Wndri Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join WNDRI Plus in the WNDRI app or on Apple podcast, or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcast. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Sheppard, and I'm joined by Monica Padman. Birthday Girl Monica Padman.

Oh, yay.

We're going hard. We're going to go all the way through. Today we have for the second time, Andrew Huberge. He is a neuroscientist. He is a pioneer in the neurological study of religious and spiritual experiences known as neurotheology. That's what we talked a lot about the last time he was here. 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. It was a juicy fun one. I love any evolutionary topic.

It was very interesting to hear how the brain works similarly with both of these opposing- Sure. Topics.

Please enjoy Andrew Neuberg. What's up, guys?

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

Let me tell you, it's too good.

I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest. Every episode, I bring on a friend.

I mean, the likes of Amy Poehler, Kael Mitchell, Vivica Fox, the list goes on.

So follow, watch, and listen to Baby, this is Keke Palmer on the WNDRI app or wherever you get your podcast.

He's an upchase, Hey, how are you? Good to meet you in person. Good to meet you in person. Yeah, absolutely.

We were on Zoom last time.

Yeah, we were. It's better in person.

Always better in person. Yeah.

It's funny because I went and listened to a little bit of it, and it's like, I forgot we did so much Zoom.

It was during the pandemic and we don't want to do that.

We did two years of Zoom.

They feel like lost episodes, though, in my head, because there isn't that person to person. It all 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 wear them before?

I never wear 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 you're getting older.

Well, yeah. I mean, that's what they're telling me. But let's see if we agree on some fundamental things. I mean, you're a certified internist. A couple of different certifications, so obviously, the pushback is going to be fierce.

But I'm an integrative medicine doctor, so I'm very holistic. Okay, great.

You have lenses. Your muscles in your eyes bend those lenses as needed to focus near distance or far. Why wouldn't it hold 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?

I don't know if there's any true way of exercising them because they're not the muscles that turn your eyes. They're like little interior muscles.

Don't you think you could go through a series of focusing? I have heard that a solution to people who get fatigued looking at computer screens is to go look at a tree because there's so many different leaves at different focal lengths.

It may work. I'll give you my wife's answer to you because she's 54 and she got cataracts actually early on. She had cataract surgery and she says it's the greatest thing everybody should have it.

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

She wants me to get them.

But do you have it? You don't have cataracts.

I don't know, unfortunately. Unfortunately. I've been wearing glasses since I've been in third grade.

Yeah, you've long accepted it. You've gone through the seven stages.

I have very tiny eyes, so putting contacts in my eyes. I will do that when I play hockey. I tried wearing glasses and they all fog up.

Yes. Well, this became a big issue, too, in the pandemic when you had to wear the face mask. It was just like an exhaust system up to your glasses.

Yeah, exactly.

It's terrible. 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? It's just be weird that we have one system that can't benefit from exercise. Everything else, the cardiovascular system. What's that?

Our olfactory system doesn't.

Yeah, there's no muscles there, really.

But there's probably systematic things.

Yeah, I I think it's a matter of how well you can get at that muscle. The good thing about your arms is that it's easy. You lift and they get bigger. Obviously, you could be a great weightlifter, but you could throw your back out. No matter how strong you get, there's little tiny muscles in between your ribs. It's always a challenge.

I've heard that the actual lens itself gets less flexible, too, which is part of the issue. I think we've solved it.

I will also say that ophthalmology, it's a whole different animal in medicine. It's a very different training.

Yeah, and where do we put Huberman in He's not an optimologist, but his specialty is the eye. I think it's interesting when they explain the eye, it's like a protusion of your brain in a way.

It's all part of your sensory systems. The eye is remarkable that it works as well as it does.

And unique in our species. Most species don't spend that much energy on eyes. Right.

I mean, our vision is really critical to us. 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.

Yes, that's incredible. 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.

You're combining with your memory. I mean, 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. It might take you back to Jurassic Park. Yeah, there's a lot going on.

It is. Your visual cortex. In fact, one of the slides that I often show because of imaging. There's a big question, a nerdy question, but what is the resting state of the brain? Is Is it with your eyes open, with your eyes closed? If it's with your eyes open, is it your eyes open looking at a blank screen versus a complex scene like this? And all of them change the way your brain is operating. 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 lights up. Then you bring in your memory. If you're reading, it brings in your language areas.

Is there arresting? There probably isn't one.

One of the things that's happened now is that they've gotten into a lot of conversations about brain networks. 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? Because it's always on. 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.

When you're trying to think of us as a study subject and you'd want to get to baseline anything, it's an erroneous pursuit because there is no baseline online experience for us. Sometimes we're sleeping, sometimes we're hunting, sometimes we're mating. It's very Buddhist.

It is. 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. One of my favorite little examples was, one of my colleagues was doing a study on memory. He said, We're always looking for subjects. So I said, Yeah, sure. So I'm in the MRI scanner and you're lying down and they're showing you a screen of different words, and then you have to remember the words and say them back. I'm doing all this. And after about 45, 50 minutes, my back's starting to hurt. I have to go to the bathroom. Ball cat. Now I'm like, I hope I'm not doing a bad job. So all this is going in my mind. But meanwhile, from his perspective, it's just ball cat. I'm just doing a memory test. 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, 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.

If you lay down for 45 minutes at any point, I will remember something I forgot to do. Right. Excuse me. Oh, boy. Oh, I hate that. What's happening there? Have you fMRIed anyone's sneezing?

Oh, no. The questions you must get asked.

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

You have pepper on the scene and some feathers and whatnot, bright light. But that would be actually very overlappy, I feel like, for your focus because the sneeze and the bless you, it's merkt up in what maybe we thought was happening. Exactly. Okay, so the last time you heard, we were talking about religion's effect on the brain. That is observable in an fMRI or through nuclear-Nuclear medicine imaging. Nuclear medicine. 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. I love talking about sex. I love talking about God. So your book is Sex, God, and the Brain. So right away, I'm very, very intrigued. But also then I'm looking at the last book. Then I get more curious about who you are and why you're steering your academic ship in this direction. Fair question. I don't think we covered this much last time, but you start in chemistry That's true. At a Quaker school. That's true, too. Okay, so these feel relevant. So what was the initial goal?

My very initial goal really goes back even to when I was a kid. I just was always wondering about why people held different beliefs. If we're all looking at the same world, why are there Democrats and Republicans? I mean, shouldn't we all look at the world the same way? Why are there Jews and Christians and Muslims and Buddhist and Hindu? Why do we all look at the world differently? My initial thought was, I got to start with the brain. When I was in first I would go to the elementary school library and they had a little book of all the systems of the body, and I would just take them out one at a time and then keep going. I had the scientific ideas about, Well, let's look at the brain. That's the part of ourselves that takes in our visual information and basically tells us what the world is like.

You're on the inside of the experience. You laid out really nicely in the book, everything's coming your way. It's coming through your ears and your eyes and your nose and your tasting. Inside of this brain, you're trying to make sense of what's outside, which is unknowable in a way.

Well, it is. That was what I discovered. 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 trapped in our brain. It became more of a philosophical question. How do you really know what you know? I started to read philosophy, and I started to take philosophy courses and courses in logic. And then I said, well, there are these religious and spiritual ideas. There's Buddhism and thinking about consciousness, and we have consciousness, But somehow we can't find it, but we know we have it. And how do I know you have consciousness and you're not just some AI zombie?

I am, just to cut to the chase. I thought so. I wasn't sure. Hillbillies from a dirt road don't end up in this house.

That's right. It became that philosophical piece. I started to merge the two.

Yeah. In your chapter about myth, we talk about myth, and I think there's a colloquially use of myth, and it generally means a not true story when we use it around town. But that's not how anthropologists look at it. And then you point out even science is a It's a story that hopes to explain our reality through empirical data, things we can observe or experiments we can run. But we'd probably all agree there's a ton of stuff that's not observable, at least yet.

Some of it is not observable. Some of it is not observable yet. Then this issue about being trapped in our own consciousness. I don't know if we can ever get beyond that, at least in some empirical way, because how do you study something that you're inside of?

I would even quickly think, Well, maybe that'll be tool in AI and machines. But at the same time, the AI is educated on a large language model originated from humans.

Part of what ultimately led me down a little bit of this path towards the mystical. It's in these mystical experiences that I first started reading about back in college and Buddhism Hindu thought, 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. If they do, you got it. If they don't, well, you have to correct. But there's no way to do that. Or is there? In a lot of these mystical traditions, they say things like, I got outside of my mind. I got outside of my brain. I got outside of my consciousness. My ego self dissolved. Now, I'm not saying that that happens, but these are the only kinds of experiences that I know of where people actually say that. To me, I'm like, Okay, well, so what's going on when that happens? Can we look at that in some way, biologically, spiritually, that might be able to get us to an answer to that question?

That's what led to this work.

I imagine, too, there's a lot of different ways to look at it. You could be first looking at how does the brain react to this idol you show it or this word cat You can hope to discover maybe the mechanisms inside, what happens physiologically in your brain. That's one question. But then above that is, what was it before it went through that mechanism?

And one of the questions that I challenge a lot of my students is ask the scientific question, all right, you've got trillions of neurons, you've got quadrillions of interconnections, you've got all different kinds of neurotransmitters being released, you have all the electrical depolarizations and electrical activity and all these different neurons. Where in all of that is your thought? Where in all of that is your consciousness? 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 go down that road. But an individual neuron doesn't seem to have it. So does 20 have it? Does a million have it? Does 10 million have it? 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. Yes.

A unique thought at that. It's not even just this fires, this fires, then you get this thought. Everyone has unique thoughts all the time. Yeah, what causes that?

We don't know. I mean, now there was some very interesting research that was done a little while ago, and the joke was the Jennifer Anaston neuron. There were seizure patients, and they actually put these very, very fine needles into individual cells, and they could find out that this cell activated when you showed somebody a picture of Jennifer Anaston, for example. Oh, my God. No, but that's not the experience of the picture of Jennifer Anaston.

You know you're famous whenever human got a neurotransmitter dedicated to your face. Do you think people would seizures over index in liking Jennifer Anaston?

Because that would add up.

Monica has I'm seeing.

And I love friends.

Oh, okay. Well, I do, too, and my daughter does, too. But interestingly, when we talk about this larger field of studies, sometimes referred to as neurotheology, this intersection between science and religion, there are lots of pieces to it. 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. So you start to think, why is that? What's going on? And where people have seizures, they have seizures, and then they have the time in between the seizures. So are they having these experiences when they have the seizures? Are they having it in between? There's some very famous cases of people who have these seizures and become hyper-religious or have unusual mystical experiences. Now, it's a very small population of people. I hope you get those.

I'd rather not have another seizure, but...

We had another expert talking on the history of medicine. Yeah, so epilepsy was almost always regarded as some spirit possession. Oh, absolutely. The devil was in the person in whatever formed that culture thought of the devil.

It's interesting how some of these things a couple of thousand years ago, they thought there was a religious, maybe somebody like Moses or somebody who saw a light and heard a voice. In the medieval days, it was demon possession. And then nowadays, it's a medical disorder. So we'll see how it all goes.

I like the Moses one. Yeah.

That's enlightened. I actually talk about seizures at different times. And the carefulness we have to have is that sometimes people look at these kinds of results. People have seizures or people have schizophrenia who think that they're the Messiah or whatever. But then we sometimes overpathologize that. What is interesting about even the famous people who've had religious experiences is that it's a one and off. It's not like Moses kept seeing the burning- It's not a chronic condition. Which is what seizures are. Normally, if you have seizures, you continue you just have the same thing happening over and over again.

Maybe he got on Kepra after he saw the Bush. There's a lot of theories.

There's a lot of theories out there.

Okay, but your own personal story has to be imbroiled in this because I even think of, so Paulsky, he's looking in a way at the same thing, and he has a very rigid explanation of that. 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. It goes right up against self-will and all these other things. It doesn't hold any space for something that we don't understand or isn't observable. You must have your own relationship with spirituality or minimally, maybe meditation.

Do you have some practice that maybe makes you more open to considering all 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. I spent a lot of time just thinking about this problem. It became a scientific spiritual meditation 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. I thought, if there's something that I'm not sure about, it doesn't mean it's wrong, but I'll just say for the moment, I'm going to doubt it. I don't know if it's right, I don't know if it's wrong, and I'm just I'm going to hold it off to the side. I called it doubt. I started to go through this whole process of doubting the ways I was thinking, of doubting different philosophies, of doubting science. This was a very challenging thing to do in college when you're studying for finals and in the middle of the year, I'm doubting everything.

It sounds like you're teetering on a psychotic break. It felt very weird. I was in a similar place, by the way, when I was 20.

I think a lot of us are. We all go in our different directions. But after college was over, I managed to graduate, and I was getting ready to go to medical school. You have this little summertime where you just want take off. And so I said, Well, I'm just going to really try to solve this problem because it was driving me crazy. Day after day, I'm just like, How do I solve this? 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. It just became this infinite regression of not knowing. But it's a very interesting experience because, first of all, everything's part of it.

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

Exactly. There was this oneness. I was doubting myself, obviously, so there was no Andy Neuberg. Sometimes when I've told people this, they're like, Well, this must have been the worst experience you could have possibly had. Here you are trying to find an answer, and you found that there's no way you can have an answer. I said, But it was the most blissful, calming experience. 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.

I completely relate to this. I don't know that I had 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. There's some freedom. I think the anxiety, 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. You approach it with a sense of humor. Oh, yeah.

When we look out on this universe, which is, let's just, for argument's sake, basically infinite. What do we have access to? In the immediate moment, we have access to this room. You don't even know what's going on, but the guy's working on your house over there.

No, it could have turned.

Right. The whole house could have fallen out. It could be a mutiny happening. Let alone what's going on in China, in the galaxy next door. Then somehow we all feel like we know exactly what's going on. We know what's right and wrong, political or religious. It's very arrogant. It is. There is a survival value to it. You have to be making decisions, 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. That is going to blow our anxiety out of the water. We want to feel like we understand the world, and that is part of why we've gotten to where we are in the world through social media, because we want to hear all the reasons why we're right and that guy is wrong.

Also, anyone that has the appearance of conviction is very settling.

Provided that it's a conviction. They That you agree with. That you agree with. Then again, the problem 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? 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 a a bad person.

Yeah, evil. Now we go into our other opposition paradox we love.

Then you get into the us versus them. That's part of the mythic element. It's part of the mating sexual piece, too, because we have the us versus them. It's our family, it's our group, it's whoever we are and whoever they are, they're a challenge to our survival.

I wonder if do you feel like that has made you a little less fervent about the political energy. Completely. I look at both sides and I look at it the same way I'm looking at the universe. It's like, everyone's damn certain they're right. Let's just start there. I'm no different. I can't really be trusted to think that I'm any more right than anyone else.

You have You have to live on a practical level. You have to live in a house. You have to get some food. You have to make decisions. You have to do the best that you can. But in the back of my mind, there's always like, Well, that's what I'm doing, the best that I can. And I could be wrong. 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.

Or how about minimally? I'm aiming 60% good decisions would be a big victory.

Exactly.

That's probably true. I don't also have the illusion that I could possibly make all the right decisions.

I always think about sports, and we always think that the great athletes never lose, but actually, they lose a lot. Probably, they win 60% of the time. The best hitter is 30%.

They're legends. In 20, you suck. What a margin. What a delta between glory and...

Right, exactly. Isn't that weird? And that is interesting, too, because you get this whole bell curve of all of us. And it is remarkable when you have some of these people who are just the LeBron James.

Simone Biles right now.

What makes them at this other level that is just different than everybody else. But again, you can extrapolate that to religion and too. There's only one Pope and there's only one Mother Teresa. There's a bell curve of all of this.

Yeah. The last book that we talked about was, again, about religions or God's effect on the brain. Now we've incorporated sex. I think the best place to start is how completely universal mating ritual is for all animals. Tell us a little bit. I mean, once you start giving examples, it's like, Oh, of course. I've never seen a National Geographic show on animals where we didn't see the pageantry.

It's really remarkable. This goes back also in my own personal life to this mentor who I met in medical school. It was a guy named Dr. Eugene DeQuilly, and he was a psychiatrist, but he had a PhD in Anthropology. We used to go to these dinner parties where here I am, this little lowly nothing. I'm sitting around, literally, people who have won Nobel Prizes and who have revolutionized the fields of psychology and medicine. Jean's greatest thing was he loved rituals. In fact, his family from Italy. He was actually nobility in Rome. He used to enjoy calling himself and his wife, baron and baroness of the Holy Roman Empire. As he should. It turns out he found out that as a baron of the Holy Roman Empire, that means that he was allowed to night someone. He found the whole ritual and how it all had to work and all the Latin, and they nighted one of the uncles or something. This is great. As an anthropologist, he was looking at everywhere you see these rituals in animals, and he studied them, and he wrote a book called The Spectrum of Ritual, and he talked about rituals take advantage of all the different senses that we have.

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. All these different things, they stimulate the brain towards mating and bringing them together. But what he was also getting at then was, well, what about human rituals? I mean, theoretically human rituals would have to evolve from animal rituals. But in human beings, we certainly have our mating rituals and all the sights in the the smells and meet people at a dance and the movements and rhythms. But ultimately in human beings, we have incorporated rituals into every part of our lives.

We just had a ritual expert. Yeah, he was fascinating. Who was that? Michael Norton. He's weirdly a Harvard business school professor, but he's a psychologist. Okay. So his newest book is about ritual. And yeah, we went through all these different, like your morning ritual and how people... Boy, what's the term they use in psychology? They're offended. Yeah, they're disgusted when you tell someone, do you brush your teeth before the shower or after the shower? In the shower, right? Or do you brush your teeth before you put your lotion on? These are really important things to people.

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

Your other. Exactly. We have rituals throughout our lives and all different aspects of our life. And across the lifespan. We have rituals for marriage and child. But of course, religions are loaded with rituals from the ceremonies that we do. Again, the life rituals, the prayers, meditation. They're almost all rituals. They're all rituals. This is now 30 years ago, but Jean 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 evolved from animal rituals, all animal rituals are mating rituals.

Yeah, what's the original ritual?

The original ritual is mating. I mean, all animal rituals essentially are mating rituals or social hierarchy rituals, but they're all part of the mating process. So sexuality ultimately has to be suffused throughout this whole thing. And so the basis of human rituals has to be the same as the mating rituals. So we kept saying, now there's got to be something that connects the sexual and the spiritual. And then we We started to think about that in terms of the brain. And one of the ways that we got at that was through the rhythmic elements of these rituals.

Say more on that. 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. Absolutely.

With evolution, we talk about natural selection, which is what most people think of as evolution, which is survival of the fitness.

Your 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 To the next generation.

That's natural selection. Then there's sexual selection, which is part of the process because it's part of the mating process. But for whatever reason, a given species starts to like some ornement, we'll call it. So the classic examples are the big antlers of a moose or an elk. I'm living in Colorado right now, so they're all sporting these large antlers.

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

Exactly.

Oh, so it's always something superfluous?

Often is. Almost always, yeah.

And the ritual itself is an opportunity for the female to determine the fitness of this mate. So for peacks, those are a great expense. They draw attention from predators. They're sending a lot of signals that this motherfucker is fit. I can handle this. He's got a big sign saying, Come get me, and he's still in front of me.

What's interesting about this, too, is that's part of why these sentiments get real big.

It's why male birds are generally prettier.

Exactly. It's almost always the males who have that because because it's the females that's guiding that selection process.

They got the selection across the board.

Pretty much. Well, because they have the egg. It's interesting because the male is selecting the female, but the female ultimately has that final evolutionary push. And part of what has been proposed and goes along very well with what I talk about in Sex, God and 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.

Yeah, but the brains have to evolve together.

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

Exactly. Well, why does that happen all the time then?

Well, you've got a lot of variety in 8 billion people.

It goes back to the Bell Curve concept, 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. So some guys have a better sense of humor. Some guys tell a better story, some guys have a better voice. And that's part of it, too, which is the beauty of evolution is that there's not a right or a wrong. It's a course it's on. It's what is more adaptive. And so if you 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. But then somebody else likes a great story.

And so we're saying these things like sense of humor, they're the ordinance.

The mental ordinance of who we are as human beings. And then that's what starts leading us. Forgetting the religious explanation of religion for a moment. Look at religion. I mean, it's got the rituals, it's got the stories, it's got the social connection. It's got a lot of stuff that can really be very exciting for someone and ultimately creates that cohesive group that ultimately everybody wants to be a part of. 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 brings us together in ways you believe what I believe in. This is an important story, and this tells me how the world is. 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. You're attracted to that.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, If You Dare. What's up, guys? It's your girl, Keke, and my podcast is back with a new season.

Let me tell you, it's too good.

I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest. Every episode, I bring on a friend and have a real conversation.

I don't mean just friends.

I mean the likes of Amy Poehler, Keel Mitchell, Vivika Fox. The list goes on.

So follow, watch, and listen to Baby, this is Keke Palmer on the WNDRI app or wherever you get your podcast.

It's interesting, though. They can converge or overlap, and maybe that's my complaint always about anything binary, is there's overlapping those two mechanisms, which I think of the lion, right? Male and female lions have this huge sexual dimorphism. The male is so much bigger than the female. And that's going to continue to increase ad infinitum because the way the mating works in a pride of lions is one lion comes in that's bigger than the previous alpha, gets over thrown, and then that one reproduces. Every generation size is rewarded, and the male keeps getting bigger when the female stays the same size. That's just the course it's on. That seems like an overlap between mate selection and natural selection in a bizarre way. You could look at that either way.

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.

Because that's your fundamental question. How would our capacity to believe in a religion or a God be adaptive in either one of these?

From the perspective of sexual selection, it tells a story. It connects you to ideas about the world. It has music. It has social. It has all these great things that bind people together. So that's the sexual selection part. But it seems to have a natural selection part as well because it does create cohesive societies. 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 9,000, 10,000 in BC, thousands of years before we had civilization. So religion seemed to occur long before we were actually able to create these social groups that actually became very adaptive for us because it bound us all together. As far as I know, I don't think there's ever been a civilization that has developed de Novo without religion. I mean, you look at ancient Mesopotamian, Egypt. This Moscow.

Well, but that's why I say de Novo.

And in fact, actually, because I took a course in Russian history in college, the religious elements of Russia were huge. They were the second Creeks.

Yeah, they were the second Creeks. Yeah, exactly. 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. That's what humans traditionally lived in. This common belief in a shared deity allowed us to congregate in groups peacefully, like a thousand, 2,000, 3,000. Then now we're a member of a group that's 3,000. We can easily displace a group of 200 Neanderthals that might be physically superior to us but have less numbers. So then it becomes part of natural selection.

Exactly. And I think it really does blend both. There's two forces that have guided human history. One is the science technology, the wheel fire to iPhones, 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, 2000, 2000, 2000, 2000, We're in Europe, but Monica and I were in India this year in Hyderbad.

Where we were staying was predominantly Muslim, and they were doing the call to prayer five times a day. The entire city stops and does that, and it's very loud. That's what everyone's doing. 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.

Even in places like Europe and in areas like the United States where there's been a move away from religions, there's There's still a great deal of spiritual elements to it. People are still looking for that connection. They're still looking for what connects them to the universe, connects them to something greater. It could even be just humanity. I mean, it could be being a humanist and saying, I've got to take care of humanity. That's what I want to do. I want to be altruistic. I want to be charitable. I want to help the downtrod and whatever it is. But there's that thing that connects us to something greater. And that, to me, is what we ultimately are talking about. It can be codified into a religion. And obviously, those religions which are still around today, and I've done that very successfully. The analogy to me is music. Millions of people are writing their own songs, but there's only one Beatles. And why was that? 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.

So I think that's part of it, at least in terms of the codified forms of religion. That gets back to this discussion that we were just having. There's an evolutionary aspect to religions, which is when Christianity was starting out, there were lots of individual sects of religion. And so which were the ones that really lasted? And they were the ones that, for a variety of reasons, hit the largest majority and felt right and could bring all these people together. 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. 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.

Yeah, you said if there's eight billion people, there's eight- Eight billion religions.

There's exactly- Eight billion religions. But there still can be a billion Christians or a billion Muslims. So I think that's part of the power of it.

Okay, so let's get into a little bit the physiology of these things. So give us a brief course on the autonomic nervous system and what's happening.

My favorite part of the brain. That was one of the things that my late mentor, Jean Quillian, and I talked about when we were talking about this connection with sexuality and rituals. How does this all connect? And we looked at what's called the autonomic nervous system. So the autonomic nervous system connects the brain to the body. There's two main arms. So one of them is called the sympathetic nervous system. That's the scientific term. I typically refer to that as the arousal system of the body. And then there is the parasympathetic, which is the calming or quiescent side. And they are very much balancing each other out throughout our whole lives. We almost sit within this balance of all of them. And so if we were sitting here and suddenly we heard an explosion outside, the arousal system would kick in. Do we need to pay attention to that? Do we need to run? Do we need to stand and fight against a predator, whatever it is? But it gets our heart rate going. It gets us aroused. It gets us getting ready for whatever it is that we need to do. 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.

It calms us down. It makes us feel blissful. 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. You I was incredibly aroused. Energy, electricity, all these different words that people use, but incredibly calm, oceanic blissfulness thing. Sometimes they happen together, which is interesting because the two systems, they normally inhibit each other a little bit. If you heard an explosion, that isn't the time to take a nap. That's the time to get out. And by the same token, we've all been in that place where 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, and we can't sleep. Why? Because our arousal system keeps impinging on that calming side. 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. 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.

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. And on the other hand, if you want to get this sense of oceanic blissful overwhelming love of God thing, then a Gregorian chant or a hymn that's very calming or some prayer where you just come along and it slows you down and it gets you to feeling this very, very calm feeling. So that's how the rituals start to affect that. But ultimately, why do we have these systems at all? It's because of sex. These two systems are what enables sex to occur. They enable the rituals to start the process. You start to get that balance. There isn't a one way to do it. Some people like a lot of energy and arousing. Other people like to be calm and relaxed. But you find the person who resonates with you. 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 organism.

Well, that's what makes it so pleasurable, right? Is that both sides are firing at max capacity, which is very unique.

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

Well, because I'm a junkie, I will also parallel with that's why the the ultimate drug has always been the speedball. It's virtually that exact same thing in chemical form. It's an upper and a downer at once, and it's creating this cake and eat it two steak.

When I was talking earlier about this big puzzle of neurotheology, the whole aspect of using psychedelics and different drugs to induce spiritual states. This is exactly what's going on. Those chemicals are changing in the brain, and many people talk about those psychedelic experiences as being profoundly spiritual and sometimes sexual.

Yeah, MD may. Yeah. Let's see, myth we touched on. I just wanted to point out because I like that you shined a light on it. But the brain is just really great at creating opposites. 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. I think this is an outgrowth of that, right?

Oh, absolutely. Our brain works best when we can clearly delineate things. We have what we used to refer to as a binary operator. We have parts of our brain that see the opposites. You think about how you grow up, you learn synonyms and and black and white. Our brain likes things that way because it also makes things clear. For anybody who's had a kid, what you did was right or wrong. It can't be, well, you can turn the juice cup over on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but not Mondays and Wednesdays. 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. But we get into these issues of Republican and Democrat or something. It's yes or no, instead of the world itself is deeply gray. That's where our challenge comes in. And that's the basis of myth, which is that we bring these opposites that we really can't reconcile easily. In religious myth, the fundamental opposite is God versus us as human beings. How do we, as these very finite, limited, small, mortal beings, have any interaction with something which is arguably infinite and eternal and omniscient and so forth.

It's the mythic story that brings them together and helps us to resolve those opposites. That's why you often see things like a profound sense of oneness or connectedness that's a part of that mythic story.

Bridging the gap between these opposites you've laid out. It's ironic that that's a pleasurable state at times.

Well, it is because it resolves a problem for you. 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. So wherever you grew up, you rooted for your high school basketball team, and you hated the high school down the road's basketball team. It's us versus them. But then we're all part of the same city, so we're all going to root for the Lakers, and we hate the Celtics.

It keeps transferring. Right.

And now we're in the Olympics. And so the guys who played on the Celtics and the guys who played on the Lakers, this is all the United States. If aliens came down, then we'd be all playing. 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? And the us versus them is movable, and sometimes in very good ways, but sometimes bad ways. That's the downside.

If we can remember that it's movable, that would be good.

Exactly. Okay, let's get into the history a little bit of how some of these religions have dealt with sex. 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. So how on earth does it go from how it started to this weird division? Maybe we could start with what's sacred prostitution?

Before I get to the sacred prostitution, you asked a great question. I've been thinking about this. One of the things that we almost have to start with, what is arguably one of the most well-known sacred texts of the Bible, The moment that human beings are created by God, what does God do? God doesn't tell human beings to pray, to create religion, or even to believe in God. God says, be fruitful and multiply. 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. I mean, that was the first thing that we were told to do. And of course, if you go to the very first line of the Bible, it's God created the heavens and the earth. God gave birth to the universe. The whole act of creation and sexuality is fundamental to the monotheistic traditions. And I think to all traditions where I think the flip started to occur is there began to be this concern about the overlap. 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.

But then there are lots of traditions, and you mentioned being in India and Hinduism and even the ancient Christian Jewish approaches. Sexuality was a part of the process. You mentioned prostitution. 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. Back in the ancient times, they were regarded very highly in society.

Yeah, unlike prostitution now, which diminishes status, this elevated status in Mesopotamian, Sumerian tradition. Exactly.

Exactly. Part of it has been this slow evolution of, well, where does sexuality fit in all of this? I mean, the original traditions were often about fertility goddesses and coming from Mother Earth, God, the Father. 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 connection, which in many ways parallels what we are supposed to be doing with God.

It seems like they're caught in a bit of a trap. Exactly. 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. Yet no religion could be against procreation or it wouldn't have made it to now. 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 to have sex, well, now we're ensuring you're going to have a ton of babies because we want to fuck. That's what's going to happen.

Exactly.

So it's all very convoluted.

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. 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. That's why some religions have found ways of utilizing sexuality as part of that process, and others have been more concerned about it.

Will you tell me about the cult of Venus? Just because I'm perverted and I want to know how it was before.

A lot of this was based on the idea of the sexual energy as being the way that you could achieve spiritual enlightenment. We see this in a number. If you look at some of the ancient Hindu art forms and so forth, there's a lot of eroticism. It was really about engaging in sexuality and activity as a way of facilitating the spiritual.

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.

How about a high five or something? Yeah.

They're asking you to basically alter the most important thing to you. Is that for proof? So that people will know you're a member, this in-group.

That's right. It's amazing. That was the approach that was taken.

It's so extreme. It's so based on validate. We just inherited it as something that happens, but it's so extreme. Not like, cut your pinkie off or give yourself a tattoo.

Yeah, or a nose ring or something. Yeah, because you're seeing the penis when you're having sex.

So it is all connected.

And it gets back to the stories and that sexual selection discussion. So it's all connected.

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. Intensity, clarity, unity, connectedness, and surrender.

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. But again, they are all part of the sexual experience as well. So intensity. If you look at history, what else has garnered human attention more than sex? Every poem, every song, every play, they're all about sexuality. 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? So if you want to facilitate an intense experience, you would take the most primal experience that we have, which is having sex. If we don't enjoy it, we're not going to do it. It better be the best experience we can possibly have. And that's because of its intensity, the unity. I mean, that's another really fundamental piece of what sexuality is. 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 our self and another.

Normally, animals are pretty separate in the world. They're certainly not going to start jumping on top of each other, but they do it for that. 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 a Christian or the universe, or universal conscience, whatever it is. You mentioned the sense of surrender. As you get into sexuality, as you get into spirituality, at the beginning, you're making things happen and you're controlling what's going on. I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, whether it's meditation or sex. But at some point, you lose control of the whole process.

Ideally. Yeah.

That sense of letting go and surrender is the transcendent part. Then with regard to human beings and sex, we When you talk about clarity in spirituality. That's I get it, I understand the world. In the context of sexuality, it's I get it. This is the person for me. This is who I now will connect with. It has a transformational element. When you fall in love, it feels forever and it feels like I'm a different person now. You complete me, the old saying from Jerry Maguire or whatever. But that's the feeling. The same thing happens with spirituality. The person feels completed. They feel that they understand it. They feel transformed by the experience. We can start looking at the different brain areas. 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. 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.

And that makes sense. It turns on to give you your sense of self When it goes away, you lose it. And you lose the boundary between yourself and other, between other objects in the world. So that's one of the big areas that we talk about. And then the sense of surrender is just one other example we think is very related to the frontal lobe. And so our frontal lobe, which is behind the forehead and enables us to focus our attention on meditation, prayer, sex, whatever it is that we're focusing on. Model the future. Yeah, that turns on our frontal lobe. But when we watch these practices where the person feels that sense of surrender, you mentioned going to India and look at Muslim practices. We studied Muslim practices, and the whole basis of Islam is surrender. Their frontal lobes actually shut down. It turns on to make us feel purposeful and to be in charge of whatever it is that you're doing. When your frontal lobe goes down, you surrender yourself. Sometimes people talk about the feeling of flow. You're just in it, and it's just happening to you, and you're just going with it.

I think of the stereotypical, you hear this all the time, that very common submissives in these subdom relationships are people who actually have great, great control and power in their real life. It's so exaggerated in their daily life that to keep everything balanced, they almost need this submissive role. It's fascinating.

It is fascinating. And part of the basis of rituals and mythss and all these things that we're talking about is that as you turn the brain on in these different ways or off, 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 do it again. The cute phrase is that neurons that fire together, wire together. Well, that's why rituals work so well. You mentioned they're called to prayer five times a day, every day. So as you come back and you do that prayer, as you do a 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. Because of that autonomic nervous system, and this is the final part of the rituals, is the rituals are connected to the myth, to the story. It's not that you just understand what it means cognitively to be Jewish or Christian or whatever.

You feel it in your body. That's what sexuality does. It's not just, Oh, I love that person. But you're connected to that person in every way possible. It's a different relationship than you have with your best friends. So it establishes a whole different feeling, and that's why they're so powerful.

In the chemicals involved, you have a section called the Biochemistry God and sex. So what molecules are at play?

One of the things that I often say is that there's not one part of our brain that makes us religious or spiritual. And similarly, there isn't just one molecule that's going to make us feel something. And I think for anybody who does have a spiritual feeling in their life, they realize that there are different elements to it. There's things they think, there's things they feel, there's the emotions that they have. And we've done some brain imaging studies where we've looked at some of these different neurotransmitters. One of the ones that a lot of people probably have heard of a dopamine, and that is the feel-good molecule. That gets released during practices like meditation. It gets released during sexual arousal. The dopamine becomes a very important part because it gives you that real euphoric high. That's part of why the drug cocaine is so powerful, because it causes a release of dopamine. The Serotonin system is another one. That's where the psychedelic drugs work. Serotonin gets released when we are engaged in these different rhythmic processes and these practices. 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.

Each time now you have a new firing of it, it's like a little added effect, almost like a drug. It keeps getting stronger and you may want it more and more because it keeps feeling better and better. One other one is a neurotransmitter. Many people may not have heard of this one called GABA, which is an acronym for Gamma Aminobacteric Acid. And what it is, is it's one of the main inhibitory neurotransmitters in the brain. It calms the brain down. It's actually one of the sites where most of the big anti-anxiety medications. What GABA does is it helps to calm the brain down. 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. And that's what I think GABA does. And there's been evidence that there's a release of GABA in the brain when people are meditating or praying. And so we see all of this, but these are also all part of the sexual... 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 neurotransmitters, it seems like it's a very similar mechanism.

It's utilizing that mechanism to have those same powerful feelings.

Basically, you can observe that the spiritual experience and the sexual experiences are both very similar in their chemical composition and physically what areas of the brains are engaged. Then it really is just a question of which one was first, and it seems pretty obvious that it would have to be sexual.

If you take the evolutionary, the idea that there were all these animal rituals for millions of 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- Prehistoric crocodile, I'll give an example.

Is this why cults are so powerful? It's like the trifecta. They do rituals. There's some spiritual element to a lot of them, and often a sexual element to a lot of them.

Absolutely. Sexuality as well as spirituality can be incredibly positive, and they can lead to compassion and understanding, but they can also be used for a lot of negativity. Manipulation. Yeah. Even the idea of a cult is interesting because back in the day, 2000 years ago, Christianity was a cult. Is it not a cult now because there's a billion people who follow it? This, to me, is a really interesting part of neurotheology, which is the whole normal and not normal, and how do we define that? We did a study of people speaking in tongues. We did the brain scans.

These are pentecoptical- While they were speaking in tongues.

While they were speaking in tongues. Incidentally, they feel that sense of surrender, so their frontal lobes shut down also. 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. But there are psychiatrists who will tell you this is a train psychosis or hypnosis, and Then there's other religious people who would say, That's not connecting with God. That's the devil. So you have the same thing that now everybody's looking at differently. 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 have, quote, unquote, normal religiousness. But what do you make of a nun or a monk who says, I'm not having a family. I'm going to take a vow of celibacy. I'm not going to take any money. I'm just going to be very focused on only that. Is that normal?

It's not a successful reproduction strategy, minimally. Exactly.

Unless it's a way of showing a target. 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 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.

It's like, it's real. Look at her.

Exactly.

Can't be me. They're almost like in hunger games, they're tributary. Yeah. They're like, I'll go. Right.

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 two consenting people and they love each other. It's great. It's intimate. It feels terrific. But it can obviously go very wrong to the point where you have abuses and rape and addiction.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, If You Dare. Let's save dark side of sexuality and religion until the end. Tell us about the OM group and what opportunity they opened up for you, having had this curiosity for 30 years.

For 30 years, I've been thinking about this relationship between sexuality and spirituality. But my late mentor, Jean DeQuilie, he died very suddenly after I've been working with him for about six, seven years. He really had that anthropological background. I'm coming at it more from the neuroscience side. As part of the team, I could continue the neuroscience piece, but I had to leave a little bit of that anthropological piece behind because it wasn't my area. But I always felt like that was part of how we got here, and I kept wanting to find a way to do that. 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, and would you be interested in studying it? Usually, I say yes because that's what I do.

Monica, people have gone in the MRI and masturbated.

Not with me.

But I found that interesting because you point out, look how strong 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 are in an inside of an MRI.

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. I don't know. Okay. Sounds interesting. I like both those words.

Tell me more.

Tell me more. 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. It's a meditative approach that uses sexual stimulation as the focus of the meditation. My first thought was, 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. Probably the most common one is our breath. You meditate by closing your eyes and focus on your breath and the air feels cool and you feel all these things. There's a meditation called the body scan. There's walking meditation as well. The idea of using some stimulation that's part of your body, okay, that makes sense. 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 does sexual stimulation do in the brain when it's not specifically used for sexual stimulation, but as a spiritual meditative focus.

I think we need to talk about what's physically happening. In this practice, a woman's meditating in a man, generally. There's a stroker and a stroked. And so a man is stroking the woman's clitoris as she meditates.

Exactly. There were a couple of things that were interesting to me, too, because it is a paired practice, and I do We had a lot of questions about what's the difference when you're doing a meditation practice if you're just sitting there yourself versus if you're a large group at an ashram or something like that. But this is a meditation practice which is done with two people. They were very adamant about the fact that the person who is doing the stimulation is part of the practice. 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. For the female who is having the sexual stimulation, she's also involved in this meditation. She's focusing her mind on the feelings that she's having on the energy that is being generated as part of this process. Part of what also was 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.

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. It's great for me to do that, but it captures that moment in time when I do the injection. So I need to know what they're doing at that moment. And when we did our Buddhist meditation study many years ago, they said, well, we meditate for an hour, hour and a half. How do I know where you are in your practice? I mentioned the speaking in tongue study. There was no timing on that, but you can hear them doing it. So the nice thing about this practice was that it's a very clearly timed practice. It's 15 minutes. The last half of that 15 minutes is the peak experience, so I can know when to inject, I can know when to do the study. 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. They were very clear that it's not having sex.

Orgasms are happening sometimes and sometimes not.

Occasionally, but that is not the goal. They were very clear about that. As part of our study, we asked 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 We asked them if they had actually a climax, and in our group, none of them did.

That's a little interesting to me. I don't know how one gets their clitoris stimulated for 15 minutes while focusing on that. Are they actively trying not to have an orgasm?

I don't think they're purposely trying not to. I just don't think that's their goal.

That where their energy is focused.

Their energy is not focused on it.

It's more just connecting with the actual stimulation. Exactly.

Part of me was interested in seeing how the sexual-spiritual piece matched up. But then there was also the social connection, too, going back to our whole conversation about rituals and how do these two people connect with each other.

And is he being observed as well?

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

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

That was part of what we found. We saw changes in their brains in general. We saw their frontal lobes decreasing. By the time they get into this process, it's this natural thing that's just happening to them. I should also be really clear that as with a lot of our studies, these were all people who are very experienced in this. We're not just taking somebody off the street and saying, here, try it.

Two students on campus, Hey, give her to home. Yeah, right.

Here, let's try this. In fairness, when We've studied people speaking in tongues, 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? So these are all people who are very experienced with it, and that, to me, was part of it. So we saw the frontal lobes decreasing in both the males and the females. We saw the parietal lobes decreasing because there was this very intimate connection.

There's sharing an identity in a way.

Exactly. What we also found was that there were certain changes in their brains that correlated with how the other one was doing. It really showed that connection. 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 a practice.

Yeah, because my knee jerk on the surface of learning of this practice was like, Well, this is very lopsided. This is interesting. The guy just stimulates. But at the same time, no, I've had those experiences, and they're very wonderful for you, too. I guess I'm relieved to hear their brain patterns were mirroring each other.

There were some distinctions as well. The other areas of the brain that also were different in them were something called the precuneus and the insula. These are basically social areas of the brain. 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. So these areas were also significantly effective.

Well, because you're overly aware of any cue being broadcast to you so that it will inform your actions. Exactly. Even that act of trying your hardest to observe what someone's doing is a euphoric. It's like shrooms in that it forces you out of your own head enough that it's pleasant.

You're really almost feeling what the other person is feeling, or at least that's your goal. It could be very powerful for, obviously, both individuals. This is part of where this practice and meditative practices, talking about the real positive side of things, does this enable your brain to continue to be empathic towards others, even in a non-sexual way? Does it make you try to understand other people more, try to reach out to them, be intimate with them? I don't mean sexually intimate, but understanding who you are and where you're coming from.

Are those reps of intimacy and reps of empathy?

In this particular case, we didn't specifically measure that, although we do see longer term changes in these individuals in these areas. But other studies have certainly looked at that with things like mindfulness and other types of practices.

This is just for your own amusement. It's an anecdote. But we interviewed people who had been in cults, and we interviewed a guy who was in a cult that was a spinoff of this. There was a woman in New York that practiced this and then ended up with a house everyone lived in, and it was wild. I don't know if you crossed paths. I I think there's a doc about them. Okay, so let's now talk about the dark side of sexuality and religion.

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. There's a truth to that. This, to me, is a real area where the field of neurotheology can help us with because clearly there are people who turn to religion. Some of those wonderful human beings I've ever met were in the pastoral care department at our hospital, and they're deeply religious. They have their own religious tradition, but they're open to everyone. They love everyone. They want everyone to be well and healed. So they turn their religion outward and help everyone. 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. 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? How dogmatic do we get about that? 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. 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, it turns that into a very negative energy.

One of the statements that my mentor and I used to talk about is that rituals are a morally neutral technology. They can be used for great good, bringing the whole country together or bringing a whole group of people together and loving each other. Or Hitler. Or Hitler. And he was terrific at using symbols and rituals. I mean, the rhythm and the songs, unfortunately.

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. You can find freedom and peace from whatever is haunting you. You can enter this zone, and that is this freedom. Without sounding too judgmental, I have definitely met people who practice religion in a way that I would say is identical. 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. Do you think there's any parallels between those two?

Absolutely. 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. Sometimes people think God is punishing them. 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 quell what they're feeling. 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. 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. 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? You look at alcoholics anonymous and using a higher power. I mean, that's a fundamental part of the whole process, and it's very powerful for a lot of people. And obviously, it's worked for lots of people, but it doesn't work for everybody.

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? I do suspect that in addition to just the overall biochemical changes is you're talking about some very core areas of the brain. There's a very central structure called the hypothalamus, which sits at the very base of the brain. It's an amazing part of our being because it's maybe a half a centimeter, a half an inch or whatever in size, but it regulates our autonomic nervous system. It regulates our hormones. 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. But it also is where a lot of our pleasure centers are, and they're very close to each other. To me, I'm always thinking, well, if it's just a a millimeter to the left or a millimeter to the right, you get different neurons.

Those are people who fight and then have sex.

I talk about that a lot in the book. I mean, that has a long, thousand-year history of aggression and violence and then followed by rape. 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 aggressiveness with your partner, but it can also, when that's not wanted, it can lead to horrific stuff. 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.

Both prone to indulgent power and dominance.

But that, to me, also is just why it keeps coming back to this common theme of they're using the same parts of in your brain.

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?

It's a great question, and it is extremely hard. A lot of the people who get caught up in these things, they can undergo a conversion. They can go through a process where they come to some realization. Now, that, to me, is another really great neurotheological question. What is the data? What is the piece of information? What happens? What is that moment of, This is wrong?

That was in Rabbit Hole, if you remember, Monica. These people that started as Occupy Wall Streeters that then evolved into Q-Unon-ers, but then some of the people that left Q-Unon because it got really religious. And then for whatever reason, you keep going down in layers of identity. 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. As much as I believe in all this other stuff, the Q-Unon and the Occupy Wall Street-I'm not religious. It got to this point where now we're quoting text from 2000 years ago, I'm out. It 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.

How much information or what happens within when we have a paradigm shift. This is not just for religion, this is for science. When I was going through medical school, if somebody had an ulcer in their stomach, it was because of acid. One day, and I remember we were reading these articles about how there was a bacteria that was doing this. That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.

It's definitely coffee.

Yeah, it can't be that. That article that says it's a bacteria, that was poorly done. These people don't know what they're talking about. And today, we give you an antibiotic. So they always joke that science proceeds one funeral at a time. As people change their way of thinking, how much data do you need? The other story I always think about is Albert Einstein in quantum mechanics. He couldn't get there.

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

Exactly. 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, and he still didn't like it. What do you need to know that?

I know. It's this truth that we always try to pretend it's not there. I even asked it to Sapolsky. I said, You have this enormous brain to bear on whatever your intuition is, and you can fool yourself, but we have this intuition. We have some weird base belief, and then we can deploy our huge brain to confirm it, and you can't know.

You can't know.

Okay, the one thing that I felt like is missing from all this conversation, and also I want to point out, you lay this book out beautifully for both people. So whether you're an atheist or whether you're religious, this book, I don't think, threatens either one of those. It's very inclusive of both those experiences. Thank you.

I try to be.

It's very meticulously done. I'm an atheist. So of course, I'm looking at this as basically this system has been coopted by this human invention of religion. But the other explanation I've had for why we are so prone to and primed to accept a deity is that we're the ultimate social species. And so hierarchy is the most important force in our life. Our hierarchy is going to determine our mating access, our access to food, to shelter, to everything. It's number one. I agree. And we are masterful at identifying hierarchy immediately. We pick up so many cues to figure out where we fall in the status ladder. 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. It's the ultimate alpha. It's just, of course, there's another thing above this alpha. I'm just curious, how do you see our predilection and obsession with status and hierarchy play out in sex and religion? Or is that even an aspect you think of much? Then maybe even what's happening in an fMRI when we are evaluating status and hierarchy? Is that perfectly parallel to the sexual thing as well.

First of all, I completely agree with you. In fact, that's part of the argument that I make. The term I was using a little bit in the book was worship. If you look at the social hierarchy of all animals, as you mentioned, there's the alpha male or a queen bee, and it is all about mating. That whole process is deeply embedded within us to be able to establish those hierarchies and to have that alpha male. And to just pick up on one thing in 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? But they don't. You are very deferential to anyone who is above you in that hierarchy. And so that clearly has been a part of what has been embedded within us.

I would see it on playgrounds all the time. You must have, too. It's like these two kids hate each other's guts. They schedule the fight in front of the school. They fought like crazy. They cried their blood. They get up. They're instantly at peace with each other. The immediate resolution of it reeked of something primitive in hundreds of thousands of years old.

Even if you look at major wars, we had World War II, where our hated enemies were Germany and Japan. Now, I don't know if we're best friends, but we're certainly good friends.

Up there, yeah. England and us.

Yeah. That is part of that process because it maintains that social hierarchy. So I completely agree. And talk about that, that that whole concept of worship and even the Ten Commandments is no other God. I mean, it's like, I'm Alpha, no idles. I don't know the exact biology of it. 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. But what's also interesting is we use our autonomic nervous system also to evaluate how that hierarchy runs. We did an interesting article, I thought, on the forgiveness process. This is also an interesting piece of religion and spirituality and revenge versus forgiveness. I started with, well, how do you know that somebody has injured you in the first place? Because if you're my boss, you're allowed to tell me I did a lousy job if I did a lousy job. You're not allowed to abuse me, but you're allowed to tell me I did a lousy job.

If you're my friend, maybe you're not allowed to tell me that I did a lousy job at work.

Yeah, just ignore that. You just stumbled in Monica and I's life.

What about when it's your boss and your friend? That's very tricky.

I never recommend that.

Too late.

Revenge behavior, this is in the Bible, too, about an eye for an eye.

Ahmaud Arbe. Right.

So if you injure me, I injure you back, an eye for an eye. I have rebalanced that hierarchy, however that was. Even if I perceived you to be higher than me, I may not 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. I might say, Well, you know what? He hurt me or he insulted me, but he's a human being. Maybe he was having a bad day. I'm a human being. I've had bad days. I'm going to let this go. In my mind, I reestablish the hierarchy in a different way. 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.

My concrete example is always in traffic, you're merging, someone's pissed someone off, 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. I guess what I'm getting at is, I have gotten a much deeper lesson out of having wrong 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. I don't ever get into the evaluation. Autonomic nervous system. Yeah, it's so powerful. Somebody comes at you.

It's almost deadly. It's like trying to hit nothing. I got into playing pickleball. If somebody smacks the ball at you hard, it's easy to punch that back. Somebody gives you a real softy, it's hard. It's like baseball.

Good luck getting there.

It's like hitting a knuckleball. You can't do it. This also just shows how this intimate connection of sexuality and spirituality all fit together. 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.

Oh, it's so fascinating. Is there anything prescriptive?

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. I study these things, so To me, it's never, Hey, do this practice or do that practice, but it's really about understanding ourselves. 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. Maybe I should be a little bit more open and understanding and compassionate to them.

I would like the three main ones to lighten their stranglehold up on sexuality. I think that was my original complaint where I was like, Well, fuck this. This is what you're laying out for me. We're going to deny our sexuality. I'm out. This is crazy and untenable for me.

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? But what I always emphasize is to find the ways that it's productive, to find the ways that it's good. Sexuality is wonderful when you're with the right person and it connects you and all those wonderful feelings. You can use that to be empathic and compassionate to others as well. The same thing for spirituality. Have your belief, but go out and reach out to other people and engage them and try to learn about them. I think it makes us all better people, and I guess that's what it's all about.

Oh, well, such an interesting book, Sex, God, and the Brain. Andrew, your second visit. I hope there'll be a third. I'm happy to. You keep writing very interesting stuff. Despite you acknowledging you'll never know anything, you keep trying anyways, and I appreciate it. That's right.

If I ever figure it out, I promise I will tell you.

Yeah, please publish.

Persistence to be your next book.

It might be. All right, well, so fun having you in person, and I hope we see you again soon Thank you so much. All right. Take care. Hi there. This is Hermium Hermium. If you like that, you're going to love the fact check with Ms. Monica. Hello, Armcherries. This marks our last episode under the Spotify umbrella. We've worked with so many wonderful people over the last three years, and I just wanted to thank everyone. We had such a wonderful experience there. We really did.

We were treated very, very well. Loved working with Spotify.

Yeah, we were treated abnormally well, I would say. Right out of the gate, Dawn Ostrow, who's the original exec to reach out to us and have interest in us and bring us over. She was always so wonderful, and then followed by Julie McNamera. Then Jordan Newman, we love to death. Jess Borison, who I even had the pleasure of partying with in Austin at Danny Ricardo's Live Music. I'm partying quotes. Yeah. Yeah. In Asia, in Giselle, some folks are still-In an incredible team over there we got to work with, and we're very lucky and thankful. Thanks for having us. Truly. It was a wonderful three years. Yeah.

We have another fun three years of coming. Yes, we do. Which is very fun. A reminder, ding, ding, ding, that starting next week, 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- I would. You can go to WNDRI Plus.

If you want to see us on video, you can go to YouTube and some other places. I'm not totally sure on that.

But YouTube for sure. You can find us for the fact check and for experts.

There's just way more fun options coming your way. That's right. We have recorded in the new video space. We have. And I like it.

Yeah. Well, let's give some behind the scenes of our feelings.

Yeah, let's do it. I will say our very first guest, I did feel disoriented for about the first eight minutes. I don't know what your experience was, but I was like, Oh, man, yeah, it was lights, a lot of lights. A lot of lights. I mean, the attic is generally a little moody. It is. The lights don't work in here. Yeah, it actually It don't work. In fact, we have been many times interviewing someone in the winter that started at two or three, and it's getting dark, and we're like, Oh, fuck, I got to wrap this up. I can't see the person anymore.

Yeah, we're riding by daylight.

Yes. I had six minutes of worrying where I put my coffee, and is it distracting that I'm reaching over to get my coffee? Thought about my notes. Do I ever want anyone seeing me glance at my notes? Oh, wow. Yeah. One of their things. Yeah. But then that went away.

Our first recording we did is an amazing guest who also knows this space very well, this video space very well.

Yes, that's where they live.

That was a very nice entree in. I don't know that they're all going to feel...

I think I'm just going to be Yeah, you tell me your feelings. I think there's going to be some growing pains. Yeah, sure. But by the way, think about... Well, I'm reminded of when we first got in here and started doing in here, there were some growing pain.

No, but that's because I did my first video at it yesterday. Oh, you did? Yeah. And it was great. 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. I told myself to think of that positively, but there were minutes of that feeling soul crushing. Oh, really? Yeah.

You got to learn a whole new thing.

I can't believe we've been doing this for seven years and we're starting from scratch. Scratch. And this is going to take a long time to get to the point where we were at as far as ease.

Right.

Well, this is even workflow stuff. It's like there's a lot more to it. That's what I mean. The other stuff's I would say not the vibe of the show, per se, but just the workflow of it, right?

Yeah. And I was remembering, oh, yeah, when I was first editing, it would take so long, and now it's dialed. And then I was like, oh, my God, it's taking so long. Oh, no.

Sure. A little panic. There's a little bit of panic. Also, we're accelerated. So it's as hard as it'll be right now because we're playing catch up. Yes.

Because, again, if you have Wendry Plus, you can also get episodes a week ahead. Right.

So virtually at the beginning, we have to do two weeks in one week. Yeah.

Six episodes in one week.

Okay, great. Yes, six episodes in one week.

Yeah, it's a little bit of... It's an intense week. Yes. But it's great. I mean, it is a lot of looking at yourself on this video. And I already was like, Oh, no. Oh, no. I'm nodding so much. Why am I nodding so much? Oh, I hate that. And then today we recorded and I was like, Oh, my God, am I doing it? I forgot to think about it. And then halfway through, I remembered to think about it. Oh, my God.

Well, that's what I was feeling in the first eight minutes. Now, mind you, I have had a lot more time on camera to break my bad habits, right? I mean, I think I told you the most embarrassing thing I ever lived through was playing the drums on camera in Parenthood, having no clue what I look like when I played the drums and be like, whoa, that's what you look like.

It's different, though, than watching myself on a show.

So because that's a character?

Yeah, maybe because it's a character. And also- It's not real. It's not real. It's not as long. I mean, it's like a whole episode of just- No, you're in a movie. Watching us. A movie, if you're in every shot.

That's right. And it's a two-hour movie. Yeah, you're doing three movies a week.

That's not normal. Anyway, I was nodding a lot. So I know people are probably going to comment on that. And I already know that I am nodding too much. So you don't need to say. I will try to dial it back. But I also don't want to be in my head because that's the whole point of the show. And all these things start to- Well, I felt that, again, back to the very first one, I felt that for the first eight minutes.

I found myself being a little self conscious. But then the next episode, which we recorded yesterday, and I immediately just flopped into like, Oh, I'm just alive. I'm talking, I'm alive. I'm not even thinking about it. So yesterday for me was really encouraging for my own self-conscious state. I was like, Oh, yeah. There were many long stretches where I completely forgot. That was my hope, or maybe/my fear, is like, In here, there's long periods where I completely forget it's being recorded. It's like the sweet spot of this. And so I was like, God, am I ever going to ever forget I'm being recorded when there's a camera at me? And yesterday, yeah, totally. I completely forgot so much at the time.

It's going to be an evolution.

But we should be clear. I would hate for people to think that the episodes are going to suffer because of that aspect.

I don't think they're going to suffer, but part of this show is being really honest about our feelings on everything. And that is something I also don't want to go away. I don't want the video to be a movie. I don't want it to be presentational in that way. We're still us. And so if we are uncomfortable a little bit or for some reason, I don't know.

But I think my optimism is like, when we start doing fact checks down there- Yeah, I'm not worried about that. Because 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. If you're sitting across from me, 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 Kraus in acting scenes. That's nice. 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, 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.

Can see you thinking about that?

No, you can see me. Oh, right. So So it's a little bit- You're more reminded, you think. Yeah. I mean, it's funny. What I did get to is this is life. Life is pushing yourself and changing. And we got really comfortable, which is incredible. But you can't just stay stagnant forever, and it's good to try new things.

That's how I'm taking it. It's like, well, A, the Phil Stutz thing, right? This is what life is. It's change and it's work and it's blah, blah, blah. And then also maybe I feel like I've earned this at 49. If you throw this at me, it'll just be another opportunity for me to figure something out and ultimately look back and be proud of myself. I'm already down the road with it.

No, it's a good challenge. And it's an excuse. I'm going to buy so many new outfits.

Oh, sure. Yeah.

Rob, I was mad at you when I was editing it because I was like, My shirt is not right. You do have to tell me that.

How would he know if it's right or wrong? He can see them. We've got this always recording thing, too, so I'm juggling. Just make sure all these are focused and framed. No, no, no. Hopefully, audio is running, too. I imagine whatever for experiencing. I'm imagining, Rob, you're probably having 3X that you have so much more going on in the actual recording. Why? He's got to be looking at focus for five different cameras cameras.

It's not your changing. You're pulling focus.

I mean, I'm just framing everyone when they sit down and the bottom of the thing. Also, cameras stop recording.

Can you move it? It's not on robotics, is it?

No, we don't have a remote head on any of these.

That would be cool. Yeah.

That would be scary. It's back there fucking pushing in and shit. Directing. I think I technically could with that setup, but manual is better.

Well, all to say, I'm not saying you have to fix it in the middle of the recording, but at the beginning, if my shirt is not looking good on camera. I need last looks.

If you're okay, if you're giving me the okay to tell you that during a recording, I will. Or could he yell avocado or something? Maybe we have three or four different code words.

But what if it's really serious moment? Because I need to look good for the serious moment.

I can sneak behind that wall maybe and whisper to you. Okay.

Let's try it.

What if we put a little light system on the coffee table? We should have codes, right? Like your shirt is something, and your face is fucked up is like another thing.

That's code for your face is fucked up. Avocado. No, your face is fucked up is code for your face is fucked up.

Your shirt is messed up.

Anyway, new horizons. It's exciting. New outfits. It's going to be great.

Yeah, for you. This is your time to shine. Today's outfit is fantastic. We just left the space. Thank you. Your outfit's on fire.

Thank you. It was my It's your birthday.

Before we do that, I wanted you to do two housekeeping things. Great. One is we heard loud and clear from the Misophoniex. What do you call people Misophonia? Probably not Misophoniex, and they probably wouldn't like that.

Misos?

Misos. So the misos were, in general, the water pouring, delightful. Okay. They did not like the sound of me drinking. The drinking. Yeah, that's where it broke apart.

It's mouth sounds. It's not It's not ASMR. I think we did.

When you open up the door for the misos to sound off, they're going to let you know.

Yeah, you have to be careful with what you ask.

I was thinking it was very consistent that they hate water. The the sound that they started hating it when I was drinking. But then they would go on to list the things that really irk them the most. And there, there wasn't a tremendous amount of consistency. So it's like, if you were dating a miso and you had previously dated a miso, you You still got to figure out what their unique misos are.

It's the same with sex. That's all ailments.

And just like, you got to relearn everybody.

Yeah, everyone's different. Everyone's different.

And then next bit of housekeeping. Yes. Many people pointed out that the Jake Jelenhall glasses thing he commented on, and he took it from Paul Newman. Paul Newman wore his glasses that way in something.

He commented on our post?

No, he didn't. Many of the listeners had either... My Well, many of them said he said it here, which I don't recall. But then others said they saw him on a talk show talking about it. But no matter what the origin source was, the story was still the same, that it's a nod to... Oh, JJ. Jj, you playful little girl.

Obviously. He might have said that here.

That sounds familiar now, but we hadn't seen the show yet.

He did like Paul Newman. I do remember that.

Well, he was his godfather.

Oh, yeah. And he would come over. Not godfather, but he would come over. I don't know if he was his godfather, but he would come over.

I don't know if he was his godfather, but he would come over.

And He had the dressing recipe or something. Oh, maybe he did. Are we making a lot of- Well, definitely the Paul Newman was at the house, and he was around him a bunch.

Yeah.

Okay.

Jj. 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, like.

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.

It's very good you said that. Oh, that was another thing in the comments. Some people said you can spell it both ways.

Well, you can't spell the show both ways.

No, not at all. But the word synced, apparently.

Oh, all right. Well, that was interesting. That's fine. But let's not confuse people more. No. It's spelled S-Y-N-C-E-D. And go check us out on Thursdays. If you miss having a Thursday episode, we're still around.

You can just run from Wednesday morning straight through the weekend.

We have the best questions on there. People really write in incredible questions.

Everyone you bring to me, I'm like, That's a fucking great question. I know. And they're very honest in what they're going through, which is sweet.

It's very sweet and very vulnerable. Yeah, we have fun over there.

It's almost like a mini version. I don't want to say mini or anything diminutive, but it's related to Armchair Anonymous, but it's also different.

Yeah, it has an element of that because we're hearing from real people who listen.

I'm so glad that just came up. I had a very funny experience, which is I go to my daughter's New Schools barbecue right after your birthday. Ding, ding, ding. And I'm in line, I'm talking to a young... Well, she's a girl, she's not a woman. She's probably 15 or 16 or something. And she's rolling out the burgers. I step up and I go like, Okay, I'm going to hit you with a really annoying request. You got an assembly line going here. I see it. Is it possible to just get the Patty? I don't want to waste a bun, basically. I had talked long enough that she was staring at me really bizarrely, and she goes, Hold on, it's Are you on Anonymous? And I go, Wait, Armchair Anonymous? She goes, Yeah. Is that you? I recognize your voice. And I'm thinking, This is incredible. This is a teenager who doesn't know who I am.

He doesn't know you as an actor.

Yeah, or a human on planet Earth. But she is in high school and she listens to Armchair Anonymous. She doesn't listen to anything else. And she's like, Oh, my God. Yeah, I listen every Friday. I think it's so funny. I love it. And I was like, Oh, what's What are your favorite stories? It was so funny. I loved it.

I hope she's sharing it with all her friends. I hope we have an upcoming Jen.

Calvin got really into it on our road trip. Younger people like Anonymous. He couldn't remember the name of it. He kept saying, Can we listen to Broadcast Studios? We should change the name.

He was such good.

We listened to almost every single one on the road trip.

No, did you listen to Running?

Shit in your pants and coming? No, I skipped that one. But he loved the grizzly bear attack. Oh, yeah. The pooping ones he loves. Sure.

We have one coming up that I told a bunch of people about. Which one? Blessing in Disguise. Oh, yeah, There were a couple on that that were like- Blessing in Disguise was great.

I admittedly was very wrong about that prompt.

That's a very fun episode coming up.

Anyway.

Anyway.

Okay, your birthday.

Yeah, I had a birthday. Came and went. No. Oh, yeah. According to you, I have a lot of days left, which is exciting. Yeah.

I haven't got on the chain yet, but I'll be there.

On the Connection's chain, you've been saying happy birthday for the past few days. Yeah, yeah.

Then I'm going to continue, too.

And it It was really nice. So nice. At Cara. Yeah, we went to Cara. Well, I had a shopping day in the morning.

Where did you go?

I went to some stores. I won't say which. I went to some relatable stores. And I got a haircut. I got a birthday haircut. That's a really fun thing to do.

Where at? At a salon?

No, Jenny came over.

Oh, she did. Good birthday treat to yourself.

Big treat. I needed it so bad. Don't feel like you need to comment on my hair on some of the beginning episodes of video. I hadn't had my haircut, and Rob forgot to tell me that it looked bad. So no need to comment. What's that one?

That one's going to be Beehive.

Birthday haircut. Birthday haircut, which was a lovely start to the day.

She knocked it out of the park.

She's so good. But yeah, then in shopping, then we went to Cara, had just people come, stop by.

Very casual.

Very casual. It was so nice.

My favorite kind.

Yeah, you came. A lot of people came.

Oh, there was 20 plus people there.

Yeah, and then when you left, some other people came.

Much more than I can. Who came after I left? Ryan and Amy. Okay, good.

They made it? Yeah, they had Evy's soccer game. Okay. We had some COVID people who couldn't come. Oh, who had COVID? Laura and Matt.

Oh, I thought that was baby-related, of course. No.

You saw Calleigh.

We had to leave earlier than I I would have wanted to for the before mentioned barbecue.

For the hamburger.

Yeah, the school barbecue. Yeah, but it was really fun.

I had three martinis.

Oh, nice. Over the course, though, of six hours. Yeah, six hours.

That's not enough. One every two hours is not enough, I don't think, on your birthday. I know, but I didn't know this phrase, but apparently, it's a phrase, Martinis are not to hurt anyone's feelings, okay? Because everyone's body's perfect.

But martinis are like, boob's. One is not enough and three is too many. I recently heard that saying, and it's a good one.

It's good because it's accurate.

One's not enough and three is too many. Three pushes you over the edge a little bit. Even if you love boobs. I love Boobs. Oh, I meant for Mark, too. I mean, four is good, though, right? You think so?

Oh, well, I got you.

Threesome. Okay. But yeah, I love Boobs.

But a third one, I don't know. It would-You'd probably still like it.

Yeah, I guess. I like anything. I can get myself to any. Yeah. Yeah, I can buy in. It sounds perverted, but it's a good thing about you.

Yeah, it's my superpower. You're open. I can find most things beautiful if I like the person.

And I can think someone's very unattractive because I don't like them, even though they're objectively-Oh, yeah. I mean, I think we all do that.

Yeah. Well, actually, I can't speak for everyone, but I definitely do that.

Well, I knew a lot of dudes that hooked up with people they didn't like. Yeah, that's weird. It is.

I I mean, it's not for me.

No.

I can't even talk to someone I don't like. Yeah. Well, you know this term hate fuck, that's a whole thing, too. That's bad. Yeah, it is bad. If you hate fuck people, you're a baddie. Yeah, you're bad. Tell me what's your trauma. Oh, okay. So I did realize, but I didn't put two and two together. Reels, you can only do in a minute 30.

That thing is 220. Oh, it is. So I chopped the beginning, 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 why don't I do it tomorrow and then collab? And what we're releasing? Well, I'll just We'll collaborate. Yeah, that makes sense. That's easiest. Nice. How do you feel about collabs? If we could just talk about that for a second. I see something I like and I look up and I want to follow the person who posted or at least inquire into their other content.

And there's two or three people 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.

Now I'm thinking about Instagram. Do you have any issue with that at all? Does that bother you? No. 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.

Oh, you want to know because it's a funny piece of content.

Yeah. Well, why don't you just click on each person and then see? Exactly. Oh, wow. If I can click on three people and go through their whole page, try to figure out who the genius in this mix is. I think you can probably find out quickly. I guess for you and I, it doesn't matter. Who are you trying to figure out? Oh, tons of times. It's all shit that gets recommended to me, and there's three names on it, and I don't know who's the genius behind this.

If you're wondering on my collabs with Liz, it's Liz who's the genius behind it.

Okay, that's very honest of you. Yeah. Okay. Can I play one thing for you? Yeah. Okay. I got to find out who I sent it to.

Okay.

I know I sent it to Kimmel because he loved Yot Rock. Oh.

This is great. Was Yot Rock-What if Metallica was Yot Rock? This is AI. Enter the Sandman. The song fucking slaps, by the way. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, What? I I love this song.

Isn't it fucking cool? Wow, that's good. Isn't that wild? I like that.

I should give the dude who created it some props.

How do you know?

Has he collabbed with a lot of people? Well, luckily, it was just his name. But Mr. Professor318, he makes AI make weird mashups, is what I can gather from his page. And so he just tells AI Do Enter the Sandman as Yot Rock. And this fucking spin-up... Now, we have a lot of fear about AI. We got to say this is awesome. That's great.

Except I don't think we need to shout out Mr. Professor Blablas. Well, he's the one 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. Oh, the AI robot.

I thought you were talking about our robot, our in-house robot.

I am always talking about him, but no. Amy, play Metallica, enter the Sandman as your rock, I can't remember my tune.

Oh, my God, Dax. I hate this.

It's been too long.

It's been... It's been too long.

It's been too long. I want to hear some Metallica, but I'm in the moon for ya rock this afternoon. And then he just starts playing it, I guess. Yeah. Okay. All right. I can only think so highly of Mr. Professor.

But this is actually, weirdly, what's going to be the future of AI.

It's just a tool humans are going to use in a very creative way. And so I certainly didn't think to tell AI to do that. I did.

I just forgot. Let's hear your version. I forgot to do it. My version would be the same. It would be, Have AI make this song sound like this?

Now, here's something really curious, and I don't know enough about AI to say it, but if this guy tells AI to do it, and then you AI to do it an hour later. Is it different? Does it come up with the same song or different? My hunch is different.

And how is that?

That's weird. Each person's AI has a personality. That'll be cool.

I had spinning, but I'll be listening to this great song as they take over the world.

Great. Was there anything else? About your birthday. Anyone throw a drink in anyone's face? Was there any fist fights?

What happened when it became open to the pub? No It was no problem?

It was no problem.

Yeah. Yeah. So it was private for a little bit.

Then it became open to the pub. Figatively, yeah, literally. Yeah.

And then I was practicing doing some side-eyes. Oh, okay. To deter. To let people know you're not welcome here. Yeah, but I forgot.

Okay. Also, a sweet arm cherry sent me a drink. By the way, they were serving Ted Seeger's there, which blew my mind.

Yes. Oh, my God. Was that exciting? That is so cool. It is. Yeah. You got a little video. You have to post that. I will. All right. I'm going to get into some facts.

Now, it'll be my last non-video in it. Enjoy it. Yeah. Maybe drink four or five Margies. Oh, no, not Margies.

Martini's. I could feel it. I could feel that third Martini, even though it was six hours.

I don't think I drink enough water. You felt it the next day or you You felt it in the moment? Did you feel a little sloshy? No, the next day.

No, you didn't feel sloshy. I didn't. I felt- Now, in control.

I felt sober.

You rode a motorcycle home, right? Yeah, I did. I did. I did not feel drunk or anything. Did you say anything crazy? Probably. Actually, there was one conversation that I was in the middle of talking and I was like, I think I'm done making full sense because it was a serious conversation. It 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.

You didn't lay on that point. I didn't. Normally, you could. But everyone nodded. Yeah, people are pretty codependent, which is helpful. They were also everyone else is ranking, too. They're a little shit-based, too. Well, that's getting stoned.

I mean, that's the name of the game. Yeah, that's why I don't like it. Yeah, you're like midway through some point, and you're like, I'm so lost in this fucking point, and there's no way they don't all know, and what do we do now? I know. But no, the next day, I could feel it a bit. Birthday blues. Okay, cataract surgery. My dad got cataract surgery, and he was saying, You You can have your vision fixed while you're in there, but you have to pick nearsighted or farsighted.

Sophie's choice. Yeah. He picked-Farsightedness. He picked fixing distance. Yeah. And he wears his little glasses. It makes the most It makes sense because you can easily throw the glasses on. It's probably safer to be able to see far away. But I will say, I don't know if that's the right choice because at least my current life is like a ton of reading and doing research and then journaling in the morning.

I just feel like a big chunk of my life is near sighting.

Right now, though. You're right. When I move into my boating phase, I want my foresight a bit more.

Definitely. I don't see anything up close.

And then your glasses might fall into the water. Blow off when they hit those north of 100 on my triple engine pontoon boat.

Okay, so you said Huberman's specialty is the eye, but he's not an ophthalmologist. Yeah, I wish I could remember what his... He is- He's a neurologist that specializes in the eyes, right?

Yeah, he's Associate Professor of Neurobiology and of Optimology. Oh.

So the Huberman lab is focused on brain function, development, and repair, with emphasis on regeneration to Prevent and Cure Blindness.

But he's not a medical doctor, which isn't an optimologist, a medical doctor?

He must be. I don't think he is. He's a researcher. Can you teach without- Yeah, he's a researcher, I think.

So he must have a PhD.

And not an MD. Right. Retinol and optic nerve damage and glaucoma and disorders of sensory limbic function, such as depression and PTSD. Anyway. That song is so stuck in my head.

You know It was funny. When I was pulling up my fax, I just typed in his name in my email because I send my fax to myself.

So I just typed in Andrew.

To make it feel like you get mail. You like getting mail. I love getting email.

I love it so much. I love it so much that I have 39,170 emails. I would throw that phone in the river. If I looked at my phone and it said that, I would scream out loud, I think.

I know.

It's It's quite noise.

I don't see that. Okay, so I typed his name in, pulled up the fact check, started looking up the facts, and I was like, What?

I don't really remember that, but we've done a lot. It was from last time. It was from last year. Yeah. Well, I've had that problem, too, because I keep a file of all my research. And then so I have, over time, had to start putting the date. Well, then I looked at the email date and I was like, Oh, shit. But when I I did that, it was cool because I learned something. What did you learn? What did you relearn?

I relearned. Dyscronimateria. That's color blindness?

Nope. Also called dyscronia is a condition of cerebular dysfunction in which an individual cannot accurately estimate the amount of time that has passed.

Distorted time perception. Funnel lobe stuff? Cerebral. Send the Sarah Bellum. Oh, Sarah Bellum. Yeah. Anyway, that's from last year. I'm still settling into the revelation that every brain part we've been talking about, there's two of. I'm still digesting hippocampi.

Same.

I don't even know if I believe that.

Okay. I'm turning into you. I like it, though. We talked about sadism. I mean, no, we didn't. Oh, my God. Sub and dom. Oh, There's a psychology today. This was in 2020, 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 masochism and submission, as well as their reasons or motives for continuing to practice masochism and submission. It's interesting because it breaks down intrinsic origins. It says, The significant majority of participants, 78%, described having an intrinsic interest in masochism/submission. 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. Update. I don't think my heart's going to explode. She didn't keep you. That's a good sign. She didn't admit me to the hospital. Yeah, when at any time they say, Clear the rest of your day, that's when you got it right.

Yeah, I am probably going to go on a statin, which Which is fine.

As I just said that, I didn't like it. Yeah, well, look, this is the story of getting older. The medications just start 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 Kepra, and you're on I know. I'm trying to sympathize with you.

It's so many to take at night now.

You should see the thing I take in the morning. 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 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 mine are elective, which is nice. If I travel and forget that, I'll be fine.

Yeah. That's nice. And I wonder if going on the statin means I can go crazy.

Well, that's, I think, how people fuck up the statin as they start. Because I I remember being with my uncle one time, and he was eating six, seven pounds of baking. He's like, Yeah, I'm on whatever it used to be called. Lippertor? Lippertor is one.

Yeah, just like, off to the races. I'm not sure that that's how it's supposed to be used. She said, which was reassuring, 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.

And mine is not.

I don't have it. But then there's this other piece called familial something, I forget the word. And she's like, You probably have that, but you probably only have one as opposed to two. She said some people 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? No.

I'll try it. Okay. Sounds fun. Although I don't really want to go there. Well, I'm sure we have some listeners in Stanton Island.

No, I mean, I do want to go there.

What if the communication was called to see your arm's side? Oh, I would love it. I would love it. Okay. Anyway, most of these participants describe their interests in BDSM starting at a young age without necessarily having a sexualized component. For example, some participants describe liking to be tied up or blindfolded during various believe games such as cops and robbers. These participants often said they were, quote, born liking BDSM or that they were wired that way. About seven % indicated that they had an aha moment later in life realizing they had always been interested in BDSM practices. Then there's extrinsic origins. 22% of participants described extrinsic oranges. 11% reported it being connected to a history of childhood sexual abuse. I want to guess wrongly, obviously, that that was a bigger percentage.

More than that. Oh, wow. 9% due to a parental discipline, example, spanking with an object.

Another 9% 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 9% reported being introduced to BDSM as an adult by a recent sexual partner. Interesting. As of yet, I 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 don't want to dominate or be masochistic because I can relate to most of these sexual things. I'm like, Yeah, I could see getting into that? Yeah, I definitely don't want to be.

You might want to dominate. I don't know because- Kind of a boss.

Yeah, but I have that in life, so I don't think I need to play that out there.

You're the CEO. You would go the other way, but you don't want to go the other way. I don't. I don't feel safe enough in that environment to be dominated. Right.

Even though you set the rules, we should say that. That is the interesting thing about it.

You set your own rules. Yeah, but I think I don't- You don't even know what your rules are. No, I don't trust people enough to follow the rules during sex.

People get up. Sure, you get a little caught up in the moment.

Their hormones are all messed up. Blood's moving from the brain to other areas. I don't trust it.

You're as you said, about chimps.

I haven't watched yet, and I do really want to. What's the second episode last night? He mentioned the cell that activates to some people when you show them a picture of Jennifer Anastas in. I was like, That's so cool. I'd really like her to come on, and I just want to say that out loud. Sure. Put it in the universe. Yeah, I want to put that in the universe. I'd love it, too. Another plea to Selena Gomez This is my friend.

Okay, we're doing the whole- We're doing a roll call.

Who I follow. Yeah. Still haven't heard her back from that. Jay Zee, if you're listening.

No, I have a course I want. We have a whole list. Hey.

M&m. But so that's it. Happy birthday. Oh, thanks.

We're going to go till September 24th. Well, 23rd. Oh, that's going to be such a sad day. The 24th, the first day without a happy birthday?

I think. I mean, I'm inclined to go fine. I'll keep going. But no, then it's not... You would care less come next august. It means nothing then.

It's like when you tell everyone they're your favorite person. It's just like that. Waters it all down. All right. Love you. Love you.

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