#712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs
03:23:42 Share

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My yesterday is doctor Jordan b. Peterson is a clinical psychologist, pod caster speaker and an author.

Finding meaning in the modern world can be a difficult task when life is convenient, comfortable discovering our purpose and facing hard things can be increasingly tough, but there are some reliable routes toward the greatest adventure of your life. Expect to learn why you are morally obligated to do remarkable things. The most important adventure is to be found in life.

My war on cynicism, the delusions that destroy your happiness, Jordan's opinion on doug les murray, why you don't want to be elon musk, why the world has abandoned a belief in god, what it's like work with bench peo, whether universities are salvagable and much more so, so much to take away from today. I really enjoys these conversations with Jordan in eighteen months since he was on the show, and he feels like the world has changed an awful lot in the interim. So very good to sit down and catch about what he's been working on.

Also, don't forget, you might be listening but not subscribed, and that means you'll miss episodes when they go up. So navigate to spotify, a apple podcasts, and press the subscribe button. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentleman, please welcome doctor Jordan b. Peterson.

You say you are morally obligated to do remarkable things. why?

Well, I think partly because life is so difficult and chAllenging that unless you give IT everything you have, the chances are very high that you will emitter you and then you'll be a force for darkness are not good. And so you know the fact that life is short and can be brutal can terrify you into hiding and avoiding.

But I can also, you can flip that on its head and understand that since you're all in anyways, you might as well take take the risks that are adventurous, and that's a very good thing to understand. And what is also useful to understand in that manner is that there isn't anything more adventurous than the truth. This is something that took me a long time to figure out.

Well, you can craft your words to get what you want know when people do that all the time, they cry afterwards. So they can avoid taking responsibility for things they should take responsibility for. They can craft the words to gain an advantage that they really don't deserve.

That's what you do when you manipulate. And the problem with that, you might say, what why not do that if I can get what I want? And the answer that is, you aren't necessary the best judge of what you need.

And it's easy to be deluded in what you want. And that's the sort of delusions the people chase if they chase power. If you decide instead that you're going to just say what you believe to be true, you have to let go the consequences.

And you might think, well, I don't want to let go the consequences because I want to control what's going on. But what you miss them is adventure because if you don't control what's going on, you don't know what the health going to happen. And maybe that's exciting.

And actually, there's no doubt about IT. And then you have the additional advantage if you're attempting to say what you believe to be true and attempting to act in the manner that you think is most appropriate, that's genuinely you and you have the force of reality behind you. You obviously that's what you have for turing to say live in the truth is you have the of reality behind you.

That seems like a good deal. Then you have the reality and the adventure. So why is that a moral obligation? Well, if you hide and you don't let what's inside of you out, and you don't bring into the world what you could bring, and you become cynical and bitter, you will start doing very dark things.

So you start in, not only will you not add to the world what you could add, but you'll start being jealous of people who are competent and doing well and work to destroy them. So that's the pathway to hell, really. So one of the trends .

that have been rAiling against most recently has been cynicism, is this pervasive belief that everything is terrible and I can't get Better, and the people who believe that I can improve a dumb and delusional. And the problem, and I I don't .

know where IT comes from.

I don't I don't want.

is the beginning of wisdom. Cynisca is part of the reason why it's hard to combat know because people start out knife and knife. People are optimistic, but not really.

They are just naive and naive people have no idea that there's, say, malevich in the world. They have no idea that there's more levels in their own heart, their sheltered and dependent. And when that breaks IT often breaks into cynics. And so sync ism is actually an improvement.

The details have fAllen from your eyes.

Exactly, exactly. The problem with sync m is that especially that's allied with a kind of arrogance, is that you can end there and that's a big mistake. So then the question becomes, what once once you've been bitten in hard and you're no longer naive, well, that is very hard on your optimism, let's say. So then the question is, how do you restore that without reverting to the navy, which you can't do anyways, without blinding yourself? You've been britain.

And answer, that is your substitute courage for navy, and you and you regain your optimism as a moral imperative, right? So one of the things you might ask yourself is, well, if the future is likely to be catastrophic and a variety of different ways, which is definitely the case both socially and personally, then what attitude should you bring to barrow on that? And the answer might be, well, if you were courageous and faithful, and I can explain what that means, then you would conduct yourself in in a manner that met the future head on, with the presumption that you can manage IT.

And this is the presumption we should bring to bear politically. And all these, the people who are using fear to garner power, point to the various apocalypses that might be false and it's difficult to counter them because the future is always in apocalyptic horizon, like everything can fall apart and and has before and might well again and will, in fact, in your life as you age and die. And so it's very easy to construct an apocalypse.

Then the question becomes, the question becomes not, is that apocalypse SE potentially real? Because the answer that is yes. But what attitude should you have towards that? Naive, that's not good.

Cynical, that's that's Better, but it's still not good. It's another form of hell, and IT also tends to make the potential apocalypses more likely. Well, so what do you have when you move beyond sync m and what you have when you move yond cynical m is wisdom.

And that's not naive. It's courageous. And one of the things that religious people have done relatively badly, especially in recent years, is they failed to delineate the relationship between faith and courage, know people like darkness and the new atheists.

They point to faith, and they describe IT as something like belief and foolish superstitions. But that isn't really what faith in the deepest stance means. That means that you are willing to act out the proposition that you can ride the wave no matter how big IT becomes and that we can all do that together, especially if we do that in goodwill.

And I think that's that's a much more it's a much more appropriate way to confront the future, and it's also the proper medication for cynicism. Now the other thing the cynics see, the other thing about cynics that's interesting too, is that cynics aren't cynical enough about their own cynics, right? Because you can get doubtful enough to start doubtings the validity of your own cynicism.

So like, what makes you so smart? What makes you the judge of being? And the column kids were like that, you know, they decided that existence itself was unsustainable, given its cruelty, and that the proper response was to put up a giant middle finger to man, men and god.

right? Well, here's a way of being cynical about cynics. How does your cynics let you off the hook, right? How does your cynical m justify your desire to avoid necessary responsibility and to pursue your own short term hedonic gains? Like weren't you cynical about your own doubt? And that's that's another place where wisdom begins like that.

So that's too right. Cynicism beats navy, but it's not the ultimate destination. And you should be cynical enough to question the moral validity of your own of your own resentment and your own, what would you say, your own turning away from the world .

the way that I see, given that we don't know the future, given that much of our motivations are invisible to us, we're not a Crystal pond that we can see into. You have to have some form of delusion about what's going to happen in the future. You're trying your best to see the way that it's going to be. But given the glass could be half and to a half full, why not have a delusion that's going to be useful to one of hope, even in the face, and the understanding that things might be difficult and that .

going to be obstacles there? There is a line of social psychology that pursued that argument for quite a while, that made the argument that people had to have positive illusions about the future, and that that was the fundamental way that people staved off despair and poster their self a steam. But I don't think, I don't think we need to separate out the distinction between fantasy and delusion.

You do have a fantasy about the future. You have to because, like you said, it's not structured. So you have to you have to provisionally map of the future. That's what a plan is. Positive strategy is right, but that doesn't make IT a delusion like IT becomes a delusion when the map bears no relationship to the underlying territory.

So if you have a strategy for the future, maybe let's say that your strategy for the future, just for the sake of argument, is that you have five million youtube subscribers in three years. Well, you have no evidence of the strict sort that that's how it's going to be because anything could happen between now and three years from now, let's say. But you there is no reason to call that a delusion.

It's it's one it's one hypothetically possible path of potential and then you can make the sacrifice is necessary to bring that about. So even though it's a fantasy because IT map something that isn't there, it's not a delusion. It's a delusion when you ignoring elements of your own experience that would inform your fantasy more effectively, you're ignoring them so that you can live in positive representation of the future without having to pay the appropriate Price for IT.

One of my favorite ideas I learned over the last couple of uses, the inner citadel from ici balin. You know this. So a cybermen says, when the natural road toward human fulfillment is blocked, human beings retreat into themselves, become involved in themselves, and try to create inwardly that world which some evil fate has denied them externally.

That's a delusion. Often, if you cannot obtain from the world that would you really desire, you must teach yourself not to want IT. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. This is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth into a kind of innocent deal in which you lock yourself up against all of the fear for eels of the world, mutual friend rob hanna son, explained in a simple way, if your leg is wounded, can try to treat the leg, and if you can't, then you cut the leg off and announced that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued. And I think that we see this everywhere.

Well, okay, so you so match, you lay out a plan and IT meets with an impediment, and IT knocks the slaves out from underneath the plan. Okay, now you retreat. Okay, now you have an option when you're retreating in one option is to construct the world in fantasy where you're taking revenge on those who wronged you and getting what you want.

That's that's a pathway to madness. So often people who develop serious delusions do develop um what would you call them their their compensate fantasies and then they start to dwell in them and often for hundreds of hours. So the kids again, who shot up to call the bite high school, they do out in a fantasy world for hundreds of hours before they undertook their dreadful actions, right? But you can also flip back into yourself, let's say, and you can, this is like, this is like confession.

And tony ment, it's a proper way to think about IT as you can think about what IT is that you did wrong or insufficiently that LED to the collapse of your plan, right? So that's the first investigation. I made some sacrifices I attempted to bring about a particular form of the future.

I did happen. Okay, why? Well, the world is set against me in the Cosmos.

Evil and there's no god. And i'm bitter and cynical. That's one potential explanation, right? Poor me. right. And and i'm not trying to be flippant about this, because sometimes people's dreams are quite realistic and they still fail canasta PC ally, you know, IT can be brutal.

You know, maybe you did make a lot of good decisions and you suddenly got ill, or someone in your family did, and everything went to hell on you. IT doesn't have to be because you've done something cardinal foolish that you fail. No, it's built into the structure of the world, but doesn't matter.

You can also retreat into yourself and you can say something like, all right, I need to read tool, my conception of strategy, but also potentially my conception of goal. You know, maybe i'm looking in the wrong place. Maybe I have to look somewhere else, and you can open yourself up to a revelation.

So there's a gospel statement that's very relevant to this. So Chris tells his followers that if they knock, the door will open. If they ask, they'll receive, and if they seek, they'll find.

And so IT sounds like, IT sounds magical. IT sounds like the sort of thing that the new atheists would have a field day with. But that isn't that's not a wise interpretation about saying the proper interpretation is something more like a recognition of the way thought works. So imagine your plans didn't work out. Can now you sit down and you say yourself, i'd like to know.

Even if the world was conspiring against me and my failure was ninety five percent the fault of external occurrences and other people, what did I do that wasn't as good as I could have been? And where did I fail to look so that the probability of my failure was higher? Now, now to ask that question, you have to want the answer.

That's that's what that means to knock or to ask to seek. This is no joke. It's like you have to want to know.

And it's a very painful thing to do because especially if you had given that you're all to the degree you were able to and you have reason to be bitter, you're going to be searching for the errors that you still made. And discovering your own errors is always extremely painful, right? Is especially if their errors that you're in love with.

And so you have to be willing to strip yourself down. That's what humility means fundamentally. And then but the advantages, this is what so useful to listen to people. You might find out where you're stupid and then you could stop being stupid. And so one of the reasons you confess your sins, let's say, is because you wanted discover where you're insufficient.

Now it's painful, you know, it's painful to encounter an impediment in the form of someone else's opinion that might show you where you're blind and ignorant or wilfully blind even. But the advantage to that is you can rectify the error. And then as you move forward, you're stronger. You know, one of the things I taught my kids, and I hope at least someone successfully, was that you always asked a stupid question.

And and that doesn't mean the sort of question that someone who wasn't paying attention would ask if you're listening to someone and you don't understand what they're saying and you reveal that you're healing your ignorance, you know and maybe you're in a room full of people and you think you're the only person stupid enough to not get IT, which is very rarely the case, by the way. The thing is though, if you if you reveal that ignorance to yourself and to the other person, they can rectify IT. And if you do that a thousand times, you're not ignorant anymore.

And and this is a real pathway to success to you see, you do this because you ask real questions in your podd cast. And rogan does this A K ogan. So was trying to be a little smarter than he already is. And then that works because iterated, like if you ask a thousand dumb questions and you listened the answer, then you know a thousand things, some of them deep that you didn't know before. So that's the that's the advantage to searching your soul, let's say, for the for unrequited sins and attempting to a tone that's not a delusion, right? It's an attempt to say yourself right to the opposite of the delusion, even though there can be a fantastical .

element to IT yeah the conversation on people who try their best, do as many things right as they could and yet still fall short, became the world is random and unfortunate things happen. Happiness, as far as I can see, IT sits in the gap between your expectations and reality.

But the problem here is that people who have high standards often end up feeling a luck, right? How can people who strive like this avoid feeling deponent at falling short of their own high standards? I've heard you talk about the statue of David saying something like you are not all that you could be here. And as soon as you posit an idea, you begin to compare yourself in that idea.

So well, part that's a good question mean um the ultimate ideal is also the ultimate judge because the ultimate ideal is is something against which you fall far short and that might be so painful that you can barely stand IT. But then what you do is you you two things I suppose, is you lower the ideal and you raise your estimation of your of your potential.

And what do I mean by lower the idea? Well, if you're comparing yourself to someone, or even to a future self, and the gap is so painful that IT paralyzes you, then you've created a drag and that you don't have the tools to master. And so what you have to do is you have to scale the drag and down the size.

And you want to scale the drag and down the size until it's size that you are willing to move toward, however small that is. Now, you know, if you're here and your ideal is here and that gap is unbearable, then you reduce the gap and you reduce the gap, and you gonna have to do that anyways, because you're gonna move from where you are to perfect in one fell swap, right? There's going to be incremental steps.

So you have to fill in that that hierarchy of progression with with a high enough resolution representation so that you can start to move forward. And and then you should be buttress. There's another gospel comment that's very interesting.

IT has to do. It's called the Matthew principle. And the Matthew principle is to those who have everything, more will be given.

And from those who have nothing, everything will be taken. Now it's brutal because IT implies that reality works like this. When you're moving up, you go like this, right? And that's pretty nice.

That's a lot Better than this. But when you're going down, you go like that, right? It's like downhill, downhill, Cliff. okay? So you want to avoid the downhill path. Well, if the upheld path is like this, which is like exponential that say or geometric, then what that means is that IT doesn't matter how big the first steps you take up.

Hill r even if they're trivial, even if they're shameful in their in their size because you're so useless that if you if you're disciplined in that, you'll speed up extraordinary y rapidly. And so that's the good news you might say, is that you can take very small steps, even ones that might be shameful in their size, and you have to admit that to yourself. But once you get the ball rolling, IT doesn't role in a linear fashion.

IT rules geometric fashion. And this is a really good thing to know, because IT can take the thing out of the realization of your own stupidity. It's like, yeah, you know, everybody has their weak sides. Let's say things they're embarrassed about.

When I first started going to the gym, I was like, how old I one thousand nine hundred eighty five twenty three, and I think I wait one hundred and thirty five pounds, and I was at six foot one, very, very thin, a twi write twenty seven, and wait something like that. I smoke like mad, and I drink too much like I wasn't in good shape. The first, the first attempts forward I took in the gym, I went to the swim exercise class.

Jesus IT was me. And this, like, really fat guy, Young guy, probably not anywhere shaped than me. And like seven old women over seventy, and they could outswim me like, I was pretty damped, humiliating. And so I did a semester of that, got myself and somewhat Better shaped. And then I started to go to the gym to work out to lift weights.

And that was also rough because, you know i'd be underneath the bloody bench press trying to lift seventy five pounds off the off the rests and you know some muscle headed bastard would come over and tell me how to do IT. It's like, yeah, thank you but you know it's embarrassing and lots of times people won't do things like go to the gym because they're so embarrassed about how they look at what sort of shaped they're in. And it's a pain to start at the bottom.

But you start at the bottom where you're weak. And if you want to rectify what's weak, you have to accept the fact that you're at the bottom and that the first steps are gone to be painful. You know, I IT took me about three years, but I stopped smoking, and then I stopped drinking.

And I game forty pounds, muscle, and like, three and half years, something like that. I basically to stop doing that because I had to eat like six times a day was crazy. But I got a lot more physically confident and a lot more coordinated, because working out with dumb bells makes you coordinated right? Because IT IT exercises all the small leggings and attendance.

And so my lower body in particular, or got a lot more ordinary, then I could dance. So that was Better when I was going out dancing, because I did a lot of that graduate school. And but the point of all this is, if you're gna rectify your weaknesses, you have to admit your insufficiency to your own shame. Now, if the gap between you and your idea is so great that IT paralyzes you, you shrink that, right? One of the .

things i've been talking about in the live shows is your comparison group is incorrect. The fact that, you know, we have the opportunity to sit down and listen to anybody on the planet, right, the best minds, the best athletes, the best thinkers, the most articulate that are alive right now, all listen to the people that have died that were around when video cameras existed.

And you can compare yourself to that group, yes, but that's not your comparison group. If you have the impetus to sit down and listen to mean, you waffle on for three hours about this deep topics, these interesting ideas, you are so already selected out of the Normal group, you're already asking yourself questions that almost nobody, almost nobody else is right. But because your comparison group of people that are unbelieved the high performing, remember, before I started in my podcast, i'd listen to to you, or to sam, or to joe, and I think, god, that recall is is amazing.

It's so it's like they would ve just got this identic memory and everything that they ever red is able to come to the surface. They're able to say that in this way, it's completely seamless. And all the rest of IT we go, okay.

Well, are you really person that's never recorded a podcast before going to compare yourself to geo ogan man that's recorded a thousand and spent ten thousand thousand on stage and on all of this U F, C. Commentary and on all of this stuff in terms of TV, is that really who you are going to compare yourself to? And it's unfair.

And the problem that I see is people who have big dreams for themselves and want to do great things, they like to set their sites high yeah. And yet they feel despondent in the comparisons. I think there's.

I did not too way .

I like I can be.

I want to be well, or that who I should be comparing myself too, right? That's the pride. And the pride is something like I should be that, or even I could be that like, well, maybe you could, but you're certainly not going to do IT, as you already pointed out, without the apprentice, right? So you could say that the despondency is actually is is in proportion to the to the false pride.

Now I wrote a chapter in, I think, my first book, which was compare yourself to who you are today, not to who someone else is. It's sorry, I I angled out to some degree, but you get at the point the proper comparison group for you is you yesterday because you can make first of all, you're you're you you're the only control group that's appropriate to you because you have a certain set of talents and possibilities and limitations and tragedies that are truly unique to you. And so you might be comparing yourself to someone else on some dimension, but it's not a reasonable comparison because you don't know what talents they were blessed with, you also don't know what opportunities they had that you didn't.

Actually, it's just not a reasonable comparison. It's a lot Better to think about who you were and then to think, well, could you be somewhat Better in some dimension? And the the positive thing about that is the answers almost always.

Yes, now you can orient that transformation towards some Stellar target, and that's a reasonable thing to do. But that doesn't exactly mean that you should compare yourself to that target. Aiming at something and comparing yourself to IT are not exactly the same thing. Plus your bloody comparison is also a delusion. You know, that's another thing that you have to understand, is that you look at the person you jealous of and really what you're doing is your you're looking through a very narrow appear 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, right? 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 is a good example.

You wanted to be Russell brand. You wanted to be as charismatic and as famous he is. Well, you're real wish is that you get to have everything russia brand has, but none of his problem.

Well, come on. I mean, that's just it's just it's no wonder that a vision like that would make you responded because it's it's naive, it's resentful, it's jealous, it's bitter and it's unreasonable. You have take the good with the bad. You have take the bad with the good. And people very rarely think about that when they're thinking about know the famous people they think they'd like to be.

There was a recent interview with elon mosque 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, they don't understand. What do you think of that? Elan, someone that people probably look up to and admire, is going to be .

one of the downsides to high level genius is you might describe IT as hyper mania. 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 as many four letter words as you can in three minutes that begin with tea. Okay, that's that's pretty constrained.

Four letters and tea, or or write down as many words as you can in three minutes to begin with. S, that's less constrained, all right. So there is 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. Fluency is how many words .

you can produce in a given.

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 to write down like twelve words, and some are write down one hundred and fifty. And the ones who are writing down one hundred and fifty, their minds are going at a hyper manic rate. They're just thinking .

five times this.

yeah, without any remission whatsoever. And when that gets completely out of control, you have manic, you have someone is manic and there's nothing fun about manic. That's where the word manias comes from.

And someone whose manic has a thousand different plants, 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 limited pathology on the creative front. And someone like mosque is clearly a genius.

That's what he's contending with in his international landscape. Now I am not saying that he's manic because I see no signs of that, but someone that creative is on that edge or you told you see someone like being superior IT me. It's very interesting to talk to band because and russia brand is the same way super speaks, I think, more rapidly than anyone I ever met.

But if you're with them, you see very clearly that he's probably thinking five times that fast, and that's a lot. And when I was writing maps of meeting, 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 twelve hours, as, and the thoughts came as way faster than thinking.

They probably came about as fast as I can read. And I can read about twelve hundred words a minute if the materialism overwhelmingly dance. And so IT was just non stop thought for like sixteen hours a day. That's part of the reason I started lifting weights because if I was lifting.

have be thinking at twelve hundred words a minute while I love got one hundred .

thousand and my yeah, yeah, yeah I was enough to shut IT down. And IT was also one of the reasons that I drink, because that was another thing .

that would shout IT off you. Well, I think the Price that people pay to be the person you admire is just such an interesting frame to look at someone like you on 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. You get to, you know, dance on stage and and release cars that you a bullet proof and put rockets in space still. Well, yeah, but what about all of the baggage?

What's the right? He also appears to me to be hyper conscientious ous. And I know people who've worked with him like mosque, isn't just a creative genius.

He's also an extremely conscientious engineer, which and really concious engineers. They are very interesting minds. I like talking the engineers because my brother was a great engineer.

And when when he understand something, jim, when he understands something, he understands how to build IT out of Adams, 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. I know he works all the time.

Yeah, does that sort of a hydrophone executive function helped to arranged some of the defuse creative energy we're going na put IT into this one thing at least for a while.

and they will move on to another place. Yes, I definitely you you erik einstein, a good example of someone. I hope eric isn't annoyed, ed by this, but eric is unbelievably created, but he's not particularly conscientious.

And so his and and I think he found an occupation where that works extremely well because he's I don't know, he's still doing this, but he worked with Peter deal for quite a long time as his idea, man, right? And eric, an extremely interesting person. Mosque is hyper creative. And as far as I can tell, hyper consanguineous and the conscience ously does focus IT and 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 countries est person in a thousand, you're one person in a million and mosque is probably more like one person in one hundred million, right? Something like that maybe more, but or maybe a billion, right? Maybe yet.

Interesting to consider the changes that happen to people as well as they as their platforms as the scrutiny y around them continues to increase. Obviously, this has been a journey for you over the last, you know, need the approaching ten years now with two thousand six with that still see sixty two thousand and sixty two thousand and sixteen. Yeah, sorry. How have you found fame change you? What's been the impacted or changed due to the the scrutiny and the surveilLance and the adoration and the criticism?

Well, the first thing that changed, I think, was that I saw misery on a scale that I hadn't really seen IT before. No, I had worked as a clinic for a long time, and I worked with, say, twenty people a week, and I was always in the realm of difficult existential problems wrestling with my clients, problems alongside of them. And I like that a lot.

And then I had my research, and I had my family and various business interests. And so that missoury, in some ways, was contained in boxing. And I had a lot of structure around that to be able to function, despite the fact that I was necked deep in twenty people's serious problems, which I really like, by the way, when when 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 john athan. hind's.

Research is indicating this, that possibly Young women are even in the shape, but for whatever reason, most of the people I was meeting, at least to begin with, our Young men, I think that was probably because most of them, far more people on youtube, very Young men. And so the IT was shocking and brutal to see how much demoralization help widely spread the demoralization. And our culture was other than that.

And that that was a real shock. And IT 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 full of to be anything but abjectly grateful. Mean, the misery that I saw was a shock and IT hurt me. And IT IT was part of what?

How did how did that impact you? Did that change the way that you see the world?

IT made me understand more deeply how important IT was to offer people and 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 tame I tour constantly is because IT seems to be good. IT seems to be a good thing. No, we've even seem 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 and to women was higher. And the men, we're generally there alone, and they were of them.

We're looking pretty ragged around the edge. And now five years later, half the audience comes in suits. It's as if they're dressed for a wedding.

Most of the guys are there with some women. Um the 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 think that I was in a constant storm of aggravated controversy.

But all of that, virtually all of that is virtual. It's just in the online world. Now, IT touches the actual world from time to time, because I am being pursued by my regulatory college eduction.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is, you know, mostly just an annoyance and a preposterous annoyance and preposterous, expensive and time consuming annoyance. But apart from that, everything that happened around me has been positive, a IT.

That's a strange thing, too positive at such an intensity that even that is daunting. You know you 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 I am in that situation and it's quite something to contend with. I I was fortunate I supposed to some degree that IT didn't happen to me til I was all because i've never really, i've never really got .

a customer to IT. I've had a thought about this. What's happened to you? And you know, the widest are a good example of this too. We often hear the paris of getting things too Young in demo, I culkin of the world, the britany speers 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 on mood. 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 your on, and then out of nowhere, you get ripped away from all of the areas of reference, all of the way markers that thought you knew, and now you're just floating in the earth. I I imagine that could be even more discreetly in some ways.

Well, when everything grew up around me to begin with, IT was stressful, I would say, because my job was on the line, my university job, and I never thought that would happen. I mean, my when I worked at harvard and at the university of toronto, that was all positive. Like I really like working with my graduate students.

I had at least cordial relationships with my, with my fellow facility members at harvard. They were more than cordial at the university of toronto. Most of the facility members that I started to develop friendships with were also those who ended up moving away.

And so and they were often people who got offers from other places, and 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 us tightly tied in with regards to friendship networks among my parents, as I had IT harvard, for example.

But I had great relationships with undergraduates and with my graduate students that was planning like I loved working with my graduate students and so wasn't like I was pining in loan, not at all had a good network of friends and and so then that was threatened and really disappeared in two thousand and sixteen. Um and 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 eventually someone's going to find out what i'm teaching and you know there's gonna trouble I couldn't believe I was allowed, encouraged to teach what I was teaching um but you know the universities and this was particularly true of harvard in the united. That's how they were structured.

What was so rebellion about what what you were teaching.

Well, there wasn't really anybody who was concentrated on the nexus between, say, architects, al ideas architect and religious ideas in neuroscience. So that wasn't the thing. I mean, neuva a few people yet.

Panem was one of them who a lot of the researchers who are interested in the neutral signs of emotion became interested in deep narrative because they started understand that our emotional life is a story that's a good way of thinking about IT, and that we are guided, we are guided by our emotional instincts. Ts, and what our emotional instincts to do is put us into certain stories. That's what IT means to be in love. For example is that you're in love story .

in yeah not it's not a particular baLance of oxytocin and in dorlin ins that you are aware of, it's not broken down to its constituent part. Finally, italian about this means.

and well and interesting that the manifests itself as a story. And so I was very interested in narrative and story. And I and also see no psychologist study.

Carl, you not like literally virtually none really. Now definitely not. I mean, psychology. Psychology really developed in some ways as the materialist antithesis to psycho analysis.

So freud and Young and even add ler, to some degree, they were off limits for for scientifically trained behavioral psychologist. And that's what I was, and am I I trained at my gill. There were no courses in psychiatric theory at my gill.

I read fraid and you completely on my own, a flying in the face of the advice that I was getting, even from my well meaning graduate supervisor, who is 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.

And 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, when 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 d 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 know what 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. What a stupid way of starting your career.

Well, that goes back to the truth, right? Telling the truth what you going to. If you tell a sufficiently seductive lie, what is the best you can hope for, right? The person that you are telling the line 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 in all, and what I was interested in.

And two people, three people bit. And the one that I like, best party, because he was at my gill and I wanted to be in montreal or with my graduate supervisor, Robert peel. And he knew what he was kid.

And we had a great time. I still work with him like 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. That was because like bob's a very honest person.

We were very different. He's very practical. He's a very good administrator, a manager, erik type, although he is super smart, he had an exhaustive knowledge of the relevant research, psychology, literature.

And I came and, you know, flying on a matter psychoanalytic theory and philosophy and religious ideas, very, very different, although we shared a real deep interest in the practical alias of research. And he taught me how to fall in love with the more scientific of the research distribution. But the point on making is that he knew, 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 subterfuge, and I turned out that are his talents and mind dove tale extremely well. So and we had a blast I loved working with well, and like that's we been working together for forty years.

I traveled all over north amErica with bob because we also started a business, and I 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. Yes, not for this thing. You've created this lie.

Does this story that doubles. 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 industries been working for a long time, is accumulated a number of haters and fans, and to the back end of his career, as dog as is starting his, he decides that he wants to release a western play about the life of prince Charles and rimming copyright, adventurous as as western plays go. And obviously was all of this scrutiny, because he was this very well known individual within the publishing world.

And opening night, by the half time into that, there was no one left in the entire o auditorium, including the, and this guy was devastating ted, right? And he was marked in the press or the rest of IT. Pretty Douglas m. Shortly afterward, and asked him kindly.

was like, block, like.

what are you thinking, western play about the life of prince Charles and fucking rimming couplets. He said, what I followed, my instinct and instinct. They may sometimes lead you wrong, but that the only thing that ever let you right, right. And that stuck with me because.

yeah, there there's something very relevant there too on the instinctive front, kay. So things will back into you and call to you, and you'll have the 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 pathologies your instincts and then your intuitions lead you wrong. And so there's a sin that's laid out in the gospel s it's the sin against the holy ghost, and it's unforgivable. And people have been debating for like two thousand years about what this particular thing is. But it's something like the pathologist ation of the instincts that orient you.

If you sacrifice your relationship to the truth, you warp your vision and then you can see, and then one day they'll be dark and they'll be sharp things in the fog in front of you and you'll wonder, write into them because you pathologies your own vision ah you don't want to lie because you you programme 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 will think, oh my god, the world is 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 and then you think, while the worlds made of nothing but obstacles is like, 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 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.

Psych, well, how could IT be otherwise? If you see, if you really unjust? This people have commented to me many times about my bravery, and I, I, I don't like that.

I it's, it's, it's not right. I'm afraid of different things than the typical person. Maybe 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 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 i'm writing a book at the moment called me who rest with god and one of the things Christs says to people continually is to not damage the vision, is to not put. That's the best way of putting IT. Don't include your eye. You can see what's in front of you if you're willing to see IT and if you're willing to see IT. The terrible lobs, many of the terrible obs cycles 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.

what the best thing that you can hope for, if you do, do that, is to fluke success, leaving somebody else like.

right, right? Great, wonderful. Yeah, exactly. You get to be, you get to be a successful fraud.

I remember this documentary about ron jeremy. My think they called him the head hog. He's this famous porn star.

have in a muc video.

okay, 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 jeramy 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 ava of success, right? And so he got what he wanted. I suppose he had easy access to easy women.

Well, let me give let me give you this. This is why I think the beginning of the install movement and the black pill movement was born out of pick up artist. The origin, if you trace IT back using internet history of the insel black pill ideology, was A, I think it's a subway or a website called P A hate pick parties hate.

And what IT was was A A group of men who had been through the pipeline of pickup artistry yeah, and come out the other side with a very jed 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 twenty notes, pick up our history, is you realized that there is a particular set of actions, a script you can run yeah, which makes IT more likely than a woman is going to go to. But what you realize, when you do that, as you learn how to neg and do keino escalation 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, right, who you are. And this extravagant persona that you need to convolution into existence in order to get this woman into bed makes .

you feel worse.

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. This is 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 most guys directly.

the form of scripted psychopathy. So what a psychopath does is pain competence, right? So most psychopaths are very emotionally stable.

And so one of the. Early stage markers for competence is self position and common. And so if you're not an anxious person, you've got an edge on that already.

And most psychopath are very high stability. And so they look confident because confident people tend not to be that nervous. Like if you're doing something, you're expert at what you're not nervous because you know how to do IT.

okay. So the lack of nervousness is a hint to competence. What you can fain that, you can gain confidence, you can fain confidence. That's what the pick up artist teach. Now I would say there's even some utility and what they do, right?

Because if you're dependent and bitter and resented 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 cloth. And you could learn through that how to fill in the gap. Sait, 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 your you're being rewarded for being fake, right? And that's part of the problem without you 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 that's the ultimate extreme of jade ness. And if you practice manipulating, especially if the women happen to be reasonable, good women, if you practice manipulating them in your successful, then you're learning to be one, you're learning to be one horrible person.

Now, 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, what sort of like substituting cynical m for navy now as a complex problem? I mean, part of the reason that people like and tate are so attractive to Young guys is because they do put up that.

confident. That false confidence IT takes a complicated guy because it's not all false. You know real people are complicated.

The way that like baLance and in comic books aren't takes a fighter is clearly the case that he's got a certain degree of physical bravery. That's real. alright.

There's an element of what he says that very attractive to bid bedroom basement dwelling losers because he's at least there out in the world, you know, taking the blows and he's got a fast car and he's flashy and he's attractive 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, is not an optimal model for people who are trying to progress.

But it's a strange thing because just as cynics is an improvement over nativity, right? The capacity to be dark is an improvement over the lack of ability to be dark at all. And so tate is attractive in the way that the shadow beckons to people who are undeveloped, right? Because he does is like your your neurotic and your dependent and you're repressed because your images 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 is not harmless, right? Well, that's that's a it's a virtue now it's a virtue that has to be bracketed.

It's like cynics is a virtue compared to navy, but it's not it's not virtuous of itself. It's a step on the way. And so maybe you can learn how to fain confidence and you can learn how that works.

And maybe that's an improvement at a guy in my clinical practice who got involved with the pick up our this community and he told me, taught me a lot about IT. And one of the exercises that their initiates had to do was to go and ask fifty women for their phone number in one day. And that's a great exercise. You know, when i'm not .

explosion therapy approaching diety.

absolutely getting over your fear of rejection, right? And fifty times i'll do that because you're gonna get rejected. The vast majority, well, likely fifty times, although generally that wasn't people's experience. You know if if they were even vagary skilled, they at least get a false phone number out of the deal, but then they could lay learn that the rejection wasn't as catastrophic as they thought. But more important, they learned that they could continue moving forward in the face of rejection.

So 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 tank amount to destruction. IT does exactly the same thing. You need to IT goes back to asking stupid questions, being prepared to ask the stupid questions, and look not like the most informal to person in the room, but also, importantly, nowhere near the most stupid person in the room, because you are the .

one is asking the stupid dest 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 .

a from .

you that's part of this idea that you should love your enemy. So you might say, what why should you do that? Well, your enemy is gonna your horse's 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 we're there. And so that's a it's a very. A very strange way of looking at the world to think that you should welcome an attack, you should eat.

And this is, but this is right. Yes, i'm saying that with all do caution, let's say the the more vicious the attack. The more of your potential hidden flaws might be revealed, have you all? definitely.

But I also found that. The attacks forced you to contend with IT to to see if it's there right to to test IT. I suppose the attacks that have come after me that have been most successful, they are they're almost always journalists and they're usually british female journalists.

but not always. We produce a nation of hot hitting journalists.

Yeah well, in faith in journalist is the lowest in the U. K. And anywhere in the western world.

And I can see why. no. But there's some advantage. There's some really advantage to facing someone. It's a fera acy problem in in the gospel. Chris was always contending with these ferries, and what the ferraris were always trying to do was to lay a verbal trap forum.

So this is ferry Y A person.

Ferrari was a, was a jewish sect. And the ferries were very legalistic tic in their interpretation of mosaic law. So they were sort of, they were hypo critical the way their portrait in the gospel, they were hyppolito al by the book moralists.

And part of what, and most of their morality was, for sure, they like to pray in public. They like to be seen being holy, at least that's the criticisms that are levy 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 as a herit can kill them, right? So every single thing they say is a snare of some sort.

And there's lots of journalists like that. Nelly balls, who wrote an article about me for the new york times, which was a very devastating article in many ways, and very certain time and and saddle SHE. Three years later, he wrote another article about what I was like to work for the new york times when he was working there and the tricks that the journalists played, including her.

And he 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 is to trick you into saying something that will end your career. Essentially.

that social status stands on the shoulder of yours.

Absolutely, absolutely. And so now the 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, won by channels for griffe, Kathy, Kathy newman.

thy griff .

and Cathy. Kathy, at least had a sense humor. Another one by Helen Lewis, who had no sense of human at all and doesn't seem to have learned anything at all in the interm.

But I think that I think that one has eighty 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 fifty tricks or one hundred tricks.

Kathy had like four when they were pretty blunt and he 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. And so but how does this feel looking back on those two?

There were very formative time, which 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've said at the time I took you many days to recover from that kind of KTV kerris 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 IT because I was ill, IT took me a long time to recover from a serious boat. I mean, the first time I talk to sam Harris, not that sam play 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 my chair .

talking to some Harris makes you ill. 对。

No, no, not at all. No, no. Salon, I ve had very productive conversations. That was another good example, I suppose, of the utility of an adversarial conversation. You know what means, sam comes to a conversation like that pretty well armed, but it's very helpful because IT forces you to look in nux and currents that you might not have looked in. And to be Crystal clear to the degree that that's possible about what you're actually saying.

the idea of of loving your enemy is something have been playing with a little bit recently. It's been I guess, my platform is getting to the level now where there's a reason for someone to have a house I pointed at least remotely in my direct because there's no point in trying to take somebody down. That's nothing that's got no status. Why you do best the time you're the step that you're going to get in terms of you stay to standing on the show. This is so small .

that it's a and compliment .

in the same way. Yeah um but you're right. And some the some of the criticisms that i've got ten 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, as I I know that you won't doing this to make me Better. Yes, I know that you want doing this to try and to try and benefit me. And yet, and yet, yes, in reflection, it's like alchemy. It's like a roly southern and calls IT alchemy taking something that was bad.

I had this reflection. Well, we've learned, my families learned, like, when a public attack occurs, there's a massive opportunity nested in IT. If you can reorient like, okay, this is bad.

This is vicious. This is not, this does not look good. And maybe you could take me out to 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 or not side of things was when I was written into captain in america, as .

I spoke to.

well, IT was shocking, right? IT was, IT was very shocking. And then I live a wild. Now, that was shocking too.

Yeah, there's a literal of.

yes, yes. Well, and IT did became increasingly preposterous. And and the livia wild episode was one of the that was so proposers IT was almost .

immediately safely that film was so badly made. And i'm pretty sure that SHE cast her boyfriend as one of the got rid of someone that was super competent and put somebody in that was pretty incompetent. And I think that that kind of caused IT to flub. But yeah the the enemy thing I i've ended up becoming really good friends with one of my harshest critics. It's so strange, uh, and yet makes complete sense afterward.

Uh, you how did you end up making friends?

So I got criticized um by a pair of pod casters who um do this they they kind of take down or or they have a very critical a eye of much of the of the podcasting world and they they did episode about an episode I done and they have a right of reply thing yeah, sam been on to do IT been on to do.

I I did couple of the constant is in being to do and I I went on and there was a bit of like I listen to that show, I think it's very illuminating way to see how people that have a different perspective about what's going on in in your world see IT and I was like, yeah, I got the opportunity to go on in and have a conversation and I did and I found them to both be like way more charming than I thought that they were going to. And i've ended up both Chris and matt or a matt less so. But with Chris, like we must speak once a month, every couple of weeks, will of the so just ring and will catch up about what's being going on in the world.

And he has a very different sort of world. Dee, to me, he lives in a different area of the world. He psychologists studying a religion, I think, and and h 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 I was really uncomfortable because this was still, this was three years ago, something now maybe, and i'm still super uncomfortable about IT. And oh my god, these people going to take me down.

And they both academics, and they're really, really well educated, and they are gonna smart. They going to say, things make me look silly. And I said things that make me look silan.

Picked a particular episode, baba. And yet, in reflection, it's been 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.

And I I almost think that the degree of discomfort that I went through was Mandatory because how I not felt so much like fear and anxiety, embarrassment about the fact that i'm going to going to be out there and we will focus attention and not a nice way. It'll be tweet and all the rest of stuff that was sufficiently uncomfortable to force me to actually genuinely look at the things that 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 IT was as much a gift as IT could be. Here's another thing I spoke to David gog's about this last year about how I was boi as a kid. I was quite unpopular in school, and I was an only child, so I didn't really have many people to back me up, you know, in the school yard, whatever. And I for a long time had a chip on my shoulder about the kids that is treated me in school, as you might expect. And then I got to what, you know, maybe a few years ago, I really, really started to reflect on IT and realize that so many of the things that I value in myself, with the light side of something dark, that had been created during that time in school.

So my complete prepared ness 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 podcasting work, or spending hours and hours working, or researching, or recording podcasts, or doing intro oh whatever is like all of us things um not having a super tight social network as a kid meant that I wasn't beholding to anybody when I grow up, that I didn't feel the need to have as much A. 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 I was missing as a kid um 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 a 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 as positive. But then another level above that would be, wow, so maybe I should be thankful.

right? right? Well, know, we were talking earlier in the podcast vote. What is the appropriate attitude towards the future? And I would say, well, we could put past, present, in future, in the same in, say, well, one of the things that you want to do is practicable titurel.

One of the primary religious rituals you might say is the practice of gratitude. You might say, what, my life is so horrible, what do I have to be grateful for? And I would say that that's for Better, worse.

That still a form of blindness, right? 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. no. 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, but job is a story of unjust suffering. Fundamentally, god deems job a good man. So we have IT on god's word. The job is actually good man.

And then all help breaks lose, partly because god makes a bit with sam, which is, you know, a hell of the thing to do, and says, do your worst. He'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 these terrible things have been happening to him. It's brutal and job refuses to lose faith in himself. He says, look, i'm i'm not perfect.

I'm but as far as men go, i've done what I should do and 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. I'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, cursing and die because things have come so badly for job he 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.

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 and say and conspire against you, they'll be times in your life for IT feels like that's happening.

And 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 at the hell of bitterness and resentment and in gratitude. And well, that turns into the desire for revenge very, very quickly. 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 is and I 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, you know and that's a hell of a thing to say and you know, you might say, without impossible people, some people have such brutal lives that they are destined to be corrupt. But I would say that's not true.

I ve ve met many people, particularly in my clinical practice, who had lives that we're so brutal that you couldn't even listen to them without you, like breaking you into pieces. Brutal, brutal childhoods of of a 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 in the world. And so it's like that on the table for people.

IT seems like an odd paradox that the people who have been brought up under lives of the most privileged, often the ones that have the most complaints about the world, and people who have been brought up in deprivation, a lot of I were able to be perfectly in gratitude. IT seems very strange that that .

that's the way, yeah, well, like having. So one of the things I saw, the university, I saw that fact, 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 that didn't really happen at harvard when I was there in the ninety nineties, although I was starting to fray around the edge slightly.

But I really watched at the university of toronto in the twenty years I was there. The administration kept making demands on us, and every time they made a demand, we would vote every time, ten thousand micro retreats. So then the administrators took over the university, and then the work types took over the administration.

And that was that. Well, the reason what I saw, my fact members do, the academics that I worked with, is that this is how the corruption starts, is like when you're undergraduate, you write down what you think the professor wants to hear to get the grade, and then you're a graduate student. Then you you have to, let's say, get along with your professors and your supervision.

You 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 are three levels of being professor.

You're not ten year 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 build to tell the truth. But that's based on this weird idea that the courage to tell the truth is based on security. What courage is 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, win the zero risk. Well, obviously, that's a contradiction in terms.

You're only courages if there's a risk. And not only that, by the time you've sacrifice your word for elusive security for fifteen years, there's nothing left of you. That's true. You've already that's gone a long time ago.

You you probably look back at the former self who was never thought that you could say what you think as just well, you're IT you're cynical about IT you know that person just didn't know how the way, didn't know how the world worked. And then it's the same thing that you point IT out. The idea that you become good because you have material plenty. That's a silly idea. Why would that be?

The case is like the same as assuming the old rich people have got taste right.

poor people .

who have got beautifully designed interiors and rich people who have got goldy method right yeah well then the poor people .

are actually rich.

absolutely. Um 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 eighteen to twenty five, thirty four percent reported feelings of loneliness. Fifty one percent said achievement pressure negatively impacted their mental health. Fifty eight percent reported lacking meaning or purpose in their lives.

In the last month, fifty percent reported that mental help was negatively influenced by not knowing what to do with my life. There has been much examination of the world being fifteen s aged fourteen to seventeen. Not much has been known about those occupying the critical Young adults. And yet Young adults report roughly twice the rates of anxiety and depression as teams. 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 thirteen and fifteen was the most difficult transition. But I saw that become older by the time my kids, my kids are thirty now, basically, by the time my kids were Young adults, I could see that that transition into adult od was the place where the difficult is. We're starting to.

I think, perversely, that the therapeutic world has a fair bit to do with this, partly because therapies who are basically secular, liberal, protestants as a good way of thinking about them, ten to conceptualized mental health. As mental as subjective right is like 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. Well, obviously you're not because other people what other people have to go along with your game, their buddy and they're you're gna do that. They're not gonna do IT or they're gone to do IT voluntarily or they're gone to do IT by force.

If they're not gonna do IT, you're screw if you have to use force that's not gonna. And if you want them to do IT voluntarily, then it's not gonna 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 while part of IT is the they're thinking i'm not trying to be judge mental of a whole generation. It's a, it's a form of thought.

Your mental health isn't dependent on you. It'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 precondition for successful adaptation. As 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 in IT. That's not sanity. That's impulsiveness.

That's endlessness. They're the same thing. If it's what if it's all about what you want right now or more accurate, all about what's something in you want this moment. That's the definition of image 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, 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. Well, 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 is 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 of a sudden we'd be mentally healthy. It's like. There is no difference between thinking about yourself and being miserable. Technically, if you, if you, if you look at you can, you can group descriptive statements about yourself. Statistically, all the, all the descriptive, all the descriptors that are reflective of self consciousness load on negative emotion.

I do not 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 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. Why do you like your podcast? You can pursue what you're curious about, but you did 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 he kept me accountable because I knew that if I didn't do IT, if I wasn't regression precise and um aligned with what i'd said and done previously, that there was external eye that's watching OK oo OK.

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 a view as a consequence of what you say and how you act.

Okay, that's not about you. That's about your nesting in a social hierarchy, right? And so I think I think you can and then you might say too, well, maybe you're thinking about yourself when you establishing an aim or a goal.

Well, not if their good names are goals because if their good aims are goals and 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 situations, including many, many people. So the a solution that iterative across time, that and that is situation independent and that's broadly socially inclusive is a Better aim, right? It'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 aims have the characteristics I just described, they're not about you. And then we can also ask, what do you mean about you? Exactly what you are you talking about here? 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. Okay, 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 sing 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 too. 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 reduce who you are to your sexual desire, you've reduced your sexual desire to the minimal set of preconditions that would satisfy. Well then the first question that might come up there is why not just use porn? It's a lot simpler.

And answer that is that is what people are doing. Well, it's no wonder that they're anxious and loan some an aimless because we've they've reduced themselves to a short term desire. They found the easiest possible way of gratifying that and they've abandoned everything that would be a much broader conceptualizing of what sexuality would be if I was embedded properly in how about a relationship to start with, are not just these are not just opinions.

So there are two different strategies of reproduction broadly in the animal world. One is zero investment, fish, mosquitoes, million of spring, they all die. But one, right? So you can reduce reproduction in mosquito oes, basically to sex, and you make a million 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. Now you might say, well, we could pull sexuality out of the relationship and just indulging 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 nights and human being repetitive, one nights ands. 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 bans? So let's go to the short term, one nights and sequential relationship types. Okay, who are they? Psychopathic, narcissistic, macewan and sadistic all one .

night stand people.

If they don't start out that way, they're going to end that way because you can't use yourself or other people for short term gratification. K, 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 not like that. I just like sex. It's like, yeah but if you practice that for five years or you're not going to become what you practice, you know and.

I talked to rest a brand about this little bit on, and I can say this because I was on his podcast. So it's not like this is secret, you know, Russell had what? And rotate promises his followers.

He had fame, he was charismatic and he had more or less unlimited access to short term sexual gratification OK. In combination with, you know, the chemicals that make that even more likely, alcohol and cocaine, let's say. So what are the consequences? Well, I asked, what were the consequences? You had this? He said, uh, despair, anxian, hopelessness, right? But but not just that.

Because, you know, russia got himself in trouble here months and half ago, just about took him out. Well, IT was this past coming back to on time I can. He had to score through his psychic, see, you know, well, 要。 And with all these short term relationships, these short term sexual gratification binges that I adult gin, did I ever cross the line? Well, the answer is, well, you're gono na have like two hundred encounters like that.

You're not going to cross the line when you're drunk, when you're on cocaine, you're going to a cross a bunch of lines, and then it's gonna come back and haunt you. And so. 行。

It's very interesting to see in our culture back to the hopelessness and despair that you were mentioning, that characterizing Young adults life is like, well, it's all about me that's the self, the steam movement but then me becomes its all about what I want and then that becomes its all about what I want right now. Then it's it's what the lowest part of me wants right now.

And to help 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 play in that game. And the other thing is even worse than that because you're going to end up with the jeremy, the porn star problem, anybody.

You're not going to be very happy about being with the people who wants to play that game with you because they're not gonna the people that are really going to make you feel that life is worth living. They're gonna the people, especially on 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, there's gonna be plenty damaged by the time they're done with IT.

The last time that we spoke mean, you talk about population decline and the census bureau's released today predicting that the U. S. Population will decline for the first time ever by the twenty one hundred after peaking in twenty eighty.

So the estimates showed that the U. S. Population, which is about three hundred and thirty three million at the moment, so expected to reach three seventy by twenty eighty, but will be back down to three sixty six by twenty one hundred. And even immigration can't offset this birthrate decline over the last two years. Do you think things i've got Better or worse than you anticipated from birth rate and marriage standpoint?

I think they're probably still getting worse. And I think mask mosque is one of the few people elon musk is one of the case. Anybody was wondering um he's one of the few people who who's called out the danger of you know a one child policy or the idea that we should decrease the population, mean things that don't grow die, but they die for all sorts of reasons.

We can have this back to identity. You know, what's my identity? I could say, well, how I feel about myself.

That's that's the line that used everywhere. Now you don't get to tell me who I am. I know who I am, I can, and who I feel I am.

Well, first of, I don't you know what you mean? I feel like what to help. What does that mean?

Your your emotional state at the moment and you can just impose that on everybody. That's your theory. Is that the theory of a two year old, literally that's a very bad theory. well. Where could your identity be other than that? Well, one of my identities when I taught at harvard was professor, obviously, and that was a 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 on 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 win what I thought of myself. And like part of the reason that you can take some, let's call, IT gratification from being a successful pod caster is that you're actually a successful pod caster. It's not in your head.

It's in one point five million subscribers. It's how many podcast have you done? Seven hundred.

okay. So it's in seven hundred podcast. It's not something you're caring around .

in your and you remember what I love the forty two rules that created the twenty four you ended up coming up but but there's one that you didn't use ah if you have to choose be the one who does things, not the one who is seen to do things. 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 are willing to take responsibility for IT if you don't want credit.

One of the most effective political manuvers i've ever seen woman who's she's so brilliant. I won't tell you who he is, but she's so sharp, she's so brilliant. And he told me the last time I R.

She's had her finger and pie for like thirty years pop up in places you'd never expect. I thought I asked, just like, how the hell did you pulled this off and he said, oh, I decided thirty 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, Stellar. And i've worked with other people who have done the same thing. It's very interesting. It's very interesting thing to realize.

You might say, why? Why would I want the responsibility without the glory? It's like a do you want to 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. What maybe doing the thing is plenty of reward. Love itself with regard identity.

When when I was a professor, I was also a husband, I was also a father. With those were identities, but they want, in my head, they 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 a radical to say this.

In the modern world, you can be isolated, alone, without responsibility and pursuing your heads 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 i've said things that have made me somewhat unpopular, like it's very difficult for people to mature until they have a child. You find a huge part of what you are in that relationship makes you responsible, makes you grow up and 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 rules that scale and others. You should take care yourself. Integrate yourself means you can conduct yourself properly across the medium to long run, yourself sustaining.

Then 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 and able to take on that responsibility. That's the alternative to isolated hysteric. Slavery is slave to your own wims.

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 blamed IT on the therapies a little bit.

I called them liberal protestant secures. And that's because they think about the local locus of the psyche as interior subjective. That's what the liberal would do.

It's just not accurate. That isn't 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 is 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 you want to be.

That's what the adventure is. You want to be solipsistic, a solipsistic porn mater batter, she's just wanted the aimless and miserable. Well, god, so pathetic.

Why am I so unhappy? You think about yourself, oh no, you think about the lowest impulses in yourself, all the type. That's why you're missing while being oak.

What I thought was particularly interesting with your live event that he goes that at the o two in the evening time and everyone was great. But Douglas, I thought, was just a tour of force that evening. What have you learned since being friends with Douglas? He impacted you, are influenced you.

Well, Douglas, Douglas is very, very disagreeable, you know, and he enjoys combat. And that isn't something that really characterises. I don't enjoy combat at all in 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 the right to the bottom. And that's very unpleasant. But if you do IT, sometimes you only have to do at once and the problem goes away, and then you don't have that bloody problem every day for the rest of your life.

And sometimes IT takes, you know, twenty 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 Peter lessons about him that's extraordinary, admirable.

It's a judicious petley ness, you know and it's a dangerous game to play because is 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 like 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. There's no way around that.

And so doubles plays a dangerous game because he's very combat of, but he's also extremely carefully. He's very careful with his words, and we've had a hatred with me through europe. I think we did nine shows together.

We split the Q, N. A. He, he did a little bit of an introduction before my lectures. I really liked that. I thought I was great. It's been a privilege to get to know i'm super sharp um very cultural person um very witty so he has has a great sense of humor which is also fun which also was one of the things that makes them a very dangerous opponent in a debate because not only does he have the facts at hand, like boring long, but he's devastatingly and windy and cutting and it's fun to watch that he's a master at IT .

so IT was is interesting to think about the fact that all you need really in a live debate I think I lenders from you in sam ages ago, if you're doing a live debate now, it's not a proper intellectual formatted opening reMarks on the soft. If you manage to get sort of two or three real singers, you won regardless of the content. If you do two or three real singer, whole crowd labs, guess what I what the .

great public intellectuals have a vicious sense of humor, right? I also think that's why so many of the successful pod casters have been comedians like at the art conference. I think constantly kissing speech was the overwhelming hit of the convention. I think it's got six hundred thousand views as of today, six on the ark IDE, about six hundred on his own channel, and constantly did a beautiful job of merging intellectual content with .

what was the thing. The interesting thing about my life to be that am about to start doing 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 is expecting you to be funny. If you manage to be funny four times in ninety minutes you've killed.

If i'm not funny once every seven seconds, i'm a shit comedian. So the bar is set. An obviously coming in with background of comedy means that he is able to be, by father, far away, wait funnier than most public, but doesn't get held necessarily to the same standard that is not expecting to be one line is 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. Do you other think about how much time over the last decade some of the smartest people on the planet have had attention, that cognitive horse power, just new, taken away, arguing about whether men and men and women and women or not, or whatever. The idea the year of the day is, yeah, well, this sometimes. So i've been .

partnering with the daily wire for spot about year and half so far. Not been very successful. We've been a pleasure to work with. But what they wresting with constantly, all of them, all of the principles, all of the principles of daily, are would rather, in some real way, be be concentrating on philosophical, theological or dramatic matters.

So which is partly why the daily wire is turning towards entertainment for kids, but also for adults starting make movies, for example, in TV shows they'd rather be doing that. I had been superior um he participated in the seminar and accidents that I produced with about nine other um extraordinary interesting thinkers and bend just shown you know he he he's wasted is he wasted on the political. The political necessary, but it's it's one nation under god for a reason because the political the political isn't the pinal never it's never the pinnacle. And if you're capable of discourse at the political discourse is secondary. It's also have a decent right .

this way that I can tumble as well. This how would you say degrees of depth of political stuff too because what works on youtube a lot of the time .

is in react to insane talks. Yeah and IT is is that a waste? It's not optio, but it's a question it's an interesting .

question to be asked right about how much sort of ankle or skirt or need you need to show from an algorithmic perspective in order to keep numbers turning because ultimately, you are producing what people click on. You don't want to be completely beholding to your audience that audience camp, but you also don't want to be so unaware of having a finger on the post of what is trending .

come up yeah right and absolutely. And 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. Mean, JoNathan patio has done a good job of that, although his market is still relatively niche and he certainly is more so terc.

Let's say that the daily wire guys who tend to evolve into the political and that divorce into the cheap political from time to time, right? The hit for hitt sake, or the, or that chasing the algorithm, and I mean, that's the danger that all politicians have to, 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 dismissively, it's really hard to sell to market, to communicate. I I saw the Elvis movie recently, and I thought I did a beautiful job of laying this out because Elvis was a Stellar talent, but his manager, who is a real shyster, was also a Stellar talent, like Elvis wouldn't have been who he was without his corrupt manager. And you know, it's sort of a deal with the devil, but you have to give the devil is due to and the sales.

Many part of american culture can easily devolve into a kind of nurses isc manipulative veness. That's that's where 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've been seen any of IT and IT sounds like based on what you're reading at the moment, you are trying to grapple with religious text, especially the bible, we who wrestled with god.

the name of who are with god, which is that what the word israel means? Israel means we who resort with god. And so what's very interesting, because that means the chosen people are the people who wrestles with god.

And you might say what? Who restless with god? And answer that is, well, everyone resets 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 restless with god.

Got a moral decision.

God 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.

That's 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, 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 clear. So there's no there's a little evil idea that god is the summer born up, 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? Or 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? An answer that has to be yes, because otherwise you don't have a conception of good, right? The word good implies that across good things, through some essence.

Okay, well, the definition, the media, one medieval definition of god, is the essence of good. Well, okay, let's say you don't believe in that OK. Does that mean you don't believe in anything that's good? Okay, then how 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 what you might see might say, well, I don't believe that there's a unity good. Okay, you believe that there's a fraction onate good.

Well, then what do you do when those things suppose one another, right, which would be in a conflict of duty? What, how do you refer to? What do you refer to, to help you a judicatory tween different goods?

Well, generally what you do is if you could pursue a, which is good, or b, which is good in the 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 or good, then do you believe in the highest good? Well, the highest good is god. What you mean by that? By definition? okay. So now I have a definition now.

Then the next question might be, well, what's your relationship with the highest good? And you might say why 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 purpose 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 collection of text that makes up yeah .

because it's a library of books essentially right, the bibles is actually the first library of books. It's written by A A very large number of different people and aggregated over thousands of years and then sequence actually sequent into a narrative, interestingly enough, because no one really quit, or by no one, I 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 good. So the bible is an analysis of the human relationship with the good. what?

What would have to happen after the publishing of we who rustle with god for you to look back on that publication and consider a success? What is IT did you want to happen? What do you want people to feel or to take away from that work?

I think we're at the beginning of the counter enlightenment. The the propositions, the enlightenment view of man is wrong. And this, you know, out of the enlightenment view came science. But the science now indicates that the enlightenment view of man is wrong.

What you mean?

Well, the enlightenment types believe that we could only ourselves in the world, let's say empirically, that, and this is sam Harris proposition, you can abide by the fact you can orient yourself as a consequence of the this passionate analysis of the fact you can't. And I would say the artificial intelligence engineers have figured that out.

The postmodern literary critics have figured that out, the psychologists and physiologists of perception have figured that out, and the neuroscientists have figure that out. So it's not just the evidence that that view is necessarily incorrect, is overwhelming and multi. 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 in fact.

So there's as many facts as there are things and combinations things. Well, you can't orient yourself by that that you drown in chaos. It's like you're standing in the desert and there's an infinite number of directions you could go well. How do you choose .

the direction? And that's showing up in the most recent survey that I just mentioned.

people feeling meaningless URL. T there's desert that's and the desert is the desert of fact, it's dead fact.

especially given how few people can agree on. Is this a factor? Is this count? D.

well, that's also a problem, is 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. You 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 senses that the new discoveries from the web telescope have made many of the presumptions upon which the big bang model was based questionable.

So now I don't want to, you know, 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 hierarch value and see the thing about, i've tried to make this case in the book. You do this when you look at the world. You can't look at the world except through a hierie 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 and looking at this little spot on the concrete floor or the spot besides, 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. Also.

why humans have got Whiter on the right exactly.

is 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 higher archy value.

Stories can be fantastical though, right? If that entered to anything, I can make a Harry potter a story. Now.

this, if they're untether anything, you won't find them interest .

because they won't resent.

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. it's.

Our math, there's a huge debate among philosophers about mathematical abstractions. Are they real? Ed, well, you can make a case that a mathematical abstraction is more real than the thing from which is abstracted.

How would you make that case? If you are 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, is a narrative. It'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 is in some ways because IT captains what's similar across all churches, right? So IT, it's like a platonic ideal.

A category is like a platoon. Ic 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 idea of, and we certainly, and that's actually, in some ways, built into our perception. 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 idea 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 an example of these patterns. So in the story of can enable, you have two patterns of sacrifice.

okay? Why is sacrifice an issue? The reason is an issue is because people exist in a sacrificial relationship to the world. What does that mean? That seems to mean something like human beings are aware of their extended self.

You know, you're going to be around tomorrow and next week and next month, the next year and five years from now, ten years from now. Now it's certain as you go out, but you do have the sense of yourself is 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.

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, but someone can come up with a Better definition of work in that, but I don't think so. It's like you 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? What is that a contract with the future? Is that a covenant?

Because the relationship that the biblical corpus insists characterises human striving is covering, 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 deeply than that. It's built into the structure reality itself, and that if you got the sacrifices right, the future would be paradise. Al.

i've got in my head that called Young quote to aware of a earned wisdom that feels like, that feels like he 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 as attractive and you're being able to be a picker, parties that is able to make the mouth .

noises and the hand, the fruits of fall sacrifice. You could say that unearned, unearned moral reputation is the consequences, false sacrifice.

Well, this is performative empathy, right on internet.

Definitely like 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 a rix havoc on the good claim.

But it's also, I spoke to dog s about this IT seems to almost be a predict. It's an identified that you should be a little bit more cautious about what this person is definitely you know every single person that super sweet t and nici liza do you liz was in the news recently. No so he is a um artist singer uh SHE the one that that gotten trouble .

for abusive her dancers dances yeah he made her .

dances eat bananas out with the vagina of amsterdam I an strippers doubles said that ah that's a little on .

the head island power mad side well, he was .

supposed to be, you know this business like yeah for the girls and body positivity in all this stuff but IT turned up behind the scenes that he was treating her dance is terribly body shaming them all of the time. But he was the one up front that was the vanguard of this particular movement. But you'd seen the same with was a Jimmy fan. I think he was I caught up in a fuel recently that he was a tired to work for yet out front Allen to generous again the same. It's almost actually like if somebody is is very .

much like the .

overloading on the sweet, nicer I am here for the underlings that you go. I'm a little bit suspicious of what's .

going on that .

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 gods name in vain. okay? Now people think that means don't swear and IT sort of means that that's one of its like ten gentil meanings but what IT really means is do not claim divine motivation for self serving behavior writing 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 pleated, unearned because this is something J K rolling got so accurate with her deloris ambridge character was absolutely .

wer parking.

We've kitten had the kitten on the plates. It's like this toxic sentimentality. I'm so nice. It's like, yeah, i'd like to stay away from you and you're devoured ing nicest in the ferri. Dans knew about that very, very in a very sophisticated way, very early, because the devoured ing mother, the debt mother, is the shadow side of compassion.

I've been trying to come up with the term for this for a while. I like mean things into existence, giving them names useful um and at the moment the best one i've got is the the shallow pond of empathy, which is at the moment something which appears people and does not cause them any discomfort. Immediately is always prioritized even if the net effect back over the long term results in the suffering ability .

is the exactly what that exactly what the edible 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 the nest says this is going to hurt now, but the iterating consequences are positive.

Mi P, A 的 right？

exactly. That's right. That's right. And that's exactly right. And and the moral of that story is, is that if you give up your children to the world, you will keep them right? That's the sacrifice of asham ice.

Abram 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, you undermine them, you destroy them. It's very, it's a very paradoxically truth. We are talking about patterns.

Cae is the pattern of the inappropriate sacrifice. He does everything second rate. He lies, he omits, he prevails.

He pretends he doesn't offer his best able the opposite, he offers his best, which means he's 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 me 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 honestly saying what you mean, not prioritizing avoiding a someone else 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.

A 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 is the essence of sacrifice to for the this is, 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.

It's like, what is 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 continent, you know, when 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 in its most positive guys is for you to adopt the most appropriate sacrificial relationship?

What's a big risk is not because you have to give up everything. That's the, 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 architect story. Because Christ is the person who sacrifices everything. Thirdly, one hundred percent.

And the biblical notion is that there is no difference between that and the descent of the god of the old testament into into the space of human reality. So god is elaborated as a spirit in the old testament. That's way of thinking about IT flashed out right into the law and the profit.

And Chris presents himself as the embodiment of that. So 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 last. 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 testa. 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. And 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. Chris has to confront that, and he has to confront moez ance. That's the heroines 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 you 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. I have discomfited 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. And one of the solutions that they come up with, which isn't the solution but IT kind of is to them, is i'm not going to do anything yeah you know that um no decision is kind of the same as neutral neutral choice one of my friend's alex is got this quote which I love and he says the heaviest things in life and main and gold but unmade decisions. The reason you are stressed is that you have decisions to make and .

you're not making them. Yeah that's yeah yeah no doubt about IT. Well, there's no indecision, right?

There's only because you age and you pay for your you pay for your in decision. It's a decision. It's a decision to avoid fundamentally no. And part of the moral that's embedded in the story of job an in the Christian passion is that you can master what your 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 clinic, is you look at what people are attempting to accomplish and and maybe that needs some retooling. But let's assume that they have a goal in mind that would work, right? You've talk IT through with them strategically.

They have a well layout vision, okay? Now they're layout division and they encounter impediments that stop them and maybe their impediments that make them afraid and paralyze them. And so then what you do is you decompose the impediment, just as we talk 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 theyll face IT. Okay, then they face IT, then what happens? They get more competent and that's what happens.

And then they get Better at facing all problems. So they don't just learn how to deal with that specific problem. They learn a less than that generalizes across problem.

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 the braver moves from situation to situation. okay. So the question is here.

Here's the question. If you're faced everything that was put in front of you, who would you be? Well, the answer, the biblical answers, you'd be a true sound of god.

That's the biblical answer. Like, well, do you believe that depends on what you mean by believe? Do you think that you do you have a Better bet than facing what's there? Well, you just have to be sensible about IT for a moments like is your theory that you're going to adapt Better using forest hood 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 those that yet, 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 survive.

I think that for a lot of people is it's born out of fear. It's born out of being a people please a yeah and not wanting to hurt the people around you and not wanting to tell them things that they don't to hear or not doing your same things going to upset the people that are around.

right? But in the short term again, yeah, in the short term again, you know, if if you look at a good mother, a good mother upsets your kids a lot, quit doing that. why? why? why? Why not just let your children do exactly what they want when the answer to that is, well, first of all, I 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 world space in which they have the optimal amount of freedom. So a person who truly loves someone else doesn't strive at all costs never to upset them.

That's that's the devouring mother. If if you love someone, well, that's the people, quote, you chastise them. What does that mean is like, look, if you love someone, they're doing something stupid himself, destructive.

And you can see IT, it's in common on you to say, you know, this is gonna a upset, you but as far as I can tell, you're doing something stupid and self destructive and then there's gonna a tussle about that because they're gonna what who are you to judges? 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. Sometimes that can be really compelling. You know you meet people who are bitter and resented, and then they tell you both their life and you think, well, 行， but but then you meet people who've had just as terrible life who aren't bitter and resent for, right? And they are 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 and is someone who maybe thinks that they should break up with the relationship, but doesn't do IT and sticks about in order to protect their partner.

And i've 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? Are 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?

Are you only in love with that good side, that 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 crisis.

And IT seemed to me to be a collection of people who had managed to believe that, continuing to mariana, marianna, the short term postponed of the discomfort of the decision that they wanted to have around their partner, are 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 out long enough and then it's just hidden, we just shown under the rug. So 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, if you have a thousand fights, then you don't have to fight. You will make peace that way.

You know because you're different in your partners. So there's things to work out there. You might think about that as a compromise, but it's not it's that 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 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 could play alone. That's not a compromise well, but getting to that very difficult.

And people bring all sorts of baggage due a relationship. And you have to it's just like disciplining children, really. It's the same thing your children are you note your children are annoying you.

You can note that, oh, there are being annoyed by my child. Okay, so what questions do you ask? Am I A tyrannical son of a bit 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 bit who's touchy and SHE said, yeah, you probably need something need or you're a bit of a prick that way and you gotto listen because maybe it's you or maybe he says, yeah, that god dam chard's being in on my case too and then you ask each other, are we mutually tyrants like, no, that kids annoying. Okay, do we want him to be annoying? Well, if you love your child, then answer that would be no.

Because if he's annoying you, he's gonna noy other people. He's gonna noy his potential friends. He's going to annoy other adults.

He's gonna through the world being annoying and everyone's gonna Brown. Adam, that's not helpful. So then you could just fix IT and that's gonna some short term upset.

You know you maybe you have a like a thirteen months old who's very extravert and disagreeable, who like rules the roost. And every time the mother goes more than a foot away from her, SHE has a small fit because she's learn 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 fourteen 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 terrorized by a fourteen months old. That's a bit of a status hit like IT should be.

So you have to notice, I am annoyed by this child. Then I should do something about IT. What's gona 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 you should have talked about that.

You're annoying me, convinced me that it's me and I should listen because maybe it's me. And if I 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.

You know, a battle usually, man, that's battle. There's just constant thrust and counter thrust in a discussion like that. And usually, you know, the conversational circle around whatever they held.

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, if you sort out enough of those things, you live in peace.

And that's something worth tainting. no. And i've thought forever in my marriage is 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, is like if someone bugs you, you should note that and you shouldn't do anything about IT.

Probably if they bug twice the same way, then you think, oh, okay, that's twice, but probably still you shouldn't anything about IT. But if they bug you three times and 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 a stupid sun 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 unraveled the problems you 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 that's that's attainable.

IT you got a work, man, there's there's, there's seen in in genesis got throws adami about to paradise because of they're pride, they're sin of pride. They each have their own particular version of that scene, eve, sin and atoms. But they get through another paradise anyways for pride.

And god puts Cherry s at the gates of paradise and the cherries. They're kind of these monstrous Angels, terrifying figures, and they hold source that are on fire that turn every which way and burn. And you might say, well, what does that mean? And IT means that, well, a sort is something that cuts away, right, a sharp blade, and and fire is something that burns, and a sort that burns, burns and cuts away.

And a sd that burns and turns every which way is a burning sd from which nothing can escape. Okay, now you want to walk into paradise, everything that isn't worthy, and 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 that have to do? IT has to be cast into the older darkness where there will be nation of tea, right? IT has to be cut away and destroyed, and everything that isn't worthy has to go with the Michael Angelo .

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 are both going to communicate to each other. And we're going to stand our ground where we have boundaries, and we going to .

continue to compromise what we should do. That's what love should do, like if you love someone, if it's genuine love, you see, you see their hidden soul. That's a good way of thinking about.

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 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 mice effect i'd heard of not .

been using IT. Why the Michelle effect.

This is why michelAngelo sees this huge, massive on huge bomb.

And inside of that.

he is able to see David. And over time, slowly he will chip away. He will chip away. He will chip away. So you see something that isn't there, that's inside of the thing, which is rough and unhung and unsimilar zed, and and domesticated and rebound ches and and sometimes terrible and you were able to from that yeah yeah.

That's actually part of the doubt, ching. The uncarved block. So a child is an uncarved block in in in the dose view and and you remove everything that's access until what's perfect remains, right? And that's see the logos in the all the new testament, the logos that creates the world is the judging faculty.

That what would you say that separates the weed 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, but 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 them is behaving, you think, no, that's no, not that, not that something more sophisticated even with my little grand daw or 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 to be around. But SHE hasn't seen me for a while, and so he was poking me, get me to chase her around and poking me, and SHE come up and give me a wake, you know? And at one point he walked me too hard and he knew IT, and I said, that's not fun.

That's not acceptable. And then he stopped, but he was playing with that edge, trying to find out where fun is. And you know, how hard can I hit grandpa? He does bad. Well, know. SHE kind of knows, but he 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 wac in exactly the way that listed 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 he could be right. And 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. They go like we .

because then how is going to play with with other kids if he doesn't .

know they're going to be as forgiving as grandpa?

Definitely not.

Yeah, we were talking before we got started. I had this conversation with robots of poly and IT. IT was really, really profound. And I know that is a brilliant guy.

This new book of this is about sort of freeway and determines, and which got, and not abandon on how interesting that is for me. But he gave this quote to Andrew human, where he said, doping is not about the pursuit of happiness. IT is about the happiness of pursuit.

right?

That's definitely right. And I I haven't been able to stop seeing this everywhere. So Morgan houses, 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 planned to go away on holiday. They're been planning IT for a long time. And with the kids and the wife and him and all of his businesses, that was an arduous thing to go through to get themselves out there.

And finally, they get there after the journey, in the plane, in the children, in the crying, in order of the rest of IT. And he walked out on the balcony on the first night of this holiday that y've planned for forever. And his first thought to himself was, wouldn't be great if we came back in next year.

IT would be so great if we could come back next year. So literally, during the supposed enjoyment of the destination, he was already thinking about the journey. And you know, it's not the journey, it's not the destination.

It's the journey. Kind of try. But IT 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 not been I haven't not been able to see. I I seed everywhere. I see everywhere in my online.

but there's technically two different forms of reward. There's consumer ory reward. And so that's the reward. That's what an orgasm is, consuming reward IT IT brings the behavioral and perceptual sequence to a halt IT ends IT right at the climax IT ends IT. But then it's over.

That journey is over, right? Then there's the dopa energy c reward that suppose he was talking about. And dopa energia reward is evidence of advancement towards a goal, right? Okay, so so there's a corporation to that.

Well, how do you become ultimately engaged? Because dope, I mean, facilitates engagement and focus, which is why drugs like ampt means can be used for kids who are attention deficit disorders. You tilt, tap up the dope, and in response they lock on, right? okay?

So they're locking on to a goal directed pursuit. The problem with ept means is that they can lucky y on so hard you can get out of the frame. So like kids on ept, amines will obsess, for example, cleaning up the closet, they can switch to the next activity.

okay? Dopa energia, reward is reward. That's a crude in relationship to a goal.

okay. So what what's an implication of that? Well, pursue the highest possible goal.

Well, why? Because the kick from advancement is high. Or now you have to baLance that IT can't be.

You have to advance, right? Imagine the rewards got two components. Number one is you're moving toward something valuable.

okay? So you wanted to be as valuable as possible, okay, but you have to be moving. So IT can't be so valuable that it's .

walk to the moon. I'm not going to be able to see every single increment that I .

you want to get to the moon. That's right. You can 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. Like I want things to be the best they could be. That's a vision of paradise.

Well, that has to be fraction input into you. You're proximal decisions. But lurking behind that should be this continual movement towards, what would you say, a heaven that receives as you approach IT.

That's a real proper vision of heaven. And 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 and and you need that.

This is part of the problem with a static utopia envisions something. Does the sk criticize if you gave people nothing but consumer tory reward, he famously says, so that they can do nothing but sit in tubs of hot water e cake and busy themselves with the, 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 the youth 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 what's the problem? Can you well, Carry guard pointed out that if we, if as we make the world easier, 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. Yes, yes, exactly, exactly.

It's optimal deprivation. You know, if everything is delivered to you on a platter, like what the hell you even doing there? This happens in the story of 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 got nothing that he has to do. He's like seventy. 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. And neighbor ham's pretty all by this point. But for whatever reason, he decides that he's going to forgo the comfort for the adventure.

And then as Abraham progresses, he makes the requisite sacrifices. Each becoming more difficult as he a sense. And he adopts this pattern of relationship with the god that calls them to adventure, that literally makes them the father of nations.

And so you can even think about that biologically, if you want, you might as well people like dog and think reproduction is sex. And that's why he can talk, for example, about the self, this gene making itself manifest in sex. Reproduction isn't sex.

Sex is unnecessary, but insufficient precondition for reproduction. Abram adopts a motive being, a sacrificial motive being, that establishes the optio environment for his sons, who then establish the optimal environment for their sons and their sons and their sons. So you imagine that what Abraham is doing, this is what the story means.

this. He's adopting a motive behavior that works best, all things considered across multiple generations. And he sacrifices everything to that. It's this incredibly expensive vision given .

that we're in the world which is comfortable and we 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, right? The proliferation .

bumps on the roads for the same reason.

proliferation of ice baths and sooner and and and even reading, to some extent in a difficult reading, difficult things, where should people go given that they are in A A world which is more comfortable than ever before? Where should they go to encourage them to find difficult truth?

Truth is what's optimates difficult. The truth is optimates difficult. It's a really wonderful thing to know. The truth is adventure is no, there's no distinction partly because.

If you're going to just say what you believe to be true, you have to let go the consequences. You can't predict the consequences. Well, there's no difference between not being able to predict the consequences and having an adventure. They are the same thing, right?

Because if you knew the consequences, IT wouldn't .

be an adventure, not an adventure. If if if the consequences .

are forgone the same as it's no sacrifice or courage.

if there's no risk, right, right, right? It's exactly the same. And so it's a it's a wonderful thing to know that optimized adventurer to be held in the truth, think and everything of the situation.

So Chris says in the sermon on the mount that to orient yourself properly, and it's often view as this happy pay on, take no thought of the moral, the moral will, take care of itself, god takes care of the sparrow. He'll certainly take care of you is like a hippy wet dream. IT isn't what that isn't the, that isn't the core of the message.

The core of the message is very straight forward. Christ has 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 pinacle, in new 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.

It'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. Uh.

nothing well done is insignificant, right? right? yeah. Well, think you are. So Chris tells this followers and the gospel to to store up treasure in heaven, not in the places that mosque e and rust can destroy.

Well, 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 D disciplinary process so you accomplish something, maybe IT doesn't you don't obtain the goal you are aim ing at, but you a crew, 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 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.

It's not competence because you can be rich and useless. Now it's not that easy, but I 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 confident you could be thrown into the desert and you'll make IT bloom.

I've said this about a people to go to the gym. So from the outside, someone that goes to the gym and has got a good body, whatever is the body.

And IT, this is what you get to touch during sex on your incident, 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 manifest physically is someone who is reliable, who is able to overcome hard things. He is self discipline. Yeah it's just this whole big long laundry list of thing that they're able to deal with pain and discomfort. Kind of sexy in a way is the .

perfect is the perfect materialist disciplinary strategy, right? Because it's very concrete. Well, you change your body like, is that a spiritual pursuit? Well, IT is in so far, IT requires in a long term disciplines 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 and and focus on that too obsessively, but you can also use this as a stepping stone to discipline, pursuit itself. And lots of people do that.

I think I told you the last time that we chat about the mono pause, this thing that i'd come up inside notice to all the end of my twenties, that lots of guys who had been training with a particular mada to usually body building, usually exclusively for the way that they looked, realized as they approach authorities, that they were getting out of breath, going up a set upstairs, and that they maybe couldn't touch their toes and they looked fantastic.

But I know they they just felt like they should maybe start to value different things, and they then change their training, and they would go and do brazil individual or yoga across fit, or, you know, some of the form of whatever. And that precipitated a change in everything else. And I saw this in myself, right? I get to all the end of my twenties.

I've achieved success in many of the ways that society tells a Young man that he should value success. There is a discord. Something fell off. And you don't 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 realized, I don't know. IT feels like a quality life crisis. I think so many men go through this.

I O, I either succeeded or didn't succeeded in 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. Maybe there was some elements.

I was so proud of what I do with my business one, and I was so proud of the things that we achieved. But then there was another stuffer as I gave, I attached so much of my sense of self worth into this and this and this. And then you start, you have to assess.

And um so this is what happens in the story of existence when moses encounters the burning bush. So he's just gone about his business as a shepherd and he's doing alright. He's got two wives.

He likes his father law. He's well regarded in this new country that is in, he's left to egypt. There's a Price on his head essentially for killing a egyptian who was tormenting one of the hebrus.

Anyways, moses is just gone about his business as a shepherd, which was very tough job in those days. And this thing catches his this, this glimmer, this clean, and he goes to investigate. Okay, so what what does that mean? That means as you're progressing through life, something will capture your interest.

And in the story you just told, it's like somebody decides that are 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 the interest. So they decide to pursue IT. So they look into IT more deeply.

Well, moses approaches the burning bush, and he gets closer and closer, right? And the bush is a symbol of life, right? Like it's a tree, a tree of life.

And a tree of life that's on fire. Is being that 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 and you get more, more discipline. But as you get more and more discipline, you start to transform, right? And 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 deep, so he takes off his shoes and 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 them into a leader.

And so what does the story mean? That 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 IT doesn't really matter what IT is that calls.

What matters is that you pursue and you you pursue IT to the depth. And as you pursue IT to the depth, you will become transformed. And if you do that without reservation, that will turn you into, that will turn you into the person who freeze 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 been, he has derided ted a lot by pretty much everybody at the moment, is university education. And I had such an interesting time, university, almost exclusively outside of my education, right? All of the good things that happened to me while I spent five years, and newcastle didn't include what I was taught.

IT was never inside of the electra was everything I was doing outside of that. And lot of my friend very trendy on the internet to mock higher education as use of species of paper. Ah it's not you don't need IT in order to be able to be successful.

And certainly the thing that invented up doing this podcast didn't require me to go to university, but maybe in some ways IT did. But also from definite from a qualification perspective, IT didn't. But I I think i'm still relatively pro university experience and and yeah you know you've got Peter, an academy launching, which is your new thing. I wondered how you thought what basically are university salvagable given that so much that good about the university experience has almost nothing to do with the education side of IT?

Are they still visible? Some are, I imagine. Hills dell does great, but that is a conservative college in northeastern us.

Run by they earn they have a one percent drop out rate as opposed to the typical fifty percent drop out rate. And they they provide classical, what used to be a liberal education, libraries, education. It's a more conservative enterprise given how the overturn window has shifted.

But Larry 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 the thirty of the students take music courses. So the places very musical um it's a very discipline place that 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 irretrievably corrupt as far as I can tell. And 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. It'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 if you're fortunate when you go to university, you find a professor to that you can work with who really teach you how to think they're usually those professors are generally quite rare. And you're fortunate if you do establish relationship that like that, especially a big university where the student to fact ratio was absurdly high. I was one hundred to one.

I was electricity. There were three hundred to one, right? I did. I didn't get a relationship like that with any of mine.

right? right? And that's that's that's really not good because you need you need an apprenticeship relationship to become educated fundamentally. Um we started this. We're formulating Peters and academy.

We're hoping that we can provide people with extremely high quality lectures, unfortunate 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 lectures 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 to for itself as a marker for conscience scioux ness and educated expertise. We'll see.

We're also building out the social side of IT because as you pointed out, a huge part of what happens 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? Is a huge just one of those times in your life where you can parcel of who you were and you could become something new.

You remember every single summer, at least for me, maybe this is because of chronically so unpopular in school. I would come back every summer, a imagining that would be able to reinvent myself. I'm going to be the cool kid.

I'm going to be kid here, whatever. But the big one is a jt, because you are not even in the same town. No one even knows. No one even knows what to think, think about. And I doubt for me was the big inflection point of me going from the child that I was to the sort of Young adult I was going to end up.

right? right? Well, if you're fortunate, you have a number of times where that happens in your life. You could make a relatively clean break and you can invent yourself for you.

This is just reject. I like you. There's an idea called monk mode ah which is kind of become a bit of a meme online. But I first write about this years ago and IT involves extended period of um isolation to work on yourself ah to reflect on your flaws, to kind of do the inner work to introspect. It's usually tied in with meditation, with improving your diet, with improving your physical fitness, you're 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 maybe a couple of months really, really focusing on you still going about in doing your work and doing the rest of the things. But outside of of that, just really, really trying to make yourself as good as possible. Periodic ing. That for me, was one of the most powerful inflections aside from the lifestyle change.

That's what confession is supposed to be fundamentally mean. When you take stock of yourself, you confess, you confess to yourself. and. You make your sense of reality, you assess yourself for your insufficient and you proclaim your insufficiencies and that well, then you can start working on them 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 are teenager, but that doesn't mean that you had to Carry that forward into university, right? There is 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 are the kids would wear the shirts or tie, their tires .

or the sort of shoes .

that they would wear. My, I didn't realize that I was just, I wasn't socially adapt. 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, huge social skills and now finally was able to sort of cast off some of the Price oppositions that I had maybe been following me. Uh.

because what were the opening points for you? Like, do you remember the first friendship you made in university?

Oh, yeah. The guys that I lived with. So.

okay, so were roommate. Yeah, yes. yeah. okay. So yeah. That's a good up. See, that's a thing that's hard to duplicate online, right? Because it's a having a group of roommates is a formative experience.

He was crazy for me. I didn't know because again, only child, two parents living in a small house. I didn't know that was proposed to knock on someone's bedroom door before you were to go in.

I'd never done that. I'd spent my eighteen years. I'd never had to knock on anybody's bedroom door because I, who else is looking, knock on the dogs like the kitchen daughter, as if the dogs are. Mind me going into the kitchen. A and so many of those things are looking back and and now is so ridiculous not knowing that was something that you were supposed to do yeah well.

not knowing those elementary skills. So that can be a huge impediment. You know, I had people in my clinical practice. We spend hours practicing how to introduce them and to shake hands because you want to be expert that be because if you're not good at that at all, like if you're really bad at IT, you're screwed. You can't even tell someone your name. And so how are you going to make a friend that you, you, you announced yourself as incompetent with your first move? And then if you do, if that happened to at ten times, you're so .

terrified to god.

terribly, terribly. So you should become expert at that. Not something you can do with your kids so they can become expert, introducing themselves, you know, shake hands, deal with a bit of a firm grip. Look at the other person, try smiling, you know, match your temple to the other person.

Another dynamics that i've been thinking about recently, as at a retreat in L. A. A few months ago, and one of the guys that was the had said he'd stopped talking and writing on the internet because he noticed that the story he was telling in public, he began feeling the necessity to live up to in private. And I think that whether you're a writer or or just someone that's got five hundred follows on your instagram and a face from back in the day or whatever, there is a, 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 well.

That's the problem with writing essays that contain what your professor wants to hear. So you can't do that without altering your soul. You can't do that. You cannot construct for yourself of false persona designed to extract resources from the world without that becoming part of you. Like there's no one is that sophisticated.

No one can have two shelves like that is part of the reason why you have to be very careful about what you say and do is that your. When you, when you practice false, you become false. It's not like those are beliefs that are just in your head.

You required yourself. So you start to literally see the world through the frame of your falsehood. Ds, that's a very bad plan.

I've heard you say, if you say things along enough.

you're going to believe them. You become them. It's even worse than believing them.

It's deeper than that. They they are built into as unquestioning plica accident. And as we set delly run.

this can go either direction, right? You can fake IT until you make IT one small step at the time, moving toward a vision which you know is positive, and you continually used to ensure that are high jacking going in the wrong direction?

yes. Are you do generated? So looking in the pennock o movie, which either analyze .

to death in the disney peno kio .

exactly, exactly part pennock o is trying to get rid of the strings that that that pull on him every which way that aren't under his control. And IT becomes something genuine. okay? So he has three basic temptations.

One is to lie, right? So that's the nose. Another is to be an actor. And when I first came across that the movie, I thought, what they else going on here, one of peno cus temptations, is to be an actor.

Now, why would the hollywood people do that? Why would they denigrate the actor? And then I thought it's not an act or 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 is so interesting, especially in in, in the world, that we have now, how perspective these anim atas were pennock a was literally enticed onto the island of pleasure by a false doctor who diagnosis 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. What 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. It's something like that you don't see much of the world, right?

You see IT through narrow APP atures. 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 lot of my friends who are smart, 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 shared, I should not, at any moment, and, you know, talking about the soul or the innovation of the conscience. So you might refer to IT as god that's coming through the best version of yourself. People that ruminate and intros pect are very capable of talking themselves into or out of something .

that fears intellect.

How would you advise somebody who enjoys thinking about things deeply to cast that often be able to hear themselves a little bit more clearly?

There's a difference between attention and intellect. There there is something to be said for paying attention. It's not the same thing like 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 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 attention. I have to note my ignorance.

I'm attending to my ignorance. Well, this is what rogan graded this year, grated this as well. If you attend to your ignorance, then you know what to do.

You just ask the question, it's like why 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 elusive erie intellect to do is 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 your ignorance. What's the definition of humility? Humility is attending to your ignorance, and you can do that wherever you are.

Is that not still a intellectual exercise? Here are the holes in what I know. Therefore, I am just going to continue ask to ask the questions until I fill them.

Well, it's not something completely divorced from. It's the difference between questioning and answering. Like I would say, this is, let's say, definitional the luciferin intellect has an answer.

What when you say lusa hering intellect. What's that?

The lose safari 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 let itself out of their feet because they think, well, i'm so smart, everything should just becoming my way because they pride themselves. So on that like, and intellectual pride, well, that might be the cardinal sin. The luciferian intellect is the intellect that wants to put itself in the highest position.

Its chAllenges got, that's what sadness. That's what Lucia her is, literally in the multi ian story is lusa. Her is the spirit who attempts to you serve god.

That's what the communist st. did. That's what the fascists did. That's what we do when we build towers of bible.

And we can easily elevate the intellect of 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 a very good example of this, because rogan is not an intellectual, he's a seeker, and 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. Two thousand podcast, twenty five hundred podcast. He's done like twenty five hundred high level graduates seminar something like that.

It's crazy. And so his questions get Better and Better as he fills in the gaps is IT intellectual. No, 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 try to teach the most, 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, usually fear in a crowd.

And you have a stupid question and you've been paying attention, eighty percent of the crowd has the same question. And then relieved that you know you and you asked IT. In fact, they'll think you're brave.

It's so interesting. And because you're afraid when you ask a question, if you're in the university seminar, you're afraid that what you're going to do expose your stupidity and be, what would you say? shame.

And what happens is exactly the opposite is everybody who's too cowardly asked that question now things that you're courageous, it's exactly the opposite of what you think yeah, 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 your, I don't know, you're fiddling with your phone and you and the class is just covered something and you didn't notice and you ask, well, clue in that's not a real question. That's just you're just wasting people's time. But 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 like, no, no, if you are, if you it's so cool to because sometimes the stupid est 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, that humility in the pursuit of humility and the pursuit of the idea. That's not an intellectual exercise, not, not, not in the strict sense. It's definitely what generates knowledge though .

that seems to be a good stepping block to our own wisdom .

as well that earned wisdom you have earned wisdom through humility, right? What if 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 going to finish this book only by the end of december. It'll be published november, but i'm gonna on tour, weirdly enough about the book probably starting in january. I'm going to american tour and then I think i'm going to go to africa and to south amErica and to south east asia.

That's the plan. And um i'm very excited about this new book. Um 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 you mean to consume .

yeah it's it's more it's heavy, it's it's deeper. Have you been fighting .

with trying to make IT accessible? No.

not really right. I I i've been just trying to lay the argument out as clearly as I can like and I think you'll do the trick and I I have to go over again and edit and make sure that it's no more obscure than is absolutely necessary. No, I wanted 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 of genesis in two thousand and seventeen, which turned out to be quite influential. And then I just did a seminar on accidents with a group of thinkers.

And 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 ask me earlier, what would I consider success with this book? I don't think that you will be able to read this book and understand that. And b atheistic, I think I can demolish the atheistic c argument permanently.

And it's party. That is a weird thing because it's not like all sudden people are gna throw themselves at the feet of god and worship. It's like IT requires a reconsideration of what we mean by belief.

And I walk through some of its like, do you believe in the good whether the difference between believing in good and believing in god is it's it's a very narrow difference. Now there are important differences, but it's still a narrow difference. And the thing is, if you don't believe in in good, your aimless. And if you're aim less, your hopeless. And if you're aimless and hopeless, your anxious and franco inside and people can't unite in their beliefs, like the the alternative is not good.

Reversing the enlightenment is no small task.

Well, hopefully we can save the best of the .

enlightenment as well. It's like the um chest in's fence of chest in's fence, like how many how many different fences are in the field. So speaking to on this one out.

we're trying to plug IT interesting. And I think people like dockers have started to realize this. And I know that people like doug les murray and ion hersel I and neil ferguson have recognized this, is that with the death of got 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.

how? So because .

science as a practice is a religious practice is is predicated on religious acids as well, you have to believe that there's such a thing is 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 is 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 than if you investigate the mysteries of the material world, that that will be beneficial, right? Those aren't scientific claims.

Those are made a physical claims. And that meta physical claim is nested in a story. You know, when the the enlightenment types they have ve portrays the scientific revolution as something contrary to the religious substrate.

And that's not accurate. That's a french revolution. That's a luciferin intellect history.

It's not true. The universities grow to the monastery ies. That's where the universities came from. And science, as a widespread enterprise got IT started in the universities and they grow to the monastery ies. 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 college is a monastic layout. So the idea that there is some fundamental contradiction between religious belief and the scientific enterprise, it's there's nothing about that. That's true.

And part of the reason that we're part of the really reason that we're losing the scientific enterprise right now is because we've one more 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 dock's beliefs in the truth, by the way. So he's an atheist s but a very he's much less of an atheist st. Tiny thinks that's my impression.

Lying scientist started isc or just malevich and docking's is a truthful scientists 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 Christian to its core. Now I know he doesn't like that idea, but he also doesn't like the fact that the scientific enterprise seems to be collapsing in terms of its what would you call reliability and validity everywhere? So I appreciate you might .

I appreciate the time that we get to spend. They always seems to be a very interesting inflection. Um again.

yeah the inflection this time is your on tory I am .

what's your advice for me? I'm i'm onna survive life on the road.

Make sure that when you step on stage, that you understand how unlikely 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. They've 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 gotta remember that IT keeps you on the ground too. You should be grateful that they're not thrown rocks at you, right? If how ridiculous is that you get to do this, how unlikely is 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 overwhelming is becoming an increasingly difficult task.

Yeah well, part of the way you handle that is that you pass off the jobs that other people can do. You know, when you're out on tour, the social element of that can be overwhelming. So you've 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 tour so far, they become increasingly well run. I 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 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 responsibility somewhere.

How do you wind down?

After a show, I watched the trailer park boys. Yeah, yeah. Well, after being that good, you have to not be so good for a while. And the trader port voice, a very good way of doing that count.

And a little bit, I texted rogan about this yesterday, and I thought that he would know, I got know how many shows like guston. I thought he would have some wisdom for me. And every time that I do a show, I am so excited.

After I finished that, I find IT difficult to kind of wine down. And i've got four shows back to back and we've ly to buy. Then we got only shows around the U.

S. And canada. And i'm nervous that i'm not going to be able to sleep.

And then if I do not sleep and i'm not going to be able to perform as well tomorrow and the middle spiral, and I thought that you would just have some wisdom and he said, that's a tough one, man, to be honest, i've never had any problem slept as I will fuck that, I guess, you know. But now i'm excited. I'm excited.

Now i'll check back in once once everything that I we're gona record one of them properly fully properly recorded like a special um so that will be maybe we'll put IT up. Maybe it'll just stay for possible. I don't know, but we're gonna have IT.

So i'm excited. Yeah well, good luck. Thank you.

Thank you. Should be a blast.

Yeah, yeah. I'm definite 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 like vulnerable in summer regards. I guess, the other things that are meaningful to me, and yeah, I hope that people take take a lot away from you. I hope they have done from today too.

So one of the things I do when I go on stage is like I spent the first ten or fifteen seconds looking at the audience like I .

don't mean I would i've seen you do this a lot. I I would technically refer to what is stalking um but yeah, it's not far from a store.

It's it's good. I I look everywhere and this is an exposure technique. 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 I look everywhere. And as you know, you can see in the back rose if it's a big place. 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 have come here. And then that's easy because you can talk the individuals and there your guests say that's another, that's another thing for your staff to know to like everyone who comes to one of your events has to be treated in the most positive possible way because they're looking into you for something you know and it's very hard on them if they are 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 real number one is treat the audience members, even the ones that are have some trouble and maybe even a troublesome is like treat them like their guests because their guests, and you're bloody lucky that they're here. So don't get all high and mighty about IT because they put in their time and effort to come here, they're looking for something. So that's part of that gratitude that that and then it's fun, right?

That keeps IT fun like you're so privilege to be there talking to them that so you got to have that in mind what a privilege is that what is these people? They are coming to listen to what you're doing. That's a good deal, man, as as good as IT gets. So you want to have that firmly in the back of your mind and the front too.

Yeah, i'll try my best. Jordan Peterson, ladies and gentleman, Jordan, thank you so much for today. I'm looking forward to the next time we get to .

catch good to talk to you, Chris.