I love this idea or what you just said that it doesn't even so mat so much matter the direction as much as the commitment uh a colleague of mine at Stanford who I um respect tremendously Anna lmy who wrote the book dopamine Nation she's the head of our dual diagnosis Addiction Center she was the one who really truly deserves credit for bringing dopamine into the public discussion over the last few years she initiated that talking about how big inflections in dopamine that are very fast that aren't preceded by effort AKA drugs of abuse behavioral addictions
Etc leave us below Baseline with our dopamine and then people will engage in more of the behavior it drives us further and further and further that's kind of the the principle of it um I was talking to her about how people get sober and the conversation turned to how do young people find their purpose it was it was very interesting she said let's talk about finding purpose everyone nowadays wants to know what their purpose is and she said the way you find your purpose is by going out on your front lawn and seeing if the
leaves need to be raped sounds familiar right you find purpose by um figuring out how you can be of use at progressively larger and larger spheres away from yourself and in doing that present and in doing that you start to hear the calling and you find your purpose and it as you said or it reveals itself to you it's the same thing right so I think you to would be enjoy a conversation at some point this important thing to return to because people are often curious about what to do practically it's like okay first this
is what Jacob does Jacob in the Old Testament stories he eventually becomes Israel right and so that's his name and Israel means we who wrestle with God now Jacob is a bad guy when the story starts and he leaves his home and the perverse influence of his mother and his criminal betraying past behind and he decides that he's going to aim up and that night he makes an altar and he makes a sacrifice and that night he has a dream of a staircase that reaches up to heaven which is now what he's walking up right
and so he finds his his purpose he finds his Adventure as a consequence of his decision to be better okay so now you want to find your purpose okay first thing you have to do you have to review how wretched miserable you actually are and you have to face that and then you have to think I'd rather not have that and it has to be true and then you have to aim up now you don't know what that means because like you're pretty scattered and dissolute but at least you got the damn intent in mind
and then you have to be willing to make the sacrifices right along the way okay then what happens well then the pathway will reveal itself to you in increments calling is there something around here that I could fix that I would fix that's a great question is there something at hand that I could fix that I would fix it might be something low because especially when you first get going you're not good for anything so you might have to start with something pretty trivial but it doesn't matter because you start getting better is there something
that bothers me that's conscience that I could set right in some small way well that's there for everyone right in the midst of the most catastrophic mess that pathway you might even say look The More Mess Around you the more unstructured possibility you have at hand and it's true you know it's like I'm not trying to be a poly an Anna about this I know how difficult that is but it is the case that the more mess at hand that you can see the more opportunity that's there cuz well if you can see that it's
a mess then you can see the pathway to to cleaning it up well so do it do it see what happens that's the adventure what's going to happen in my class I my maps of meaning class I used to have students do this as a project and one of the projects was find something around you in your neighborhood wherever in your family that isn't set right and see if you could set it right just write down what happens well one student in particular he decided his mother had died and the family kind of fragmented and
so he decided he would take try to take on the role of mother you know be responsible for the household operating well it grew him up like mad as you could imagine he ran into all sorts of weird resistances right because his family was upset that he was doing what mom used to do and like he just had a tremendously complex Adventure as a consequence of his willingness to pursue this was obviously necessary because the alternative was that his family was going to fall apart it's like that's there for everyone you say well my circumstance
are so difficult it's like fair enough so are everybody else's by the way but that means there's a lot of mess like fix it a bit and that's ridiculously entertaining and unpredictable and that in itself is a great deal you have no idea what's going to happen just like you didn't know what happened when you started the podcast why' you start it I had a for me I felt a compulsion um to share what I knew but because during the pandemic everyone was so focused on vaccines and lockdowns that no one was talking about the
reality that everyone was facing including sorry Josh Gordon I know him through time um our director of the national institute's sub mental health not a single thing out there about hey folks if you're going to be indoors this much get some sunlight in your eyes in the morning or else you're going to have trouble sleeping trouble sleeping equates to mental health issues stress uncertainty my lab was working on ways to regulate stress through deliberate breathing through other mechanisms it was like well I want people to have tools zero cost tools to deal with their stress
to help them regulate their circadian biology because those Wick out to countering the negative forces that were on us which are social order was disrupted people are at home so it was a desire to give people tools that I knew existed that I was knowledgeable about and I had a a long-standing kind of and growing compulsion that I wanted to talk about Neuroscience because it's so darn cool right okay so it's a l there there was a lot of energy behind the the mission but then there was a calling the calling was from hearing about
people suffering it's like well of course you're not sleeping well I mean not only are there a million things to worry about right now people aren't working Etc but you're not getting sunlight in your eyes you need to get outside you need to you know and then there's the whole socialization thing and look whatever people's circumstances there are things that they could do and so I felt that calling and my conscience told me that I have the knowledge so why would why would I Cloister it cler with it at home that's like what good is
that so I just started blabbing on the internet right yeah right that's why yeah well that's a that's a perfectly you know you can think well that's a logical extension of your subsidiary calling to be a teacher and a professor you're already a researcher you're already a professor so you're investigating and transmitting knowledge it's like well looks like you could do that on a broader scale and the technolog is there why not explore that that's a perfectly reasonable and you can see the interplay of calling and conscience there that's a lovely way of characterizing the
voice of the Divine which is is how it's characterized repeated Elijah Elijah is the prophet who is appears with Christ when he's transfigured on the mount in the New Testament it's Elijah and Moses Elijah is the first person in human history who identifies the Divine with conscience that's his contribution that's a major psychological Revolution right it's an unheralded transformation in understanding it's like it's not the storm it's not the forest fire it's not the earthquake it's not the god of nature he's the originator of the phrase the still Small Voice right like that's a that
the notion that your conscience is the voice of the Divine my God there's there's there's virtually no dis no Discovery there's no proposition more revolutionary than that and so that's why Elijah is a prophet of you know primary status and I just see no reason at all not to take that claim seriously it's like you come up with an explanation for your conscience it tells you things you don't want to hear so how is that you I I mean you have to gerrymander the definition of you for that to be you
