Andrew Newberg Returns (on Sex, God, and the Brain)

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[3] Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert, experts on expert.

[4] I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Monica Padman.

[5] Birthday girl, Monica Padman.

[6] Oh, yay.

[7] We're going hard.

[8] We're going to go all the way through.

[9] Today we have for the second time, Andrew Newberg.

[10] He is a neuroscientist.

[11] He is a pioneer in the neurological study of religious and spiritual experiences known as neuropheology.

[12] That's what we talked a lot about the last time he was here.

[13] And he's got an incredible new book out right now called Sex, God, and the Brain, how sexual pleasure gave birth to religion and a whole lot more.

[14] It was a juicy fun one.

[15] I love any evolutionary topic.

[16] It was very interesting to hear how the brain works similarly with both of these opposing topics.

[17] Please enjoy Andrew Newberg.

[18] What's up, guys?

[19] It's your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season.

[20] And let me tell you, it's too good.

[21] And I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay?

[22] Every episode, I bring on a friend.

[23] I mean the likes of Amy Pollard, Kell Mitchell, Vivica Fox, the list goes on.

[24] So follow, watch, and listen to Baby.

[25] This is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app Or wherever you get your podcast Hey, how are you here?

[26] Good to meet you in person.

[27] Meet you in person, yeah, absolutely.

[28] We were on Zoom last time.

[29] Yeah, we were.

[30] It's better in person.

[31] Always better in person.

[32] Yeah.

[33] It's funny because I like went listen to a little bit of it.

[34] And it's like I forgot we did so much Zoom.

[35] It was during the pandemic and we don't normally do that.

[36] We did like two years of Zoom.

[37] Yeah.

[38] They feel like lost episodes, though.

[39] in my head because there isn't that person to person it all sort of blends this is where glasses become a problem i'm in my glasses more and more and more it's a great source of angst for me you never wore them before i never wore them and i have it in my mind that the more i wear them the more i'll need to wear them oh yeah they say that i don't know i don't think your eyes actually do that because we're getting older well yeah i mean that's what they're telling me yeah let's see if we agree on some fundamental things.

[40] I mean, you're a certified internist.

[41] A couple different certifications, so obviously the pushback's going to be fierce.

[42] But I'm an integrative medicine doctor, so I'm very holistic.

[43] Okay, great, great, great, great.

[44] So you have lenses.

[45] Your muscles in your eyes bend those lenses as needed to focus near distance or far.

[46] Why wouldn't it hold that those muscles like all other muscles need to be worked out and kept at peak fitness so that it can perform the task of bending the lens?

[47] I don't know if there's any true way of exercising them because they're not the muscles that turn your eyes.

[48] They're like little interior muscles.

[49] Don't you think you could go through a series of focusing?

[50] I have heard that a solution to people who get fatig looking at computer screens is to go look at a tree because there's so many different leaves at different focal lengths.

[51] It may work.

[52] I'll give you my wife's answer to you because she's 54 and she got cataracts actually early on.

[53] She had cataract surgery and she says it's the greatest thing everybody should have it.

[54] I'm almost wanting to get diagnosed as having cataracts.

[55] She wants me to get them.

[56] But do you have it?

[57] You don't have cataracts?

[58] I don't know.

[59] I've been wearing glasses since I've been in third grade.

[60] Yeah, you've long accepted it.

[61] You've gone through the seven stages.

[62] And I have very tiny eyes.

[63] So putting contacts in my eyes.

[64] I will do that when I play hockey.

[65] I tried wearing glasses and they all fog up, you know?

[66] Yes.

[67] Well, this became a big issue, too, in the pandemic when you had to wear the face mask.

[68] Right.

[69] It was just like an exhaust system up to your glasses.

[70] Yeah, exactly.

[71] It's terrible.

[72] Okay, I'm going to try to reframe this as a much broader question, which is, wouldn't it be weird that the only thing in our body that doesn't benefit from exercise would be the eyeballs?

[73] It's just be weird that we have one system that can't benefit from exercise.

[74] Everything else, the cardiovascular system.

[75] Our olfactory system doesn't.

[76] Yeah, there's no muscles there, really.

[77] But there's probably systematic things.

[78] Yeah, I think it's a matter of how well you can get at that muscle.

[79] The good thing about your arms is that it's easy.

[80] You lift and they get bigger.

[81] Obviously, you could be a great weightlifter, but you could throw your back out.

[82] No matter how strong you get, there's like little tiny muscles in between your ribs.

[83] It's always a challenge.

[84] I've heard that the actual lens itself gets less flexible, too, which is part of the issue.

[85] I think we've solved it.

[86] I will also say that ophthalmology is like a whole different animal in medicine.

[87] It's a very different kind of training.

[88] Yeah, and where do we put Huberman in that?

[89] He's not an ophthalmologist, but his specialty is the eye.

[90] And I think it's interesting when they explain the eye.

[91] It's like a protrusion of your brain in a way.

[92] It's all part of your sensory systems.

[93] The eye is remarkable that it works as well as it does.

[94] And unique in our species.

[95] Most species don't spend that much energy on eyes.

[96] Right.

[97] I mean, our vision is really critical to us.

[98] But I mean, every animal, I always think about the eagles who can soar three miles up and then they see a little mouse on the ground.

[99] Yes.

[100] That's incredible.

[101] But also, they say even with less information, our brain is so good that it digests the information we're receiving and builds a much more complicated model than even with lesser eyes.

[102] Right.

[103] You're combining with your memory.

[104] I mean, like, as I look around this room, I know what a can of Diet Coke means, and I know what the dinosaur is, and everything has a meaning to me. You might even smell popcorn when you see that T -Rex.

[105] It might take you back to Jurassic Park.

[106] Yeah, there's a lot going on.

[107] It is.

[108] Your visual cortex.

[109] In fact, one of the slides that I often show because of imaging, there's a big question, kind of a nerdy question, but what is the resting state of the brain?

[110] Is it with your eyes open, with your eyes closed?

[111] If it's with your eyes open, is it your eyes open looking at like a blank screen versus a complex scene like this?

[112] And all of them change the way your brain is operating.

[113] And if I do a brain scan with your eyes closed and then I just do a brain scan with your eyes open, the whole back of your brain, which is your visual cortex just like lights up.

[114] And then you bring in your memory.

[115] And if you're reading, it brings in your language areas.

[116] Is there arresting?

[117] There probably isn't one.

[118] One of the things that's happened now is that they've gotten into a lot of conversations about brain networks.

[119] And so there's something called the default mode network, which was first discussed about 15, 20 years ago, which is what is your brain doing when it's not doing anything?

[120] Because it's always on.

[121] Right.

[122] You know, like if I do a brain scan of you at any point in your life other than when you're dead, there will be blood flow and metabolism and all different kinds of things going on.

[123] Yeah.

[124] When you're trying to think of like us as a study subject and you'd want to get to baseline anything, it's kind of an erroneous pursuit because there is no baseline experience for us.

[125] Sometimes we're sleeping, sometimes we're hunting, sometimes we're mating.

[126] It's very Buddhist.

[127] It is.

[128] One of the funny stories I tell students also is that whenever you do a brain scan of somebody, there's a certain degree to which you have to trust them, that they're doing whatever it is that you're asking them to do.

[129] One of my favorite little examples was one of my colleagues was doing a study on memory.

[130] He said, we're always looking for subjects, so I sort of, yeah, sure.

[131] So I'm in the MRI scanner, and you're sort of like lying down and they're showing you a screen of different words and then you have to remember the words and say them back.

[132] I'm doing all this, and after about 45, 50 minutes, my back's starting to hurt, kind of have to go to the bathroom, ball, cat.

[133] Now I'm like, I hope I'm not doing a bad job.

[134] So all this is going in my mind.

[135] But meanwhile, from his perspective, it's just ball cat.

[136] I'm just doing a memory test.

[137] Now, the hope is that if you take 30 people and have them all do the ball cat, that will overwhelm all of the random.

[138] This guy had to go to the bathroom and this guy's arm hurt and this guy's foot hurt and this guy's thinking about picking up his kids.

[139] If you lay me down for 45 minutes at any point, I will remember something I forgot to do.

[140] Right.

[141] Excuse me. Oh, boy.

[142] Oh, I hate that.

[143] What's happening there?

[144] Have you fMRIed anyone sneezing?

[145] Oh, no. The questions you must get asked.

[146] The problem is you never know when they're going to happen.

[147] You have like pepper on the scene and some feathers and whatnot, bright light.

[148] But that would be actually very overlapping, I feel like, for your focus.

[149] Because the sneeze and the bless you, it's murked up in what maybe we thought was happening.

[150] Exactly.

[151] Okay.

[152] And the last time you hear we were talking about religion's effect on the brain.

[153] That is observable, like in an fMRI or through nuclear.

[154] Nuclear medicine imaging.

[155] But I'd first like to start because at this point now, to be honest, when I saw the topic of the book, I love it.

[156] I love talking about sex.

[157] I love talking about God.

[158] So your book is sex, God, and the brain.

[159] So right away, I'm very, very intrigued.

[160] But also then I'm looking at the last book.

[161] Then I get more curious about who you are and why you're steering your academic ship in this direction.

[162] I don't think we covered this much last time, but you start in chemistry.

[163] That's true.

[164] At a Quaker school.

[165] That's true, too.

[166] Okay, so these feel relevant.

[167] So what was the initial goal?

[168] My very initial goal really goes back even to when I was a kid.

[169] I just was always wondering about why people held different beliefs.

[170] If we're all looking at the same world, why are there Democrats and Republicans?

[171] I mean, shouldn't we all look at the world the same way?

[172] Why are there Jews and Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindu?

[173] Why do we all sort of look at the world differently?

[174] My initial thought was, I got to start with the brain.

[175] When I was in first grade, I would go to the elementary school library and they had a little book of all the systems of the body.

[176] And I would just take them out one at a time and then keep going.

[177] So I had the scientific ideas about, well, let's look at the brain.

[178] That's the part of ourselves that takes in our visual information and basically tells us what the world is like.

[179] You're on the inside of the experience.

[180] You laid out really nicely in the book.

[181] Everything's coming your way.

[182] It's coming through your ears and your eyes and your nose and you're tasting.

[183] Inside of this brain, you're trying to make sense of what's out.

[184] side, which is kind of unknowable in a way.

[185] Well, it is.

[186] And that was kind of what I discovered.

[187] And as I got into college and into this Quaker school of asking all these questions and then chemistry and understanding the science of the world, I realized that while I love science, there were some elements where it fell short, were sort of trapped in our brain.

[188] And so it became more of a philosophical question.

[189] How do you really know what you know?

[190] So I started to read philosophy and I started to take philosophy courses and courses in logic.

[191] And then I said, well, there are these religious and spiritual ideas.

[192] There's Buddhism and thinking about consciousness.

[193] And we have consciousness, but somehow we can't find it, but we kind of know we have it.

[194] And how do I know you have consciousness?

[195] And you're not just some AI zombie.

[196] I am just to cut to the chase.

[197] I thought so.

[198] I wasn't sure.

[199] Hillbillies from a d 'Urboro don't end up in this house.

[200] That's right.

[201] You know, it became that philosophical piece.

[202] I started to sort of merge the two.

[203] Yeah.

[204] In your chapter about myth, we talk about myth.

[205] And I think there's a colloquial use of myth, and it generally means a not true story when we use it around town.

[206] But that's not how anthropologists look at it.

[207] And then you point out even science is a myth.

[208] It's a story that hopes to explain our reality through empirical data, things we can observe or experiments we can run.

[209] But we'd probably all agree there's a ton of stuff that's not observable, at least yet.

[210] Some of it is not observable.

[211] Some of it is not observable yet.

[212] And then this issue about sort of trapped in our own consciousness.

[213] I don't know if we can ever get beyond that, at least in some kind of empirical way, because how do you study something that you're inside of?

[214] I would even quickly think, like, well, maybe that'll be some tool in AI and machines, but at the same time, the AI is educated on a large language model originated from humans.

[215] Part of what ultimately led me down a little bit of this path towards the mystical.

[216] It's in these mystical experiences that I first started reading about back in college and Buddhism, Hindu thought.

[217] Because in my mind, I thought, well, the only way to answer this question is that somehow you have to get outside of your brain, outside of your consciousness, look at what's out there in the world, look at what you're thinking on the inside and see if they match.

[218] And if they do, you got it.

[219] And if they don't, well, you know, you have to correct.

[220] But there's no way to do that.

[221] Or is there?

[222] And so in a lot of these mystical traditions, they say things like, I got outside of my mind.

[223] I got outside of my brain.

[224] I got And so to me, I'm like, okay, well, so what's going on when that happens?

[225] And can we look at that in some way, biologically, spiritually, that might be able to get us to an answer to that question.

[226] And that's what led to this kind of work.

[227] I imagine, too, there's like a lot of different ways to look at it.

[228] You could be first looking at how does the brain react to this idol you show it or this word cat, right?

[229] You can hope to discover maybe the mechanisms.

[230] inside.

[231] What happens physiologically in your brain?

[232] That's kind of one question.

[233] But then above that is what was it before it went through that mechanism?

[234] And one of the questions that I challenge a lot of my students about is ask the scientific question.

[235] All right, you've got trillions of neurons.

[236] You've got quadrillions of interconnections.

[237] You've got all different kinds of neurotransmitters being released.

[238] You have all the electrical depolarizations and electrical activity and all these different neurons.

[239] So where in all of that is your thought?

[240] Where in all of that is your consciousness?

[241] Because we don't seem to find it in a neuron, unless, again, if you're Buddhist and you say, well, everything has consciousness, then you could kind of go down that road.

[242] But an individual neuron doesn't seem to have it.

[243] So does 20 have it?

[244] Does a million have it?

[245] Does 10 million have it?

[246] And it's not just the neurons, because if I have a person who died and I'm looking at their brain, as far as we know, they don't have consciousness, unless consciousness is something that goes beyond the brain.

[247] Not alone a unique thought at that.

[248] It's not even just this fires, this fires, and you get this thought.

[249] Everyone has unique thoughts all the time.

[250] Yeah, what causes that?

[251] We don't know.

[252] I mean, now, there was like some very interesting research that was done a little while ago, and the joke was like the Jennifer Aniston neuron.

[253] There were seizure patients, and they actually put these very, very fine needles into individual cells, and they could find out that, like, this cell activated when you showed somebody a picture of Jennifer Aniston, for example.

[254] Oh, my God.

[255] But that's not the experience of the picture of Jennifer Addison.

[256] You know you're famous when every human's got a neurotransmitter dedicated to your face.

[257] Do you think people with seizures over index in liking Jennifer Aniston?

[258] Because that would add up.

[259] Monica has epilepsy.

[260] And I love friends.

[261] Oh, okay.

[262] Well, I do too.

[263] And my daughter does too.

[264] But interestingly, when we talk about this larger field of studies, sometimes referred to as neurotheology.

[265] this kind of intersection between science and religion.

[266] There are lots of pieces to it.

[267] And one of those pieces is actually people who have seizures because there's been this interesting link between people who have seizures and people who have unusual religious experiences.

[268] So you start to think, why is that?

[269] What's going on?

[270] And where people have seizures, they have seizures, and then they have the time in between the seizures.

[271] So are they having these experiences when they have the seizures?

[272] Are they having it in between?

[273] You're some very famous cases of people who have these seizures and become hyper -religious or have unusual mystical experiences.

[274] Now, it's a very, very small population of people who are at it.

[275] Well, I'd rather not have another seizure, but...

[276] We had another expert talking on the history of medicine.

[277] Yeah, so epilepsy was almost always regarded as some kind of spirit possession.

[278] Oh, absolutely.

[279] The devil was in the person and would have reformed that culture thought of the devil.

[280] It's interesting how some of these things a couple thousand years ago, they thought there was a religious, maybe somebody like Moses or somebody who saw a light and heard a voice, You know, in the medieval days, it was demon possession.

[281] And then nowadays, it's a medical disorder.

[282] So we'll see how it all goes.

[283] So like the Moses one.

[284] Enlightened.

[285] I actually talk about seizures at different times.

[286] And the carefulness we have to have is that sometimes people look at these kinds of results.

[287] People have seizures or people have schizophrenia who think that they're the Messiah or whatever.

[288] But then we sometimes over -pathologize that.

[289] And what is interesting about even the famous people who have had religious experiences is that it's kind of a one and off.

[290] It's not like Moses kept seeing the burning bush.

[291] It's not a chronic.

[292] Yeah, which is what seizures are.

[293] Normally, if you have seizures, you continue to have the same kind of thing happening over and over again.

[294] Maybe he got on Kepra after he saw the bush.

[295] There's a lot of theories.

[296] There's a lot of theories out there.

[297] Okay, but your own personal story has to be embroiled in this because I even think of, Sapolsky's, he's looking in a way at the same thing.

[298] And he has a very rigid explanation of that.

[299] You could, in theory, pinpoint what is critical mass for those neurons to create that thought, right, I worship him, but I was a little, there's something not very optimistic about it.

[300] It goes right up against self -will and all these other things.

[301] It doesn't hold any space for something that we don't understand or isn't observable.

[302] You must have your own relationship with spirituality or minimally maybe meditation.

[303] Do you have some kind of practice that maybe makes you more open to considering all this?

[304] It was really in college where I was trying to go down the scientific path, felt that it wasn't getting me all the way there, started to look at these other approaches.

[305] And I spent a lot of time just thinking about this problem.

[306] it became a kind of scientific spiritual meditation.

[307] I started to take this approach, which I felt was helpful, because again, I'm still going back to the question of what's real.

[308] And I thought, if there's something that I'm not sure about, it doesn't mean it's wrong.

[309] But I'll just say, for the moment, I'm going to doubt it.

[310] I don't know if it's right.

[311] I don't know if it's wrong.

[312] And I'm just going to hold it off to the side.

[313] I call it doubt.

[314] And I started to go through this whole process of doubting the ways I was thinking, of doubting different philosophies, of doubting science, And this was a very challenging thing to do in college when you're like studying for finals and in the mid -in theater, I'm doubting everything.

[315] It sounds like you're teetering on a psychotic break.

[316] It's very weird.

[317] I was in a similar place, by the way, when I was 20.

[318] I think a lot of us are.

[319] Yeah, yeah.

[320] We all go in our different directions.

[321] But after college was over, I managed to graduate and I was getting ready to go to medical school and you have this little summertime where you just want to take off.

[322] And so I said, well, I'm just going to really try to solve this problem because it was driving me crazy.

[323] Day after day, I'm just like, how do I solve this?

[324] I eventually had an experience that, for lack of a better name, I describe it as infinite doubt, that I got to this point where I was like, not only do I not know anything, I don't even know that I don't know anything.

[325] You know, and it just became this sort of infinite regression of not knowing.

[326] But it's a very interesting experience because, first of all, everything's part of it.

[327] Yeah, it's unifying in that none of it can be trusted.

[328] Exactly.

[329] Yeah, yeah.

[330] And so there was this sort of oneness.

[331] You know, I was doubting myself, obviously.

[332] so there was no Andy Newberg.

[333] Sometimes when I've told people this, they're like, well, this must have been like the worst experience you could have possibly had.

[334] Here you are trying to find an answer and you found that there's no way you can have an answer.

[335] And I said, but, you know, it was the most blissful, calming experience.

[336] And from that moment, I realized a new way of looking at all of this where I can keep exploring the question, but the pressure was all off.

[337] I completely relate to this.

[338] I don't know that I have the period of elation or transcendence, but I definitely got mentally to a point where I thought it's all unknowable and that is really liberating because it doesn't matter if you're wrong because everyone's wrong.

[339] There's some kind of freedom.

[340] I think the anxiety and even in a Buddhist way, it's like the tension is the craving for the answer and the admission that there isn't an answer is the erosion of that tension or craving.

[341] You approach it with a sense of humor.

[342] Oh yeah.

[343] When we look out on this universe, which is let's just for argument's sake basically infinite and what do we have access to?

[344] In the immediate moment, we have access to this room.

[345] You don't even know what's going on, but the guy's working on your house over there.

[346] No, it could have turned.

[347] Right.

[348] The whole house could have fallen out.

[349] It could be a mutiny happening.

[350] Let alone what's going on in China, in the galaxy next door.

[351] And then somehow we all feel like we know exactly what's going on.

[352] We know what's right and wrong, political or religious.

[353] It's very arrogant.

[354] It is.

[355] There is a survival value to it.

[356] You have to be making decisions.

[357] And your brain uses its problem -solving abilities to give you the story that we tell ourselves, but if we are worried about our story, our survival is at risk.

[358] That is going to blow our anxiety out of the water.

[359] So we want to feel like we understand the world.

[360] And that is part of why we've kind of gotten to where we are in the world through social media, because we want to hear all the reasons why we're right.

[361] Yeah.

[362] And that guy's wrong.

[363] And also anyone that has the appearance of conviction is very settling.

[364] Provided that it's conviction that you agree with.

[365] That you agree with.

[366] And then again, the problem is, is that if you don't, agree with me now I have one of two choices either I'm right and you're wrong or you're right and I'm wrong well which one is my brain going to select yeah well I must be right and you must be wrong but now if you're wrong and you keep speaking with such conviction to try to convince me you must be kind of a bad person yeah evil now we go into our other opposition yeah paradox we love and then you get into the us versus them and that's part of the mythic element it's part of the mating sexual piece too because we have the us versus them.

[367] It's our family.

[368] It's our group.

[369] It's whoever we are and whoever they are.

[370] They're a challenge to our survival.

[371] I wonder if do you feel like that has made you a little less fervent about the political energy?

[372] Completely.

[373] I look at both sides and I look at it the same way I'm looking at the universe.

[374] It's like, everyone's damn certain they're right.

[375] Like, let's just start there.

[376] And I'm no different.

[377] I can't really be trusted to think that I'm any more right than anyone else.

[378] I mean, you kind of have to live on a practical level.

[379] You have to live in a house.

[380] You have to get some food.

[381] You have to make decisions.

[382] You have to do the best that you can.

[383] But in the back of my mind, there's always like, well, that's what I'm doing, the best that I can.

[384] And I could be wrong.

[385] This may not be the best thing for me or this may not be the right answer or I think these are the right people to vote for.

[386] Or how about minimally, like, I'm aiming 60 % good decisions would be a big victory.

[387] Exactly.

[388] That's probably true.

[389] I don't also have the illusion that I could possibly make all the right decisions.

[390] I always think about sports.

[391] And I mean, we always think that the great.

[392] athletes never lose, but actually they lose a lot.

[393] Probably they win 60 % of the time.

[394] The best hitters 30%.

[395] And they're legends.

[396] And 20s suck.

[397] What a margin.

[398] Yeah.

[399] What a delta between glory and Right.

[400] Exactly.

[401] Isn't that weird?

[402] And that is interesting too because you get this whole sort of bell curve of all of us.

[403] And it is remarkable when you have some of these people who are just the LeBron James.

[404] Simone Biles right now.

[405] What makes them at this other level that is just different than everybody else.

[406] But again, you can kind of extrapolate that to religion and spirituality, too.

[407] There's only one Pope and there's only one Mother Teresa.

[408] There's a bell curve of all of this.

[409] Yeah.

[410] So the last book that we talked about was, again, about religions or God's effect on the brain.

[411] And so now we've incorporated sex.

[412] So I think the best place to start is how completely universal mating ritual is for all animals.

[413] So tell us a little bit.

[414] I mean, once you start giving examples is like, oh, of course, yeah, I've never seen a National Geographic show on animals where we didn't see the pageantry.

[415] It's really remarkable.

[416] This goes back also in my own personal life to this mentor who I met in medical school.

[417] It was a guy named Dr. Eugene de Quilly and he was a psychiatrist, but he had a Ph .D. in anthropology.

[418] And we used to go to these dinner parties where, you know, here I am this little lowly nothing.

[419] And I'm sitting around literally people who have won Nobel Prizes and who have revolutionized the field of psychology and medicine.

[420] And Gene's greatest thing was he loved rituals.

[421] In fact, his family was from Italy.

[422] He was actually nobility in Rome.

[423] And so he used to enjoy calling himself and his wife Baron and Baroness of the Holy Roman Empire.

[424] Well, it turned out, as he found out that as a Baron of the Holy Roman Empire, that means that he was allowed to knight someone.

[425] Oh.

[426] And so he found the whole ritual and how it all had to work and all the Latin.

[427] And they knighted one of the uncles or something.

[428] Oh, this is great.

[429] So as an anthropologist, he was looking at everywhere you see these rituals in animals.

[430] And he studied them and he wrote a book called The Spectrum of Ritual.

[431] And he talked about rituals take advantage of all the different senses that we have.

[432] So there might be movements that you see of a different animal or the big colorful feathers or the different sounds and the calls that they make or the smells that they emit.

[433] So all these different things, they stimulate the brain towards mating and bringing them together.

[434] But what he was also kind of getting at then was, well, what about human rituals?

[435] I mean, theoretically, human rituals would have to evolve from animal rituals.

[436] But in human beings, we certainly have our mating rituals and all the sights and the smells and, you know, we meet people at a dance and the movements and rhythms.

[437] But ultimately, in human beings, we have incorporated rituals into every part of our lives.

[438] We just had a ritual expert out.

[439] Yeah, he was fascinating.

[440] Who was that?

[441] Michael Norton.

[442] He's weirdly a Harvard Business School professor, but he's a psychologist.

[443] So his newest book is about ritual.

[444] And, yeah, we went through all these different, like your morning ritual and how people, Boy, what's the term they use in psychology.

[445] They're offended.

[446] Yeah, they're disgusted when you tell some, like, do you brush your teeth before the shower or after the shower or in the shower, right?

[447] Or do you rush teeth before you put your lotion on?

[448] These are like really important things to people.

[449] If it doesn't match up with yours, you're like, something's wrong with you.

[450] Your other.

[451] Exactly.

[452] We have rituals throughout our lives and all different aspects of our life and across the lifespan.

[453] We have rituals for marriage and child.

[454] But of course, religions are loaded with rituals from the ceremonies that we do again, the life rituals, the prayers, meditation.

[455] They're almost all ritual.

[456] They're all ritual.

[457] This is now 30 years ago, but Gene and I were talking about, well, if this is the case, we have all these incredible human rituals and specifically religious and spiritual ones, but if they evolve from animal rituals, all animal rituals are mating rituals.

[458] Yeah, what's the original ritual?

[459] So the original ritual is mating.

[460] I mean, all animal rituals essentially are mating rituals or social hierarchy rituals, but they're all part of the mating process.

[461] So sexuality ultimately has to be suffused throughout this whole thing.

[462] And so the basis of human rituals has to be the same as the mating rituals.

[463] So we kept saying, now there's got to be something that connects the sexual and the spiritual.

[464] And then we started to think about that in terms of the brain.

[465] And one of the ways that we got at that was through the rhythmic elements of these rituals.

[466] Say more on that.

[467] And we should also do two seconds on the two forces behind evolution as a brush up because I think it would funnel in nicely.

[468] Absolutely.

[469] Yeah.

[470] So with evolution, we talk about natural selection, which is what most people think of as evolution, which is survival of the fitness.

[471] Their neck was longer by mutation and you reached higher trees and then you're a more successful giraffe and you can pass on your long neck jeans.

[472] To the next generation.

[473] That's natural selection.

[474] And then there's sexual selection, which is part of the process because it's part of the mating process.

[475] But for whatever reason, a given species starts to like some kind of ornament, we'll call it.

[476] So the classic examples are the big antlers of a moose or an elk.

[477] I'm living in Colorado right now.

[478] So, you know, they're all sporting these large antlers.

[479] They're a great cost to the animal, and they have no benefit other than the mating ritual.

[480] Exactly.

[481] Oh, so it's always something superfluous?

[482] Often is, almost always, yeah.

[483] And the ritual itself is an opportunity for the female to determine the fitness of this mate.

[484] So for peacocks, those are a great expense.

[485] They draw attention from predators.

[486] They're sending a lot of signals that this motherfucker's fit.

[487] He's like got a big sign saying, come get me. And he's still in front of me. And what's interesting about this, too, is that's part of why these ornaments get real big.

[488] And it's why male birds are generally prettier.

[489] Exactly.

[490] I mean, it's almost always the males who have that because it's the females.

[491] It's sort of guiding that selection process.

[492] They got the selection across the board.

[493] Pretty much.

[494] Well, because they have the egg.

[495] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[496] It's interesting because the male is selecting the female, but the female ultimately has that kind of final evolutionary push.

[497] And part of what has been proposed and goes along very well with what I talk about in the sex god in the brain is the human brain may have evolved not just because of natural selection, that we can solve problems and we can know how to plan our food so we can eat better, but maybe more so because of sexual selection, because what ultimately started to connect us with each other was poetry, music, stories, charm, sense of humor, playfulness.

[498] Yeah, but the brains have to evolve together.

[499] Yeah, you point out if a male was really funny and the female couldn't understand any of the It would not result in mate selection.

[500] Well, why does that happen all the time, then?

[501] Well, we've got a lot of variety in 8 billion people.

[502] It goes back to the bell curve.

[503] Which actually is important, though, because take peacock feathers or the antlers on an elk, if all the antlers on elk could only be two feet long and had no variability, well, they can't be a choice for selection so that you need something that actually can be larger, smaller, more or less, whatever it is.

[504] So some guys have a better sense of human.

[505] Some guys tell a better story.

[506] Some guys have a better voice.

[507] And that's part of it too, which is the beauty of evolution is that there's not a right or a wrong.

[508] It's a course it's on.

[509] It's what is more adaptive.

[510] And so if you have a woman who really likes great music, then the guy who tells a good story is going to be less interesting than the guy who's got a great voice.

[511] But then somebody else likes a great story.

[512] And so we're saying these things like sense of humor.

[513] They're the ornaments.

[514] The mental ornaments of who we are as human beings.

[515] And then that's what starts leading us for getting the religious.

[516] explanation of religion for a moment.

[517] Look at religion.

[518] I mean, it's got the rituals.

[519] It's got the stories.

[520] It's got the social connection.

[521] It's got a lot of stuff that can really be very exciting for someone and ultimately kind of creates that cohesive group that ultimately everybody wants to be a part of.

[522] So it can work very well both on a natural selection, because it creates a cohesive society, but on a sexual selection basis that it kind of brings us together in ways you believe what I believe.

[523] And this is an important story.

[524] And this tells me how the world is.

[525] I've now shown you if you have somebody who's got a lot of fervent belief in something, but it's consistent with yours, then you like that.

[526] You're attracted to that.

[527] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[528] What's up, guys?

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[545] It's interesting, though, they can converge or overlap, and maybe that's my complaint always about anything binary, is there's kind of overlapping those two mechanisms, which I think of the lion, right?

[546] Male and female lions have this huge sexual dimorphism, the male is so much bigger than the female.

[547] And that's going to continue to increase at infinitum because the way the mating works in a pride of lions is one.

[548] line comes in that's bigger than the previous alpha gets overthrown and then that one reproduces.

[549] Every generation size is rewarded and the male keeps getting bigger when the female stays the same size.

[550] That's just the course it's on.

[551] That seems like an overlap between mate selection and natural selection in a bizarre way.

[552] You could look at that either way.

[553] That's actually, to me, the power of religion if you look at it from an evolutionary perspective, which is that it really works on both mechanisms.

[554] Right.

[555] Because that's your fundamental question.

[556] How would our capacity to believe in a religion or a god, be adaptive in either one of these.

[557] From the perspective of sexual selection, it tells a story, it connects you to ideas about the world, it has music, it has social, you know, it has all these great things that bind people together.

[558] So that's the sexual selection part.

[559] But it seems to have a natural selection part as well, because it does create cohesive societies.

[560] And in fact, one of the things I point out in the book is this idea that we have found ancient temples that were built in like 9 ,000, 10 ,000 BC, thousands of years before we had civilization.

[561] So religion seemed to occur long before we were actually able to create these kind of social groups that actually became very adaptive for us because it bound us all together.

[562] As far as I know, I don't think there's ever been a civilization that has developed de novo without religion.

[563] I mean, you look at ancient Mesopotamian, Egypt.

[564] Well, but that's why I say de novo.

[565] And in fact, actually, because I took a course in Russian history in college, the religious elements of Russia were huge.

[566] Yeah, they were the second Greeks.

[567] Yeah, exactly.

[568] But back to the evolutionary thing, Yuval does a great job at demonstrating this in Sapiens, which is conventionally we're designed to live in a group of about 100 people.

[569] That's what humans traditionally lived in.

[570] And this common belief in a shared deity allowed us to congregate in groups peacefully like 1 ,000, 2 ,000, 3 ,000.

[571] So, and then now we're a member of a group that's 3 ,000.

[572] And we can easily displace a group of 200 Neanderthals that might be physically superior to us, but have less numbers.

[573] So then it becomes part of natural selection.

[574] Exactly.

[575] And I think it really does blend both.

[576] There's two forces that have kind of guided human history.

[577] One is the science technology, the wheel, fire to iPhones.

[578] And then the other is the religious and spiritual, which for all of the issues that religions have had over the years, here we are 2 ,000, 5 ,000 years after.

[579] And they have survived Greece, the Roman Empire, Soviet Union.

[580] religions kind of keep going.

[581] Well, I think you could lose track of that a little bit in the U .S. or in Europe, but Monica and I were in India this year in Hyderabad.

[582] Oh, yeah.

[583] Where we were saying was predominantly Muslim, and they were doing the call to prayer five times a day.

[584] And, you know, the entire city stops and does that.

[585] And it's very loud.

[586] That's what everyone's doing.

[587] For me, at least, I was like, oh my God, yeah, it's so alive and it's so integrated in all day, every day still.

[588] Even in places like Europe and in areas like the United States where there's been a move away from religions, there's still a great deal of spiritual elements to it.

[589] People are still looking for that connection.

[590] They're still looking for what connects them to the universe, connects them to something greater.

[591] And it could even be just humanity.

[592] I mean, it could be being a humanist and saying, I've got to take care of humanity.

[593] That's what I want to do.

[594] I want to be altruistic.

[595] I want to be charitable.

[596] I want to help the downtrodden, whatever it is.

[597] But there's that thing that connects us to something greater.

[598] And that, to me, is what we ultimately are talking about.

[599] It can be codified into a religion, and obviously those religions which are still around today, and have done that very successfully.

[600] The analogy to me is music.

[601] Millions of people are writing their own songs, but there's only one Beatles.

[602] And why was that?

[603] Well, there was something about their brains that allowed them to write songs that had a universal appeal, whereas some guy sitting in his garage could be writing a fantastic song, but it just doesn't resonate with people.

[604] So I think that's part of it, at least in terms of the codified forms of religion.

[605] And that gets back to this discussion that we were just having.

[606] There's sort of an evolutionary aspect to religions, which is when Christianity was starting out, there were lots of individual sex of religion.

[607] And so which were the ones that really lasted?

[608] And they were the ones that, for a variety of reasons, kind of hit the largest majority and felt right and could bring all these people together.

[609] And that I think is true of all of the major traditions, that they just seem to be able to connect with a lot of people.

[610] I always argue that everybody, because all of our brains are unique, I mean, no two people look at the world exactly the same way.

[611] Yeah, you said if there's eight billion people, there's eight billion religions.

[612] Eight billion religions.

[613] But there still can be a billion Christians or a billion Muslims.

[614] So I think that's part of the power of it.

[615] Okay, so let's get into a little bit the physiology of these things.

[616] So give us a brief course on the autonomic nervous system and what's happening.

[617] Oh, my favorite part of the brain.

[618] That was one of the things that my late mentor, Gene Quillian, I talked about when we were talking about this connection with sexuality.

[619] and rituals, how does this all kind of connect?

[620] And we looked at what's called the autonomic nervous system.

[621] So the autonomic nervous system connects the brain to the body.

[622] There's two main arms.

[623] So one of them is called the sympathetic nervous system.

[624] That's the scientific term.

[625] I typically referred to that as the arousal system of the body.

[626] And then there is the parasympathetic, which is the calming or quiescent side.

[627] And they are very much balancing each other out throughout our whole lives.

[628] We almost sit within this balance of all of them.

[629] And so if we were sitting here and suddenly we heard an explosion out, side, the arousal system would kick in.

[630] Do we need to pay attention to that?

[631] Do we need to run?

[632] Do we need to stand and fight against a predator, whatever it is?

[633] But it gets our heart rate going.

[634] It gets us aroused.

[635] It gets us getting ready for whatever it is that we need to do.

[636] And then you have this calming side, which is what turns on when it's getting late at night and it's time for us to get ready to go to sleep.

[637] So it calms us down.

[638] It makes us feel blissful.

[639] What's interesting about this system is that us and other colleagues have proposed that this is a key part of religious or spiritual experiences because when you talk to people about their experiences and we've done surveys of thousands of these experiences, you get these two sides.

[640] You get, I was incredibly aroused energy, electricity, all these different words that people use, but incredibly calm, you know, oceanic blissfulness kind of thing.

[641] And sometimes they happen together, which is interesting because the two systems, they normally kind of inhibit each other a little bit.

[642] If you heard an explosion, that isn't the time to take a nap.

[643] That's the time to get out.

[644] And by the same token, we've all been in that place where, you know, we're trying to get a good night's sleep before we have a big test the next day or a big something at work.

[645] And we can't sleep.

[646] Why?

[647] Because our arousal system keeps impinging on that calming side.

[648] But what's also interesting is that fundamental to sexuality and the rituals that we have, the rituals, depending on the rhythms, drive the autonomic nervous system.

[649] So that's why if you're getting ready to play a football game, You want some heavy rock or rap that's got this big beat that's going, and it drives your arousal system.

[650] It wakes you up, and now you're ready to go out there and fight or do whatever it is that you need to do.

[651] And on the other hand, if you want to get this sort of sense of oceanic, blissful, overwhelming love of God kind of thing, then a Gregorian chant or a hymn that's very calming or some kind of prayer where you just come along and it slows you down and it gets you to feeling this very, very calm feeling.

[652] So that's how the rituals start to affect that.

[653] But ultimately, why do we have these systems at all?

[654] It's because of sex.

[655] These two systems are what enables sex to occur.

[656] They enable the rituals to start the process.

[657] You start to get that balance.

[658] There isn't a one way to do it.

[659] Some people like a lot of energy and arousing.

[660] Other people like to be calm and relaxed.

[661] But you find the person who resonates with you.

[662] But ultimately, in terms of the act of sex itself, both arms of that autonomic nervous system have to turn on in order for you to have an orgasm.

[663] Well, that's what makes it so pleasurable, right?

[664] Is that both sides are firing at max capacity, which is very unique.

[665] Right.

[666] As far as I know, the only two times that that happens where people talk about that happening is sexual ecstasy and spiritual ecstasy.

[667] Well, because I'm a junkie, I will also parallel with that's why the ultimate drug has always been the speedball.

[668] It's virtually that exact same thing in chemical form.

[669] It's an upper and a downer at once, and it's creating this cake and eat at two's steak.

[670] When I was talking earlier about this big puzzle of neurotheology, the whole aspect of using psychedelics and different drugs to induce spiritual states.

[671] You know, this is exactly what's going on.

[672] Those chemicals are changing in the brain.

[673] And many people talk about those psychedelic experiences as being profoundly spiritual and sometimes sexual.

[674] Yeah, MDMA.

[675] Yeah.

[676] Let's see, myth, we kind of touched on, I just wanted to point out because I like that you shine the light on it.

[677] But the brain is just really great at creating opposites.

[678] We talked about it already in terms of even if you don't know your reality, you're best to think you know your reality because you do have to decide.

[679] And I think this is an outgrowth of that, right?

[680] Oh, absolutely.

[681] Our brain works best when we can clearly delineate things.

[682] So we have what we used to refer to as a binary operator.

[683] We have parts of our brain that see the opposites.

[684] And you think about how you grow up.

[685] You learn synonyms and antonims and black and white.

[686] Our brain likes things that way because it also makes things clear.

[687] For anybody who's got a kid, what you did was right or wrong.

[688] It can't be, well, you can turn the juice cup over on Tuesday.

[689] and Thursdays, but not Mondays and Wednesdays.

[690] Or it's okay to do it if you really don't like it, but it has to be yes or no. That makes our lives easier.

[691] But we get into these issues of Republican and Democrat or something.

[692] It's yes or no instead of the world itself is deeply gray.

[693] That's where our challenge comes in.

[694] And that's the basis of myth, which is that we sort of bring these opposites that we really can't reconcile easily.

[695] And in religious myth, the fundamental opposite is God versus us as human beings.

[696] How do we as these very finite, limited, small, mortal beings have any kind of interaction with something which is arguably infinite and eternal and omniscient and so forth.

[697] So it's the mythic story that brings them together and helps us to resolve those opposites.

[698] And that's why you often see things like a profound sense of oneness or connectedness that's a part of that mythic story.

[699] Bridging the gap between these opposites you've laid out.

[700] It's ironic that that's a pleasurable state at times.

[701] Well, it is because it resolves a problem for you.

[702] Because of that, it releases some of those feel -good molecules, the dopamine and so forth that makes you feel good, makes you feel like you understand something now, talking about the Olympics right now.

[703] So wherever you grew up, you rooted for your high school basketball team and you hated the high school down the roads basketball team.

[704] It's us versus them.

[705] But then we're all part of the same city, so we're all going to root for the Lakers.

[706] And we hate the Celtics.

[707] It keeps transferring.

[708] Right.

[709] And now we're in the Olympics.

[710] And so the guys who played on the Celtics and the guys who played on the Lakers, this is all the United States.

[711] If aliens came down, then we'd be all playing.

[712] which is an interesting piece of all of this because it gets into the us versus them concept, but where do you define those lines?

[713] And the us versus them is movable and sometimes in very good ways, but sometimes bad ways.

[714] That's the downside of it.

[715] Well, if we can remember that it's movable, that would be good.

[716] Okay, let's get into the history a little bit of how some of these religions have dealt with sex.

[717] Given they're so related, it is interesting and ironic that so many of the ones we're familiar with, abhor sex, apparently, unless it's in pursuit of procreation.

[718] So how on earth does it go from how it started to this weird division?

[719] And maybe we can start with what's sacred prostitution?

[720] Before I get to the sacred prostitution, you asked a great question.

[721] I've been thinking about this.

[722] One of the things that we almost have to start with, what is arguably one of the most well -known sacred texts, the Bible.

[723] The moment that human beings are created by God, what does God do?

[724] God doesn't tell human beings to pray, to create religion, or even to believe in God.

[725] God says, be fruitful and multiply.

[726] It's interesting that even in the religion of many of these monotheistic traditions, which now have a lot of trepidation about sex, at least for the sake of having sex, the original admonition to us was to have sex.

[727] I mean, that was the first thing that we were told to do.

[728] And of course, if you go to the very first line of the Bible, it's God created the heavens and the earth.

[729] God gave birth to the universe.

[730] The whole act of creation and sexuality is kind of fundamental to the monotheisticians and I think to all traditions where I think the flip started to occur is there began to be this concern about the overlap.

[731] If sexuality and spirituality are using the same basic biological mechanisms, they can be viewed as competing with each other, in which case you should only have sex for procreation and not for fun.

[732] But then there are lots of traditions, and you mentioned being in India and Hinduism and even some of the ancient Christian Jewish approaches, sexuality was a part of the process.

[733] And you mentioned prostitution.

[734] The idea was these women who were performing sexual acts were doing so at the behest of God, helping people to connect with God in a very fundamental way.

[735] And back in the ancient times, they were regarded very highly in society.

[736] Yeah, unlike prostitution now, which diminishes status, this elevated status, in like Mesopotamian, Sumerian tradition.

[737] Exactly.

[738] Part of it has been this slow evolution of, well, where does sexuality fit in all of this?

[739] I mean, the original traditions were often about fertility goddesses and coming from Mother Earth, God, the Father.

[740] And in fact, it is interesting because even in more modern times, I think one of the quotes that I have from Pope John Paul II, talks about how sexuality, obviously, within a marriage for the Catholic tradition, but it's talking about it's this devotedness, this complete giving over of yourself to another, this incredible oneness and connection.

[741] which in many ways parallels what we are supposed to be doing with God.

[742] It seems like they're caught in a bit of a trap, right?

[743] Which is like they don't want you to be able to go out and experience this unique experience you get with God with someone else because it cheapens the God one.

[744] Yet no religion could be against procreation or it wouldn't have made it to now.

[745] Yet then there's also a great hack in there, which is if you can only have sex to procreate and we know how much you want to have sex.

[746] Well, now we're ensuring you're going to have a ton of babies because we want to fuck.

[747] That's what's going to happen.

[748] Exactly.

[749] So it's all very convoluted.

[750] To me, that was part of what was exciting about writing this book because it was really identifying the underlying biology of why this has become such a challenge because it looks like it really does ride on the same biological mechanisms, the autonomic nervous system, some of the other brain areas.

[751] The fact that there's so much common elements to it literally within us, it creates this problem and it creates this paradox that is challenging.

[752] That's why some religions have found ways of utilizing sexuality as hard of that process and others have been more concerned about it.

[753] Will you tell me about the cult of Venus just because I'm perverted and I want to know how it was before?

[754] A lot of this was based on the idea of the sexual energy as being the way that you could achieve spiritual enlightenment.

[755] And we see this in a number, you know, if you look at some of the ancient Hindu art forms and so forth, there's a lot of eroticism.

[756] And it was really about engaging in sexuality and sexual activity.

[757] as a way of facilitating the spiritual.

[758] Well, even the notion you pointed out in the book, Yahweh's covenant with his people is going to be symbolized by cutting the penis.

[759] How about a high five or something?

[760] Yeah.

[761] They're asking you to basically alter the most important thing to you.

[762] Is that for proof?

[763] So that people will know you're a member, this in -group.

[764] That's right.

[765] It's amazing that was the approach that was taken.

[766] It's so extreme.

[767] It's based on sexuality.

[768] You know, we just kind of inherited it as something that happens, but it's so extreme, not like cut your pinky off or give yourself a tattoo.

[769] Yeah, or a nose ring or something.

[770] Yeah, because I'm sensibly, you're seeing the penis when you're having sex.

[771] So it is all connected.

[772] And it gets back to the stories and that sexual selection discussion.

[773] And so it's all connected.

[774] Okay, so sexual ecstasy and spiritual ecstasy seem to have also, aside from the sympathetic and parasympathetic, we also have these subjective feelings that parallel.

[775] Intensity, clarity, unity, connectedness, and surrender.

[776] When we did a survey of spiritual experiences, and we looked at all the ways in which people describe them, we came up with the fact that there seemed to be these five basic elements that are part of those experiences.

[777] But again, they are all part of the sexual experience as well.

[778] So intensity, if you look at history, what else has garnered human attention more than sex.

[779] Every poem, every song, every play, they're all about sexuality.

[780] So part of the other piece of all of this is even if you were to take a religious perspective and say, well, if God's up in heaven and here we are and there needs to be some connection there, why wouldn't God utilize the things that are part of who we are?

[781] So if you want to facilitate an intense experience, you would take the most primal experience that we have, which is having sex.

[782] If we don't enjoy it, we're not going to do it.

[783] it better be the best experience we can possibly have.

[784] And that's because of its intensity, the unity.

[785] I mean, that's another really fundamental piece of what sexuality is.

[786] When we talk about the rituals, the basis of animal rituals as well as human rituals is to create this rhythmic pattern that breaks down the barrier between ourselves and another.

[787] Normally, animals are pretty separate in the world.

[788] They're certainly not going to start jumping on top of each other, but they do it for set.

[789] So there's something about that part that brings us together in an extremely intimate way that is also reflected then in spirituality, that sense of oneness, that incredibly intense and intimate encounter with God, if you're Christian or the universe or universal consciousness, you know, whatever it is.

[790] You mentioned the sense of surrender.

[791] As you get into sexuality, as you get into spirituality, you know, at the beginning, you're kind of making things happen and you're controlling what's going on and I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, whether it's meditation or sex.

[792] But at some point, you kind of lose control of the whole process.

[793] Ideally.

[794] Yeah.

[795] That sense of letting go and surrender is the transcendent part.

[796] And then with regard to human beings and sex, we talk about clarity and spirituality.

[797] That's, I get it.

[798] I understand the world.

[799] In the context of sexuality, it's, I get it.

[800] This is the person for me. This is who I now will connect with.

[801] And it has a transformational element.

[802] I mean, when you fall in love, it feels forever and it feels like I'm a different person now.

[803] You complete me, you know, the old saying, or who's it from Jerry McGuire or whatever.

[804] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[805] But that's a feeling.

[806] And the same thing happens with spirituality.

[807] The person feels completed.

[808] They feel that they understand it.

[809] They feel transformed by the experience.

[810] And we can start looking at the different brain areas.

[811] So one of the ones that I talk about a lot, and I may have mentioned this the last time, is that we have our parietal lobe, which is located in the back part of our brain, and it takes our sensory information from all the rituals, from everything that we see, and gives us our sense of self, where we are and what we're doing and how we're interacting with the world.

[812] What we have found in a lot of spiritual practices that when you get that sense of unity, that sense of connectedness, you lose the sense of self, that parietal lobe quiets down pretty dramatically.

[813] And that makes sense.

[814] It turns on to give you your sense of self, when it goes away, you lose it.

[815] And you lose the boundary between yourself and other, between other objects in the world.

[816] So that's one of the big areas that we talk about.

[817] And then the sense of surrender is just one other example, we think is very related to the frontal lobe.

[818] And so our frontal lobe, which is behind the forehead and enables us to focus our attention on meditation, in prayer, sex, whatever it is that we're focusing on.

[819] Yeah, that turns on our frontal lobe.

[820] But when we watch these practices where the person feels that sense of surrender, you mentioned going to India and looking at Muslim practices.

[821] We studied Muslim practices, and the whole basis of Islam is surrender.

[822] Their frontal lobes actually shut down.

[823] You know, it turns on to make us feel purposeful and to be in charge of whatever it is that you're doing.

[824] And when your frontal lobe goes down, you surrender yourself.

[825] Sometimes people talk about the feeling of flow.

[826] Like, you're just in it, and it's just happening to you, and you're just going with it.

[827] I think of the stereotypical, you hear this all the time that very common submissives in these sub -dom relationships are people who actually have great, great control and power in their real life.

[828] It's so exaggerated in their daily life that to keep everything balanced, they almost need this submissive role.

[829] Fascinating.

[830] It is fascinating.

[831] And part of the basis of rituals and myths and all these things that we're talking about is that as you, turn the brain on in these different ways or off.

[832] The brain is a great analogy to a muscle because the more you use your brain in certain ways, the more the neurons connect to enable you to do it again.

[833] The cute phrase is that neurons that fire together wire together.

[834] Well, that's why rituals work so well.

[835] You mentioned they're called to prayer five times a day, every day.

[836] So as you come back and you do that prayer, as you do the life ceremony or what you do at a wedding, you do it over and over and over and over again, those neural firings and all, they connect those neurons in a way that really supports your way of thinking about the world and connect you to that in a very fundamental way.

[837] And because of that autonomic nervous system, and this is kind of the final part of the rituals, is the rituals are connected to the myth, to the story.

[838] It's not that you just understand what it means cognitively to be Jewish or Christian or whatever.

[839] You feel it in your body.

[840] That's what sexuality does.

[841] It's not just, oh, I love that person, but you're connected to that person in every way possible.

[842] It's a different kind of relationship than you have with your best friends.

[843] So it establishes a whole different kind of feeling.

[844] And that's why they're so powerful.

[845] And the chemicals involved, you have a section called the biochemistry of God and sex.

[846] So what molecules are at play?

[847] One of the things that I often say is that there's not one part of our brain that makes us religious or spiritual.

[848] And similarly, there isn't just one molecule that's going to make us feel something.

[849] And I think for anybody who does have a spiritual feeling in their life, they realize that there are different elements to it.

[850] There's things they think.

[851] There's things they feel.

[852] There's the emotions that they have.

[853] And we've done some brain imaging studies where we've looked at some of these different neurotransmitters.

[854] And so one of the ones that a lot of people probably have heard of a dopamine, and that is the feel -good molecule.

[855] And that gets released during practices like meditation.

[856] It gets released during sexual arousal.

[857] So the dopamine becomes a very important part because it gives you that real euphoric kind of high.

[858] And that's part of why the drug cocaine is so powerful because it causes a release of dopamine.

[859] The serotonin system is another.

[860] another one.

[861] That's where the psychedelic drugs work.

[862] And serotonin gets released when we are engaged in these different rhythmic processes and these practices.

[863] And we did a study where we looked at somebody who went through a long -term retreat program and it showed that the brain was more sensitive to dopamine and serotonin.

[864] So each time now you have a new firing of it, it's like a little added effect, almost like a drug.

[865] You know, it kind of keeps getting stronger and you may want it more and more because it keeps feeling better and better.

[866] One other one is a neurotransmitter.

[867] Many people may not have heard of this one called GABA, which is an acronym for gamma amynobutyric acid.

[868] And what it is is it's one of the main inhibitory neurotransmitters in the brain.

[869] It kind of calms the brain down.

[870] It's actually one of the sites where most of the big anti -anxiety medications.

[871] What GABA does is it helps to calm the brain down.

[872] So remember when we were talking about the frontal lobe quieting down, the parietal, well, there needs to be neurotransmitters that help those areas do that.

[873] And that's what I think GABA does.

[874] And there's been evidence that there's a release of GABA in the brain when people are meditating or praying.

[875] And so we see all of this, but these are also all part of the sexual, you know, if you look at how sex actually happens and the arousal that you get with the dopamine and then you get the serotonin and then some of these other neurotransmit.

[876] It seems like it's a very, very similar kind of mechanism, it's kind of utilizing that mechanism to have those same powerful feelings.

[877] Basically, you can observe that the spiritual experience and the sexual experiences are both very similar in their chemical composition.

[878] and physically what areas of the brains are engaged.

[879] So then it really is just a question of which one was first, and it seems pretty obvious that it would have to be sexual.

[880] Right.

[881] If you take the evolutionary, the idea that there were all these animal rituals for millions and millions of years, and you go back in the brains and look at ancient animals, and we find autonomic nervous systems, and these neurotransmitters have been around for...

[882] Yeah, prehistoric crocodile.

[883] You give an example.

[884] Is this why cults are so powerful?

[885] it's like the trifecta.

[886] They do rituals.

[887] There's some spiritual element to a lot of them and often a sexual element to a lot of them.

[888] Absolutely.

[889] Sexuality as well as spirituality can be incredibly positive and they can lead to compassion and understanding.

[890] But they can also be used for a lot of negativity.

[891] Yeah.

[892] Even the idea of occult is interesting because back in the day, 2 ,000 years ago, Christianity was a cult.

[893] Is it not a cult now because there's a billion people who follow it?

[894] This to me is it really, really interesting part of neurotheology, which is the whole normal and not normal and how do we define that.

[895] We did a study of people speaking in tongues.

[896] We did the brain scans.

[897] These are when they were speaking in tongues.

[898] While they were speaking in tongues.

[899] Incidentally, they feel that sense of surrender, so their frontal lobes shut down also.

[900] But what was interesting to me, as I was looking it up, doing my due diligence of trying to understand what it was, for the people we had coming in, it was connecting with God.

[901] But there are psychiatrists who will tell you this is a trained psychosis or hypnosis.

[902] And then there's other religious people who would say, that's not connecting with God.

[903] That's the devil.

[904] So you have the same thing that now everybody's looking at differently.

[905] But getting back to your point, though, even within that concept of normal and not normal, you might say, well, somebody who likes to go to a church or mosque, they kind of have quote unquote normal religiousness.

[906] But what do you make of a nun or a monk who says, I'm not having a family?

[907] I'm going to take a vow of celibacy.

[908] I'm not going to take any money.

[909] I'm just going to be very focused on only that.

[910] Is that normal?

[911] It's not a successful reproduction strategy, minimally.

[912] Unless it's a way of sort of showing a target.

[913] We understand that not all of us are going to be able to do that, but if we all strive to be good people and we realize that there's this sort of ultimate goal of connecting with God, whether it's now or someday in the future or after death, it helps to support the overall community.

[914] It's real.

[915] Look at her.

[916] Exactly.

[917] Can't be me. In Hunger Games, they're tributary.

[918] Yeah.

[919] And like, I'll go.

[920] Right.

[921] Your question is great because this is part of what this whole research helps us to understand, which is sexuality is wonderful when it's too consenting people and they love each other.

[922] And it's great.

[923] It's intimate.

[924] It feels terrific.

[925] But it can obviously go very wrong to the point where you have abuses and rape and addiction.

[926] Stay tuned for more armchair expert.

[927] If you did.

[928] Let's save dark side of sexuality and religion until the end.

[929] Tell us about the Om Group and what opportunity they opened up for you, having had this curiosity for 30 years.

[930] For 30 years, I've been thinking about this relationship between sexuality and spirituality, but my late mentor, Gene DeQuilly, he died very suddenly after I've been working with him for about six, seven years, and he really had that anthropological background.

[931] I'm coming at it more from the neuroscience side, so as part of the team, I could kind of continue the neuroscience piece.

[932] But I had to leave a little bit of that anthropological piece behind because it wasn't my area.

[933] But I always felt like that was part of how we got here.

[934] And I kept wanting to find a way to do that.

[935] And a lot of times I get a call out of the blue from somebody who says, hey, we've got this practice that is really interesting.

[936] And would you be interested in studying it?

[937] And usually I say yes because that's what I do.

[938] Monica, people have gone in the MRI and masturbated.

[939] Not with me. Yeah.

[940] But I found that interesting because you point out like, look how strong.

[941] this wiring is that you can be in this machine making a lot of noise, knowing you're observed, you're probably assuming that it's not going to happen, but you show some pornographic images, boom, and people orgasm inside of an MRI.

[942] So one day I'm in my office and I get a call from this woman who I don't know anything about and she says, we do this interesting practice called orgasmic meditation.

[943] I don't know, okay, sounds interesting.

[944] I like both those words.

[945] Tell me more.

[946] Tell me more.

[947] As she was describing it, I realized fairly quickly that one, this may be an interesting, link between this whole discussion of sexuality and spirituality.

[948] It's a meditative approach that uses sexual stimulation as the focus of the meditation.

[949] My first thought was like I'm sure many people that seems a little odd, but when you actually take a step back and think about how many practices work, many practices use our body's physiology as a focus.

[950] And probably the most common one is our breath.

[951] You meditate by closing your eyes and focus on your breath and the air feels cool and you feel all these things.

[952] There's a meditation called the body scan.

[953] There's walking meditation as well.

[954] the idea of using some kind of stimulation that's part of your body, okay, that makes sense.

[955] And then there was this added piece, which was the sexual stimulation, which to me, I'm like, this could be a little bit of this missing link because here I might be able to actually show what the sexual stimulation do in the brain when it's not specifically used for sexual stimulation, but as a kind of spiritual meditative focus.

[956] I think we need to talk about what's physically happening.

[957] So in this practice, a woman's meditating and a man generally, there's a stroker and a stroked.

[958] And so a man is stroking the woman's clitoris as she meditates.

[959] Exactly.

[960] There were a couple of things that were interesting to me, too, because it is a paired practice.

[961] And I do get a lot of questions about what's the difference when you're doing like a meditation practice if you're just sitting there yourself versus if you're a large group at an ashram or something like that.

[962] But this is a meditation practice, which is done with two people.

[963] They were very adamant about the fact that the person who is doing the stimulation is part of the practice.

[964] So the male, and it could be a female theoretically, but in our study we did it as a male and female pair, the male who's doing the stimulation is very much meditating on what they're doing and what effect they're having.

[965] For the female who is having the sexual stimulation, she's also involved in this meditation.

[966] And so she's focusing her mind on the feelings that she's having on the energy that is being generated as part of this process.

[967] And part of what also was kind of helpful for me as a researcher, sometimes when we've done a study like Buddhist, meditation, when we scan people, we need to have some sense of timing because I can't put somebody in a scanner for hours and hours on end.

[968] And one of the ways that we do our scans is through what's called nuclear medicine, where we inject a little bit of a radioactive tracer.

[969] It's great for me to do that, but it captures that moment in time when I do the injection.

[970] So I need to know what they're doing at that moment.

[971] And when we did our Buddhist meditation study many years ago, they said, well, we meditate for an hour, hour and a half, you know, like, how do I know where you are in your practice?

[972] I mentioned the speaking and tongue study, there was no timing on that, but you can hear I'm doing it.

[973] So the nice thing about this practice was that it's a very clearly timed practice.

[974] It's 15 minutes.

[975] The last half of that 15 minutes is the peak experience.

[976] So I can know when to inject.

[977] I can know when to do the study.

[978] All of that became very helpful for us from a research perspective because it made it easy to know what the whole very well -defined intentional process was.

[979] They were very clear that it's not having sex.

[980] And orgasms are happening sometimes.

[981] and sometimes not.

[982] Occasionally, but that is not the goal.

[983] They were very clear about that.

[984] And as part of our study, we ask everybody how it was, because that's a whole other piece, which is we want to make sure that anybody who's coming in for our study is doing the practice in a genuine way.

[985] We asked them if they had actually a climax in our group.

[986] None of them did.

[987] That's a little interesting to me. I don't know how one gets their clitoris stimulated for 15 minutes while focusing on that.

[988] Are they actively trying not to have an orgasm?

[989] I don't think they're purposely trying not to.

[990] I just don't think that's their goal.

[991] were their energies focused.

[992] Their energy is not focused on it.

[993] It's more just connecting with the actual stimulation.

[994] Exactly.

[995] Part of me was interested in seeing how the sexual, spiritual piece matched up.

[996] But then there was also the kind of social connection, too, going back to our whole conversation about rituals and how do these two people connect with each other.

[997] And is he being observed as well?

[998] We actually were able to set it up in such a way where we actually scanned both of them.

[999] And did they have this great correlation of brain activity, the way when people sing together or do anything together?

[1000] That was part of what we found.

[1001] We saw changes in their brains in general.

[1002] We saw their frontal lobes decreasing.

[1003] By the time they get into this process, it's sort of this natural thing that's just kind of happening to them.

[1004] I should also be really clear that as with a lot of our studies, these were all people who are very experienced in this.

[1005] We're not just taking somebody off the street and saying, you know, try it.

[1006] Two students on campus.

[1007] Hey, you ever heard of home?

[1008] Yeah, right.

[1009] Here, let's try this.

[1010] And in fairness, I mean, when we've studied people speaking in tongues, and these are all people who have been doing it for many, many years, which in and of itself is a whole other interesting question about who should you study and should you get people who are experts or novices.

[1011] So these are all people who are very experienced with it.

[1012] And that, to me, was part of it.

[1013] So we saw the frontal lobes decreasing in both the males and the females.

[1014] We saw the parietal lobes decreasing because there was this very intimate connection.

[1015] There's sharing an identity in a way.

[1016] Exactly.

[1017] What we also found was that there were certain changes in their brains.

[1018] that correlated with how the other one was doing.

[1019] It really showed that connection.

[1020] And in some ways, that was, I think, maybe the best evidence of the whole sexual selection model, which is that your brains are really resonating with each other as you get into this kind of a practice.

[1021] Yeah, because my knee jerk on the surface of learning of this practice was like, well, this is very lopsided.

[1022] This is interesting.

[1023] The guy just stimulates.

[1024] But at the same time, no, I've had those.

[1025] experiences and they're very wonderful for you too.

[1026] I guess I'm relieved to hear their brain patterns were mirroring each other.

[1027] And there were some distinctions as well.

[1028] The other areas of the brain that also were different in them were something called the precuneus and the insula.

[1029] And these are basically social areas of the brain.

[1030] They are the areas of our brain that we use so that I can read what you're feeling and know how you're thinking and try to be empathic and compassionate to you.

[1031] So these areas were also significantly affected.

[1032] Well, because you're overly aware of any Q being broadcast to you so that it will inform your actions.

[1033] Exactly.

[1034] Even that act of trying your hardest to observe what someone's doing is kind of a euphoric.

[1035] It's like shrooms in that it forces you out of your own head enough that it's pleasant.

[1036] You're really almost feeling what the other person is feeling, or at least that's your kind of goal, and it could be very powerful for obviously both individuals.

[1037] And this is part of where this kind of practice and meditative practices, talking about the real positive side of things.

[1038] Does this enable your brain to continue to be empathic towards others, even in a non -sexual way?

[1039] Does it make you try to understand other people more, try to reach out to them, be intimate with them?

[1040] And I don't mean sexually intimate, but understanding who you are and where you're coming from.

[1041] Are those reps of intimacy and reps of empathy?

[1042] In this particular case, we didn't specifically measure that, although we do see longer -term changes in these individuals in these areas.

[1043] But other studies have certainly looked at that with things like mindfulness and other types of practices.

[1044] This is just for your own amusement.

[1045] It's an anecdote.

[1046] But we interviewed people who had been in cults.

[1047] And we interviewed a guy who was in a cult that was a spinoff of this.

[1048] There was a woman in New York that practiced this and then ended up with kind of a house everyone lived in and it was wild.

[1049] I don't know if you crossed past.

[1050] I did not.

[1051] I think there's a doc about, okay, so let's now talk about the dark side of sexuality and religion.

[1052] The most well -known atheist, the first thing they point out always is more people have been killed in the name of God than anything else.

[1053] And there's a truth to that.

[1054] So this to me is a real area where the field of neuropheology can help us with because clearly there are people who turn to religion.

[1055] Some of those wonderful human beings I've ever met were like in the pastoral care department at our hospital.

[1056] And they're deeply religious.

[1057] They have their own religious tradition.

[1058] But they're open to everyone.

[1059] They love everyone.

[1060] They want everyone to be well and healed.

[1061] So they turn their religion outward and help everyone.

[1062] And then of course there's people who are willing to drop a bomb around their chest and kill people who don't believe the way they do.

[1063] And this goes back to our earlier conversation a little bit about where is our line drawn in terms of the us versus them and how strongly do we feel about that?

[1064] How dogmatic do we get about that?

[1065] Even if you're one person, if you believe you're connected to all of humanity, then you're a loving, compassionate person to all of humanity.

[1066] But if you think that it's your group and your idea and you're going to defend that idea and anybody else who says anything differently, there's got to be something wrong with them and they're evil.

[1067] It turns that into very negative energy.

[1068] One of the statements that my mentor and I used to talk about is that rituals are a morally neutral technology.

[1069] They can be used for great good, bringing the whole country together or bringing a whole group of people together and loving each other.

[1070] Or Hitler.

[1071] And he was terrific at using symbols and rituals.

[1072] I mean, the rhythm and the songs, unfortunately.

[1073] I also can imagine, again, I'm always infusing the addiction lens with all this, is that for sex addicts, it is a great way to regulate your internal state with this great distraction.

[1074] And you can find freedom and peace from whatever is haunting you.

[1075] You can enter this zone and that is this freedom.

[1076] Without sounding too judgmental, I have definitely met people who practice religion in a way that I would say is identical.

[1077] The normal day -to -day life is so uncomfortable that this constant retreat into this world and thought process is being used at all times to regulate.

[1078] Do you think there's any parallels between those two?

[1079] Absolutely.

[1080] Part of what has been realized with the good versus the bad of religion and spirituality is that religion does get wrapped up sometimes in that negative aspect.

[1081] Sometimes people think God is punishing them.

[1082] Sometimes people turn to a religion that seems to be very dogmatic and very hate -filled, but ultimately resonates with them because of whatever issues they've been dealing with and does help to kind of quell what they're feeling.

[1083] And so people have tried to turn to different psychotherapeutic approaches that incorporate religious content to help bring people around to a different way of looking at it.

[1084] And instead of looking at God is hateful, God is angry, God wants us to harm other people, God is loving, God is compassionate, God wants us to be compassionate and loving to other people.

[1085] But that to me is why it's a really interesting neurotheological question, which is what is the difference in a brain of somebody who has an addiction and turns towards religion or spirituality?

[1086] You look at Alcoholics Anonymous and using a higher power.

[1087] I mean, that's a fundamental part of the whole process.

[1088] And it's very powerful for a lot of people.

[1089] And it obviously has worked for lots of people, but it doesn't work for everybody.

[1090] And then there are people who really go in very negative directions and what is the difference in the brain of somebody who takes that negative path?

[1091] And I do suspect that in addition to just the overall biochemical changes, you're talking about some very core areas of the brain.

[1092] There's a very central structural called the hypothalamus, which sits like at the very base of the brain.

[1093] It's an amazing part of our being because it's maybe a half a centimeter or half an inch or whatever in size, but it regulates our autonomic nervous system.

[1094] It regulates our hormones.

[1095] And because it regulates these things, it's very involved in our aggression because we sometimes have to be able to fight or flight and quickly.

[1096] But it also is where a lot of our pleasure centers are and they're very close to each other.

[1097] To me, I'm always thinking, well, if it's just a millimeter to the left or a millimeter to the right, you get different neurons.

[1098] Those might people fight and then have sex.

[1099] And I talk about that a lot in the book.

[1100] I mean, that has a long, thousand year history of aggression and violence and then followed by rape.

[1101] Again, it all gets wrapped up because it's all part of that stimulatory piece, which can lead to very good things, and it can be fun to have a sort of aggressiveness with your partner, but it can also, when that's not wanted, it can lead to horrific stuff.

[1102] And it is interesting how both sexuality and religion or spirituality can both have that wonderful positive side and both have that really horrible negative side.

[1103] Both prone to indulgent power and dominance.

[1104] But that to me also is just why it keeps coming back to this common theme of they're using the same parts of our brain.

[1105] Well, physiologically, if we're talking about, let's say, terrorists or something, if their frontal lobe has shut down because of ritual and spirituality and all these things that are used at first, can they even logic their way out of some of these things that are getting told to them?

[1106] It's a great question, and it is extremely hard.

[1107] A lot of the people who get caught up in these things, they can undergo a conversion.

[1108] They can go through a process where they come to some realization.

[1109] Now, that to me is another really great neotheological question.

[1110] What is the data?

[1111] What is the piece of information?

[1112] What happens?

[1113] What is that moment of this is wrong?

[1114] That was in rabbit hole, if you remember, Monica, these people that started as Occupy Wall Streeters that then evolved into QAnoners, but then some of the people that left QAnon because it got really religious.

[1115] And then for whatever reason, you keep going down in layers of identity.

[1116] And eventually one of these will bump up against an even more core identity marker, which would be for this woman, it was like, I'm an atheist.

[1117] As much as I believe in all this other stuff, the Q &N on the Occupy.

[1118] I'm not religious.

[1119] It got to this point where now we're quoting texts from 2000 years ago.

[1120] I'm out.

[1121] They can keep moving its way through your identity until it hits a roadblock where that one's so core to how you define yourself, you're now willing to be critical.

[1122] How much information or what happens within us when we have a paradigm shift.

[1123] This is not just for religion.

[1124] This is for science.

[1125] When I was going through medical school, if somebody had an ulcer in their stomach.

[1126] It was because of acid.

[1127] One day, and I remember we were like reading these articles about how there was a bacteria that was doing this.

[1128] That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.

[1129] It's definitely coffee.

[1130] Yeah.

[1131] It can't be that.

[1132] That article that says it's a bacteria, that was poorly done.

[1133] These people don't know what they're talking about.

[1134] And today, we give you an antibiotic.

[1135] So they always joke with, you know, science proceeds one funeral at a time.

[1136] As people change their way of thinking, how much data do you need?

[1137] You know, the other story I always think about is Albert Einstein and quantum mechanics.

[1138] He couldn't get there.

[1139] Yeah, smartest guy in the world could not get there.

[1140] Exactly.

[1141] And he would come up with ways to prove that it was wrong, and then they would do the experiment to show that it was right.

[1142] And he still didn't like it.

[1143] Like, what do you need to know that?

[1144] I know.

[1145] It's this truth that we always try to pretend not there.

[1146] I even asked it to Sapolsky.

[1147] I said, you have this enormous brain to bear on whatever your intuition is.

[1148] And you can fool yourself, but we have this intuition.

[1149] We have some weird base belief, and then we can deploy our huge brain to confirm it.

[1150] And you can't know.

[1151] You can't know.

[1152] Okay, the one thing that I felt like is missing from all this conversation.

[1153] And also, I want to point out, you lay this book out beautifully for both people.

[1154] So whether you're an atheist or whether you're religious, this book, I don't think, threatens either one of those.

[1155] It's very inclusive of both those experiences.

[1156] Thank you.

[1157] I try to be.

[1158] It's very meticulously done.

[1159] I'm an atheist.

[1160] So, of course, I'm looking at this as basically this system has been co -opted by this human invention of religion.

[1161] But the other explanation I've had for why we are so prone to and prime to accept a deity is that we're the ultimate social species.

[1162] And so hierarchy is the most important force in our life.

[1163] Our hierarchy is going to determine our mating access, our access to food, to shelter, to everything.

[1164] It's number one.

[1165] I agree.

[1166] And we are masterful at identifying hierarchy immediately.

[1167] We pick up so many cues to figure out where we fall in the status ladder.

[1168] So because we're so blueprinted to recognize and accept and then be deferential to status and to be subordinate to status, of course a god is easy for us.

[1169] It's the ultimate alpha.

[1170] It's just, of course, there's another thing above this alpha.

[1171] And so I'm just curious, how do you see our predilection and obsession with status and hierarchy?

[1172] play out in sex and religion?

[1173] Or is that even an aspect you think of much?

[1174] And then maybe even what's happening in an fMRI when we are evaluating status and hierarchy.

[1175] And is that perfectly paralleled to the sexual thing as well?

[1176] First of all, I completely agree with you.

[1177] In fact, that's part of the argument that I make.

[1178] And the term I was using a little bit in the book was worship.

[1179] If you look at the social hierarchy of all animals, as you mentioned, there's the alpha male or a queen bee.

[1180] And it is also something all about mating.

[1181] So that whole process is deeply embedded within us to be able to establish those hierarchies and to have that alpha male.

[1182] And to just pick up on one thing particularly important that you mentioned, which is that when you have an alpha of any particular kind, I often thought, well, if somebody decides to fight the alpha and then they lose, why don't they just try again?

[1183] But they don't.

[1184] You are very deferential to anyone who is above you in that hierarchy.

[1185] And so that clearly has been a part of what has been kind of embedded within us.

[1186] I would see it on playgrounds all the time.

[1187] You must have, too, is like these two kids hating each other's guts, they schedule the fight in front of the school, they fought like crazy, they cried the blood, they get up, they're instantly at peace with each other.

[1188] Yeah.

[1189] The immediate resolution of it reeked of something primitive in hundreds of thousands of years old.

[1190] Even if you look at major wars, we had World War II where our hated enemies were Germany and Japan and now, I don't know for best friends, but we're certainly good friends.

[1191] Up there, yeah, yeah.

[1192] England and us.

[1193] Yeah, that is part of that process because it maintains that social hierarchy.

[1194] So I completely agree and talk about that, that whole concept of worship and even the Ten Commandments is no other God.

[1195] I mean, it's like, I'm alpha, no idols.

[1196] I don't know the exact biology of it.

[1197] I suspect that it does have something to do with the autonomic nervous system, because as you said, you get to this fight where your arousal system is as high as it's going to be, and then once that fight is done, that drops and your calming side comes in.

[1198] But what's also interesting is we use our autonomic nervous system also to evaluate how that hierarchy runs.

[1199] We did an interesting article, I thought, on the forgiveness process.

[1200] And this is also an interesting piece of religion and spirituality and revenge versus forgiveness.

[1201] And I sort of started with, well, how do you know that somebody has injured you in the first place?

[1202] Because if you're my boss, you're allowed to tell me I did a lousy job if I did a lousy job.

[1203] You're not allowed to abuse me, but you're allowed to tell me I did a lousy job.

[1204] If you're my friend, maybe you're not allowed to tell me that I did a lousy job at work.

[1205] You just stumbled into Monica and I's life.

[1206] What about when it's your boss and your friend?

[1207] That's very tricky.

[1208] I never recommend that.

[1209] Too late.

[1210] So revenge behavior, this is in the Bible too, about an eye for an eye.

[1211] Ahamaraibi.

[1212] Right.

[1213] So if you injure me, I injure you back.

[1214] An eye for an eye.

[1215] And I have rebalanced that hierarchy, however that was.

[1216] Even if I perceived you to be higher than me, I may not know.

[1217] necessarily bring you down below me, but I've at least haven't let you get much higher than me. But interestingly, forgiveness also allows for a rebalancing, depending on the cognitive and emotional processes that are part of that.

[1218] So I might say, well, you know what, he hurt me or he insulted me, but he's a human being.

[1219] Maybe he was having a bad day.

[1220] I'm a human being.

[1221] I've had bad days.

[1222] I'm going to let this go.

[1223] In my mind, I reestablish the hierarchy in a different way.

[1224] And interestingly, as we have learned in history, while revenge, we see this all the time in the Middle East, but sometimes forgiveness is a more powerful approach because other people see what's going on and take your side as the one who is now forgiven.

[1225] My concrete example is always in traffic, you're merging, someone's pissed someone off.

[1226] Someone waves and they're basically saying I'm sorry versus you go to war and you argue and then you leave continuing to hate that person or you have misbehaved.

[1227] I guess what I'm getting at is I have gotten a much deeper lesson out of having wronged people and they forgave me and then I had the moment to reflect that my behavior was wrong and felt shame and guilt about that versus if they just fight back and I get locked in the fight.

[1228] I don't ever get into the evaluation.

[1229] Autonomic nervous system.

[1230] Yeah, it's so powerful forgiving somebody.

[1231] Yeah.

[1232] It's almost deadly.

[1233] It's like trying to hit nothing.

[1234] I got into playing pickleball.

[1235] If somebody smacks the ball at you hard, it's easy to punch that back.

[1236] Somebody gives you a real softy.

[1237] It's like baseball.

[1238] It's like getting there.

[1239] It's like hitting a knuckle ball.

[1240] You can't do it.

[1241] This also just.

[1242] shows how this intimate connection of sexuality and spirituality all fit together.

[1243] The whole social hierarchy of animals for mating that we see in all the other species on the planet that have social hierarchies, it became part of us too.

[1244] Oh, it's so fascinating.

[1245] Is there anything prescriptive?

[1246] I don't know if it's prescriptive so much as I hope it gives people an ability to reflect on their own ways of thinking about things on their sense of spirituality, their sense of sexuality helps them to identify the ways in which it works for them, appreciates when it doesn't, and I study these things.

[1247] So to me, it's never, hey, do this practice or do that practice, but it's really about understanding ourselves.

[1248] And I think that that helps us to know how to manage the different ways in which we are, even if it can just give us a little bit of pause and say, maybe that person, they're a human being too.

[1249] Maybe I should be a little bit more open and understanding and compassionate to them.

[1250] I would like the three main ones.

[1251] lighten their strangle hold up on sexuality.

[1252] I think that was my original complaint where I was like, well, fuck this.

[1253] This is what you're laying out for me. We're going to deny our sexuality.

[1254] I'm out.

[1255] This is crazy and untenable for me. And I think that's part of it too, which is does it give us a better understanding of that relationship and maybe helps people to not feel the shame?

[1256] But what I always emphasize is to find the ways that it's productive, to find the ways that it's good.

[1257] Sexuality is wonderful when you're with the right person and it connects you and all those wonderful feelings.

[1258] And you can use that to be empathic and compassionate to others as well.

[1259] And the same thing for spirituality.

[1260] Have your belief, but go out and reach out to other people and engage them and try to learn about them.

[1261] And I think it makes us all better people.

[1262] And I guess that's what it's all about.

[1263] Oh, well, such an interesting book.

[1264] Sex, God, and the Brain.

[1265] Andrew, your second visit.

[1266] I hope there'll be a third.

[1267] I'm happy to.

[1268] You keep writing very interesting stuff.

[1269] Despite you acknowledging you'll never know anything, you keep trying anyways.

[1270] That's right.

[1271] If I ever figure it out, I promise I will.

[1272] We'll tell you.

[1273] Yeah, please publish.

[1274] Persistent should be your next book.

[1275] It might be.

[1276] All right, well, so fun having you in person, and I hope we see you again soon.

[1277] Thank you so much.

[1278] All right, take care.

[1279] Hi, there.

[1280] This is Hermium, Hermium.

[1281] If you like that, you're going to love the fact check, Miss Monica.

[1282] Hello, Armcherry's.

[1283] This marks our last episode under the Spotify umbrella.

[1284] And I just wanted to thank, we've worked with so many wonderful.

[1285] people over the last three years.

[1286] And I just wanted to thank everyone.

[1287] We had such a wonderful experience there.

[1288] We really did.

[1289] We were treated very, very well, loved working with Spotify.

[1290] We were, yeah, we were treated abnormally well, I would say.

[1291] And right out of the gate, you know, Dawn Ostrov, who's the original exec to reach out to us and have interest in us and bring us over.

[1292] She was always so wonderful.

[1293] And then followed by Julie McNamara.

[1294] And then Jordan Newman, we love to death.

[1295] Jess Boris.

[1296] who I even had the pleasure of partying with in Austin at Danny Ricardo's live music.

[1297] I'm partying quotes.

[1298] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1299] In Asia, in Giselle.

[1300] An incredible team over there we got to work with, and we're very lucky and thankful.

[1301] Thanks for having us, truly.

[1302] It was a wonderful three years.

[1303] Yeah.

[1304] We have another fun three years of coming.

[1305] Yes, we do.

[1306] Which is very fun.

[1307] Reminder, ding, ding, ding.

[1308] that starting next week you can find us at you can find us anywhere we're everywhere can't put too fine a point on this because i see it in the comments wherever you're listening right now wherever you're at right now you can stay right there you don't have to do a damn thing don't worry but if you want to if you want to listen to us ad free oh i would you can go to wondery plus yeah if you want to see us on video you want to see us on youtube and some other places I'm not totally sure on that.

[1309] Yeah, but YouTube for sure, you can find us for the fact check and for experts.

[1310] There's just way more fun options coming your way.

[1311] That's right.

[1312] We have recorded in the new video space.

[1313] We have.

[1314] And I like it.

[1315] Yeah, how, let's give some behind the scenes about our feelings.

[1316] Yeah, let's do it.

[1317] I will say our very first guest, I did feel disoriented for about the first eight minutes.

[1318] I don't know what your experience was.

[1319] But I was like, oh man, yeah, there's lights, a lot of lights.

[1320] I mean, the attic's generally a little moody.

[1321] It is.

[1322] The lights don't work in here.

[1323] Yeah, actually don't work.

[1324] In fact, we have been many times interviewing someone in the winter that started at like two or three.

[1325] And it's like getting dark.

[1326] And we're like, oh, fuck, I got to wrap this up.

[1327] I can't see the person anymore.

[1328] Yeah, we're riding by daylight.

[1329] Yes.

[1330] And I had like six minutes of worrying like where I put my coffee.

[1331] And is it distracting that I'm reaching over to get my coffee?

[1332] I thought about my notes.

[1333] You know, I don't know I ever want anyone.

[1334] seen me glance at my notes.

[1335] Oh, wow, yeah.

[1336] What other things.

[1337] Yeah, but then that went away.

[1338] Our first recording we did is an amazing guest who also knows this space very well, this video space very well.

[1339] Yes, that's where they live.

[1340] That was a very nice entree in.

[1341] I don't know that they're all going to feel.

[1342] I think I'm just going to be.

[1343] Yeah, you tell me your feelings.

[1344] I think there's going to be some growing pains.

[1345] Yeah, sure.

[1346] But by the way, think about, well, I'm.

[1347] reminded of like when we first got in here and started doing it in here I know there was some growing pain no but that's because I I did my first video at it yesterday oh you did yeah and it was great yeah but I was like you got to look at yourself a lot well a few things one I was like I feel like we're starting all over and that I told myself to think of that positively but there were minutes of that feeling soul -crushing.

[1348] Oh, really?

[1349] Yeah, like, you got to learn a whole new thing.

[1350] I can't believe we've been doing this for seven years and we're starting from scratch.

[1351] And this is going to take a long time to get to the point where we were at as far as, like, ease.

[1352] Right, right, right, right.

[1353] Well, this is even workflow stuff.

[1354] It's like there's a lot more to it.

[1355] Yeah, yeah.

[1356] Like the other stuff dialed.

[1357] Yeah, not I would say not the vibe of the show per se, but just the workflow of it, right?

[1358] Yeah.

[1359] Yeah, like it, the original, and I was remembering, oh, yeah, when I was first editing, it would take so long, and now it's dialed.

[1360] And then I was like, oh, my God, it's taking so long.

[1361] Oh, no. Oh, no. Sure, a little panic.

[1362] There's a little bit of panic.

[1363] Also, we're accelerated.

[1364] So it's as hard as it'll be right now because we're playing catch up.

[1365] Yes.

[1366] Yes.

[1367] Because, again, if you have Wondry Plus, you can also get episodes a week ahead.

[1368] Right.

[1369] So virtually at the beginning, we have.

[1370] to kind of do two weeks in one week.

[1371] Six episodes in one week.

[1372] Okay, great.

[1373] Six, yes, six episodes in one week.

[1374] Yeah, it's a little bit of, it's an intense week.

[1375] Yes.

[1376] But it's great.

[1377] I mean, it is a lot of looking at yourself on this video.

[1378] And I already was like, oh, no. Oh, no, I'm nodding so much.

[1379] Why am I nodding so much?

[1380] Oh, I hate that.

[1381] And then today we recorded and I was like, oh, my God, am I doing it?

[1382] I forgot to think about it.

[1383] And then halfway through, I remembered to think about it.

[1384] Oh, my God.

[1385] Well, that's what I was feeling in the first eight minutes.

[1386] Now, mind you, I have had a lot more time on camera to break my bad habits, right?

[1387] I mean, I think I told you the most embarrassing thing I ever lived through was, like, playing the drums on camera on parenthood, having no clue what I look like when I played the drums and be like, whoa, that's what you look like.

[1388] It's different, though, than watching myself on a show.

[1389] Because that's a character?

[1390] Yeah.

[1391] Yeah, maybe because it's a character and also...

[1392] It's not real.

[1393] It's not real.

[1394] It's not as long.

[1395] I mean, it's like a whole episode of just watching us.

[1396] A movie, if you're in every shot.

[1397] That's right.

[1398] And it's a two -hour movie.

[1399] Yeah, you're doing three movies a week.

[1400] That's not normal.

[1401] And so, anyway, I was nodding a lot.

[1402] So I know people are probably going to comment on that.

[1403] And I already know that I am nodding too much.

[1404] So you don't need to say, I will try to dial it back.

[1405] But I also don't want to be in my head because that's the whole point of the show.

[1406] And, you know, all these things start to.

[1407] Well, I felt that, again, back to the very first one, I felt that for the first eight minutes.

[1408] I found myself being a little self -conscious.

[1409] Yeah.

[1410] But then the next episode, which we recorded yesterday, and I immediately just flopped into like, oh, I'm just alive.

[1411] I'm like talking.

[1412] I'm alive.

[1413] I'm not even thinking about it.

[1414] So yesterday for me was really kind of encouraging for my own self -conscious state.

[1415] I was like, oh, yeah, there were many long stretches where I completely forgot.

[1416] That was my hope, or maybe slash my fear, is like, in here, there's long periods where I completely forget it's being recorded.

[1417] It's like the sweet spot of this.

[1418] And so I was like, God, am I going to ever forget I'm being recorded when there's a camera at me?

[1419] And yesterday, yeah, totally, I completely forgot so much at the time.

[1420] It's going to be an evolution.

[1421] Well, we should be clear.

[1422] I would hate for people to think that the episodes are going to suffer because we're, because of that aspect.

[1423] I don't think they're going to suffer, but part of this show is being really honest about our feelings on everything.

[1424] And I, and I, that is something I also don't want to go away.

[1425] I don't want the video to be like a movie.

[1426] I don't want it to be presentational in that way.

[1427] We're still us.

[1428] Yeah.

[1429] And so, you know, if we are uncomfortable a little bit or for some reason, I don't know.

[1430] But I think.

[1431] Yeah.

[1432] my optimism is like when we start doing fact checks down there yeah I'm not worried about that because we know like I look at you I hope I won't speak for you I look at you and I go oh I can do anything yeah I feel so safe like if you're sitting across from me yeah I'm like oh yeah turn this thing on I feel very anchored by you in the way that I used to feel anchored by Peter Krause in acting scenes you know like oh I'm good Peter's here yeah I feel that for the fact I'm very excited to do fact checks on video actually but it is funny though because again like starting over a little bit I'm a little bit back in my head a little about how much I'm talking how much I'm not talking because you can see it it's a little you thinking about that no you can see me oh right so it's a little bit you're more reminded you think yeah so you know it's just I mean it's funny what I did get to is this is life life is pushing yourself and changing.

[1433] And we got really comfortable, which was, which is incredible.

[1434] But, you know, you can't just stay stagnant forever and it's good to try new things.

[1435] That's how I'm taking it is like, well, hey, yeah, the Phil Stutz thing, right?

[1436] Like, this is what life is.

[1437] Yeah.

[1438] It's change and it's work and it's blah, blah, blah.

[1439] And then also maybe I feel like I've earned this at 49.

[1440] Like, like if you throw this at me, it'll just be another opportunity for me to figure something out yeah and ultimately look back and be proud of myself like i'm kind of already down the road with it no it's a it's a good challenge and it's an excuse i'm going to buy so many new outfits oh sure yeah i did rob i was kind of mad at you when i was editing it because i was like my shirt is not right like you do have to tell me that well how do you know if it's right He can see them.

[1441] We've got this always recording thing, too, so I'm juggling, like, just make sure all these are focused and framed and, like, hopefully audio's running, too.

[1442] I imagine, like, whatever her experiencing, I'm imagining.

[1443] I'm imagining, Rob, you're probably having 3x that you have, like, so much more going on in the actual recording.

[1444] Why?

[1445] He's got to be looking at focus for five different cameras, and he's got sometimes seven.

[1446] You're pulling focus.

[1447] I mean, I'm just framing everyone when they sit down.

[1448] and the bottom.

[1449] Can you move it?

[1450] It's not on robotics, is it?

[1451] We don't have a remote head on any of these.

[1452] That would be cool.

[1453] It's scary.

[1454] Pushing in and shit.

[1455] Directing.

[1456] I think I technically could with that setup, but manuals better.

[1457] I'm not saying you have to fix it in the middle of the recording, but at the beginning, if my shirt is like not looking good on camera, I need last looks.

[1458] If you're okay, if you're giving me the okay to tell you that.

[1459] Yeah.

[1460] During a recording, I will.

[1461] Or could he yell avocado or something?

[1462] Maybe we have like three or four different code words.

[1463] But what if it's a really serious moment?

[1464] Because I need to look good for the serious moment.

[1465] So I can sneak behind that wall maybe and like whisper to you.

[1466] Oh, okay.

[1467] Yeah.

[1468] Let's try it.

[1469] What if we put a little light system on the coffee table?

[1470] Yeah.

[1471] We should have codes, right?

[1472] Like your shirt is something and your face is fucked up is like another thing.

[1473] That's code for your face is fucked up.

[1474] avocado no your face is fucked up is code for your shirt is messed up um anyway new horizons it's exciting new outfits it's gonna be great yeah for you like this is this is your time to shine you like today's outfit is fantastic we just left the space thank you your outfits on fire thank you um it was my birthday yeah before before we do that i want to do two housekeeping things great one is We heard loud and clear from the misophoniacs.

[1475] What do you call people with misophonia?

[1476] Probably not misophoniacs, and they probably weren't like that.

[1477] But misos?

[1478] Misos.

[1479] So the misos were like, in general, the water pouring, delightful.

[1480] Okay.

[1481] They did not like the sound of me drinking.

[1482] Yeah, that's where it broke apart.

[1483] It's mouth sounds.

[1484] It's not ASMR.

[1485] I think we did.

[1486] Yeah.

[1487] When you open up the door for the misos to sound off, they're going to let you know.

[1488] Yeah, you have to be careful with what you ask.

[1489] I was thinking there, there, it was very consistent that they hate water, you know, the sound, that they started hating it when I was drinking.

[1490] But then they would go on to list the things that really irk them the most.

[1491] And there, there wasn't a tremendous amount of consistency.

[1492] So it's like if you were dating a miso and you had previously dated a miso, you still got to figure out what their unique misos are.

[1493] And same with sex.

[1494] That's like all ailments.

[1495] And just like, and just like, Like, you got to relearn everybody.

[1496] Yeah, everyone's different.

[1497] Everyone's different.

[1498] And then next bit of housekeeping.

[1499] Yes.

[1500] Many people pointed out that the Jake Gyllenhaal glasses thing, he commented on it.

[1501] And he took it from Paul Newman.

[1502] Paul Newman wore his glasses that way in something.

[1503] He commented on our post?

[1504] No, no. Many of the listeners had either, many of them said he said it here, which I don't recall.

[1505] But then others said they saw him on a talk show talking about it.

[1506] but no matter what the origin source was, the story was still the same that it's a nod to...

[1507] Oh, J .G. J .G., you can playful little girl.

[1508] Obviously.

[1509] You might have said that here.

[1510] That sounds familiar now, but we hadn't seen the show yet.

[1511] He did like Paul Newman.

[1512] I do sort of remember that.

[1513] Well, he was his godfather.

[1514] Oh, yeah.

[1515] And you would come over.

[1516] I don't know if he's his godfather, but he would come over.

[1517] And he had the dressing recipe or something.

[1518] Oh, maybe he did.

[1519] Are we making a lot up?

[1520] Well, definitely the Paul Newman.

[1521] was at the house and he was around him a bunch yeah okay j -g so that's all settled okay that's great one more housekeeping also because next week new stuff go find synced yes on its own feed subscribe subscribe go there that's where you'll find it to listen forward out on thursdays just type that baby in synced, S -Y -N -C -E -D.

[1522] It's very good you said that.

[1523] Oh, that was another thing in the comments.

[1524] Some people said you can spell it both ways.

[1525] Well, not, you can't spell the show both ways.

[1526] No, not at all, but the word synced apparently.

[1527] Oh, all right.

[1528] Well, that was interesting.

[1529] That's fine, but it's not confuse people more.

[1530] No. It's spelled S -Y -N -C -E -D.

[1531] And go check us out on Thursdays.

[1532] If you miss having a Thursday episode, we're still around.

[1533] You can just run from Wednesday morning, straight through the weekend.

[1534] We have the best questions on there.

[1535] Yeah.

[1536] People really write in incredible questions.

[1537] Everyone you bring to me, I'm like, that's a fucking great question.

[1538] I know.

[1539] And they're very honest in like what they're going through, which is sweet.

[1540] It's very, very sweet and very vulnerable.

[1541] Yeah, we have fun over there.

[1542] So it's like it's almost like a mini version.

[1543] I don't want to say mini or anything diminutive, but it's related to Armchair Anonymous, but it's also different.

[1544] Yeah.

[1545] It has an element of that because we're hearing from.

[1546] real people who listen.

[1547] Oh, I'm so glad that just came up.

[1548] I had a very funny experience, which is I go to my daughter's new school's barbecue right after your birthday, ding, ding, ding.

[1549] Yeah.

[1550] And I'm in line.

[1551] I'm talking to a young, well, she's a girl.

[1552] She's not a woman.

[1553] She's like probably 15 or 16 or something.

[1554] And she's don't want out the burgers.

[1555] I step up and I go like, okay, I'm going to hit you with a really annoying request.

[1556] Like you got an assembly line going here.

[1557] I see it.

[1558] Is it possible to just get the patty?

[1559] Like, I don't want to waste a bun, basically.

[1560] Yeah.

[1561] I had talked long enough that she was staring at me really kind of bizarrely.

[1562] And she goes, hold on us.

[1563] Are you on anonymous?

[1564] And I go, wait, armchair anonymous?

[1565] She goes, yeah, is that you?

[1566] You're, like, I recognize your voice.

[1567] And I'm thinking, this is incredible.

[1568] This is a teenager who doesn't know who I am, visually.

[1569] You as an actor.

[1570] Yeah, or a human on planet Earth.

[1571] But she is in high school, and she listens to Armchair.

[1572] She doesn't listen to anything else.

[1573] And she's like, oh, my God, yeah, I listen every Friday.

[1574] I think it's so funny.

[1575] I love it.

[1576] And I was like, oh, what are your favorite stories?

[1577] And it was so funny.

[1578] I loved it.

[1579] I hope she's sharing it with all our friends.

[1580] I hope we have an upcoming Jen.

[1581] Calvin got really into it on our road trip.

[1582] Younger people like Anonymous.

[1583] He couldn't remember the name of it.

[1584] He kept saying, can we listen to Broadcast Studios?

[1585] Oh, we should change the name.

[1586] He has such good.

[1587] We listened to almost every single one on the road trip.

[1588] Running.

[1589] Shitting your pants and coming?

[1590] No, I skipped that one.

[1591] Okay.

[1592] But he loved like the grizzly bear attack.

[1593] Oh, yeah.

[1594] My kids.

[1595] Pooping ones he loves.

[1596] Sure.

[1597] We have one coming up that I told a bunch of people about.

[1598] Which one?

[1599] Blessing in disguise.

[1600] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1601] There were a couple on that that were like.

[1602] Blessing to Disguise was great.

[1603] I admittedly was very wrong about that prompt.

[1604] That's a very fun episode coming up.

[1605] Anyway.

[1606] Okay, your birthday.

[1607] Yeah, I had a birthday.

[1608] Came and went.

[1609] No. Oh, yeah.

[1610] According to you, I have a lot of days left, which is exciting.

[1611] Yeah.

[1612] And I haven't got on the chain yet, but I'll be there.

[1613] On the connection chain, you've been saying happy birthday for the past few days.

[1614] Yeah, yeah.

[1615] And I'm going to continue to.

[1616] And it was really, really nice, so nice.

[1617] Nice.

[1618] At Kara.

[1619] Yeah, I went to Kara.

[1620] Well, I had a shopping day in the morning.

[1621] Where did you go?

[1622] I went to some stores.

[1623] I won't say which.

[1624] I went to some relatable stores.

[1625] And then, and I got a haircut.

[1626] I got a birthday haircut.

[1627] That's a really fun thing to do.

[1628] Where at?

[1629] At a salon?

[1630] No, Jenny came over.

[1631] Oh, she did.

[1632] Good birthday treat to yourself.

[1633] Big treat.

[1634] I needed it so bad.

[1635] Don't feel like you need to comment on my hair.

[1636] Um, on some of the beginning episodes of video, uh, hadn't had my haircut and Rob forgot to tell me that it looked bad.

[1637] So, um, no need to comment.

[1638] That one's going to be a, beehive.

[1639] Birthday haircut.

[1640] Birthday haircut, which was a lovely start to the day.

[1641] She knocked it out of the park.

[1642] Uh, she's so good.

[1643] But yeah.

[1644] So, yeah, then in shopping and then we went to Kara had just kind of people come, stop by.

[1645] Very casual.

[1646] very casual it was so nice my favorite kind yeah you came a lot of people came oh there was 20 plus people there much more than i can much more than i can who came after i love right and amy okay good and yeah they made it they made it they had evy's a soccer game okay we had some covid people who couldn't come oh who had COVID oh i thought that was baby related of course um cat you had to leave on earlier than i would have wanted to For the aforementioned barbecue.

[1647] Yeah, yeah, that's cool barbecue.

[1648] Yeah, but it was really fun.

[1649] I had three martinis.

[1650] Oh, nice.

[1651] Over the course, though, of six hours.

[1652] Yeah, six hours.

[1653] That's not enough.

[1654] One every two hours isn't enough, I don't think.

[1655] I know, but birthday.

[1656] I didn't know this phrase, but apparently it's a phrase.

[1657] Martinis are like not to hurt anyone's feelings, okay?

[1658] I don't, because I don't, everyone's body's perfect.

[1659] Okay.

[1660] But martinis are like boobs.

[1661] One is not enough and three is too many.

[1662] Oh, yeah, I recently heard that saying, and it's a good one.

[1663] It's good because it's accurate.

[1664] One's not enough and three is too many, yeah.

[1665] Three pushes you over the edge a little bit.

[1666] Even if you love boobs.

[1667] I love boobs.

[1668] Oh, I meant for Markete.

[1669] I mean, four is good, though, right?

[1670] You think, oh, well, I got you, threesome.

[1671] Okay, but, yeah, I love boobs, but a third one, I don't know.

[1672] You'd probably still like it.

[1673] Yeah, I guess I like anything.

[1674] I can get myself to any.

[1675] Yeah.

[1676] Yeah, I can buy it.

[1677] It sounds perverted, but it's a good thing about you.

[1678] Yeah, it's my superpower.

[1679] I can find most things beautiful if I like the person.

[1680] And I can think someone's very unattractic because I don't like them, even though they're objectively.

[1681] I mean, I think we all do that.

[1682] Yeah.

[1683] Well, actually, I don't know.

[1684] I can't speak for everyone, but I definitely do that.

[1685] Well, I knew a lot of dudes that, like, hooked up with people they didn't like.

[1686] Yeah, that's weird.

[1687] It is.

[1688] I mean, it's not for me. No. I can't even talk to someone I don't like.

[1689] Yeah.

[1690] Well, you know this term, hate fuck.

[1691] That's like a whole thing too.

[1692] That's bad.

[1693] Yeah.

[1694] It is bad.

[1695] If you hate fuck people, you're a bad.

[1696] Yeah, you're bad.

[1697] Tell me about your trauma.

[1698] Oh, okay, so I didn't realize.

[1699] I did realize, but I didn't put two and two together.

[1700] Reels, you can only do in a minute 30.

[1701] That thing is 220.

[1702] Oh, it is.

[1703] So I chopped the beginning.

[1704] like just so that it's a little bit of that little song and then I just am going to make it the trauma part and then maybe we could do another one later in the week but I was afraid you already did it tomorrow and then collab and what we're releasing well I'll just oh collaborate yeah yeah that makes sense yeah that's easiest nice how do you feel about collabs if we could just talk about that for a second I don't like when I I see something I like and I look up and I want to like follow the person who posted or at least inquire into their other content and there's two or three people up there i'm like i don't know who's responsible for this and now i don't know who to go sniff around oh my god what i want to play something for you but that's okay it's just i'm now i'm thinking about instagram oh okay do you have any issue with that at all is that bother you okay it's never been a hang up for me okay because it says all the people who are collab i know but you don't know who originated it.

[1705] Oh, you want to know, because it's like a funny piece of content.

[1706] Yeah.

[1707] Well, why don't you just click on each person and then see.

[1708] Exactly.

[1709] Oh, wow.

[1710] Okay.

[1711] If I can click on three people and go through their whole page, try to figure out who the genius in this mix is.

[1712] I think you could probably find out quickly.

[1713] I guess for you and I, it doesn't matter, but.

[1714] Yeah.

[1715] Who are you trying to figure out?

[1716] Oh, tons of times.

[1717] It's all shit that gets recommended to me. And it's, there's like three names on it.

[1718] And I don't know who's, who's the genius behind this.

[1719] If you're wondering on my collabs with Liz, it's Liz, it's Liz who's a behind it.

[1720] Okay, that's very honest of you.

[1721] Yeah.

[1722] Okay.

[1723] Can I play one thing for you?

[1724] Yeah.

[1725] Okay.

[1726] I got to find out who I sent it to.

[1727] Okay.

[1728] I know I sent it to Kimmel because he loves yacht rock.

[1729] Oh.

[1730] This is great.

[1731] This is great.

[1732] Was yacht rock?

[1733] What if Metallica was yacht rock?

[1734] This is AI.

[1735] Enter the Sandman.

[1736] The song fucking slaps by the way.

[1737] Oh, my God.

[1738] What?

[1739] I love this song.

[1740] Isn't it fucking cool?

[1741] God.

[1742] Wow, that's good.

[1743] Isn't that wild?

[1744] I like that.

[1745] I should give the dude who created it some props.

[1746] Well, how do you know?

[1747] Is he collabed with a lot of people?

[1748] Well, luckily it was just his name.

[1749] But Mr. Professor 318, he does these he makes a i make weird mashups is what i can gather from his page and so he just tells a i do enter the sandman as yacht rock and this fucking spin up now we have a lot of fear about a i this we got out to say this is awesome that's great except i don't think we need a shout out mr professor blah blah well he's the one who he's the one who had the idea to do this yeah but he's not the robot wait the robot is the one that did it.

[1750] Oh, the AI role.

[1751] I thought you were talking about our robot, our in -house robot.

[1752] I am always talking about him, but no. Hey, me, play Metallica entered the Sandman as Yot Rock.

[1753] I can't remember my tune.

[1754] Oh, my God, Dax.

[1755] I hate this.

[1756] It's been too long.

[1757] Ah.

[1758] Da -da -da -da -da -da -da -de -de -do -do.

[1759] Yeah.

[1760] I want to hear some Metallica.

[1761] Yeah.

[1762] But I'm in the moon for Yot -Rog.

[1763] This after noon.

[1764] And then he just starts playing it, I guess.

[1765] Yeah.

[1766] All right.

[1767] But this, I can only think so highly of Mr. Professor.

[1768] But this is actually weirdly what's going to be the future of AI.

[1769] It's just a tool human art. Humans are going to use in a very creative way.

[1770] And so I certainly didn't think to tell AI to do that.

[1771] I did.

[1772] Oh.

[1773] I just forgot.

[1774] Let's hear your version.

[1775] I forgot to do it.

[1776] My version would be the same.

[1777] It would be to have AI make this song sound.

[1778] Like this, right?

[1779] Now, here's something really curious, and I don't know enough about AI to say it, but of like, this guy tells AI to do it.

[1780] Right.

[1781] And then you tell AI to do it an hour later.

[1782] Is it different?

[1783] Does it come up with the same song or different?

[1784] My hunch is different.

[1785] And how is that?

[1786] That's weird.

[1787] Each person's AI has a personality.

[1788] That'll be.

[1789] Oh, man. I had spinning, but I'll be listening to this great song as they take over the world.

[1790] Great.

[1791] Was there anything else?

[1792] About your birthday?

[1793] Did anyone throw a drink in anyone's face?

[1794] Was there any fistfights?

[1795] What happened when it became open to the pub?

[1796] No problem?

[1797] It was no problem.

[1798] Yeah.

[1799] Yeah, so it was private for a little bit.

[1800] Then it became open to the pub.

[1801] Figuratively and then I kind of was practicing doing some side eyes.

[1802] Oh, okay.

[1803] To deter.

[1804] Let people know you're not welcome here.

[1805] Yeah, but I forgot.

[1806] Okay.

[1807] also a sweet arm cherry sent me a drink by the way they were serving ted seagers there which blew my mind yes oh my god was that exciting that is so cool it is yeah you got a little video yeah you have to post that i will all right i'm gonna get into some facts now it'll be my last non video in it enjoy it Yeah.

[1808] Maybe drink four or five margis.

[1809] Oh, no, not margis.

[1810] Tini's, teenies.

[1811] I could feel it.

[1812] I could feel that third martini, even though it was six out.

[1813] I don't think I drank enough water.

[1814] You felt it the next day or you felt it in the moment.

[1815] Do you feel a little sloshy?

[1816] No, the next day.

[1817] No, you didn't feel sloshy.

[1818] I didn't.

[1819] I felt in control.

[1820] You felt sober.

[1821] You rode a motorcycle home.

[1822] Yeah, I did.

[1823] I didn't.

[1824] I mean, I felt tipsy, but I did not, I did not feel drunk or anything.

[1825] Did you say anything crazy?

[1826] Probably.

[1827] Actually, you know.

[1828] There was one conversation that I was in the middle of talking and I was like, I'm not made, I think I'm done making, like, full sense because it was sort of a serious conversation.

[1829] It required an explanation and I was making it and I was like, I don't think I'm firing in the way that I'm really making this explanation.

[1830] You didn't lay on that point.

[1831] I didn't.

[1832] Normally you could.

[1833] But everyone nodded and.

[1834] Yeah, people are pretty codependent, which is helpful.

[1835] They were also, everyone else was drinking too.

[1836] They're a little shit face too.

[1837] Well, that's, That's getting stoned.

[1838] I mean, that's the name of the game.

[1839] Yeah, you're like midway through some point.

[1840] You're like, I'm so lost in this fucking point, and there's no way they don't all know.

[1841] And what do we do now?

[1842] I know.

[1843] But no, the next day, I could feel it a bit.

[1844] Birthday blues.

[1845] Okay, cataract surgery.

[1846] My dad got cataract surgery.

[1847] Yeah.

[1848] And he was saying, you can have your vision fixed while you're, in there, but you have to pick near -sided or far -sided.

[1849] Sophie's choice.

[1850] Yeah.

[1851] He picked...

[1852] Far -sidedness.

[1853] He picked fixing distance.

[1854] Yeah.

[1855] And he wears his little glasses.

[1856] It makes the most sense because you can easily throw the glasses on.

[1857] It's probably safer to be able to see far away.

[1858] But I will say I don't know if that's the right choice because I'm...

[1859] At least my current life is like a ton of reading and doing research.

[1860] Yeah.

[1861] And it's and then journaling in the morning.

[1862] I just feel like a big chunk of my life is near sight.

[1863] Right now, though.

[1864] You're right.

[1865] When I move into my boating phase, I want my far -sighted this more.

[1866] I don't see anything about clothes.

[1867] And then your glass I might fall into the water.

[1868] Blow off when I hit those north of a hundred on my triple -engine pontoon boat.

[1869] Okay, so you said Huberman's specialty is the eye, but he's not an ophthalmologist.

[1870] Yeah, I wish I could remember what his...

[1871] He is...

[1872] He's a neurologist that specializes in the eyes, right?

[1873] Yeah, he's associate professor of neurobiology and of ophthalmology.

[1874] Oh.

[1875] So the urban lab is focused on brain function, development, and repair with emphasis on regeneration to prevent and cure blindness.

[1876] But he's not a medical doctor, which isn't an ophthalmologist, a medical doctor?

[1877] He must be.

[1878] I don't think he is.

[1879] Can you teach without?

[1880] Yeah, he's a researcher, I think.

[1881] So he must have a Ph .D. And not an MD.

[1882] Right.

[1883] Retinol and optic nerve damage in glaucoma and disorders of sensory limbic functions such as depression and PTSD.

[1884] That song is so stuck in my head.

[1885] Uh -oh.

[1886] Oh.

[1887] You know it was funny.

[1888] When I was pulling up my fax, I just typed in his name in my email because I send my fax to myself.

[1889] So I just typed in Andrew.

[1890] To make it feel like you get mail.

[1891] You like getting mail.

[1892] I love getting email.

[1893] I love it so much.

[1894] I love it so much that I have 39 ,107 emails.

[1895] I would throw that phone in the river.

[1896] Okay.

[1897] If I look at my phone and said that, I would scream out loud, I think.

[1898] I know.

[1899] It's, I don't, it's white noise.

[1900] I don't see that.

[1901] Okay, but so I typed his name in, pulled up the fact check, started looking up the facts and I was like, what?

[1902] Like, I don't really remember that, but, you know, we've done a lot.

[1903] It's from last time.

[1904] It was from last year.

[1905] Yeah, yeah.

[1906] Well, I've had that problem, too, because I keep a file of all my research.

[1907] And then so I have, over time, had to start putting the date.

[1908] Well, then I looked at the email date, and I was like, oh, shit.

[1909] But when I did that, it was cool because I learned something.

[1910] Would you learn?

[1911] Would you relearned?

[1912] Discronomateria.

[1913] Oh, that's colorblindness?

[1914] Nope.

[1915] Also called dyschronia is a condition of cereular dysfunction.

[1916] which an individual cannot accurately estimate the amount of time that has passed.

[1917] Ew.

[1918] Distorted time perception.

[1919] Ooh.

[1920] Funnel lobe stuff?

[1921] Cerebral.

[1922] Send the cerebellum.

[1923] Oh, cerebellum.

[1924] Anyway, that's from last year.

[1925] I'm still settling into the revelation that every brain part we've been talking about, there's two of.

[1926] Like, I'm still digesting hippocampi.

[1927] Same.

[1928] I don't even know if I believe that.

[1929] Okay.

[1930] I'm turning into you.

[1931] I like it, though.

[1932] We talked about sadism.

[1933] I mean, no, we didn't.

[1934] Oh, my God.

[1935] Sub and Dom.

[1936] Oh, uh -huh.

[1937] And there's a psychology today.

[1938] This was in 2020.

[1939] And it talks about a study published in the Journal of Sex Research, about understanding the personal origin stories of how practitioners became interested in massacism and submission.

[1940] as well as their reasons or motives for continuing to practice masochism and submission.

[1941] And it's interesting because it breaks down like intrinsic origins.

[1942] It says the significant majority of participants, 78%, described having an intrinsic interest in masochism slash submission.

[1943] Most of these participants describe, sorry, I can't read very well today because I woke up so early to go to the cardiologist update.

[1944] update update I don't think my heart's going to explode she didn't keep you that's a good she didn't admit me to the hospital yeah when anytime they say clear the rest of your day that's when you got yeah I am probably going to go on a statin yeah which is fine as I just said that I didn't like it yeah well you look this is the story of getting older's like the medication just racking up that is how it's like oh my god I'm 37 now I'm on a statin yeah you're already on the Capra and you're on the well not I'm I'm trying to sympathize with you.

[1945] It's like so many to take at night now you should see the thing I take in the morning you know I have a pill fucking sorter right and there's so many that it's so laborious I do two weeks at a time just because it's so much faster if I set up two weeks yeah but it's I look like I'm 100 when you go in my bathroom the biggest thing on my countertop is my pill selector yeah I mean most of my inter -elective, which is nice.

[1946] If I travel and forget that, I'll be fine.

[1947] Yeah.

[1948] That's nice.

[1949] And I wonder if going on the statin means I can, like, go crazy.

[1950] Well, that's, I think, how people fuck up the statin as they start.

[1951] Because I remember being with my uncle one time and he was, like, eating, you know, six, seven pounds of baking.

[1952] He's like, yeah, I'm on, you know, I'm on whatever it used to be called, Libertor.

[1953] No. Lipitor is one.

[1954] Yeah, just like, off to the races.

[1955] Yeah.

[1956] I'm not sure that that's how I feel.

[1957] It's supposed to be used.

[1958] She said, which was reassuring, you know, it was weird, and this is, I think, I'm getting more context to why Dr. Isaacson was like, there's weird stuff here, because there is a gene that basically shows hereditary cholesterol stuff.

[1959] And mine is not.

[1960] I don't have it.

[1961] But then there's this other piece called familial something.

[1962] I forget the word.

[1963] And she's like, you probably have that.

[1964] but you probably only have one as opposed to two she said some people who have two have like 900 wow yes do you think you could reframe it and get excited and start telling people like i'm going to stanton island oh no i'll try it okay sounds fun although i don't really want to go there well i mean i'm sure we have some listeners no no i mean i want to i do want to go there what if the But medication was called Hubbard's side.

[1965] Oh, I would love it.

[1966] I would love it.

[1967] Okay.

[1968] Anyway, most of these participants describe their interests in BDSM starting at a young age without necessarily having a sexualized component.

[1969] For example, some participants describe liking to be tied up or blindfolded during various make -believe games, such as cops and robbers.

[1970] These participants often said they were, quote, born liking BDSM or that they were wired that way.

[1971] about 7 % indicated that they had an aha moment later in life, realizing they had always been interested in BDSM practices.

[1972] And there's extrinsic origins.

[1973] 22 % of participants described extrinsic oranges.

[1974] 11 % reported it being connected to a history of childhood sexual abuse.

[1975] I want to guess wrongly, obviously, that that was a bigger percentage.

[1976] Yeah.

[1977] Oh, wow.

[1978] nine percent due to parental discipline example spanking with an object another nine percent introduced it through play as a child cops and robbers except that it was a friend who introduced the idea of restraints as opposed to them and nine percent reported being introduced to bdsm as an adult by a recent sexual partner as of yet i can't relate to either side of the equation as being very appealing to me i don't really want to be dominated and i also also don't want to like dominate or be masochistic because I can relate to most of these sexual things I'm like yeah I could get I could see getting into that yeah I definitely don't want to be you may want to dominate I don't know because I have yeah but I have that in life uh -huh so I don't think I need to play that out you're the CEO yeah go the other way but you don't go the other way.

[1979] I don't.

[1980] I don't feel safe enough in that environment to be dominated.

[1981] Right.

[1982] Even though you set the rules, we should say that.

[1983] That is the interesting thing about it.

[1984] You set your own rules.

[1985] Yeah, but I think I don't.

[1986] You don't even know what your rules are I don't trust people enough to follow the rules during sex.

[1987] And people get up.

[1988] Sure.

[1989] You get a little caught up in the mom.

[1990] Yeah.

[1991] Bloods moving from the brain to other areas.

[1992] I don't trust it.

[1993] You know, as you said about chimps.

[1994] I haven't watched yet, and I do really want to.

[1995] Watch the second episode last night.

[1996] He mentioned the cell that activates to some people when you show them a picture of Jennifer Aniston.

[1997] Oh, that's so cool.

[1998] And, you know, I'd really like her to come on, and I just want to say that out loud.

[1999] Sure, put it in the universe.

[2000] Yeah, I want to put that in the universe.

[2001] I'd love it, too.

[2002] And another plea to Selena Gomez, my friends.

[2003] Okay, we're doing the role.

[2004] We're doing a roll call.

[2005] Who I follow.

[2006] Yeah.

[2007] Still having her back from that.

[2008] Jay -Z, if you're listening, you know, of course I want.

[2009] We have a whole list.

[2010] Hey.

[2011] M -N -M.

[2012] But so that's it.

[2013] Happy birthday.

[2014] Oh, thanks.

[2015] We're going to go till September 24th.

[2016] Well, 23rd.

[2017] Oh, that's going to be such a sad day.

[2018] The 24th, the first day without a happy birthday?

[2019] Yeah.

[2020] I mean, I'm inclined to go fine.

[2021] I'll keep going.

[2022] But no, then it's not a, you would care less come next August.

[2023] It's like when you tell everyone they're your favorite person.

[2024] Yeah.

[2025] It's just like that.

[2026] Waters it all time.

[2027] All right.

[2028] Love you.

[2029] Love you.

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