medical. I would say that's what defines the religious enterprise. There's another variant of that, for example. So a variant of that would be

Not how do you solve the problem of any given thing that terrifies you, but how do you solve the problem of the class of things that terrify you? And the dragon fight mythology is the solution to that problem.

So the attitude there is you adopt the stance of voluntary approach in the face of terror because that's the best meta-strategy. And that's the strategy that works to protect you across the largest possible array of dangerous situations. This is what we learned in as clinical psychologists with exposure therapy.

Right? You find this particulars of what someone is afraid of. That turns out to be somewhat irrelevant. You teach people to voluntarily confront what they're avoiding. And that doesn't make them less afraid. It makes them more competent and braver. And that generalizes. Right. And so, yeah, the religious pursuit is the pursuit of, of meta goals in relationship to positive and negative emotion. That's a good way of thinking about it.

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I love this idea of looking upward and defining, or at least having a sense that there's an internalization of the greatest possible outcome. And when I say greatest,

both for oneself, but also for the community, 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. And but the disadvantage is you're going to strive for proximal victory. Okay, now you don't want to be a pushover.

That's a mistake. So then what could you do instead? You could pause 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 want to solve the problem.

but you don't want to sweep it under the rug, you want to solve it in a way that 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 just... If you don't alter your aim, you will be. Because you need to substitute, you've got to think, I'd really like to win this. Like, I'd seriously like to win this battle. It's like, no, you need something better than that victory. And that would be

the 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 going to list, even though I think my wife is wrong.

I'm going to listen and I'm going to 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 want to win. And then you might say, well, why? It's like, because it's a better deal. So there's one of Christ's parables where he talks about a pearl of great price, which is the pearl that a rich man would sell everything he owns to possess.

And it's something like a reference to that. It's like, why would you ever attain a proximal victory if you could attain an ultimate victory? That's the battle, let's say, between the salvation of the soul and the victory in sin. That's how the religious language would portray it. Well, you can win a local victory, and it looks like you win. But if you 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 countercurrent to our evolutionary wiring. Now you could say, well, okay, so what are we supposed to do? Move into caves anymore. 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, 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 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, because I wasn't, but that were weaned on them, for fast temporal time scales. This isn't like playing a long poker game. This is like playing the slot machine over and over and over, right? It's not like a four-day tournament. Complete with intermittent random reinforcement, which is what happens when something goes viral, unpredictably. Right, right. It's really...

And then, of course, we have this notion in this country that in any moment it could be rags to riches or some 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 adventuring a hypothesis here, is that young and older people could take a look at their life and ask, what variation of time scales do I derive reward?

You know, training for a marathon is a longer time scale. Well, that's also a hallmark of maturity. Yeah, school, a degree, et cetera. In business, the time scales are sometimes fast, sometimes short. I think you can ask even a better question than that.

The better question would be, and this is kind of what's referred to in the Sermon on the Mount, is how could I optimize my long-term view while maximizing my focus on the moment? Because then you get both. That's a really good deal, right? Because now you're conducting yourself in a manner that works in an iterated way that's socially productive.

And maybe intergenerationally socially productive, that would be the best thing to establish. That's kind of what you're doing as a good father. But you're doing that in a manner that enables you to also derive maximal impact from each step you take forward in the present.

Carl Fristen told me we were talking about entropy and emotion. I'd figured out a few years ago with a couple of my students that anxiety signifies the emergence of entropy, technically, which I was really thrilled about because it gives emotion a physical grounding, like a real physical grounding. And Fristen 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 an entropy related to entropy is because

With each step, successful step you take towards a goal, you reduce the uncertainty of the pursuit, which is manifested in that phenomena you described, which is when you see the finish line, you start running faster. Right. So they're both related to entropy. Well, to have goals at multiple timescale, you need to be able to write it in, 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. And this is part of becoming an adult, if you will. 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 going to know exactly how to do that, but that can be your goal. Okay. Now that's going to inform your perceptions and your perceptions of pathway, but it's also going to modify your reward system because now

every proximal step forward is an indicator of entropy reduction in regard to that metagol. Well, there isn't any, by definition, there isn't anything you can do that's more exciting than that. See, that kind of explains why your friend was able to pop out of his addictive frame, because now he's doing something that's so worthwhile that the temptation of alcohol, let's say, pales in comparison. Right, right. It's a rewriting of the reward contingencies. Yeah, right, exactly. And now you can imagine that

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. 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,

somebody else, they might say yes, they might say no. You ought on a date, they might not want a second date. Well, and that's all there. 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, let's say you're a foraging male and you're being rejected all the time.

And you forgo that for pornography, what you're forgoing is the corrective that all those women are offering you. Like they're rejecting you because there is something wrong. Like seriously, there's something wrong. And now you escape from that, you think, well, that's a relief because no more rejection. It's like, yeah, no more rejection, no more learning, no more improvement and no possibility of

of an actual life. Right. No action at a distance. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No distal. No distal accomplishment. Right. Yeah. The only implication of the pornography masturbation scenario is that is more pornography masturbation. That's the only implication of it. That's all that possibly could arise. It's worse than that. Yeah.

because it's more pornography in a degenerating game. Because as you said, you have to chase that novelty edge. Otherwise soap will mean it's driven down further. Well, and that means what? It's going to get more and more extreme. Well, that's not a good scenario. That's not a good, like what do you mean more and more extreme exactly? Like where does that end? Well, you know, a casual glance at online pornography can give you some real insight into where that ends. Like there's, that's a bottomless pit.

And in the most pernicious possible manner, because sexuality can definitely twist itself into pathological forms that undermine psychological integrity and demolish society. We see this with people who are highly successful, who seem to have lots of areas of their life regulated.

and then 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, it's usually just a matter of time and they don't reach the mountains. Yes, while 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.

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 Pazio. So there's a vision in 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. Now imagine when society disintegrates, men disintegrate according to their pattern, and women disintegrate according to their pattern. That makes perfect sense, right? Because if society disintegrates, it's going to be men and women who disintegrate.

There's no reason to assume that their pattern of disintegration would be identical. Okay. Scarlet beast is, that's the Scarlet beast of the state. That's Babylon, let's say. That's the degenerate tyrannical state. It has multiple heads. Why? Because whatever united it has vanished. That's like the death of God. It's vanished. And so now it's got heads in every direction. So it's confused. And it's red scarlet because that's, that confusion

That disintegration is the...

precursor to the river of blood, right? The Red Sea, the swamp of chaos. So when the patriarchal state disintegrates, it loses its unity and then its multiple heads, right? And that's the emblem of descent into diverse chaos. And caves is everywhere with the multiple heads. Precisely, precisely. It's not integrated. Okay. Now, that's the disintegration of the patriarchy, you might say. A top that is the

Horv 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.

Right. And now she's saying she's going to have sex with a thousand men. 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.

speechless. That's for sure. Speechless. My, my response to the, her kind of post 100 men thing was, it was hard for me to know to what extent that was part of the, the performance performance. What 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, um, this is a pretty dark situation. It's way darker than anybody who wanted to hold on to their sanity would possibly imagine. What's also dark. And I'm not saying this from a place of moral judgment. I'm just saying this from a place of just kind of like a, wow, like this woman obviously.

um, navigating life in this way, her choice clearly. Um, 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 like that, that this is now out, out there.

right? It's out there. Um, just like seeing somebody, you know, just like seeing somebody murder somebody in cold blood. We, we could talk about that recently, a video of an assassination that, and those had been available before, but, um, those two things kind of leveled up.

or leveled down, you know, one's idea of what humans are capable of by allowing so many people. And what's acceptable. What's acceptable. 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 horror of Babylon as enticement for its degeneration. You can have everything you want on the sexual side. At the end of that sub-story, the state, the beast, kills the prostitute. And so what that means is that the long-term consequences of

Sacrificeless sexual satiety is that sexuality itself is destroyed. And I think we're seeing that in our society now. 30% of Japanese under the age of 30 are virgins, right? About the same in South Korea, right? The birth rates in those countries have plummeted, like they're way, way below replacement. And increasingly,

fifty percent of women in in the west are childless at thirty birth rates are way way down and and going down as well fifty percent are childless half of them will never have a child because thirties already pushing and ninety five percent 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 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.

The, uh, someone I know who was a, uh, in their twenties 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. They explained to me that's not what that was about. That was about the wildness of the, of the seventies. Right. Right. That promise. Yeah. That was about the, the sort of the, um,

just, uh, promiscuity had emerged as a, 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'm saying it happened. No, no, I'm saying that happens in concert. Yeah, in concert. So it's not causal. No, no. You can't, men and women degenerate at the same rate, right? I mean, we're involved in feedback processes that are so tight that there's no, like there's no oppressing women without oppressing men. There's no oppressing men without oppressing women. It's like we're joined at the hip, so to speak.

And so these cultures that cloak women and silence them, you might think, well, that leads to the domination of men. It just turns men into pathological tyrants.

There's no victory over one sex that's a victory of any sense at all. Right, 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, it was about restoring vigor, pride, and achievement. And I thought, wow, he's not a political candidate.

That's a beautiful trifecta, vigor, pride, and achievement to celebrate those. And I put that next to the deep pleasure in generative action at a distance, a technological development, the rockets. And there are other generative achievements. I think that's exactly the theme of the story of Abraham. It's like the most, the highest form of potential satiation is risky romantic adventure.

It's not satiation. That's the wrong frame. 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. They must average about 3,000 or 4,000 people. And there's one place I go that always reduces the audience to dead silence.

The audiences are usually quiet in the events, you know, and that's one of the ways, I'm sure you know this, you want to listen to the audience, you want to stay in that zone where no one's moving, right, because then you know their attention is focused, and you can hear that, and you can, I wouldn't say, you can play with it not manipulatively, but in the proper sense of play. I learned a long while ago that

adventure, let's say, is the highest form of reward. That's a good way of thinking about it. But there's a corollary to that that conservatives need to learn because they don't know this. Conservatives talk about responsibility, but they're conscientious. And so for them, responsibility is dutiful, orderly productivity. It's conscientiousness. Responsibility is a conscientious duty. What they fail to understand is that there's no difference between responsibility and adventure.

They're the same thing. And you can tell young men in particular that, say, look, you want to have an adventure because you definitely want an adventure. You're like, you're built for that. It will increase your status. It will improve your life. Like it'll improve the probability that you'll accomplish something. You want an adventure. Every fiber of your being is screaming for it. Where do you find it? You find it in the voluntary adoption of responsibility.

And that's like everyone needs to know that. No young person has been taught that for like five generations. This is important. Can we operationalize this? So in your first book, you talked about get your room in order. Yeah. One of the first things I do when I wake up in the morning, I

look around the kitchen, I