1. AL on the Jax Jones Martin Warner Show Key [ ] = my own thoughts 1.1 Pleasure and pain are co-located; same parts of brain that process pleasure also process pain [ Why is that for us humans? So pain and pleasure are neurochemically similar? How to use this to benefit your life and the lives of everyone else?] 1.2 MW: Instead of just having a cigar, I would be exercising and lighting one up. People look at me, thinking this guy has more issues. I am absorbing more. I am increasing the potency! Everyone laughs! AL: one way to increase potency is to exercise before smoking, This increases your cardio output, hence when u do smoke, you lay out your nicotine on alveoli, increasing uptake of nicotine to your machine. Hence this is a top strategy to increase potency: combine 2 drugs together. Anna eats chocolate and reads romance novels. 1.3 MW: I want to learn. I want to deliver incremental progress. To keep myself level, I learn. I can substitute that learning for cigar smoking [ Jax bursts out laughing] AL: Learning releases dope. Hence this is a healthy source of dope. [Connection to Chaterjee; dope is not good or bad, it is where u get it. This is a top line from Chaterjee’s interview. ] We call obsessions bad when they cross the line from adaptive to having negative effects on life. 1.4 L: I wrote dopamine nation to explain: our brain wiring, which was so adaptive for a world of scarcity thousands of years ago, becomes a liability in a world of over-abundance. 1.5 L: I want to emphasise in my book; people who recover from addiction are modern day prophets because they know things we do not. [They have hard-won wisdom] People with that vulnerability, who can figure out how to live in this dopamine-overloaded world, have acquired wisdom the rest of us have not. 1.6 JJ: Can we find out about masturbation machine man. AL: This is the spirit of the book; people in recovery have this tremendous wisdom. People say their addiction has been a blessing in their life as it forced them to rethink how to live. [C-> Tony R; if you have been blessed, be a blessing] 1.7 In a dopamine world, we need to strive for new asceticism/self-discipline. We must intentionally restrain from indulging ourselves in excess and we need to invite painful things into our life in order to keep balance in a world that is out of balance. 1 healthy way to get dope is to press on pain side of balance. When we do this, we trigger our body’s re-regulating mechanism to upregulate neurotransmitters. How do we press on the pain side of this balance? Exercise. Creative Effortful Endeavours = making music, reading hard books, telling the truth, sitting with our anxiety [ Set a 10-minute timer] 1.8 JJ: we are in a world addicted to being better. AL: A key point is that life is hard [ Jordan Peterson] Pursuing pleasure for its own sake leads us to experience more pain. A wonderful interview!