What Makes Some of Us Thrill Seekers?

Where do you think selfishness came from? Autonoaded consciousness. So that's this ability to put yourself into an experience which, as I said earlier, is responsible for our greatest achievements as a species, but also is what will potentially do us in. It allows us to not only envision a world in which, you know, we can be selfless, you know, not selfish, but help others, but also how to exclude others. I think it's a natural, basic animal instinct to stay alive, obviously. Richard Dawkins said the theory of the selfish gene. Animals are incredibly selfish in their struggle for existence. So that kind of automatic selfishness is there. But what the autonomic mind allows us to do is to be intentionally, willfully selfish, to allow us to choose to do these things for our own personal good. For example, I think that the autonomic human mind is the only entity in the history of life that's been ever to put the organism, and we're talking about the conscious mind being a small part of what's going on in the cortex, to put all of the rest of the brain and all of the body at risk for the simple sake of a thrill. Mountain climbing, you know, swimming in shark-infested waters or taking drugs at dangerous levels. No other organism can commit suicide in the sense of intentionally planning to put an end to an entity that it knows has the possible end. So our conscious minds are special in good ways and bad ways. Yeah, the conscious mind that seeks thrills, what do you think is the root of that? I've always wondered, like, why certain people are drawn to doing, like, flips on motorcycles or certain people are drawn to climbing mountains with no ropes. What do you think that is? You know, I'm just guessing. I don't really know, but I think that we each have these kind of physiological states that we try to maintain. Our homeostatic levels are different, and some people need a little more adrenaline or a little more – I hate to use adrenaline in the kind of cheap way of just saying – it just needs more of a rush or kind of body activity, because all of that also affects the brain. And so consciously, you strive, you may go looking for those kinds of things to get the rush. And it's sort of on the spectrum of addiction in a sense, where you need that physiological change that the drug induces. But we also have addictions in our lives that are habits and things that we develop and pursue that aren't necessarily good for us, but that we kind of feel compelled to do. Do you know what Alex Honnold is? Yeah. I've had him on the podcast a couple of times, and every time I talk to him, my hands start getting sweaty. I get so nervous. For folks who don't know who we're talking about, he's probably the most famous free solo climber in the world. And he climbs these seemingly impossible mountains with no ropes, and there's video of him doing it, there's drone footage of him climbing these peaks, and my hands just start pouring sweat, and I just watch it. But when I talk to him, what's really interesting is he's a calm, rational, intelligent man who's very thoughtful, and he's a very kind guy. He doesn't seem like some... When I think of someone who likes to do flips with a motorcycle or do radical, I think of some crazy wild thrill seeker, some dude who just needs to constantly, or a woman who needs to be constantly freaked out. He's not that guy. And when he describes it, what's really interesting is he goes, it's very mellow. He's like, if there's really a thrill, I've done something horribly wrong. The real thrills are so scary because that means you're about to die. So instead of getting the thrill, he's getting that peace. Yeah, but he's getting a piece from putting himself at extreme risk. And there's also the thing of other people praising you for your risk taking, which is an odd thing about humans. And they've shown through natural... Well, there's a natural selection aspect of it with females and mates, that females are attracted to men that do those crazy things and take crazy risks for some strange reason, whether it's some sort of a remnant of our ancient past, like that thrill seeking man is not going to shy away from combat. He will protect our children or something like that. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of evolutionary psychology and a lot of that is speculative, of course. Yeah, of course. But the thrill seeker is one of the weirder things when everything's great and you have plenty of food and you live in cities and like, okay, look, I'm not getting enough juice here. I have to learn how to hand glide or something. And some people may do it for attention. Yes. Yeah, the things people do for attention.