#712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs

27:19And really what you're doing is you're looking through a very narrow aperture at a very thin slice of their life. You're looking at the thin slice of their life that's turning out the best, but you're also looking at a thin slice of their life that's marketed to be the best. And you have no idea what the horror of that person's life might be in its totality. And you have no idea if, like if the deal was say you wanted to be Russell Brand, there's a good example. You wanted to be Russell Brand. and he wanted to be as charismatic and as famous as he is. Well, your real wish is that you get to have everything Russell Brandt has, but none of his problems.

28:04Well, come on. I mean, that's just, it's just, it's no wonder that a vision like that would make you despondent because it's naive, it's resentful, it's jealous, it's bitter, and it's unreasonable. You have to take the good with the bad, you have to take the bad with the good, And people rarely think about that when they're thinking about, you know, the famous people they think they'd like to be. There was a recent interview with Elon Musk where he said something, my mind is a storm. I don't think most people would want to be me. They may think they would want to be me, but they don't. They don't know.

28:43They don't understand. Would you think of that? Elon, someone that people probably look up to and admire it as far to be. One of the downsides to high level genius is you might describe it as hypomania. So here's a simple test that people can do. So this is a test of something called verbal fluency. And verbal fluency is associated with creativity. And so here's a simple verbal fluency test. Right down is many four letter words as you can in three minutes that begin with T. Okay, that's that's pretty constrained for letters in T or or write down as many words as you can in three minutes to begin with S That's less constrained.

29:26All right, so There's quite a powerful correlation between the sheer number of words that you produce and your lifetime creative achievement Right, especially in the artistic and verbal domains That's different than vocabulary vocabulary is how many words you understand And fluency is how many words you can produce in a given amount of time. Deployment of those. Well, people vary to a degree that you can hardly imagine. So some people, if you get them to do the four -letter test in three minutes, they'll write down like 12 words. And some will write down 150. And the ones who are writing down 150, their minds are going at a hypomanic rate.

30:09They're just thinking five times as fast as... Bing, bing, bing, bing. Yeah, without any remission whatsoever. And when that gets completely out of control, you have manic. You have someone who's manic. And there's nothing fun about manic. That's where the word maniac comes from. And someone who's manic has a thousand different plans, each of which are one sentence long that they're hyper -enthusiastic about. They'll spend every cent of their money pursuing them and things just go immediately to hell. And so that's the that's the outer limit of pathology on the creative front and someone like Musk who's clearly a genius That's what he's contending with in his internal landscape now I'm not saying that he's man it because I see no signs of that but Someone that creative is on that edge or you see someone like Ben Shapiro I mean, it's very interesting to talk to Ben because And Russell Brand is the same way Shapiro speaks, I think more rapidly than anyone I ever met, but if you're with him, you see very clearly that he's probably thinking five times that fast.

31:14And that's a lot. And when I was writing maps of meaning, which was my first book, I had a very difficult time shutting off my mind. I was obsessed with that book. And so I was writing about three hours a day. And then I was thinking about the material, like for 12 hours. as and the thoughts came as way faster than thinking they probably came about as fast as I can read I can read about 1200 words a minute if the material isn't overwhelmingly dense and so it was just non -stop thought for like 16 hours a day that's part of the reason I started lifting weights because if I was lifting heavy enough weight.

31:53I'll be thinking 1200 words a minute while I've got a hundred pounds on my back It was enough to shut it down. And it was also one of the reasons that I drank, because that was another thing that would shut it off. Well, I think the price that people pay to be the person that you admire is just such an interesting frame to look at someone like Elon Musk. My mind is a storm. I don't think most people would want to be me. The price that you would have to pay in order to be me is not one that you would be one of the richest men on the planet. that you get to, you know, Dan's on stage and release cars that you're bulletproof and put rockets in space and stuff.

32:31Well, yeah, but what about all of the baggage? What's the point? Well, he's also appears to me to be hyper conscientious and I know people who've worked with him. Like, Musk isn't just a creative genius. He's also an extremely conscientious engineer, which, and really conscientious engineers, they have very interesting minds. I like talking to engineers because my brother and was a great engineer. When he understands something, Jim, when he understands something, he understands how to build it out of atoms, right? Like he understands it at every single level. And Musk appears to me to be someone who's this rare combination of hyper creative but also hyper conscientious.

33:12Does that ringle? Does that ringle? Does that sort of hypertrophy de -executive function help to wrangle some of the diffuse creative energy? We're going to put it into this one thing at least for a while and then we'll move on to another thing. Yes. Yes. Definitely. Definitely. You Eric Weinstein's a good example of someone. I hope Eric isn't annoyed by this, but Eric is unbelievably creative, but he's not particularly conscientious. And so his, and I think he found an occupation where that works extremely well because he's, he, I don't know if he's still doing this, but he worked with Peter Teal for quite a long time as his idea man, right?

33:48And Eric's an extremely interesting person. Musk is hyper creative and as far as I can tell, hyper conscientious. And the conscientiousness does focus. And that lots of people who are creative aren't conscientious. Well, it's rare. Like if you're one in the, there's no correlation between creativity and conscientiousness. Okay. So if you're one in a thousand, if you're the most creative person in a thousand and you're the most conscientious person in a thousand, you're one person in a million and Musk is probably more like one person in a hundred million, right? Something like that, maybe more, but or maybe a billion, right?

34:28Maybe. Yet it's interesting to consider the changes that happen to people as well as they as their their platforms as this scrutiny around them continues to increase. Obviously this has been a journey for you over the last, you know, nearly approaching 10 years now, was it 2006? Was that still C -16? 2016. 2016, yeah, sorry. How have you found fame change you? What's been impacted or changed due to the scrutiny and the surveillance and the adoration and the criticism?

35:07Well, the first thing that changed, I think, was that I saw misery on a scale that I hadn't really seen it before. I had worked as a clinician for a long time, and I worked with, say, 20 people a week. And I was always in the realm of difficult, existential problems, wrestling with my clients problems alongside of them. And I liked that a lot. And then I had my research, and I had my family and various business interests. And so that misery in some ways was contained and boxed in. And I had a lot of structure around that to be able to function, despite the fact that, you know, I was neck deep in 20 people's serious problems, which I really liked, by the way.

35:54When I started speaking on a larger scale and meeting more and more people, the scale of demoralization really hit me. I didn't know that I didn't know how deep the demoralization in our culture had become. And I think that was especially obvious to me at that point among young men. Now it looks like this is Jonathan Heitz research is indicating this that possibly young women are even in worst shape, but for whatever reason most of the people I was meeting at least to begin with were young men. I think it was probably because most of them far more people on YouTube are young men. And so the it was shocking and brutal to see how much demoralization, how widely spread the demoralization in our culture was.

36:52Other than that, and And that was a real shock and it was very hard on me, I would say. Everything else about it has been at minimum ridiculously interesting. I have an unbelievable wealth of opportunity. I'd be a fool to be anything but objectively grateful. I mean, the misery that I saw was a shock and it hurt me and it was part of what you mean. How did that impact you? Did it change the way that you see the world at all?

37:26It made me understand more deeply how important it was to offer people an encouraging word. I could see that so many people were dying psychologically or actually for lack of an encouraging word. and so it made being in the position to provide that much more necessary. In part of the reason that Tammy and I tour constantly is because it seems to be good, it seems to be a good thing. You know, we've even seen changes in the audience. So five years ago, six years ago, when we did our first tour, a lot of the people who came to the talks were in pretty rough shape. There were more men than there are now, like the proportion of men to women was higher, and the men were generally there alone, and a lot of them were looking pretty ragged around the edges.

38:26And now, five years later, half the audience comes in suits, as if they're for a wedding, most of the guys are there with some woman. The audience members are doing much better and the lecture events are extremely positive. You know, if you looked at my life from the outside, you'd think that I was in a constant storm of, you know, aggravated controversy, but all of that, virtually all of that is virtual. It's just in the online in the whole of the world. Now, it touches the actual world from time to time because I am being pursued by my regulatory college on - Reeducation camp. Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is, you know, mostly just an annoyance and a preposterous annoyance, a preposterous, expensive and time -consuming annoyance.

39:18But apart from that, everything that's happened around me has been positive. Ha, it that's a strange thing too. Positive at such an intensity that even that is daunting. You know, you'd think it's hard to imagine that you could be in a situation where things are so positive that you can barely stand it, but, but I am in that situation. And it's quite something to contend with. I, I was fortunate I suppose to some degree that it didn't happen to me till I was old because I've never really, I've never really got accustomed to it. I've had a thought about this observing what's happened to you and you know the Weinstein's are a good example of this too.

40:02We often hear the perils of getting famed too young, the Macawley Colkins of the World, the Britney Spears of the World, you know, individuals who don't have any sense of identity being thrust into a non -representative experience of the world and they're completely unmoded. But I think that there's an equally interesting question to ask, okay, and what happens if you think you know who you are? If you've spent decades, five decades, six decades of your life, understanding your place, your status, the trajectory that you're on, and then out of nowhere, you get ripped away from all of the areas of reference, all of the way markers that you thought you knew, and now you're just floating in the air.

40:44I imagine that could be even more disquieting in some ways. Well, when everything blew up around me to begin with, it was stressful, I would say, because my job was on the line, my university job, then I never thought that would happen. I mean, when I worked at Harvard, Anna at the University of Toronto, that was all positive. Like, I really liked working with my graduate students. I had at least cordial relationships with my fellow faculty members at Harvard. They were more than cordial. At the University of Toronto, most of the faculty members that I started to develop friendships with were also those who ended up moving away.

41:27And so, and they were often people who got offers from other places and, you know, they would disappear. And so a lot of the friends I developed at the University of Toronto went elsewhere. And so I didn't get as tightly tied in with regards to friendship networks among my peers as I had at Harvard, for example, but I had great relationships with undergraduates and with my graduate students. That was plenty like I loved working with my graduate students. And so it wasn't like I was pining and alone not at all and I had a good network of friends. And so then that was threatened and really disappeared in 2016.

42:04and my clinical practice was threatened. And so that was unsettling. I think there were things that continued though, even when I was teaching as a university professor, the way I taught wasn't typical. The things I taught weren't typical. I thought for decades, you know, eventually someone's gonna find out what I'm teaching and you know, there's gonna be trouble. I couldn't believe I was allowed encouraged to teach what I was teaching. But you know, the universities, and this was particularly true of Harvard in the 90s, that's how they were structured. What was so rebellious about what you were teaching?

42:52Well, there wasn't really anybody who was concentrating on the nexus between, say, archetypal ideas, as archetypal and religious ideas and neuroscience. So that wasn't a thing. I mean, there was a few people, Yacht Panks, that was one of them who, a lot of the researchers who were interested in the neuroscience of emotion became interested in deep narrative because they started to understand that our emotional life is a story. That's a good way of thinking about it and that we're guided, we're guided by our emotional instincts and what our emotional instincts do is put us into certain stories.

43:30That's what it means to be in love, for example, is that you're in a love story. It's not a particular balance of oxytocin and endorphins that you are aware of. It's not broken down to its constituent parts. No, definitely not. It's part of a narrative that you tell yourself about what this means and how this feels. Right. Right. Well, it's interesting that the instinct manifests itself as a story. And so I was very interested in narrative and story. And I, and also see no psychologist study Carl Jung, like literally virtually none. Really? Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely not. I mean, psychology, psychology really developed in some ways as the materialist antithesis to psychoanalysis.

44:15So Freud and Jung, and even Adler to some degree, They were off limits for scientifically trained behavioral psychologists. And that's what I was. And I am. I trained at McGill. There were no courses in psychoanalytic theory at McGill. I read Freud and Jung completely on my own. Flying in the face of the advice that I was getting even from my well -meaning graduate supervisor who was a great guy and who never got in my way in the least, quite the contrary. But I was warned, for example, when I went on the job market not to talk about the things that I was truly interested in. And I ignored that by the way.

44:56And what that meant was some places that I went to apply for a job didn't want me, but then Harvard did. So that worked out quite nicely. You know, and that's one of the advantages to also of being true to your own vision is that you won't get what you don't want. See, I didn't want to go work somewhere where they wouldn't want me. I wanted to go work somewhere where they wanted me. So my strategy was, well, this is who I am. And if you don't want me, you know, that's a drag because I'm looking for a job, but by the same token, I'm not going to pretend to be someone other than who I am so I can work here.

45:35What a stupid way of starting your career. Well, that goes back to the truth, right? Telling the truth, what are you going to? If you tell a sufficiently seductive lie, what is the best that you can hope for? Right. The person that you are telling the lie to falls in love with the projection. Right. Right. Absolutely. Well, when I applied to graduate school, I wrote a crazy admissions letter. And I basically laid out who I was, flaws and all, and what I was interested in, and two people, three people bit. and the one that I liked best partly because he was at McGill and I wanted to be in Montreal with my graduate supervisor Robert Peel and he knew what he was getting and we had a great time.

46:19I still work with him. I had one of the best relationships with Bob that I've ever had with anyone in my life and it's lasted four decades and it was because like Bob's a very honest person. We were very different. He's very practical. He's a very good administrator, a managerial type, although he's super smart. He had an exhaustive knowledge of the relevant research psychology literature. And I came in, you know, flying on a mat of psychoanalytic theory and philosophy and religious ideas, very, very different. Although we shared a real deep interest in the practicalities of research, and he taught me how to fall in love with the more scientific end of the research distribution.

47:00But the point I'm making is that he knew what he was getting right from the beginning and so did I. And that worked like a charm. There was no reason for any sort of substitution. And it turned out that our his talents and mind dovetailed extremely well. So and we had a blast. I loved working with it. Well, that's why we've been working together for 40 years. I traveled all over North America with Bob because we also started a business and it was great, it was great. The thing is, you know, if you tell people who you are and an opportunity opens up, it opens up for you, not for this thing you've created, this lie.

47:42Does this story that Douglas Murray told me about one of his first bosses at an early newspaper that he worked at, I can't remember the gentleman's name? This guy is a legend within the industry. He's been working for a long time, he's accumulated a number of haters and fans. And to the back end of his career, as Douglas is starting his, he decides that he wants to release a West End play about the life of Prince Charles and rhyming couplets. Adventurous as West End plays go. And obviously there was all of this scrutiny because he was this very well -known individual within the publishing world.

48:19And opening night, by the halftime interval, there was no one left in the entire auditorium, including the cast. And this guy was devastated, right? And it was mocked in the press and all the rest of it. Apparently Douglas saw him shortly afterward and asked him kindly, he was like, look, what are you thinking? West End play about the life of Prince Charles and fucking rhyming couplets? He said, well, Douglas, I followed my instincts. and instincts, they may sometimes lead you wrong, but they're the only thing that's ever led you right. Right, right. And that stuck with me because... Yeah, well, there's something very relevant there too on the instinctual front.

49:03Okay, so things will be back into you and call to you and you'll have intuitions about which pathway to take. And you will, in all likelihood, follow those because what else do you have? you have these orienting instincts. This is another reason why you don't lie. Because if you lie and you practice lying, you pathologize your instincts. And then your intuitions lead you wrong. And so there's a sin that's laid out in the Gospels. It's the sin against the Holy Ghost. And it's unforgivable. And people have been debating for like 2 ,000 years about what this particular sin is, but it's something like the pathologization of the instincts that orient you.

49:47If you sacrifice your relationship to the truth, you warp your vision and then you can't see. And then one day it'll be dark and there'll be sharp things in the fog in front of you. And you'll wander right into them because you've pathologized your own vision. You don't want to lie because you program yourself falsely and then you automatically see what isn't there. And then of course the world will slap you in the face continually and you'll think, oh my god, the world's such a pathological place. When the truth of the matter is is that no, you just keep running into things that you refuse to see.

50:25And then you think, well, the world's made of nothing but obstacles. It's like, well, Well, you put the obstacles in your own path and you did that by developing these complex self -serving delusions, a story that you tell other people about who you are that isn't true. You're trying to lay out a map that bears no relationship to reality and you keep wondering why you wander off the path and into a pit. It's like, well, how could it be otherwise? It's, you see, if you really understand this, people have commented to me many times about my bravery and I don't like that. It's not right. I'm afraid of different things than the typical person.

51:07Maybe that's a good way of thinking about it. I'm way more afraid of the consequences of saying something that's false or wandering bring off the appropriate path than I am of whatever consequences might come for saying what I believe and doing what I believe to be the case. I'm way more afraid of that. You know, I've been reading the Gospel of Saint Matthew. I'm writing a book at the moment called We Who Rese with God. And one of the things Christ says to people continually is to not damage their vision is to not put. That's the best way of putting it. Don't occlude your eye. You can see what's in front of you if you're willing to see it.

51:55And if you're willing to see it, the terrible, many of the terrible obstacles in life, you can just walk around. But if you blind yourself purposefully to follow your own narrow self -serving delusion, you're going to run into terrible things and terrible people and the terrible part of your own soul all the time. That's what you should be afraid of. But the best thing that you can hope for if you do do that is to fluke success, living somebody else's life. Right, right. Great. Wonderful. Yeah, exactly. You get to be, you get to be a successful fraud. I remember this documentary about Ron Jeremy.

52:35I think they He called him the hedgehog. He was this famous porn star. I've seen a music video with him. Not one of the world's most attractive people physically. And you know, he lived in this very interesting world. He lived in this world. He was stopped constantly on the street by people who thought Ron Jeremy was a hero. Right. So he was in hell because the people who admired him were the people who admired, he was surrounded by the people who thought that he was an avatar of success. Right? And so he got what he wanted, I suppose. He had easy access to easy women. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Manscaped.

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54:18Well, let me give you this. This is why I think the beginning of the in -sell movement and the Black Pill movement was born out of pick -up artistry. The origin, if you trace it back using internet history of the in -sell Black Pill ideology, was a, I think it's a subreddit or a website called PUA Hate, pick -up artist hate. And what it was was a group of men who had been through the pipeline of pick -up artistry and come out the other side with a very jaded and even more jaded view of the world. Even more jaded. Yes, and I'll tell you why. So what happens if a guy learns old school mid -20 noughts pickup artistry is you realize that there is a particular set of actions, a script that you can run, which makes it more likely that a woman is going to go to bed with you.

55:12Right, right, right. But what you realize when you do that as you learn how to nag and do keynote escalation and and tell them that story about the midget fight outside or whatever your script is that you're running, you then begin to see just how far away that person is from the person that you actually show up as, who you are and this extravagant persona that you need to convolut into existence in order to get this woman into bed makes you feel worse even, feel the gap between where you are and what you have to do in order to achieve the thing that you want. Now what you don't realize is that there are a million other ways that you could become sufficiently charming to get this person to like you.

55:55By actually doing it, for example, this is just one that happens to be robust and easy enough to write down in a book and easy enough for those guys to replicate. Yeah, well it's basically a form of scripted psychopathy. So what a psychopath does is feign competence. right? So most psychopaths are very emotionally stable. And so one of the early stage markers for competence is self -position and calmness. And so if you're not an anxious person, you've got an edge on that already. And most psychopaths are very high in emotional stability. And so they look confident, because confident people tend not to be that nervous, like if you're doing something your expert out, well, you're not nervous because you know how to do it.

56:42Okay. So the lack of nervousness is a hint to competence. Well, you can fain that. You can fain competence. You can fain confidence. That's what the pickup artists teach. Now, I would say there's even some utility in what they do, right? Because if you're dependent and bitter and resentful and and charmless and self -destructive and nervous and socially unskilled, the probability that you're going to be successful with women is very, very low. Okay, so you should be other than who you are. Now if you start putting on this persona, then you could think about that as a new suit of clothes and you could learn through that how to fill in the gaps.

57:28fake it until you make it. Absolutely. Absolutely. But if you take on that without doing the effort necessary to integrate that in a genuine way, then all that's happening is that you're being rewarded for being fake. Right. And that's part of the problem with that too, is that you're practicing learning how to manipulate people in a psychopathic way. And if you practice that, of course, you're going to become jaded. There's nothing more jaded than a psychopath. I mean, that's the ultimate extreme of jadedness. And if you practice manipulating, especially if the women happen to be reasonably good women, if you practice manipulating them and you're successful, then you're learning to be one, you're learning to be one horrible person.

58:14Now, you know, as you're completely useless, unproductive, and undesirable former self, you weren't exactly stellar to begin with, but substituting psychopathy for that was sort of like substituting cynicism for naivety. Now, as a complex problem, I mean part of the reason that people like Andrew Tate are so attractive to young guys is because they do put up that confident, that false confidence, it's, Tate's a complicated guy because it's not all false. You know, real People are complicated the way that like villains in comic books aren't. Tates a fighter. It's clearly the case that he's got a certain degree of physical bravery.

59:01That's real. All right. There's an element of what he says that's very attractive to bedroom basement dwelling losers because he's at least there out in the world, you know, taken the blows and and he's got a fast car and he's flashy and he's attracted to women. But a lot of what he's done, especially with women, doesn't just border into the psychopathic, it crosses the line. And that's not a good model. It's not an optimal model for people who are trying to progress, but it's a strange thing because just as cynicism is an improvement over naivety, right, the capacity to be dark is an improvement over the lack of ability to be dark at all.

59:44And so, Tate is attractive in the way that the shadow beckons to people who are undeveloped. Right? Because it does. It's like you're neurotic and you're dependent and you're repressed because you're immature and harmless. Well, one way out of that is to stop being harmless. And one of the things you can say about Tate is that he's not harmless. Right? Well, that's a virtue. Now, it's a virtue that has to be bracketed. It's like cynicism is a virtue compared to naivety, but it's not virtuous in and of itself. It's a step on the way. And so, maybe you can learn how to feign confidence and you can learn how that works and maybe that's an improvement out of guy in my clinical practice who got involved with the pickup artist community and he taught me a lot about it.

1:00:34And one of the exercises that their initiates had to do was to go out and ask 50 women for their phone number in one day. That's a great exercise. I'm not - Exposure therapy, approaching anxiety. Absolutely. Absolutely. Getting over your fear of rejection, right? And 50 times will do that because you're going to get rejected. The vast majority of times. 50 times. Well, likely 50 times. Although generally that wasn't people's experience. If they were even vaguely skilled, they'd at least get a false phone number out of the deal. But then they could they learned that the rejection wasn't as catastrophic as they thought, but more importantly They learned that they could continue moving forward in the face of rejection.

1:01:15So the thing that it makes me think about there is Intellectual humility and how tightly people hold on to their beliefs that if you believe that you are always going to be right That there is nothing to learn outside of you and that any kind of admission that you might be wrong it's tantamount to destruction, it does exactly the same thing. You need to, and it goes back to asking stupid questions, being prepared to ask the stupid questions and look, not like the most informed person in the room, but also importantly, know when near the most stupid person in the room, because you're the one that's asking the question.

1:01:48Well, the stupidest person in the room is the person who doesn't know and won't ask, or even worse, who doesn't know and won't ask and acts like they know. That's not good at all. Yeah, there's a from you that's part of that idea that you should love your enemy. So you might say, well, why should you do that? Well, your enemy is going to be your harshest critic. Now, it's possible that if you have a very good enemy that he will show you flaws in your character that you didn't know were there. And so that's a very, it's a very strange way of looking at the world to think that you should welcome an attack.

1:02:26And this is, but this is right. It's, yeah. I'm saying that with all due caution, let's say. The more vicious the attack, the more of your potential hidden flaws might be revealed. Have you found that to be true? Oh, definitely. But I've also found that, that attacks force you to contend with it, to see if it's there, right, to test it. I suppose the attacks that have come after me that have been most successful, they're almost always journalists, and they're usually British female journalists, but not always. We produce a nation of hard -hitting journalists. Yeah, well, and faith in journalists is the lowest in the UK and anywhere in the Western world and I can see why you know, but There's some advantage There's some real advantage to facing someone It's a Pharisee problem in the Gospels Christ was always contending with these Pharisees and what the Pharisees were always trying to do was to lay a verbal trap for them So it's a Pharisee of person.

1:03:39Pharisee was a Jewish sect. And the Pharisees were very legalistic in their interpretation of Mosaic law. And so they were sort of, they were hypocritical way they portrayed in the Gospels. And he was their hypocritical by the book Moralists. And part of what, and most of their morality was for show. They liked to pray in public. They liked to be seen being holy. At least that's the criticisms that are levied against them. And what they're always trying to do in the Gospel accounts is to lay a verbal trap for Christ so that they can expose him as a heretic and kill him. Right? So every single thing they say is a snare of some sort.

1:04:16And there's lots of journalists like that, Nellie Bulls, who wrote an article about me for The New York Times, which was a very devastating article in many ways, and very serpentine and subtle. She, three years later, she wrote another article about what it was like to work for the New York Times when she was working there and the tricks that the journalists played, including her. And she said that the game was to devastate someone else's reputation in the attempt to boost yours. Right. So you can think about it as a game of comparative moral standing. So the journalists trick you into saying something that will end your career.

1:05:04Essentially. That's social status stands on the shoulders of yours. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so now the advantage to being in a situation like that is that you have to step, if you step extremely carefully and you're fortunate, then you evade the traps and then the interview tilts hard in your favor. And so the most the interviews that have done me the most good in the long run were the two interviews that were most hostile one by channels for Gryffind. Kathy Newman. Kathy Griffin. And Kathy, Kathy at least had a sense of humor. Another one by Helen Lewis who had no sense of humor at all and doesn't seem to have learned anything at all in the interim But I think that I think that one has 80 million views now twice as many as the Kathy Newman interview I could just keeps racking up views and it was because Helen Lewis She has like 50 tricks or 100 tricks Kathy had like four You know, and they were pretty blunt and she had a sense of humor about them But Helen Lewis she was just all tricks and lots of them and smart You know, and it's quite something to talk to someone who's quite smart and quite educated, but all tricks.

1:06:23And so, but how does it feel looking back on those two? You know, a very formative time. It's kind of the inflection point, one of the inflection points I suppose for yourself as well. Yeah. How does it feel looking back on that? I remember you said at the time it took you many days to recover from that kind of cantankerous sort of adversarial interview. Is that, does that seem like a different lifetime or is that still very much sort of with you? Well, I'm a lot healthier than I was then. So those sorts of things wouldn't have the same effect on me now as they did then because I was ill It took me a long time to recover from you know a serious bout I mean the first time I talked to Sam Harris not that Sam played tricks like I like Sam and we've had very productive conversations I was so ill when the first time I talked to Sam that I could barely sit in my chair talking to Sam Harris makes you ill that's the...

1:07:11No, no, not at all. No, Sam and I have had very productive conversations. That was another good example, I suppose, of the utility of an adversarial conversation. Yeah. You know what I mean? Sam comes to a conversation like that, pretty well -armed, but it's very helpful because it forces you to look in nooks and crannies that you might not have looked in and to be crystal clear to the degree that that's possible about what you're actually say the idea of of living your enemy is something I've been playing with a little bit recently. There's been I guess my platform's getting to the level now where there's a reason for some adababals I pointed at least remotely in my direction because there's no point in trying to take somebody down that's got nothing that's got no status.

1:07:57Why would you invest the time? Right. You're the step that you're going to get in terms of your status standing on their shoulders is so small that no one knows. Right. So it's a backhanded compliment in the end some ways. Yeah. But you're right, man. Some of the criticisms that I've got, and I was reminded by a friend recently about this, have been some of the best inflection points, very uncomfortable, and to see it as a gift, to think about that thing as a gift. It's like, I know that you weren't doing this to make me better. I know that you weren't doing this, to try and benefit me, and yet.

1:08:31And yet, in reflection, it's like alchemy. It's like how Rory Sutherland calls it alchemy, taking something that was bad. I had this reflection. Well, we've learned, my family's learned, like, when a public attack occurs, there's a massive opportunity nested in it. If you can reorient, it's like, okay, this is bad, this is vicious, this does not look good. And maybe it could take me out, take us out. Is there a way, is there a way we can play with this that will not only neutralize it, but twisted in the other direction. I think that thing we did that was most effective on that side of things was when I was written into Captain America as...

1:09:15I spoke to you that day. I spoke to you that day that it happened. Yeah, the magical super Nazi. Floating Nazi, whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it was shocking, right? It was very shocking. And then Olivia Wilde. Yeah. That was shocking too. Yeah, there's a litany of... Yes, yes. Well, it became increasingly preposterous. And the Olivia Wilde episode was one of the, that was so preposterous that it was almost immediately. I think, mercifully, that film was so badly made. And I'm pretty sure that she'd cast her boyfriend as one of the, got rid of someone that was super competent and put somebody in that was pretty incompetent.

1:09:51And I think that that kind of caused it to flood. But yeah, man, the, the, the enemy thing, I've ended up becoming really good friends with one of my harshest critics. It's so strange. and yet makes complete sense afterwards. How did you end up making friends? So I got criticized by a pair of podcasters who do this. They kind of take down or they have a very critical eye of the podcasting world. And they did an episode about an episode that I'd done and they have a right of reply thing. Oh yeah. Sam's been on to do it. Well, it's been on to do it. I did it a couple of the constant in kissing, it's been on to do it.

1:10:34And I went on and there was a bit of, like I listened to their show. I think it's a very illuminating way to see how people that have a different perspective about what's going on in your world, see it. And I was like, yeah, I got the opportunity to go on and have a conversation and I did. And I found them to both be way more charming than I thought that they were going to be. And I've ended up both Chris and Matt or Matt Lesso, But with Chris, like we must speak Once a month every couple of weeks. Well, one of us will just ring I'm all catch up about what's being going on in the world and he has a very different sort of world view to me He lives in a different area of the world.

1:11:10He's a psychologist studying a religion, I think and and Sacred rituals and stuff like that rituals rather than religion And now he points out blind spots that I don't see and That one particular instance was, and it was really uncomfortable because this was still, this was three years ago or something now maybe, and I'm still super uncomfortable about it and oh my god, these people are going to take me down and they're both academics and they're really, really well educated and they're going to be smart and they're going to say things that make me look silly and I said things that made me look silly and picked a particular episode where blah, blah, blah, blah, and yet in reflection, it's been that That one instance and the subsequent rumination about it was one of the biggest inflection points for me going from having blind spots that I hadn't seen to that.

1:12:05And I almost think that the degree of discomfort that I went through was mandatory because had I not felt so much like fear and anxiety and embarrassment about the fact that I'm going to, it's going to be out there and we all this focus and attention in not a nice way. and there'll be tweets and all the rest of the stuff, that was sufficiently uncomfortable to force me to actually genuinely look at the things that I was doing that was getting wrong. And I'm sure that there's a million things I'm still getting wrong. But yeah, it was as much a gift as it could be. We'll get back to talking to Jordan in one minute, but first I need to tell you about element.

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1:13:16I've used this every single morning for as long as I can remember and that orange flavor is phenomenal. Plus that chocolate caramel is available right now. If you go to the link in the show notes below or head to drink LMNT .com slash modern wisdom for a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box that's drink LMNT .com slash modern wisdom. Here's another thing I spoke to David Goggins about this last year about how I was bullied as a kid and I was quite unpopular in school. and I was an only child, so I didn't really have many people to back me up in the school yard or whatever.

1:13:52And for a long time, I had a chip on my shoulder about the kids that mistreated me in school, as you might expect. And then I got to, you know, maybe a few years ago, and I really, really started to reflect on it, and realized that so many of the things that I valued in myself were the light side of something dark that had been created during that time in school. So my complete preparedness to just spend time on my own means that I don't mind about moving out to a country where I don't know anybody in trying to make this podcast thing work or spending hours and hours working or researching or recording podcasts or doing intros or whatever it is like all of those things.

1:14:36Not having a super tight social network as a kid meant that I wasn't beholden to anybody when I grew up, that I didn't feel the need to have as much support as I go along to do stuff. Now, other sides of it haven't been so great because I still seek validation. I still seek a lot of validation because that was something that I was missing as a kid. But yeah, realizing not only you probably wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the things that you went through. Okay, there's step one. And then step two is, and I'm quite grateful for what I've done. And then step three would be something like, wow, I'm proud of myself for having turned something that was negative into something that's positive.

1:15:21But then another level above that would be, wow, so maybe I should be thankful. Yeah, right. Well, we know we were talking earlier in the podcast about what is the appropriate attitude towards the future. And I would say, well, we could put past present and future in the same bin, say, well, one of the things that you want to do is practice gratitude. That's one of the primary religious rituals you might say is the practice of gratitude. And you might say, well, my life is so horrible. What do I have to be grateful for? And I would say that's for better or worse, that's still a form of blindness.

1:16:04Right? I mean, people can have very, very difficult situations, can be in very, very difficult situations. And it's in those difficult situations where the search for gratitude becomes something that is by necessity deeper and more difficult. But that doesn't mean it's not appropriate. it. You know, and there is, there is a very tight association between loving your enemy and being grateful in spite of the terrible things that occur in your life. I've been writing about the book of Job and Job is a story of unjust suffering fundamentally. God deems Job a good man. So we have it on God's word that Job is actually a good man and then all hell breaks loose partly because God makes a bet with Satan, which is, you know, hell of a thing to do and says, do your worst.

1:16:52He's not going to turn on me no matter what you do. And so Job, despite his torment, he becomes very ill. He loses everything. He has his friends. He becomes ill in a way that's disfiguring. His friends come around and laugh at him and tell him that he's a bad man. And that's why all these terrible things have been happening to him. And It's brutal and Job refuses to lose faith in himself. He says, look, I'm not perfect. I'm but as far as men go, I've done what I should do and It I'm not being punished in some manner that's obviously related to my sin. It's more like the random play of tragic forces in the world.

1:17:40I'm not going to lose faith in myself, no matter what. And I'm also not going to, his wife says, shake your fist at God, curse him and die, because things have gone so badly for Job. She thinks that's all that's left to him. He refuses to do that. So he maintains faith, regardless of what's happened to him. And that's really the moral of the story of Job, which is that you are morally obligated to maintain faith, no matter what happens to you. And there's a practical side to that. So imagine that God in Satan conspire against you. There'll be times in your life where it feels like that's happening.

1:18:18And then imagine that your reaction to that is to become bitter and resentful and hostile. Well, then whatever hell you're in, merely as a consequence of the confluence of tragic events, you have opened a whole other hell underneath it. The hell of bitterness and resentment and ingratitude and well, and that turns into the desire for revenge very, very quickly. I think things are bad just because they're bad. You wait till you see how bad they can become if you allow yourself to be corrupted by your unjust suffering. Right? And so it's just, And I do think that this is the most practical possible advice that can be given to people, which is that you are morally required to maintain faith, to aim up, and to treat other people the way you would want to be treated, no matter what's happened to you.

1:19:13You know, and that's a hell of a thing to say. And, you know, you might say, well, that's impossible. Some people have such brutal lives that they're destined to be corrupt, but I would say, That's not true. I've met many people, particularly in my clinical practice, who had lives that were so brutal, that you couldn't even listen to them without breaking you into pieces. Brutal, brutal childhoods of depth of malevolence, you can hardly conceptualize, who decided, despite that, that they were going to aim up and they were going to maintain faith in themselves and the world. And so it's like that's on the table for people.

1:19:51It seems like an odd paradox that the people who have been brought up under lives of the most privileged are often the ones that have the most complaints about the world and people who have been brought up in deprivation a lot of the time are able to be perfectly in gratitude. Seems very strange that that's the way. Yeah, well, having... So one of the things I saw at the university, I saw the faculty members, my peers, retreat in the face of the advancement of the administration over like three decades to the point where the universities really became corrupted. And it didn't really happen at Harvard when I was there in the 1990s, although it was starting to fray around the edges slightly, but I really watched at the University of Toronto in the 20 years I was there.

1:20:40The administration kept making demands on us, and every time they made a demand, we would fold. every time, 10 ,000 micro -retreats. So then the administrators took over the university, and then the woke types took over the administration. And that was that. Well, the reason what I saw my faculty members do, the academics that I worked with, is that this is how the corruption starts. It's like when you're an undergraduate, you write down what you think the professor wants to hear to get the grade. And then you're a graduate student and you have to, let's say, get along with your professors and your supervisor.

1:21:19You have to tell them what you think they want to hear so that you can get your PhD. And then maybe you are on the academic track and you're an assistant professor. There's three levels of being a professor. You're not tenured as an assistant. So you really can't say what you think or do, what you think you should do then because you have to get tenured. And then when you're tenured, well, you're not a full professor yet. And so you don't speak then. And back in the back of your mind, you have this idea, well, at some point, I'll have enough security so that I'll be able to tell the truth. But that's based on this weird idea that the courage to tell the truth is based on security.

1:22:00Well, courage isn't based on security. That's a stupid theory. You're not courageous if there's no risk. So your notion is you'll be courageous when there's zero risk. Well, obviously that's a contradiction in terms. You're only courageous if there's a risk. And not only that, by the time you've sacrificed your word for illusory security for 15 years, there's nothing left of you that's true. You've already, that's gone a long time ago. You probably look back at the former self who was naive and thought that you could say what you think as just Well, you're you're cynical about it, you know that person just didn't know how the way that didn't know how the world worked And then it's the same thing that you pointed out the idea that You become good because you have material Plenty let's a silly idea Why would that be the case?

1:23:01It's like the same as assuming that all rich people have got taste. Right. There's poor people who've got beautifully designed interiors and rich people who've got gaudy message. Right. Yeah. Well, then the poor people are actually rich. Absolutely. There's a report I wanted to bring this to you. So interesting. So recent report was released by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, detailing the drivers of anxiety for young adults aged 18 to 25. 34 % reported feelings of loneliness. 51 % said achievement pressure negatively impacted their mental health. 58 % reported lacking meaning or purpose in their lives in the last month.

1:23:4350 % reported their mental health was negatively influenced by not knowing what to do with my life. There has been much examination of the wellbeing of teens aged 14 to 17, not much has been known about those occupying the critical young adult years and yet, young adults report roughly twice the rates of anxiety and depression as teens, the young adults are not okay. Yeah, I believe that. I saw even with my own kids that the like when I was a kid, probably the time between 13 and 15 was the most difficult transition, but I saw that become older by the time my kids, my kids are 30 now, basically.

1:24:26By the time my kids were young adults, I could see that that transition into adulthood was the place where the difficulties were starting to mount. I think perversely that the therapeutic world has a fair bit to do with this, partly because therapists who are basically secular liberal Protestants. That's a good way of thinking about them. Ten to conceptualize mental health as mental as subjective, right? Is that mental health is something you carry around in your head, like you carry around your identity. That's why we have these ridiculous ideas that you can just define your own identity. I am whoever I say I am.

1:25:11Well obviously you're not because other people, other people have to go along with your game, their buddy, and they're they're going to do that. They're not going to do it or they're going to do it voluntarily, or they're going to do it by force. If they're not going to do it, you're screwed. If you have to use force, that's not going to work. And if you want them to do it voluntarily, then it's not going to be all about you, obviously, even no four -year -old can find someone to play with if he always gets to pick the game. Okay. So why might young adults be lost? Well, part of it is that they're thinking, I'm not trying to be judgmental of a whole generation.

1:25:54It's a form of thought. Your mental health isn't dependent on you. That's not the right way to think about it. You, I don't think you can be mentally healthy in the absence of a long -term stable relationship. So you have to be married. Let's put let's let's make that part of the pre -condition for successful adaptation as a young adult. You have to be married So you have to establish your relationship with someone that integrates sexuality that's there for the long run Because therefore the long run is the same as sane Therefore tomorrow, therefore the next minute that's not sanity. That's impulsiveness That's aimlessness.

1:26:40They're the same thing. If it's all about what you want right now or more accurately, all about what something in you wants this moment, that's the definition of immature insanity. You have to commit. So you commit to someone else, you commit to your family, you commit to your community. Like there are multiple levels of identity that stretch out into the social world. And voluntarily adopting those levels of hierarchical responsibility gives you an identity. It gives you a purpose. It protects you from anxiety. It does that in all sorts of ways. Like, you said earlier that one of the things you do is seek for validation and you related that to uncomfortable experiences you had when you were very young.

1:27:24Well, it might not be precisely that you're seeking for validation. You might be properly investigating how you should be embedded in a social hierarchy At every possible level. It's like well people think their mental health is something that they just carry around in their head And that if they just got the way they looked at the world right or if other people just played their game that all of a sudden they'd be mentally healthy It's like There's no difference between thinking about yourself and being miserable technically, if you look at, you can group descriptive statements about yourself statistically.

1:28:10All the descriptors that are reflective of self -consciousness load on negative emotion. Can you think about yourself in a positive way? Probably not. Really? Not. Well, let's take that apart. You like doing your podcast and you feel positive about it. Okay, but your podcast isn't about you, right? So if you're thinking about how you're of utility to a broad number of people, you know, maybe you would take some satisfaction in that, but that isn't exactly thinking about yourself, is it? It's thinking about the relationship you've established with other people and it's a relationship of responsibility.

1:28:57Why do you like your podcast? You can pursue what you're curious about, but you wouldn't have to do that publicly. Okay, so why do you do it publicly? For a few reasons, first one being that it keeps me accountable. That was one of the main reasons that it kept me accountable because I knew that if I didn't do it, if I wasn't rigorous and precise and Aligned with what I'd said and done previously that there was an external eye that's watching Okay, okay, okay, okay, so well that's very interesting. So I would also say that's not exactly about you that's about your ability to live to establish harmony between what you say in the way you act and the expectations that an increasingly broad social community has of you as a consequence of what you say and how you act.

1:29:48Okay, that's not about you. That's about your nesting in a social hierarchy. Right? And so I think you can, and then you might say too, well, maybe you're thinking about yourself when you're establishing an aim or a goal. Well, not if they're good aims or goals, because if they're good aims or goals and I would say what good means technically is an aim or goal that will play out well in the medium to long term across a multitude of situations including many, many people. So the solution that iterates across time, that, and that is situation independent and that's broadly socially inclusive is a better aim, right?

1:30:41It's a higher aim because it integrates more. All right. Now, you might want to be setting up aims and you might be pleased about how you're progressing in relation to those aims. But if those aims aren't, don't have the characteristics that I just described, then if the Ames have the characteristics I just described, they're not about you. And then we could also ask, what do you mean about you? Exactly. What you are you talking about here? You know, and so we play these identity games in the modern world that are making people anxious and hopeless. And one identity game is, I'm defined by my sexuality.

1:31:24Okay, so let's take that. I'm defined by my sexuality. Okay, but what do you mean by your sexuality exactly? Do you mean the opportunity to engage in sex? Like, are you reducing sexuality as such to the act of sex? Okay, let's say you are. So now what you're telling me is that who you are is who you are when you're sexually desirous. That's what you've reduced yourself to. But it's even more than that. It's the kind of sexual desire that wants gratification right now with no relationship whatsoever. So not only have you now reduced who you are to your sexual desire, you've reduced your sexual desire to the minimal set of preconditions that would satisfy it.

1:32:05Well, then the first question that might come up there is why not just use porn. It's a lot simpler and the answer to that is that is what people are doing. Well, it's no wonder that they're anxious and loan some an aimless because they've reduced themselves to a short -term desire. They've found the easiest possible way of gratifying that, and they've abandoned everything that would be a much broader conceptualization of what sexuality would be if it was embedded properly in, well, how about a relationship to start with? And I'm not just, these aren't just opinions. So there are two different strategies of reproduction, broadly in the animal world.

1:32:48One is zero investment, fish, mosquitoes, million offspring, they all die but one, right? So you can reduce reproduction in mosquitoes basically to sex and you make a million in mosquito offspring, all you need is one to survive problem solved. Okay. On the opposite end of the spectrum, literally are human beings because we have the longest dependency period of any animal by a large margin. We have a high investment strategy, sexual reproduction strategy. So whatever sex is for human beings isn't, you're off and that's over. That's not what it is for human beings. It's embedded in a relationship.

1:33:29Now, you might say, well, we could pull sexuality out of the relationship and just indulge in it for the pleasure. Okay, so now let's forget about all the other animals. Now we've got two types of human being. We've got the one -night stand human being, repetitive one -night stands, and we've got the long term committed relationship human being. And then we might ask, okay, what are the personality characteristics of the people in those bins? So let's go to the short term one night stand sequential relationship types. Okay, who are they? psychopathic, narcissistic, macchi -valon and sadistic. All one night stand people?

1:34:13If they don't start out that way, they're gonna end that way. Right, because you can't use yourself or other people for short term gratification. The definition of a psychopath is someone who uses someone for short term gratification. Okay, so it's definitional, right? So and then you might say, well, I'm not like that. I just like sex. It's like, yeah, but if you practice that for five years, you're not going to become what you practice. You know, and I talked to Russell Brown about this a little bit on and I can and say this because it was on his podcast. So it's not like this is secret. Russell had what Andrew Tate promises his followers.

1:34:58He had fame, he was charismatic, and he had more or less unlimited access to short -term sexual gratification. Okay, in combination with the chemicals that make that even more likely, alcohol and cocaine, let's say.

1:35:18So what are the consequences? Well, I asked him, what were the consequences? You had this. He said, despair, anxiety, and hopelessness. Right, but not just that because, you know, Russell got himself in trouble here month and a half ago, just about took him out. Well, it was his past coming back to Haunt him, like, and he had to scroll through his psyche and see, you know, well, and with all these short term relationships, these short term sexual gratification, binges that I indulged in, did I ever cross the line? Well, the answer is, well, you're going to have like 200 encounters like that. You're not going to cross the line when you're drunk, when you're on cocaine, you're going to cross a bunch of lines.

1:36:05And then it's going to come back and haunt you. And so it's very interesting to see in our culture back to the hopelessness and despair that you were mentioning that's characterizing young adults' life. It's like, well, it's all about me. That's the self -esteem movement. But then me becomes, it's all about what I want and then that becomes it's all about what I want right now. Then it's, it's what the lowest part of me wants right now and to hell with everyone else. It's like, okay. How are you going to play that game without being desperate? You're going to be desperate as soon as you start playing that game.

1:36:48And the other thing, it's even worse than that because you're going to end up with Jeremy, the porn star problem. Anybody, you're not How can we be very happy about being with the people who want to play that game with you? Because they're not going to be the people that are really going to make you feel that life is worth living. They're going to be the people, especially on the female side, women who are willing to take advantage of themselves for short -term sexual gratification. Those aren't happy women. They're usually damaged women. And if they're not damaged when they start playing that game, they're going to be plenty damaged by the time they're done with it.

1:37:26The last time that we spoke, me and you talked about population decline and the census bureau just released today predicting that the US population will decline for the first time ever by the year 2100 after peaking in 2080. So the estimates showed that the US population, which is about 333 million at the moment, is expected to reach 370 by 2080 but will be back down to 366 by 2100 and even immigration can't offset this birth rate decline. over the last two years, do you think things have got better or worse than you anticipated from birth rate and marriage rate standpoint? I think they're probably still getting worse.

1:38:09And I think Musk is one of the few people, Elon Musk is one of the case anybody was wondering. He's one of the few people who's called out the danger of, you know, a one child policy or the idea that we should decrease the population. I mean, things that don't grow die. But they die for all sorts of reasons, and we can tie this back to identity. What's my identity? I could say, well, it's how I feel about myself. That's the line that's used everywhere now. You don't get to tell me who I am. I know who I am. I'm who I feel I am. Well, first of all, I don't know what you mean by feel. Like, what the hell?

1:38:51What does that mean? You're your emotional state at the moment and you can just impose that on everybody. That's your theory is that that's the theory of a two -year -old. Literally. That's a very bad theory.

1:39:08Well, where could your identity be other than that? Well, one of my identities when I taught at Harvard was professor, obviously, and that was good identity. But you know, that wasn't exactly it wasn't something I was carrying around in my head It was a pattern of relationship that I had with a whole bunch of people all my students right it wasn't inside my head now There was a concordance between my representation of myself and how I was acting in the world and that Concordance was the health It wasn't what I thought of myself you like part of the reason that you can take some, let's call it gratification, from being a successful podcaster is that you're actually a successful podcaster.

1:39:53It's not in your head. It's in 1 .5 million subscribers. It's how many podcasts have you done? 700. Okay, so it's in 700 podcasts. It's not something you're carrying around in your head. Do you remember, I love the 42 rules that created the 24 that you ended up coming up with, but there's one that you didn't use. If you have to choose be the one who does things, not the one who is seen to do things. Exactly, absolutely. I love that rule. Oh yeah, that's a great rule. That's a great rule. Yeah, well, the thing is, is that you can do almost anything you want if you're willing to take responsibility for it, if you don't want credit.

1:40:29One of the most effective political maneuvers I've ever seen woman who's, she's so brilliant, I won't tell you who she is, but she's so sharp, She's so brilliant and she told me the last time I saw her she's had her finger in pies for like 30 years Popping up in places you'd never expect and I thought I asked just like how the hell did you pull this off? And she said oh, I decided 30 years ago that I could do whatever I wanted if I didn't want credit And so that's exactly what she's done and she's had a stellar career Staller and I've worked with other people who've done the same thing. It's very interesting It's very interesting thing to realize.

1:41:06You might say, well, why would I want the responsibility without the glory? It's like, hey, do you want the glory? Are you so sure that that wouldn't just get in your way? You know, there's something to be said for anonymity. And second, maybe you want the responsibility because that's the adventure. You actually get to do the thing that someone else just wants to take credit for. Well, maybe doing the thing is plenty of reward in and of itself with regard to identity. You know, when I was a professor, I was also a husband and I was also a father. Well, those were identities, but they weren't in my head.

1:41:41They were embedded in the relationship I had with my kids, and that was a meaningful relationship. Embedded in the relationship I had with my wife. You can't be, you know, it's almost heretical to say this in the modern world. You can't be isolated alone without responsibility and pursuing your hedonistic nonsense and not be insane and miserable. Those are all the same thing, right? And so, you know, it's got to the point, I've said things that have made me somewhat unpopular, like it's very difficult for people to mature until they have a child. So you find a huge part of what you are in that relationship.

1:42:27It makes you responsible. It makes you grow up. It gives you the opportunity to mentor someone. You have someone around who's more important than you. Well, that's part of being mentally healthy. It's a huge part of it. This is this enterprise that I put together in London, help put together Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. We're trying to put forward a model of governance. It's called subsidiary model and the idea is that people have multiple social roles that scale. Now there's you. Take care of yourself. Integrate yourself, which means you can conduct yourself properly across the medium to long run, yourself sustaining.

1:43:07Then you can maybe extend that to your partner and then to your family and then to your local community and then to broader communities as you become more and more competent and able to take on that responsibility. That's the alternative to isolated hedonic slavery. He's slaved to your own whims and it's the alternative to tyranny because if you take on all that responsibility, you don't have any need for someone to govern you. And so that's another example of how I I blamed it on the therapist a little bit. I called them liberal Protestant secularists. And that's because they think about the locus of the psyche as interior subjective.

1:43:55That's what a liberal would do. It's just not accurate. That isn't the way the psyche works. It's not in your head, you know, it's it's in your head and in the world at the same time. It's truly the case that your sanity is the concordance between you as an individual and the world. That's the sanity. It's not the proper structuring of your psyche or your brain for that matter inside your skull. You're distributed out into the world and you should be and that's you want to be That's where the adventure is. You want to be solipsistic? The solipsistic porn masterbater. Jesus is going to be aimless and miserable.

1:44:40Well, God, it's so pathetic. Why am I so unhappy? It's because you think about yourself. No, you think about the lowest impulses in yourself all the time. That's why you're miserable. Whilst being an arc, what I thought was particularly interesting was your live event that you guys did at the O2 on the evening time and everyone was great, but Douglas I thought was just a tour de force that evening. What have you learned since being friends with Douglas? How's he impacted your influence? Well, Douglas is very, very disagreeable. You know, and he enjoys combat. And that isn't something that really characterizes.

1:45:27I don't enjoy combat at all. And part of the reason that it's perverse, I suppose, in some ways. Part of the reason that I will engage in difficult conversations is because I don't want to have them forever. And so, you know, one of the rules I had in my marriage, and it was a rule that my wife also was pleased to follow, was that if we have a problem, we're going to deal with it right now, and we're going to deal with it right to the bottom. And that's very unpleasant, but if you do it, sometimes you only have to do it once, and the problem goes away, and then you don't have that bloody problem every day for the rest of your life.

1:46:10And sometimes it takes, you know, 20 times before it's fixed before you've got to the bottom of things. And that can be very unpleasant. Douglas is very, very good at not letting people off the hook. He's very tough and he's very good at defending himself. And there's a pitilessness about him that's extraordinarily admirable. It's a judicious pittiness, you know, and it's a dangerous game to play because there's another gospel realization, let's say, is the standards you judge other people by will be the standards that you yourself are judged by and the reason for that is, well, how are you going to judge everyone else and not apply the same standards to yourself?

1:47:00Like that's not going to happen because you become what you practice and you'll turn the eye, the hostile eye that you turn on others, you will absolutely turn on yourself. There's no way around that. And so Douglas plays a dangerous game because he's very combative. But he's also extremely careful. He's very careful with his words. And we've had a, he toured with me through Europe. I think we did nine shows together. We split the Q and A. He entered, he did a little bit of an introduction before my lectures. I really liked it. I thought it was great. It's been a privilege to get to know him. super sharp, very cultured person, very witty.

1:47:41So he has a great sense of humor, which is also fun, which also was one of the things that makes him a very dangerous opponent in a debate, because not only does he have the facts at hand, like Bjorn Lomburg, but he's devastatingly witty and cutting. And it's fun to watch that. He's a master at it. So it was, it's interesting to think about the fact that all you need really in a live debate, I think I learned this from you in some ages ago. If you're doing a live debate now that's not a proper intellectual, formatted opening remarks on and so on and so forth. If you managed to get sort of two or three real zingers, you won.

1:48:22Regardless of the content, if you do two or three real zinger, whole crowd laughs, guess what? You're going to... Yeah, well the great public intellectuals have a vicious sense of humor, I also think that's why so many of the successful podcasters have been comedians. Well, at the ARC conference, I think Constantine Kisson's speech was the overwhelming hit of the convention. I think it's got 600 ,000 views as of today, 650, on the ARC side and about 600 on his own channel. Constantine did a beautiful job of merging intellectual content with WIT. Well, the thing, the interesting thing about my live tour that I'm about to start doing, a bunch of my comedian friends have said to me, dude, I am so jealous of the tour that you get to do, because no one's expecting you to be funny.

1:49:14If you manage to be funny four times in 90 minutes, you've killed. If I'm not funny once every seven seconds, I'm a shit comedian. Right, right, right. So the bar is set, and obviously coming in with Constantine's background of comedy means that he is able to be by far the, you know, far and away, way funnier than most public speakers. But doesn't get held necessarily to the same standards that he's not expecting to be one line as all the time. One of the things that Douglas brought up when you guys were talking on stage that I thought was particularly interesting was the perils of smart people getting captured by culture wars bullshit.

1:49:52Do you ever think about how much time over the last decade, Some of the smartest people on the planet have had the attention, their cognitive horsepower just taken away arguing about whether men and men and women are women or not or whatever the idea to juror of the day is. Yeah, well this is something that has been lost. So I've been partnering with the daily wire for about a year and a half so far. Not being very successful. They've been a pleasure to work with. But what they wrestle with constantly, all of them, all of the principles, all of the The principles of daily wire would rather in some real way be concentrating on philosophical, theological, or dramatic matters.

1:50:34So which is partly why the daily wire is turning towards entertainment for kids, but also for adults, starting to make movies, for example, and TV shows. They'd rather be doing that. I had Ben Shapiro. He participated in this seminar on Exodus that I produced with about nine other extraordinarily interesting thinkers and Ben just shone, you know, he's wasted. Is he wasted on the political? The political is necessary, but it's one nation under God for a reason because the political, the political isn't the pinnacle. Never. It's never the pinnacle. And if you're capable of discourse at the pinnacle, political discourse is secondary.

1:51:21Well, there's also a vinescent, right? It is. There's ways that it can tumble as well. There's, how would you say, degrees of depth of political stuff too? Because what works on YouTube a lot of the time is in reacts to insane work tiptocks or does whatever. And it's easy to get pigeonholed that way. Yeah, yeah. And it is, is it a waste? It's non -optimal. But it's a question, it's an interesting question to be asked, right? about how much sort of ankle or skirt or knee do you need to show from an algorithmic perspective in order to keep numbers churning because ultimately you're producing what people click on.

1:52:01You don't want to be completely beholden to your audience, that's audience capture. But you also don't want to be so unaware of having your finger on the post of what is trendy, that you become obscure. Yeah, right. An obsolete. Right, right. Well, in that balance. Well, in that line that you're trying to walk when you're dealing with matters that are the highest and also making them publicly accessible. That's a very, very tight line to walk. I mean, Jonathan Pazio has done a good job of that. Although his market is still relatively niche and he certainly is more esoteric, let's say, than the daily wire guys who tend to devolve into the political and that devolves into the cheap political from time to time.

1:52:43Right? The hit for hit, say, or the chasing the algorithm. And I mean, that's the danger that all politicians have, too, is that, and I've seen this with lots of political types who have developed a persona. This is particularly true in the United States, I would say, because Americans are so sales money. And I don't say that just missively. It's really hard to sell, to market, to communicate. I saw the Elvis movie recently, and I thought it did a beautiful job of laying this out, because Elvis was a stellar talent, but his manager, who is a real shister, was also a stellar talent. Like Elvis wouldn't have been who he was without his corrupt manager.

1:53:24And, you know, it's sort of a deal with the devil, but you have to give the devil his due to. And the salesman, a part of American culture can easily devolve into a kind of narcissistic manipulativeness. That's where it would go if it becomes pathological. But as you said, you have to be aware of your audience and you have to be delivering what there's a market for. And it's very difficult to get those things right. This is a question that I've got about your new book coming out next year. I haven't seen any of it. And it sounds like based on what you're reading at the moment, you're trying to grapple with religious texts, especially the Bible.

1:54:02We who wrestle with God is the name of the book. We who wrestle with God. Yeah, which is them that's what the word Israel means Israel means we who wrestle with God And so what's very interesting because it means the chosen people are The people who wrestle with God and you might say well who wrestles with God and answer that is well everyone wrestles with God Well, why because you can't act without making moral decisions like every Every step forward is predicated on a moral decision. And so we're all wrestling with God. It's God a moral decision.

1:54:42God is the spirit that guides you when you make the proper moral decisions. So I wouldn't say God is a moral decision. He's the spirit of, he's the spirit of moral decision. So that's actually not a bad definition. Like, part of what I'm trying to do with this book is to point out that a lot of what's happening in the biblical corpus is actually definitional, right? Well, people, modern people think the fundamental issue is do you believe in God? But that's not the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is what do you mean by God? And so let me give an example of this that will make it clearer.

1:55:20So there's no there's a medieval idea that God is the sum of bonum, which means the sum of all that's good or the essence of all that's good. Okay, you might say, well, I don't believe in that. Now remember, this is the definition of God, right? God is the sum of all that's good. Okay. All right. So you don't believe in that. All right. Let's take that apart. Do you believe that some things are better than other things? Well, people will say, yes. Okay. So then you believe that there is a scale of good. Okay. Is there something that all things that are good share in common. And the answer that has to be yes, because otherwise you don't have a conception of good.

1:56:02Right? The word good implies that across good things, there's some essence. Okay, well, the definition, the medieval, one medieval definition of God is the essence of good. Well, okay, let's say you don't believe in that. Okay. Does that mean you don't believe in anything that's good? Okay, then how do you act then? Because to act means to do something that's better than what you're doing now, right? There's no action without movement towards the good. And while you might see, you might say, well, I don't believe that there's a unitary good. Okay, you believe there's a fractionated good. Well, then what do you do when those things oppose one another?

1:56:42Right? Which would be in a conflict of duty. How do you refer to, what adjudicate between different goods. Well, generally what you do is if you could pursue a, which is good or b, which is good and they conflict, then you pick the higher good. Okay, do you believe in a higher good? Well, if you don't, you can't decide between goods, which means you're paralyzed. If you do believe in the higher good, then do you believe in the highest good? Well, the highest good is God. What do you mean by that? By definition. Okay, so now you have a definition. Now then the next question might be, well, what's your relationship with the highest good?

1:57:23And you might say, well, I don't have a relationship. It's like, well, actually you do because you act in relationship to it. You can't help it. You, one of the interesting things about the biblical corpus is that it's based on the insistence that you have a relationship with being and becoming a relationship. like a personal relationship. When you say biblical corpus, do you mean the collection of texts that makes up the Bible? Yeah, because it's a library of books, essentially, right? The Bible is actually the first library of books. It's written by a very large number of different people and aggregated over thousands of years and then sequenced actually sequenced into a narrative interestingly enough because no one really sequenced it or by no one.

1:58:10I mean no individual person. It was the endeavor of the collective or the spirit that possessed the collective over thousands of years. But the narrative is coherent, which is really quite something. And so the narrative is an investigation number one into the nature of God, number two into the nature of relationship with God, and then number three into the nature of the proper relationship with God, all of those things. And God is the sum of all that's good. So the Bible is an analysis of the human relationship with the good. What would have to happen after the publishing of We Who Ressel With God for you to look back on that publication and consider it a success?

1:59:01What is it that you want to happen? Do you want people to feel or to take away from that work? I think we're at the beginning of the counter -enlightenment.

1:59:15The propositions, the Enlightenment view of man is wrong. And out of the Enlightenment view came science, but the science now indicates that the Enlightenment view of man is wrong. What do you mean? Well, the Enlightenment types believe that we could orient ourselves in the world, let's say empirically, that, and this is Sam Harris's proposition, you can abide by the facts. You can orient yourself as a consequence of the dispassionate analysis of the facts. You can't. And I would say the artificial intelligence engineers have figured that out. The postmodern literary critics have figured that out.

2:00:00The psychologists and physiologists of perception have figured it out. And the neuroscientists have figured that out. So it's not just the evidence that that view is necessarily incorrect is overwhelming and multi -dimensional. You can't orient yourself by the fact. Why? Because there are as many facts as there are things. In fact, if you combine things, the nature of the combination is also a fact. So there's as many facts as there are things and combinations of things. Well, you can't orient yourself by that. That's you drown in chaos. It's like you're standing in the desert and there's an infinite number of directions you could go.

2:00:45Well, how do you choose a direction? And that's showing up in that most recent survey that I just mentioned, people feeling meaninglessness, purposelessness. I lost in the desert. Yep. They're lost in the desert. And the desert is the desert of fact. It's dead facts. Especially given how few people can agree on is this a factor or is this counteroff? Well, that's also a problem, is that it's not like the facts are necessarily self -evident. Some facts are, and I suppose to some degree what the scientific corpus is, is the elaboration of a set of incontrovertible facts. I've read recently that the whole Big Bang narrative is starting to come apart.

2:01:30You know, that was a fact for a long time. Now I don't know if that's the case. I don't know enough about it, but my sense is that the new discoveries from the web telescope have made many of the presumptions upon which the big bang model was based question them. So now I don't want to fall down a postmodern rabbit hole because although the issue of what constitutes a fact is a very complicated issue. Anyways, you can cut to the chase by pointing out that we organize facts in a hierarchy of value. And see the thing about, I'm trying to make this case in the book. You do this when you look at the world.

2:02:11You can't look at the world except through a hierarchy of value. So for example, as we're sitting here, there's an infinite number of places we could be pointing our eyes. Like I could be talking to you and looking at this little spot on the concrete floor or the spot beside it or the infinite number of spots surrounding it constantly. But I'm not. I'm looking at your eyes. Okay. Why? Because I'm prioritizing them. So the fact that dominates in this landscape is the fact of your eyes. Why? I can use your eyes to evaluate our shared focus, right? And that's why we look at other people's eyes. It's also why humans have got white around the outside.

2:02:53Exactly. It's so that we can see what other people are attending to so that we can get insight into the story. A story is a description of a hierarchy of value. Stories can be fantastical though, right? If that untethered to anything, I can make a Harry Potter as a story. Now this - If they're untethered to anything, you won't find them interesting. Because they won't resonate. They won't grip you. Yeah, their tethered stories are tethered to reality in a very, very complicated way. Because reality isn't what presents itself moment to moment.

2:03:34It's...

2:03:40Our math... There's a huge debate among philosophers about mathematical abstractions. Are they real? Well, you could make a case that a mathematical abstraction is more real than the thing from which it's abstracted. How would you make that case? If you're a master of mathematics, you master the world. So, are the mathematical abstractions more or less real? Narrative abstractions are abstractions. But you could say, this is what an archetype is. An archetype is a narrative abstraction that's more real than the world, than the apparent world. It's behind the scenes. And the biblical corpus is a narrative.

2:04:23It's a hyper real narrative. That's the right way to think about it. It's more real than real. It's more real than real. How could something that isn't the thing be more real than the thing? Well, that's exactly the problem with abstraction, right? Is the idea of a church more real than a given church? Well, it isn't some ways because it encapsulates what's similar across all churches, right? So it's like a platonic ideal. A category is like a platonic ideal. Is it more or less real? Well, you could say that the reality, this is what Plato said, the reality is a dim shadow of the Essence. The reality is less real than the ideal and we certainly And that's actually in some ways built into our perception.

2:05:10Like we we criticize We criticize the things that present themselves to us because they are poor reflections of the hypothetical ideal You might say, well, the ideal isn't real. It's like, well, you could make the opposite argument, which is that the ideal is more real than the thing itself. And I mean, I can give you an example of these patterns. So in the story of Canaanable, you have two patterns of sacrifice. Okay. Why is sacrifice an issue? The reason it's an issue is because people exist in a sacrificial relationship to the world. What does that mean? It seems to mean something like human beings are aware of their extended self.

2:05:53You know you're going to be around tomorrow and next week and next month and next year and five years from now and 10 years from now. Now, it's less certain as you go out, but you do have the sense of yourself as something that stretches across the decades. Okay. And so what that means is that you have to conduct yourself in a manner that isn't merely immediate. it. You have to conduct yourself in a manner that will work across time. Now, how do people do that? They work. Work is a sacrificial gesture. So you work by definition, virtually. Work is the sacrifice of the present for the future. I mean, maybe someone can come up with a better definition of work than that, but I don't think so.

2:06:37It's like you put in time and effort right now. It's something, even if it's something, maybe not what you'd like to be doing at the moment, you put in time and effort because you believe, what the hell does that mean? You believe it'll pay off. Well, is that a contract with the future? Is it a covenant? Because the relationship that the biblical corpus insists, characterizes human striving, is covenant, it's a bargain. The bargain is you make the right sacrifices and they pay off. That's the bargain. Now you might say, well, that's just part of the social contract, but the biblical corpus insists that it's deeper than that.

2:07:20It's built into the structure of reality itself. And that if you got the sacrifices right, the future would be paradisal. I've got it in my head that Carl Jung quote, beware of unearned wisdom. That feels like, that feels like it plays a role here, like how the work that you need to put in in order to be able to arrive at genuinely knowing the thing, the difference between actually being attractive because who you are is attractive and you being able to be a pick -up artist that is able to make the mouth noises and the hand gestures that cause the people to enjoy. Those are the fruits of false sacrifice.

2:07:58You could say that unearned moral reputation is is the consequence of false sacrifice. Well, this is performative empathy, right? Sure. Exactly. On the internet. Definitely. That's the same as praying in public. Look at how good I am. If the look at, if the look at comes before the how good I am, right, right, right, right. It really wreaks havoc on the good claim. But it's also, I spoke to Douglas about this. It seems to almost be a predictor. It's an identifier that you should be a little bit more cautious about what this person is doing. Definitely. You know, every single person that's super sweet tea and nicely, nicely, Lizzo.

2:08:40Do you see Lizzo was in the news recently? No. So she is an artist singer. Is she the one that got in trouble for abusing her close -compatriots? Her dances, yeah. She made her dancers eat bananas out of the vaginas of Amsterdam and strippers. Douglas said that he... Oh yeah, that's a little on the hedonistic power mad side. Well, she was supposed to be, you know, this bassy like... Yeah, for the girls and body positivity and all this stuff, but it turned out behind the scenes that she was treating her dancers terribly, body -shaming them all of the time, but she was the one up front that was the Vanguard of this particular movement.

2:09:14But you'd seen the same with Jimmy Fallon. I think he was caught up in a funeral recently that he was a tyrant to work for, and yeah, out front, Ellen DeGeneres, again, the same. It's almost actually like if somebody is... It's very much like that. overloading on the sweet -eaten -ice, I am here for the underlings that you go. I'm a little bit suspicious of what's going on there. If you need to proclaim your purity and your good standing, if it's all words and opinions are not deeds. One of the commandments, one of the ten commandments is do not use God's name in vain. Okay, now people think that means don't swear and it sort of means that That's one of its like tangential meanings.

2:10:02But what it really means is do not claim divine motivation for self -serving behavior. Right? And that's performative compassion. So what you do is you elevate compassion to the highest place. So you make it your God, which is big mistake, because whatever God is, he is not merely compassion. You elevate compassion to the highest place. And then you say, I feel sorry for people and what that does is elevate your moral status to the highest possible place, right? It's completely unerined because This is something JK Rowling got so accurate with her Dolores Umbridge character It was an absolute power man's hire with little kittens had the kittens on the plates It's like this toxic sentimentality.

2:10:49I'm so nice. It's like yeah, I'd like to stay away from you and you're devouring niceness The Freudians knew about that very, very, in a very sophisticated way, very early, because the devouring mother, the E. Diplomather is the shadow side of compassion. I've been trying to come up with a term for this for a while. I like meaming things into existence, giving them names, and useful. And at the moment, the best one I've got is the shallow pond of empathy, which is at the moment, something which appeases people and does not cause them any discomfort effort immediately is always prioritized, even if the net effect is that over the long term results in the suffering.

2:11:32Absolutely. That's exactly what the ETABLE situation is. It's the prioritization of short -term emotional comfort over medium to long -term thriving, right? Because the mother who kicks the child out of the nest says, this is going to hurt now, but the iterating consequences are positive. Michael Andrews, P .A .D. Right, exactly. That's right. And the moral of that story is that if you give up your children to the world, you will keep them. Right. That's the sacrifice of Abraham. Abraham is called upon by God to sacrifice his son and he says, yes, so he doesn't have to. Right. You have to offer up your children to be broken by the world or you lose them.

2:12:22You undermine them. You destroy them. It's very, it's a very paradoxical truth. We were talking about patterns. Kane is the pattern of inappropriate sacrifice. He does everything second rate. He lies. He omits. He pervericates. He pretends. He doesn't offer his best, able to the opposite. He offers his best, which means his light is shining on the hill. Right? There's no hiding. He's giving it everything he's got. The covenant with God is that if you give it everything you've got, you will prevail. And that's what God tells Cain. Which to go through some of the threads from today. Instinct. Sting true to that instinct.

2:13:07Honesty. Saying what you mean. Not prioritizing avoiding someone else's or your discomfort in the short term in order to believe that this is something which is going to make you feel better over the long term. Well, that's a kind of sacrifice right there is that you're willing to sacrifice your short -term physiological and psychological comfort for a medium to long -term benefit. It's the essence of sacrifice to offer the... This is something the atheists don't understand about the biblical narrative is that the narrative insists that we live in a sacrificial relationship. It's the essence of humanity to live in a sacrificial relationship.

2:13:47It's like, was that true or not? Well, as you mature, your relationships are more sacrificial. It's less about what you in your narrow sense want right now, and it's more about what's good over the medium to long run, including other people. Well, that's a sacrificial relationship. Now, the covenant, you know, and this is a matter of faith. It's the matter of the deepest faith. Do you, are you willing to act out the proposition that the way to make the world reveal itself to you and its most positive guys is for you to adopt the most appropriate sacrificial relationship? What's a big risk, isn't it?

2:14:31Because you have to give up everything. That's the deal. You give up everything that's low, everything, everything. Well, that's what the Christian passion is because the Christian passion is an archetypal story. because Christ is the person who sacrifices everything. Thurally, 100 % and the biblical notion is that there's no difference between that and the descent of the God of the Old Testament into the space of human reality. So God is elaborated as a spirit in the Old Testament. That's a way of thinking about it. fleshed out right into the law and the prophets and Christ presents Himself as the embodiment of that.

2:15:19So imagine here's a way of thinking about it. You can invite various spirits to possess you. That's what you do when you give way to rage. That's what you do when you give way to lust, let's say. You allow spirits to possess you. Well, what would you be like if you did nothing but allow the highest of spirits to possess you? Well, that's the question that's put forth in the New Testament. And part of the answer to that is, if you allowed the highest of all possible spirits to possess you, you would be able to confront everything that life could possibly throw at you. And that's what happens in the Christian Passion because the worst that life can throw at you is the worst tragedy.

2:16:06And the worst tragedy is the worst death, the worst and most painful death inflicted on the least deserving person. Right? That's the ultimate reach of tragedy. Okay, that's not enough. Christ has to confront that. And he has to confront malevolence. That's the harrowing of hell. So the idea is that to adapt fully to life, you have to allow yourself to be possessed by the spirit that will enable you to voluntarily face unjust, suffering, and death and evil. It's like, well, you got an argument against that? How could it be any other way? One of the things that I think I see people respond to this degree of pressure when they think about what is going to happen long term.

2:16:53I have discomfort that is in front of me now that I need to face, that I need to go through if I'm going to get to something in the future that I think that I'm supposed to do. I'm one of the solutions that they come up with, which isn't a solution, but it kind of is to them, is I'm not going to do anything. You know, that no decision is kind of the same as a neutral choice. Yeah, right. One of my friends, Alex, has got this quote which I love and he says, the heaviest things in life aren't iron and gold, but unmade decisions. the reason you are stressed is that you have decisions to make and you're not making them.

2:17:27Yeah, yeah, that's yeah. Yeah. No doubt about it. Well, there's no indecision, right? There's only because you age like you pay for your you pay for your indecision. It's a decision. It's a decision to avoid fundamentally. And part of the moral that's embedded in the story of Job and in the Christian Passion is that you can master what you'll face. And maybe that's true. Maybe that's true. I mean, the clinical literature seems to indicate that it's true because one of the things you do, if you're a competent clinician, is you look at what people are attempting to accomplish. And maybe that needs some retooling, but let's assume that they have a goal in mind that would work, right?

2:18:24You talk it through with them strategically. They have a well laid out vision. Okay, now they're laying out the vision and they encounter impediments that stop them. And maybe they're impediments that make them afraid and paralyze them. And so then what you do is you decompose the impediment just as we talked about earlier until you find a way they can advance that constitutes a genuine advance that they'll actually do. So what you do is you take the problem and you narrow it until they'll face it. Okay, then they face it. Then what happens? They get more competent. That's what happens. and then they get better at facing all problems.

2:19:04So they don't just learn how to deal with that specific problem. They learn a lesson that generalizes across problems. They get braver. When you do, when you use exposure therapy, people don't get less afraid. They get braver. That's way better. Because braver moves from situation to situation. Okay, so the question is, here's the question. If you faced everything that was put in front of you, Who would you be? Well, the answer, the biblical answer is you'd be a true son of God. That's the biblical answer. It's like, well, do you believe that? Well, it depends on what you mean by believe. Do you think that you have a better bet than facing what's there?

2:19:48Well, you just have to be sensible about it for a moment. It's like, is your theory that you're going to adapt better using falsehood and avoidance? Because that's the contrary theory. You either face it and you do that predicated on the faith that something in you will respond if you do or you don't face it. That's it. Those are the options. If you don't face it, that's faith too. That's faith in the notion that avoidance and deception will suffice. I think that for a lot of people it's it's born out of fear. It's born out of being a people pleaser. Yeah. And not wanting to hurt other people around you and not wanting to tell them things that they don't want to hear or not doing or saying things that you know are going to upset the people that are around you.

2:20:36Right, but in the short term again. Yeah. In the short term again, you know, if you look at a good mother, a good mother upsets her kids a lot. Quit doing that. Why? Well, why? Why not just let your children do exactly what they want? When the answer to that is, well, first of all, it terrifies them. because kids actually want, they want walls. They don't want to be in the desert doing anything they want. They want a walled space in which they have the optimal amount of freedom. So a person who truly loves someone else doesn't strive at all cost never to upset them. That's the devouring mother.

2:21:16If you love someone, well, that's the biblical quote. You chastise them. Well, what does it mean? It's like, look, if you love someone and they're doing something stupid and self -destructive and you can see it, it's incumbent on you to say, you know, this is gonna upset you, but as far as I can tell, you're doing something stupid and self -destructive. And then there's gonna be a tussle about that because they're gonna say, well, who are you to judge? And that's a perfectly good question is what makes you think you're right? And here's the reasons I'm doing this. And, you know, these are the terrible experiences that I've had that have led me to take this path.

2:21:53And sometimes that can be really compelling. You know, you meet people who are bitter and resentful and then they tell you about their life and you think, well, yeah, but then you meet people who've had just as terrible a life who aren't bitter and resentful, right, and they're doing better. And so even if it seems justifiable, maybe even if it is justifiable, it's not justifiable. One of the most common situations I think that this People pleasing tendency would show up in is someone who maybe thinks that they should break up with a relationship But doesn't do it and sticks about in order to protect their partner and I found a thread on Reddit that was Five questions to ask yourself if you're unsure about your relationship If someone told you you're a lot like your partner would this be a compliment to you?

2:22:41Are you truly fulfilled or just less lonely? Are you able to be unapologetically yourself or do you feel the need to show up differently to please your partner? Are you in love with who your partner is right now as a whole or are you only in love with their good side, their potential or the idea of them? And would you want your future or imagine child to date someone like your partner? And this thread was just filled with people having existential crises and it seemed to me to be a collection of people who had managed to believe that continuing to manana manana the short term, postponement of the discomfort of the decision that they wanted to have around their partner was somehow the noble thing to do or the good thing to do or the virtuous thing to do or the thing that ultimately would result in the best outcome, even though they knew that if they spread it out long enough and then it's just hidden, we're just shoving under the rug.

2:23:39So yeah, that list of five questions, I think. Well, in most relationships, you can break up or you can have a thousand fights. You know, and if you have a thousand fights, then you don't have to fight. You make peace that way. You know, because you're different than your partner, so there's things to work out there. And you might think about that as a compromise, but it's not. You're different than your partner and you have to find a game that you both want to play. That's not a compromise. That's a solution. It's like you bring your skills to the table, and I bring my skills to the table, and then we figure out some game we can play where we're both optimally utilized, and it's a better game than we can play alone.

2:24:19That's not a compromise. Well, but getting to that's very difficult, and people bring all sorts of baggage to a relationship, and you have to... It's just like disciplining children, really. It's the same thing. Your children are, you know, your children are annoying. You can note that. Oh, they're being annoyed by my child. Okay, so what questions do you ask? Am I a tyrannical son of a bitch who's touchy? Well, that's why you need your wife because you can go ask her. My kids are annoying me. Am I a tyrannical son of a bitch who's touchy? And she said, yeah, you probably need something to eat or you're a bit of a prick that way.

2:24:53And you gotta listen because maybe it's you. Or maybe she says, yeah, that goddamn child being getting on my case too. And then you ask each other, are we mutually tyrants? It's like, no, that kid's annoying. Okay, do we want him to be annoying? Well, if you love your child, then the answer that would be no, because if he's annoying you, he's going to annoy other people. He's going to annoy his potential friends. He's going to annoy other adults. He's going to go through the world being annoying. And everyone's going to drown out him. That's not helpful. So then you could just fix it. And that's going to cause some short term upset.

2:25:30You know, you're maybe you have a like a 13 month old child who's very extroverted and disagreeable who like rules the roost. And every time the mother goes more than a foot away from her, she has a squawk fit because she's learned to control. Maybe the mother, you know, was still tied up with infant care and can't put down a boundary. And so now you have to do something about this emerging monster of a 14 -month -old child. And one of the things you do is every time the child is bossy, first of all you note it, and you note that you're not very fond of yourself for being tyrannized by a 14 -month -old.

2:26:08That's a bit of a status hit, like it should be. So you have to notice, I'm annoyed by this child, then I should do something about it. What's going to cause short -term emotional distress, the same thing occurs when you're dealing with your partner. It's like you're annoying me. Okay. Now maybe that's me. So I should bloody well maybe we should have a talk about that. You're annoying me. Convince me that it's me and I should listen because maybe it's me and if I'm annoyed about you and I shouldn't be I should fix that. But maybe it's you. So let's find out exactly what's going on. And that'll usually, man, that's, that'll, there's just constant thrust and counter -thrust in a discussion like that.

2:26:51And usually, you know, the conversational circle around whatever the hell the issue is, till you get to the bottom of it and God only knows where that is. But then maybe you can sort it out. You know, and if you sort out enough of those things, you live in peace. And that's something worth attaining. You know, and I've thought forever in my marriage, there's nothing, there's nothing too small to fight about. Now, you know, I put in some rules that I used to have with my clients too. It's like, if someone bugs you, you should note that. And you shouldn't do anything about it probably. If they bug you twice the same way, then you think, oh, okay, that's twice.

2:27:31But probably still, you shouldn't do anything about it. But if they bug you three times, then you can say, here's what you just did. And they'll say, well, no, I didn't do that. And then you say, Yeah, you did. And you did exactly the same thing in this other situation. And you did exactly the same thing in this other situation. So don't be telling me you didn't do it because you did it three times and I watched. Okay. Now they come up with reasons they did it. And maybe some of them have to do with what is stupid son of a bitch you are. And you should listen because maybe they're right. But that's at least the beginnings of the process by which you unravel the problems.

2:28:07You want to figure out, well, we don't want to do this. This isn't the way we want to treat each other. We want to get to a place where we want to get to a place where our whole life is like the best moments of the best dates we ever had. That's a good goal. And that's attainable. You got to work, man. there's a scene in Genesis. God throws Adam and Eve out of paradise because of their pride, their sin of pride. They each have their own particular version of that sin, Eve's sin and Adams, but they get thrown out of paradise anyways for pride. And God puts cherubs at the gates of paradise and the cherubs, they're kind of these monstrous angels terrifying figures, and they hold swords that are on fire that turn every which way in burn.

2:29:05And you might say, well, what does that mean? And it means that, well, a sword is something that cuts away, right? A sharp blade. And fire is something that burns. And a sword that burns burns and cuts away. And a sword that burns and turns every which way is a burning sword from which nothing can escape. Okay, now you want to walk into paradise. Everything that isn't worthy in you has to be burned and cut away, right? Well, that's what that conflict is in a relationship. You know, it's like that's not suitable for paradise. What does it have to do? It has to be cast into the outer darkness where there will be gnashing of teeth, right?

2:29:52It has to be cut away and destroyed and everything that isn't worthy has to go. Well, the Michelangelo effect is all about you and your partner becoming the idealized version of each other, right? You are going to do for me the things that I want within your parameters of control that you want to be the best partner for me and I want to do the same for you. We're both going to communicate to each other. We're going to stand our ground where we have boundaries, and we're going to continue to compromise. That's what love should do. That's what love should do. Like if you love someone, if it's genuine love, you see their hidden soul.

2:30:33That's a good way of thinking about it. You get a glimpse of the light that they could reveal to the world if they revealed it. That's what you see. And then to act in love is to encourage that to come forward and to discourage anything that gets in its way. That's why I love the the Michelangelo effect I'd heard of and I've been using it. Okay, so why the Michelangelo effect? This is why Michelangelo sees this huge, massive, unhwn block marble. Right. Oh, I see. I see. And inside of that, he is able to see David. Mm -hmm. And over time slowly he will chip away and he will chip away and he will chip away.

2:31:05So you see something that isn't there that's inside of the thing which is rough and unhun and uncivilized and undemesticated and rambunctious and and sometimes terrible and You were able to from that. Yeah, yeah, that's actually part of the Dowday Ching the uncarved block so a child is an uncarved block in in the Dowest view and and you Remove everything that's excess until what's perfect remains, right? And that's, see, the logos in the old and new testament, the logos that creates the world, is the judging faculty that, what would you say, that separates the wheat from the chaff, right? And it's not, it's compassion in a sense, because if you're compassionate towards someone, you want what's best for them, all things considered.

2:32:00But that compassion in the highest sense can't exist without judgment because the judgment is This part of you isn't worthy to continue and certainly that's what you're doing with your children when you see the misbehaving you think No, that's no not that not that Something more sophisticated even with my little granddaughter the other day. She's very very playful and she's very nice little girl She's very playful and very fun and funny and not neurotic and so she's a pleasure you to be around, but she hasn't seen me for a while and so she was poking me, getting me to chase her around and poking me and she come up and give me a whack, you know, and at one point she whacked me too hard and she knew it and I said, that's not fun.

2:32:44That's not acceptable and then she stopped but she was playing with that edge trying to find out where fun is and you know, how hard can I hit grandpa? She does bloody well, no. She kind of knows but she needs to know exactly. Well, I can't let her get away with it because then she's not fun to play with. She has to learn to come and give her grandpa a whack and exactly the way that elicits a playful response and that isn't annoying. And so there's a very, you know, you might think, well, it's pretty harsh judgment to lay on a five -year -old. It's like, no, it's not. I would like her to be the most fun kid to play with that she could be, right?

2:33:19And so I'm not going to pretend that it's okay when it's not. Not setting that boundary is almost like a curse. It is a curse. Yeah, there you go. We would talk. Yeah, because then how she's going to play with other kids if she doesn't know the rules. They're not gonna be as forgiving as grandpa. Definitely not. Yeah, we were talking before we got started. I had this conversation with Robert Sapolsky and it was really, really profound. I mean, I know that he's a brilliant guy and this new book of his is about sort of freewill and determinism which has got an upper bound on how interesting that is for me.

2:33:49But he gave this quote to Andrew Heubman where he said dopamine is not about the pursuit of happiness. It is about the happiness of pursuit. That's definitely right. And I haven't been able to stop seeing this everywhere. So Morgan Housel, a friend told me this great story. He is an investor, he's got a fund, he's an author, he's got a family. For all of these things. They plan to go away in holiday. And they've been planning it for a long time. And with the kids and the wife and him and all of his businesses, it was an arduous thing to go through to get themselves out there. And finally, they get there after the journey and the plane and the children and the crying and all the rest of it.

2:34:27And he walks out on the balcony on the first night of this holiday that they've planned for forever. And his first thought to himself was, wouldn't it be great if we came back here next year? It would be so great if we could come back here next year. So literally during the supposed enjoyment of the destination, he was already thinking about the journey. And it's not the journey, it's not the destination, it's the journey is kind of trite, but it puts a new perspective on it. There is no destination. Each destination is simply the beginning of the next journey. And I haven't been able to see it everywhere.

2:35:03I see it everywhere in my own life. Well, there's technically two different forms of reward. There's consumatory reward. And so that's the reward. That's what an orgasm is. It's consumatory reward. It brings the behavioral and perceptual sequence to a halt. It ends it at the climax. It ends it. But then it's over. That journey is over. right? Then there's the Dopa Minergic reward that Svolsky was talking about and Dopa Minergic reward is evidence of advancement towards a goal, right? Okay, so there's a corollary to that. Well, how do you become optimally engaged because Dopa mean facilitates engagement and focus, which is why drugs like amphetamines can be used for kids who are attention deficit disordered.

2:35:55You tap up the dopamine response, they lock on. Okay, so they're locking on to a gold directed pursuit. The problem with amphetamines is that they can lock you on so hard, you can't get out of the frame. So like kids on amphetamines will obsess, for example, cleaning up their closet. They can't switch to the next activity. Okay, dopamine energy reward is reward that's accrued in relationship to a goal. Okay, so what's an implication of that? Well, pursue the highest possible goal. Well, why? Because the kick from advancement is higher. Now, you have to balance that. It can't be, you have to advance, right?

2:36:35Because imagine the rewards got two components. Number one is you're moving towards something valuable. Okay, so you want it to be as valuable as possible. Okay, but you have to be moving. So it can't be so valuable that it's out of your reach. You're going to walk to the moon. I'm not going to be able to see every single increment that I make. Yes. You want to get to the moon. That's right. You can't walk there. So it's a bad plan. You need something extremely valuable that you can move towards. Okay, so part of the reason that you establish a relationship with God, let's say, is because that's what sets the upper bound to your vision.

2:37:12It's like, I want things to be the best they could be. That's a vision of paradise. Well, that has to be fractionated into, you know, your proximal decisions, but lurking behind that should be this continual movement towards what would you say? A heaven that recedes as you approach it. That's the proper vision of heaven. A heaven is a place that's perfect and getting better, both at the same time. That's what music shows you because a great piece of music is perfect, but it's just getting better as it unfolds. And you need that. This is part of the problem with a static utopian vision, something dusty, Efski criticized.

2:37:50If you gave people nothing but consumatory reward, he famously says so that they can do nothing but sit in tubs of hot water, eat cake and busy themselves with the continuation of the species. Human beings would break that all to hell in a moment just so they have something interesting to do. What was that quote that you said on Rogan years ago, if we were to make the world sufficiently perfect, the only desired lack would be for the desire of lack itself. What's that? What's the what's the profit? Can you remember the profit? Well, Kirchegard pointed out that if we, as we make the world easier and easier, so this is perhaps part of the problem with the material plenty that's at hand, is that at some point what becomes lacking is lack itself.

2:38:39Yes, yes, exactly, exactly. It's optimal deprivation. You know, and if everything is delivered to you on a platter, it's like, what the hell are you even doing there? This happens in the story of Abraham. Abraham. So Abraham, who's the father of nations, right? So Abraham gets it right. He has everything at the beginning of the story. He has rich parents. He has, he's, he's got nothing that he has to do. He's like 70 when the story opens. He's been taken care of hand in foot his whole life. And the voice of God comes to him and says, I'm the God of your ancestors telling you get out of your zone of comfort, get out into the world.

2:39:20And Abraham's pretty old by this point, but for whatever reason he decides that he's going to forego the comfort for the adventure. And then as Abraham progresses, he makes the requisite sacrifices, each becoming more difficult as he ascends. and he adopts this pattern of relationship with the God that calls him to adventure, that literally makes him the father of nations. And so you can even think about that biologically if you want, you might as well. People like Dawkins think reproduction is sex. And that's why he can talk, for example, about the selfish gene making itself manifest in sex. reproduction isn't sex.

2:40:03Sex is a necessary but insufficient precondition for reproduction. Abraham adopts a motive being, a sacrificial motive being that establishes the optimal environment for his sons who then establish the optimal environment for their sons and their sons and their sons. So you can imagine that what Abraham is doing, this is what the story means, is he's adopting a mode of behavior that works best all things considered across multiple generations. And he sacrifices everything to that. It's this incredibly expansive vision. Given that we're in a world which is comfortable and we have created buildings in which there are heavy things that you pick up and put down in the same place because it's simply so rare that you have to pick up heavy things.

2:40:53Right? Right. The billy operation, the same reason. Proliferation of ice baths and sauna, and even reading to some extent, reading difficult things. Where should people go, given that they are in a world which is more comfortable than ever before? Where should they go to encourage them to find difficult truths? Truth is what's optimally difficult. The truth is optimally difficult. That's a really wonderful thing to know. The truth is adventure. There's no distinction. Partly because if you're going to just say what you believe to be true, you have to let go of the consequences. You can't predict the consequences.

2:41:39Well, there's no difference between not being able to predict the consequences and having an adventure. They're the same thing, right? Because if you knew the consequences, it wouldn't be an adventure. It's not an adventure if the consequences are foregone. The same as it's no sacrifice or courage if there's no risk. Right. It's exactly the same. And so it's a wonderful thing to know that optimized adventure is to be held in the truth. Think in every given situation. So Christ says in the sermon on the Mount that to orient yourself properly, it's often viewed as this hippie peon. Take no thought of the moral.

2:42:20The moral will take care of itself. You know, God takes care of the sparrows. He'll certainly take care of you. It's like a hippie wet dream. That isn't the core of the message. The core of the message is very straightforward. Christ says aim up to the highest thing you can possibly imagine. So that's the relationship with God. You put what's at the pinnacle, properly at the pinnacle and you aim at that. And then you concentrate that and it's that and treating other people like you would like to be treated yourself. That sets the moral frame. Then you attend to the day and the cares of the day.

2:43:02It's like once you've established the proper moral frame, you pay attention to the day and you live in truth and that moves you towards that destination. You have to have the orientation, right? You have to be aiming up. But then it's just a matter of, what would you say, abiding by the truth? That's the logos that sets people free. And that's right. Doing it properly, right? There was one of the other rules that didn't make it into your book. Nothing well done is insignificant. Right, right, right. Yeah, well, you'll crew. So Christ tells his followers in the Gospels to store up treasure and heaven, not in the places that mosque and eat and rust can destroy.

2:43:42Well, what is that? What is meant by that? Well, it's meant by the same, it means the same thing that you just pointed to, which is that if you run yourself through a disciplinary process, so you accomplish something. Maybe it doesn't, you don't attain the goal you were aiming at, but you accrue a new way of looking at the world in a set of skills. Well, if you just keep doing that. You have multiple ways of looking at the world and more and more skill. Well, that's your storehouse of treasure. You know, the reason women use wealth as a proxy for attractiveness is because wealth is a proxy for competence.

2:44:20It's not competence because you can be rich and useless. Now, it's not that easy, but it can at least happen temporarily. But women use markers of wealth to assess competence and the competence is the treasure, not the wealth. Because if you're competent, you can be thrown into the desert and you'll make it bloom. I've said this about people that go to the gym. So from the outside, someone that goes to the gym and has got a good body or whatever, it's the body and this is what you get to touch during sex when you're intimate, right? But the story that someone who has a good body tells you about the sort of person that they are is much more important, I think, than the way that it manifests physically.

2:45:00It's someone who is reliable, who is able to overcome hard things, who is self -discipline. Yeah, it's a more, it's just this whole big, long laundry list of things that they're able to deal with pain and discomfort, which is kind of sexy in a way. Well, it's the perfect, it's the perfect materialist disciplinary strategy, right? Because it's very concrete. Well, you change your body. It's like, is that a spiritual pursuit? Well, it is in so far as it requires, you know, long -term discipline and sacrifice. And you might hope, and I think this is likely the case, that, you know, you can get stuck in the bodily self -improvement niche.

2:45:37And focus on that too obsessively, but you can also use it as a stepping stone to discipline pursuit itself. And lots of people do that. I think I told you the last time that we chatted about the Manopause, this thing that I'd come up with so I noticed toward the end of my 20s that lots of guys who had been training with a particular modality, usually bodybuilding, usually exclusively for the way that they looked realized, as they approached their 30s that they were getting out of breath, going up a set of stairs, and that they maybe couldn't touch their toes, and they looked fantastic. But no, they just felt like they should maybe start to value different things and they then changed their training and they would go and do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or yoga or CrossFit or some other form of whatever.

2:46:22And that precipitated a change in everything else. And I saw this in myself, right? I get to the end of my 20s. I've achieved success in many of the ways that society tells a young man that he should value success. There was a discordance, something fell off and you then think, okay, well, maybe I need to assess whether or not the things that I've been told I should want are things that I actually want to want. And very quickly you realize, I don't know, it feels like a quarter life crisis. I think so many men go through this. They go, I either succeeded or didn't succeed at a game that I was told that I was supposed to value playing and upon reflection, I really don't care for it as much as I thought I did.

2:47:05Maybe there was some elements I was so proud of what I done with my business partners. as I was so proud of the things that we achieved. But then there was other stuff where I was like, why have I attached so much of my sense of self worth into this and this and this? And then you have to assess. And the difference. So this is what happens in the story of Exodus when Moses encounters the burning bush. So he's just going about his business as a shepherd. And he's doing all right. He's got two wives. He likes his father -in -law. He's well regarded in this new country that he's in. He's left Egypt where there's a price on his head, essentially for killing a Egyptian who was tormenting one of the Hebrews.

2:47:42Anyway, Moses is just going about his business as a shepherd, which was very tough job in those days. And this thing catches his eye, this glimmer, this clean, and he goes to investigate. Okay, so what does that mean? It means as you're progressing through life, something will capture your interest. And in the story you just told, it's like somebody decides they're going to start going to the gym. There's something about becoming physically fit that calls to them, right? Which is an interesting thing, right? Because it calls to them. It's not even necessarily a decision they make. It's more like a possibility that makes itself manifest that's of interest.

2:48:18So they decide to pursue it. So they look into it more deeply. Well, so Moses approaches the burning bush and he gets closer and closer, right? And a bush is a symbol of life, right? Like a tree, a tree of life. and a tree of life that's on fire is being, that's the life, the tree, and becoming. That's the fire, the transformation. So a burning bush is a symbol of being and becoming as such. Now it's something that beckons. Okay, so now you pursue your physical fitness because it's called to you. And you concentrate more and more on it, you get more and more disciplined. But as you get more and more disciplined, you start to transform, right?

2:48:55And so your vision starts to change. Now, what happens to Moses is that as he gets closer and closer to the burning bush, he starts to realize that he's on sacred ground. So he's going deeper. The investigation is taking him deeper. So he takes off his shoes and continues to approach. He's still going down the same trail, right, pursuing this thing. And then the voice of God itself speaks to him from the midst of the burning bush. And that's what turns him into a leader. And so what does the story mean. It means that as you walk through life in your normal mode, things will call to you. And if you pursue them, they will take you deep.

2:49:30It doesn't really matter what it is that calls. What matters is that you pursue it and you pursue it to the depths. And as you pursue it to the depths, you will become transformed. And if you do that without reservation, that will turn you into, that will turn you into the person who frees the slaves and opposes the tyrants. And that is how it works. That's the call. And that can happen in any direction, virtually any direction. You just have to pursue it with sufficient faith, right? One of the things that's been I guess, derogated a lot by pretty much everybody at the moment is university education and I had such an interesting time at university almost exclusively outside of my education.

2:50:23All of the good things that happened to me while I spent five years at Newcastle didn't include what I was taught. It was never inside of the lecture theatre. It was everything I was doing outside of that and lots of my friends, it's very trendy on the internet to mock higher education as use of species of paper. It's not, you don't need it in order to be able to be successful. It's certainly the thing that I've ended up doing. This podcast didn't require me to go to university, but maybe in some ways it did, but also from a qualification perspective it didn't. But I think I'm still relatively pro -university experience.

2:51:01And yeah, you've got Peterson Academy launching, which is your new thing. I wondered how you thought, or basically our university salvageable given that so much that's good about the university experience has almost nothing to do with the education side of it. Are they salvageable? Some are, I imagine.

2:51:27Hillsdale does great. What's that? It's a conservative college in northeastern US run by Larry Arne. They have a 1 % dropout rate. as opposed to the typical 50 % dropout rate. And they provide a classical, what used to be a liberal education, liberal arts education. It's a more conservative enterprise, given how the overton window has shifted. But Larry's students concentrate on physical fitness. His philosophy department tends to meet in the weight room, which is pretty interesting. He has weight benches scattered all around the campus about a third of the students take music courses So the place is very musical It's a very disciplined place the quality of education is extremely high so there are institutes that are holding to their mandate I think That's rare and I think overall the universities have become Irretrevably corrupt as far as I can tell and so So we had hope that we could provide something approximating an alternative, but you put your finger on one of the complexities in doing that.

2:52:45It's easy to think that a university is the transmission of knowledge from experts to empty vessels, the students, let's say, so it's lectures, tests, and accreditation. But that's not really what a university is. it's an apprenticeship. If you're fortunate when you go to university, you find a professor too that you can work with who really teach you how to think. Those professors are generally quite rare and you're fortunate if you do establish a relationship like that, especially at a big university where the student to faculty ratio is absurdly high, like 100 to one. I was in lecture, it is that was 300 to one.

2:53:27I didn't get a relationship like that with any of my right, right. And that's that's that's really not good because you need you need an apprenticeship relationship to become educated fundamentally. We started this. We're formulating Peterson Academy. We're hoping that we can provide people with extremely high quality lectures. Fortunate as you are to be able to reach out to people who are charismatic and well educated and we offer them a good financial deal and we treat them very well and they come down to Miami and they record a relatively short lecture series eight hours and we're implementing state -of -the -art testing procedures and we're going to be giving out a certificate that you will have to earn to acquire and so we're hoping that the quality of our graduates will be such that the certificate will speak for itself as a marker for conscientiousness and educated expertise.

2:54:31We'll see. We're also building out the social side of it because as you pointed out, a huge part of what happens to you when you go to university is social and socialization. You get to make a whole new group of friends. It's a big deal, right? It's a huge. It's one of those times in your life where you can parcel off who you were and you can become something new. You remember every single summer, at least for me, maybe this is because I was chronically so unpopular in school, I would come back every summer imagining that I would be able to reinvent myself. I'm gonna be the cool kid this year.

2:55:07I'm gonna be the sporty kid this year or whatever. But the big one is age 18 because you're not even in the same town, no one even knows you, and no one even knows what to think about who you are. Right, right. And that for me was the big inflection point of me going from the child that I was to this sort of young adult that I was going to end up. Right. Well, if you're fortunate, you have a number of times where that happens in your life when I can make a relatively clean break and you can invent yourself a new. This is just soon to check. There's an idea called monk mode, which has kind of become a bit of a meme online, but I first read about this years ago, and it involves an extended period of isolation to work on yourself to reflect on your flaws, to kind of do the inner work, to introspect.

2:55:59It's usually tied in with meditation, with improving your diet, with improving your physical fitness, your mental fitness, all of these different things. And that I've almost seen it as if doing that and focusing on yourself for a short space of time that's very, very, you know, it's maybe a couple of months really, really focusing on you, still going about and doing your work and doing the rest of the things, but outside of that, just really, really trying to make yourself as good as possible, periodizing that for me was one of the most powerful inflections aside from the lifestyle change. That's what confession is supposed to be, fundamentally.

2:56:38When you take stock of yourself, you confess, you confess to yourself and you make your sins a reality. You assess yourself for your insufficiency and you proclaim your insufficiencies and that well then you can start working on them. It's like it's painful. Here's all the things that I'm not. Here's all the things that I'm not that I would like to be, right? That's painful self -examination, but the advantages, you get all your problems on the table. And the advantage to that is that problem by problem, there's likely some hope. Like for example, you said you were unpopular when you were a teenager, but that doesn't mean that you had to carry that forward into university.

2:57:30Right? There was a possibility that, so how did you get out of that? What did you do? The main reason I think was that I didn't really understand how to relate to other kids. So I found myself obsessing over the way that other kids would wear their shirts or tie their ties or the sort of shoes that they would wear or that. Right. So you were looking at external models or... Yeah. Marked as a whole line. That's why they had friends and I didn't. Right. And I didn't realize that it was just, I wasn't socially adept. I didn't understand how to relate to other kids very well. And I think I just got to the stage, especially when I went to university, that I'd spent enough time for me to have learned at least some rough -huned social skills, and now finally was able to sort of cast off some of the presuppositions that had maybe been following me.

2:58:28Because... What were the opening points for you? Do you remember the first friendship you made in university? Oh yeah, the guys that I lived with. Okay, so these were roommates? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so yeah, that's a good, see that's a thing that's hard to duplicate online, right? Because it's having a group of roommates is a formative experience. It was crazy for me. I didn't know, because again, only child, two parents living in a small house, I didn't know that you were supposed to knock on someone's bedroom door before you were to go in. Right. I'd never done that. I spent my 18 years, I'd never had to knock on anybody's bedroom door.

2:59:03It's like, Mom and Dad are down there. Who else is that? I'm going to knock on the dogs, like a kitchen door to see if the dogs are mind me going into the kitchen. And so many of those things, looking back on it now, just so ridiculous, not knowing that that was something that you were supposed to do. Yeah, well, not knowing those elementary skills, though, that can be a huge impediment. You know, I have people in my clinical practice. We spend hours practicing how to introduce them and to shake hands. because you want to be expert at that. Because if you're not good at that at all, like if you're really bad at it, you're screwed.

2:59:36You can't even tell someone your name. And so how are you going to make a friend that? You announce yourself as incompetent with your first move. And then if that happens to you 10 times, you're so terrified. Disincentivized. Oh God, terribly, terribly. And so you should become expert at that. That's something you can do with your kids, so they can become expert at introducing themselves. You know, shake hands, do it with a bit of a firm grip. Look at the other person. Try smiling. You know, match your tempo to the other person. Another dynamic that I've been thinking about recently, I was at a retreat in LA a few months ago.

3:00:14And one of the guys that was there had said he'd stopped talking and writing on the internet because he noticed that the story he was telling in public, like he began feeling the necessity to live up to in private. And I think that whether you're a writer or just someone that's got 500 followers on your Instagram and a Facebook from back in the day or whatever, there is an online persona that people put forward that they then almost feel is more real than what they are. And then they try and reverse engineer themselves to fit this new. Is this - Well, that's the problem with writing essays that contain what your professor wants to hear.

3:00:51So you can't do that without altering your soul. You can't do that. You cannot construct for yourself a false persona designed to extract resources from the world without that becoming part of you. There's no one is that sophisticated. No one can have two selves like that. It's part of the reason why you have to be very careful about what you say and do is that you're When you practice falsehood, you become false. It's not like those are beliefs that are just in your head. You rewire yourself so you start to literally see the world through the frame of your falsehoods. That's a very bad plan. I've heard you say, if you say things long enough, you're going to believe them.

3:01:38You become them. It's even worse than believing them. It's deeper than that. They're built into you as unquestioned implicit axioms. And as we said earlier on this can go in either direction right you can fake it until you make it one small step at a time Moving toward a vision which you know is positive and you continually reassess to ensure that you're not getting hijacked and going in the wrong direction Yes, or Are you a generator for so look in the in the Pinocchio movie which I've analyzed to death in the Disney Pinocchio you're mr. Pinocchio. Yes, well leading Pinocchio's solar so Pinocchio exactly exactly part Pinocchio is trying to get rid of the strings that that that pull on him every which way that aren't under his control and to become something genuine.

3:02:23Okay, so he has three basic temptations. One is to lie. Right? So that's the nose. The not another is to be an actor. And when I first came across that in the movie, I What the hell's going on here? One of Pinocchio's temptations is to be an actor. Now, why would the Hollywood people do that? Why would they denigrate the actor? And then I thought, oh, it's not an actor. It's a false persona to be the actor instead of the real thing, to be the appearance instead of the reality, to take the credit instead of doing the work, right? To be false, next temptation is to be neurotic. And so interesting, especially in the world that we have now, how perspacacious these animators were.

3:03:09Pinocchio is literally enticed onto the island of pleasure by a false doctor who diagnoses him with an illness he doesn't have. And the story is, look how sick you are. You're working too hard. You need to go to pleasure island. Well, pleasure island is run by slavers. Right? So it's perfect. Well, Be careful what you practice. Be careful what you practice, right? You can be the actor of your own ideal and that's a way of stepping forward. But when you make false claims to who you are, to gain status in consequence, you are you're perverting your soul. What's the soul? The soul is something like the structure through which the world reveals itself to you.

3:04:02It's something like that. So you don't see much of the world, right? You see it through narrow apertures. You see what you allow in. That's another way of thinking about it. You better make sure it's the bright part of the world revealing itself to you. And that isn't going to be the case if you lie. One of the problems I think that a lot of the people listening to this podcast and certainly a lot of my friends who are smart and cerebral encounter, they think themselves into problems and they struggle to use their intuition because they are able to come up with a reason about why they should or should not at any moment, you know, talking about the soul or the inner voice or the conscience or, you know, you might refer to it as God that's coming through the best version of yourself.

3:04:47People that ruminate and introspect are very capable of talking themselves into or out of something that feels like a ristic. Let's because they worship the intellect. How would you advise somebody who enjoys thinking about things deeply to cast that off and be able to hear themselves a little bit more clearly? There's a difference between attention and intellect.

3:05:13There's something to be said for paying attention. It's not the same thing. The intellect, let's say the intellect produces thoughts. the attention gathers information. Right? So if I'm, well, if I'm conducting a podcast, let's say, I'm paying attention to what I don't understand. I'm not thinking. It's not the same thing. I mean, sometimes I think because the person will say something and it'll set off a train of thoughts. But often what I'm just doing is like, well, do I understand what you just said? That's a matter of I have to note my ignorance. I'm attending to my ignorance. Well, this is what Rogan's great at.

3:05:56This is your great at this as well. If you attend to your ignorance, then you know what to do. You just ask the question. It's like, well, I don't understand this. That's a form of humility to attend to your ignorance. That's a good thing for those who worship the Luciferian intellect to do. It's to attend to their own ignorance. It's not about what you know. It's about what you don't know. You already know what you know. So why not investigate what you don't know? Well, how do you do that? You attend to your ignorance. What's the definition of humility? Humility is attending to your ignorance and you can do that wherever you are.

3:06:32Is that not still an intellectual exercise? Here are the holes in what I know. Therefore, I'm just going to continue to ask the questions until I fill them. Well, it's not something completely divorced from

3:06:51It's the difference between questioning and answering. Like, I would say, this is, let's say, definitional. The Luciferian intellect has an answer. What's, when you say Luciferian intellect, what's that? The Luciferian intellect is the intellect that wants to place itself in the highest position. And there's lots of people, smart people tend to be Luciferian because they think that their fundamental value is their intelligence. and they think that intelligence is the fundamental value. And then they're often very annoyed if they're very bright and the world doesn't lay itself out at their feet because they think, well, I'm so smart, everything should just be coming my way because they've prided themselves on that.

3:07:32And intellectual pride, well, that might be the cardinal sin. The Luciferian intellect is the intellect that wants to put itself in the highest position. It's challenges God. That's what Satan is. That's what Lucifer is. Literally in the Miltonian story, Lucifer is the spirit who attempts to usurp God. That's what the Communists did. That's what the Fascists did. That's what we do when we build towers of Babel. And we can easily elevate the intellect to the highest possible place, especially smart people. They do that all the time. It's better to attend to what you don't know. This is why Rogan is a very good example of this, because as Rogan is not an intellectual.

3:08:12He's a seeker. Those aren't the same thing. Rogan is always like a bloodhound. He's on the path of what he doesn't know. And the consequence of that is he knows a lot. You know, a 2 ,000 podcast, 2 ,500 podcasts. He's done like 2 ,500 high level graduate seminars, something like that. It's crazy. And so his questions get better and better as he fills in the gaps. is it intellectual?

3:08:41No, no, it's not. It's, it's, it's, there's a difference between an intellectual pursuit and a spiritual pursuit and the remediation of your own ignorance is a spiritual pursuit. It's predicated on humility. How am I stupid? How can I fix that? No, one of the things I really taught my kids tried to teach them was ask stupid questions, right? And that means you have to admit to your own insufficiency. That's what humility is. And then you have to publicly announce it. Here's how I'm stupid. Can you fix me? And you know, sometimes that is embarrassing, although much less frequently than people think.

3:09:21Usually if you're in a crowd and you have a stupid question and you've been paying attention, 80 % of the crowd has the same question. And they're relieved that, you know, you asked it. In fact, they'll think you're brave. It's so interesting, eh? Because you're afraid. When you ask a question, if you're in a university seminar, you're afraid that what you're going to do expose your stupidity and the what would you say shame? And what happens is exactly the opposite. Is everybody who's too cowardly to ask that question now thinks that you're courageous. It's exactly the opposite of what you think.

3:09:54Yeah, that happens all the time. Always in my graduate seminars, the kids that asked the most ignorant questions, assuming they were paying attention, because you can ask a stupid question, you know, stupid question is you're, I don't know, you're fiddling with your phone and you, and the class has just covered something and you didn't notice and you ask, well, you know, clue in. That's not a real question. That's just, you're just wasting people's time. But And if you're genuinely ignorant, I never had a student who asked a genuine question that I thought was a stupid question, never. And I'd never treat a student that way.

3:10:32It's like, no, no, if you're, if you, it's so cool too, because sometimes the stupidest questions cut to the heart of the chase, you know, it's the kids who would ask a really basic question that also forced me to really understand what I was teaching. And that's a reflection of their humility. So that humility in the pursuit of humility in the pursuit of the ideal, that's not an intellectual exercise. Not not in the strict sense. It's definitely what generates knowledge though. That seems to be a good stepping block to what earned wisdom as well. That's earned wisdom. Yeah. Yeah. Earned wisdom through humility, right?

3:11:18What have you got coming up next? What can people expect from you over the next few months? Well, what I'm working on right now is I'm gonna finish this book. When by the end of December, it'll be published in November, but I'm gonna go on tour weirdly enough about the book, probably starting in January, I'm gonna do an American tour. And then I think I'm gonna go to Africa and to South America and to Southeast Asia, that's the plan. And I'm very excited about this new book. I'm hoping it'll be the best book that I've ever written. It's gonna be more difficult book than the last two were, but not as difficult as maps of meaning.

3:11:56You mean to conceal? Yeah, it's more, it's heavy, it's deeper. Have you been fighting with trying to make it accessible? No, not really. I've been just trying to lay the argument out as clearly as I can. And I think that'll do the trick. I have to go over it again and edit it and make sure that it's no more obscure than is absolutely necessary. No, I want to lay it out so that it's comprehensible. And I've had a lot of success with the biblical ventures that I've already embarked on. I did a series on Genesis in 2017, which turned out to be quite influential. And then I just did a seminar on Exodus with a group of thinkers.

3:12:43And I know there's a hunger for analysis of deep stories. And I also have good people around me that can help me grind my way through the stories and understand them. And so I'm very much looking, I've been having quite a good time writing this book. actually it's very difficult to write but it's been extremely exciting and interesting and I'm hoping you asked me earlier what would I consider success with this book? I don't think that you'll be able to read this book and understand it and be atheistic. I think I can demolish the atheistic argument permanently. And it's partly it's a weird thing because it's not like all of a sudden people are going to throw themselves at the feet of God in worship.

3:13:32It requires a reconsideration of what we mean by belief. I walk through some of it. It's like, do you believe in the good? Well, the difference between believing in good and believing in God is a very narrow difference. Now there are important differences, but it's still a narrow difference. The thing is, if you don't believe in good, you're aimless. And if you're aimless, you're hopeless. And if you're aimless and hopeless, you're anxious and fractionated. And people can't unite in their beliefs. Like the alternative is not good. Reverse the enlightenment is no small task. Well, hopefully we can save the best of the enlightenment as well.

3:14:18It's like the chested and fence of chested and fence. Like how How many different fences are in the field? So to speak, and we're going this one out, and we're trying to plug it back in, but which bit of it's going back in the ground. One of the things that's very interesting, and I think people like Dawkins have started to realize this, and I know that people like Douglas Murray and I, on her C. Ali and Neil Ferguson, have recognized this is that, with the death of God, many other things die, things you don't expect, and one of the things that dies when God dies is science, and no one expected that.

3:14:53How so? Because science as a practice is a religious practice. It's predicated on religious axioms. Well, you have to believe that there's such a thing as truth. You have to believe that the truth is understandable. You have to believe that understanding the truth is good. You have to believe that there is such a thing as good. right? So imagine to be a scientist you have to imagine that first of all that the world is comprehensible to the human intellect but more that if you investigate the mysteries of the material world that that will be beneficial right those aren't scientific claims those are metaphysical claims and that metaphysical claim is nested in a story you know and the the enlightenment types they've portrayed the scientific revolution as something contrary to the religious substrate, and that's not accurate.

3:15:48That's a French revolution. That's a Luciferian intellect history. It's not true. The universities grow to the monasteries. That's where the universities came from. And science, as a widespread enterprise got its start in the universities. And they grow to the monasteries. That's not questionable. like if you go to Harvard or if you go to Oxford and Cambridge, it's just starkly evident. The layout of the of the colleges is a monastic layout. So the idea that there is some fundamental contradiction between religious belief and the scientific enterprise, it's, it's, there's nothing about that that's true.

3:16:32And part of the reason that we're losing, part of the really reason that we're losing the scientific enterprise right now is because we've unmoored it from its metaphysical substrate and it can't survive. If you're going to be a scientist, you have to put the truth above all else. Scientists are very rare. You have to believe in the truth to be a scientist. I think Dawkins believes in the truth, by the way. So he's an atheist, but a very... He's much less of an atheist then he thinks that's my impression. Lying scientists are atheistic or just malevolent. Dawkins is a truthful scientist and in so far as he's pursuing the truth and in so far as he believes that pursuing the truth will set you free, then he's walking down a path that's Christian to its core.

3:17:18Now I know he doesn't like that idea, but he also doesn't like the fact that the scientific If a enterprise seems to be collapsing in terms of its, what would you call reliability and validity everywhere? So I appreciate you, mate. I appreciate the time that we get to spend. It always seems to be at a very interesting inflection again this time. Yeah, the inflection this time is your own tour, right? I am. What's your advice for me? How am I going to survive life on the road? Make sure that when you step on the stage that you understand how unlikely it is that you have the privilege to do this and make sure you remember that all those people who came to see you, they're hoping for something from you.

3:17:58They put in some time and energy to come and see you. It matters what you do. You go out on that stage with gratitude, right? That'll help a lot. You've got to remember that. It keeps you on the ground too. You should be grateful that they're not throwing rocks at you. Right. It's how ridiculous is that you get to do this. How unlikely is it? Right. Exactly. So you keep that first and foremost in your mind. You remember that you should be stunningly grateful for the miracle that you have the opportunity to do this because it's ridiculously improbable. Yeah. Yeah. Trying to do that without getting overwhelmed is becoming an increasingly difficult task.

3:18:39Yeah. Well, part of the way you handle that is that you parse off the jobs that other people can do. You know, when you're out on to her, the social element of that can be overwhelming. So you have protect yourself from that to some degree. But the other thing you do is anything anyone else can do, get someone to do and get someone competent and reliable so that all you're focusing on, get to the next show on time in the right frame of mind. That's your job. Other people have their jobs. Make sure you surrounded by people who do their jobs like our two are so far, they become increasingly well -run.

3:19:19I don't worry about travel, hotels, meals, transportation, none of that. I worry about getting to the venue one hour ahead of time, getting my head in the right place, which has to do with this attitude of gratefulness that I described and then trying to address a serious problem with all the people who are participating in the audience. And then if it's too much, then distribute the responsibilities some more. How do you wind down after a show? I watch the trailer park boys. Of course he do. Yeah, yeah. Well, after being that good, you have to not be so good for a while. And the trailer park boys is a very good way of doing that.

3:20:04counteract a little bit. Yeah, I texted Rogan about this yesterday and I thought that he would, you know, I've got no so many shows that I've done. I thought he would have some wisdom for me. I said, every time that I do a show, I'm so excited. After I finished, I find it difficult to kind of wind down. And I've got four shows back to back, then we fly to Dubai, then we've got all these shows around the US and Canada. And I'm nervous that I'm not going to be able to sleep. And then if I don't sleep, then I'm not going to be able to perform as well tomorrow and then little spiral and I thought that he would just have some wisdom and he said that's a tough one man to be honest I've never had any problem sleeping as I will fuck that I guess you know But now I'm excited I'm excited and I'll check back in with you once Once everything's done.

3:20:44We're gonna record one of them properly fully properly record it like a special So that'll be and maybe we'll put it up. Maybe it'll just stay for posterity I don't know but we're gonna have it so yeah, I'm excited. Yeah, well good luck. Thank you, man and thank you. It should be a blast. Yeah. Yeah, I'm definitely going to learn a lot. And as we've said today, pushing through discomfort and doing different things and following something close to instinct, a lot of the things that I'm saying are vulnerable in some regards. I guess the things that are meaningful to me. And yeah, I hope that people take a lot away from it.

3:21:19And I hope they have done from today too. So one of the things I do when I go on stage is like, I spend the first 10 or 15 seconds looking at the audience. I don't mean I would, I've seen you do this a lot. I would, I would technically refer to it as stalking. But it's not far from a stalk. It's, it's good. I look everywhere. And then this is an exposure technique. You don't want to be afraid of the audience. And so, at all, and you don't want to be talking to the audience. So I look at people and I see, you know, I look everywhere. And as, you know, you can't see in the back rows if it's a big place.

3:21:53But But fundamentally, I look everywhere I can and I look at individuals and I marking them out as people and then I'm remembering, you know, I'm talking to all these individual people who come here and then that's easy because you can talk to individuals and they're your guests, say, that's another, that's another thing for your staff to know too. It's like everyone who comes to one of your events has to be treated in the most positive, possible way because they're looking to you for something, you know, and it's very hard on them if they're treated in hospitably. And so, you know, one of the things we've tried to do, I travel with a fair number of people now, but everyone knows that, like, rule number one is treat the audience members, even the ones that have some trouble, and maybe even their troublesome, is like, treat them like they're guests, because they're guests, and you're bloody lucky that they're here, so don't get all high in mighty about it, because they put in their time and effort to come here, and they're looking for something, so that's part of that gratitude, that, that, and then it's fun.

3:22:52Right? That keeps it fun. It's like you're so privileged to be there talking to them. That's you got to have that in mind. What a privilege it is that What is these people are coming to listen to what you're doing? That's a good deal, man. That's as good as it gets So you want to have that firmly in the back of your mind and the front to I'll try my best Jordan Peterson ladies and gentlemen Jordan. Thank you so much for today I'm looking forward to the next time we get to catch up good to talk to you Chris