Dr. Jordan Peterson | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #328

today's episode is brought to you by magic mind the anti-procrastination sipper if you want that small upper you can get it go to magicmind.co and use code theo magic for 20 off today's guest um is his second time returning to the podcast he has a new book out beyond order 12 more rules for life i am uh i'm almost to rule number four right now and um and man he's just uh you know i'm gracious for his time you know i'm honored to be able to talk to a thinking man this man is a real thinker and and an order and sometimes i can think and sometimes i can talk but rarely can i do both uh he's a professor he's high level in so many fields he's a best-selling author sold over 5 million copies of his first book 12 rules for life um ladies and gentlemen mr jordan peterson [Music] [Music] i'll sit and tell you my story [Music] [Applause] just dr peterson great to see you again hi theo it's really good to see you too it's been a while a long while yeah it has been a while thank you uh for the new rules i gotta ask you how many how many more rules are there overall because it's starting to add up well originally there was a list of 42 i published that on quora i've heard that yes and so in principle there's 18 more but of course you know there's an infinite number of necessary rules um i don't think i'll publish any more rule books however uh yeah i'm just letting you know as a as someone who's trying to abide by the rules we're doing our best out here and we're glad that there's more but it's also it's a lot it's a lot to do you know it's a lot yeah yeah well and and you can only beat the same horse so many times yeah i don't think that's actually a saying but now i've invented it well i've seen so i grew up in some areas they had a little bit of mild animal cruelty by us growing up nothing real heavy but you know uh probably i'm glad some of it wasn't documented at the time actually um so i i tried to get as far as i could in into a beyond order into the new book and um and it's just you know it's hard there's a lot of like you have to you have to take your time and you have to really absorb as you go and um there was one part there's a lot of parts that stuck out for me but so far there's a part in uh chapter three um where you talk about fear and you talk about the fog and um and i i wrote down a sentence that says that sometimes you're so afraid that you will not allow yourself to even know what you want uh i think that's very common it really hit me hard because sometimes i you know i admit i'm afraid to like i'm afraid to even map out even to really write down and map out what i want um but i don't know exactly i tried to really drop down and figure out what the fear was like why am i afraid like and and i had some i've had some trouble really figuring that out like am i afraid that i'll have to then do it am i afraid that i'll then feel inadequate based upon what i really want and where i currently am um so i just wanted to you to maybe expound on that a little bit and and just kind of share like what did you think why do i get afraid to to really admit even admit to myself what i really want well i think you put your finger on two um of the fundamental reasons um if you don't allow yourself to know what you want then you haven't established your conditions for failure right i mean if you if you're aiming at a goal and the goal is really clear then you can sorry i lost you oh you did yes just visually or can you still hear me i i can hear you just okay there we go sorry about that no worries okay you're better than just being still too someone might get a little no it was it was absolute blood pressure minimized okay let's forget about that we can go back to this okay um if you know what you want then you know when you're failing if you don't allow yourself to know what you want you can keep that foggy if you don't set out the conditions for your success then you can avoid your responsibility because again that's not clear and the problem with wanting something is that in all probability you're going to have to work for it you're going to have to make sacrifices and it's certainly possible that you want to avoid that you you might be afraid to make it clear because other people could deny it to you too which is something i write about a fair bit in that chapter um the problem is and and failing to make any of that clear protects you right now but it's really hard on you over the medium to long term because if you don't make it clear to yourself what you want or to other people the probability that you're just going to stumble into it is pretty low and and you can put that off indefinitely day after day but the problem with that is that you age while you're doing that and there's obviously a price to be paid for that so that chapter that's chapter three do not hide things in the fog [Music] i mean it's a it's a warning about failing to pay attention you know knowledge emerges in a very strange way it it emerges obviously when we learn something we started out by not knowing it and so what that means is that knowledge goes through a transformation process from being absolutely not there to being explicit and fully detailed and one step of that process is emotion and so for example you might find yourself frustrated disappointed about the events of the day but be unable to exactly specify why that's extremely common you know you go home to your partner and you be in a bad mood and you know you'll snap at them for something and they'll say well what's up with you and you'll say well nothing you're just being annoying when it's perfectly clear to both of you that there is actually something up with you and then that disappointment and frustration anger and sadness let's say or anxiety is a sign that something isn't right but it isn't like it isn't necessarily that you're repressing knowledge of what's not right it's that you just you actually don't know and the emotion is the first step in the process by which that knowledge emerges and you might have to sit and think and talk to your partner to a friend for god only knows how long before you're actually going to put your finger on what it is that you're upset about and it could be very far removed from whatever happened to trigger you in the moment and so that's the fog and you can keep things in the fog just by not doing that it's really easy it's no dif more difficult than just sitting there doing nothing because creating knowledge is active and difficult yeah well it's you know we've crea and we've created such a perfect fog these days like really the fog has been it's become such a the fog is such a business every little thing that they can that can be created to take away your attention from uh or that can take away our attention from figuring out who we are or like kind of spelunking inside of ourselves and trying to get some answers um has really been created it's almost it's pretty masterful how much has been created out here on the outside to keep our attention um away from delving inside of ourselves well you know attention is the basic currency right everyone fights for it and it's incredibly valuable and it it certainly is the case that it's also very tempting to turn your attention to things that grasp your short-term interest rather than say pursuing the causes of negative emotion that's a that's a good example and of course we have massive corporations working night and day to continually attract our attention and there's something sinister about that obviously but but you can't exactly lay responsibility at their feet because there isn't that there's a tremendous overlap between educating people informing them and and making them attend to you and and the lines between all of those things are very foggy let's say and difficult to lay out it's certainly the case that one of the ways that you can keep yourself in a fog about yourself is by distracting is through distraction with external uh with anything in the external world and obviously computer technology cell phones games well not negative in and of themselves perhaps are there at any moment to distract you at any moment yeah those yeah the little things that are time consumers like it's yeah there's companies there are businesses where that is their that's their that's their business is to get your attention everything's trying to get our attention sometimes i worry that the forces that are out there that have like started to you know really create algorithms even on how to get our attention and how to keep it that those forces are stronger than our human abilities to to keep them away from us do you feel like that that's true or do you feel like that that's just i really do believe that that's true i look as far as i can tell we are teaching computers to to read our minds as fast as we possibly can and they're way better at it than they were 10 years ago and they're going to be so much better at it in five years that we won't even be able to imagine it and when i say read our minds i'm not talking about something magical but oh yeah for example not talking about like guess what it's not like like they're gonna guess what we're thinking or guess what we want for dinner or anything like that probably well they might but they won't do it by directly reading our brain waves or anything like that um they'll they're already algorithms that target advertisements to send that you are pretty good at deciding what it is that you're motivated to pursue and now i heard i actually just got an ad on my phone for your new book actually so yeah oh well good so i'm involved in the same process the same nefarious process i'll just joke that that i think it's facebook but i might be wrong about this that owns oculus and the headset the vr headset company now you can you can track eye movements with uh vr headset and psychologists use the tracking of eye movements to map attention in high detail now look if you look at our eyes you see that there's a colored circle and a dark circle in the middle and then that's surrounded by white and that makes your eye very visible to other people animals too but to other people particularly human eyes are quite unique in that regard and it looks like we've evolved to have highly visible eyes and the reason for that is that other we communicate with other people and they can read our motivations by watching our eyes so if you stand in the corner and you look up at nothing in the sky and you stand there long enough someone else will join you and then if there's two people then they'll be ten right away and the reason for that is that we and this is again something uniquely human we attend to where other people point their eyes assuming that if they're interested in we might be interested in it too and so that's and human beings are visual animals about half our brain is is taken up with visual processing we're much more visual than virtually any other animal and so computers are soon going to be able to track where we place our eyes which of course advertisers are incredibly interested in and that's going to speed up the ability of of high-powered computational devices to understand human beings as a group but also each of us individually to an immense degree an immense degree and so and i i think we're probably 10 years away from computers that understand us better than we understand ourselves ai machines are going to get extremely good at this because it's so lucrative to to be able to gauge attention there's there's nothing that's more valuable than that and so do you feel like it sh do you feel like there should be le it's hard to say there should be legislation because i hate to put anything on the uh you know that the gov it's the government's responsibility but should there be like rules or legislation between allowing computers and ai to get that advanced or is it still just fall on the feet of us as humans just to battle kind of the dark arts of of of these machines that can sort of like take us into a trance and then monetize the trance at the same time i think i think that legislation in some sense is it's going to be playing catch-up and it's going to be farther and farther behind all the time because this is moving so fast and with such power and it's so distributed that no one is going to be able to even keep track of it much less regulated i mean the the the the interconnected environment is changing so rapidly that even if you're reasonably tech savvy you can't keep up with all the major changes and there's there's no evidence whatsoever that that's going to do anything but accelerate and so i can't see how legislators have the ghost of a chance at keeping up with this even if they knew what to target or what to legislate yeah and you know more and more engineers are i think china now graduates more engineers every year than the united states has engineers oh yeah china you could be eight years old in china and be a damn engineer i've been over there and i've seen it but i've seen a six-year-old build a damn bridge in front of me you know what i'm saying they they're highly capable yes well and lots of other cultures are coming online very rapidly and so we're well and there's no shortage of unbelievably proficient amateurs online as well and and and programming and and so we ain't seen nothing yet and i really do believe computers are gonna your computer is gonna understand you so well i think it it won't be long till it knows what you're going to do more accurately than you do i think that's already true to some degree but well then we're at a real loss because then if i've been afraid to make a plan for myself in my life and i've been afraid and i've been living in the fog and i've been just you know kind of sidestepping really putting my [ __ ] pants on as a human and taking some action if i'm in that fog and then the computer is able to figure out what i'm gonna do before i've even done it but i haven't even made a plan then surely the computer's going to make a plan for me it feels like i think the computer is making a plan for you all the time already by default look that's exactly what advertising is is advertising makes a plan for you it's there's no difference between those two things except maybe one of sophistication so you know i mean when you're watching something and an ad pops up that's a little world that you could visit and the advertiser obviously wants you to visit that and the the problem there because you might think well it would be really good the computer can help you make a plan but i think what's more likely to happen because at least to begin with the computer is going to be paid so to speak by the advertisers to capitalize on your short-term impulsivity is that ever more attractive distractions are going to be dangled in front of you and that's and that that's likely to keep you in the fog and and what can i do to battle the fog like what can i do you know as a human to retain my humanity as things get more tech and more and and as tech becomes far smarter in some ways you know in in technical ways than i'll ever be well you know i wish i knew the answer to that uh i don't partly because the the landscape that's unfolding in front of us because it changes so rapidly it's unpredictable um you know other rules in in my two books address that to some degree i think your your best bet the best bet you have virtually all the time is to try not to lie to yourself in in my first book um 12 rules for life i said do not lie or no i said the rule was tell the truth or at least do not lie because you know you might i mean can you tell the truth you'd have to know the truth you know you might be able to tell some partial truths but you can't tell the truth but you can not say things that you know to be false and in the second book the new one rule five is do not do things that you hate which is also a kind of lie and and i don't mean um don't do difficult things like get out of bed at six in the morning and exercise you know you might say well i hate going to the gym and that isn't what i you don't really hate going to the gym you just find it difficult um i'm thinking more that you might observe yourself engaging in activities that you find despicable even right then but certainly later when your conscience dwells on them and that you should stop doing that because that's a form of behavioral lie i think the only thing we have to orient ourselves is as individuals is our willingness to to live to live a life that's relatively free of of unnecessary deceit or of deceit at all the 11th rule is do not allow yourself to become deceitful resentful or arrogant i might have those out of order but it's concentrating on the same sort of idea you know it's partly here's another way of looking at it your your attention moves around for reasons that you don't quite understand those reasons are unconscious um you can tell that to some degree because you can't make yourself pay attention to something that you aren't interested in well you can but you really have to work at it you know it's really easy to pay attention to something you're interested in that's not difficult at all in fact it's enjoyable whereas paying attention to something that you're not interested in requires will and effort and and so you can see that there's unconscious mechanisms at work there because you can't control them now the danger to deceit is that you'll pathologize those unconscious mechanisms because as you practice something imagine you practice a particular form of untruth you tell yourself a story that you know to be false and that becomes your habitual way of looking at the world well what that means is that you're forming habits that are unconscious because habits become unconscious and then they skew the way the world appears to you it'll it'll pull your interest in places that that aren't good for you to go that aren't associated with the real world and so that's not to be wished for that's because you you don't want to be out of sync with your automatic self that's that's bad news and lying definitely does that especially if it's habitual so because it creates whatever is truth well it creates a false truth and a false you right you know because there's different kinds of memory there's the memory that's associated with the way the world is and that's called episodic memory and then there's another or declare or declarative memory there's another kind of memory that's memory for action and so that's what you use when you play tennis or ride a bike or play the piano you know how to move your hands and you move your body and that's a kind of a kind of memory as well and you don't want to pathologize either of those um because then you become you see once once the deceit has become habitual then you're it's victim you're its pawn because it's automatic and that's a that's a terrible fate you don't want that you don't you really don't want that i think your best defense against anything that's trying to hijack your attention is is something like honesty it's also very useful and i stress this quite a bit in this second book to surround yourself with people who want the best for you and who care for you because they can also help keep you on the straight and narrow path and you know that's not a matter of some trivial moral injunction it's there's terrible places you can end up oh yeah oh yes i've been to some of those places and it's yeah and you don't get any sleep when you're there either i'll tell you that um right right another indication that your unconscious mind is is not working properly at some point right because the sleep wake cycle gets gets uh dysregulated that's very unpleasant to say the least dr peterson so when i so getting back like to the fog and like and like and just the the things that can take away our attention and how valuable our attention is what can i do like to kind of are we going to start to see like new parts of like new like small societies form of people that don't want to be influenced by technology or you know what do you what do you feel like some of the future looks like as far as trying to retain some sense of of holding on to my attention and using it for myself as opposed to letting it be used by outside influences does that make any sense or not yes yes well look there's another rule i suppose a dictum perhaps that if you don't have your own story then you're going to be a bit player in someone else's story okay so let's talk about that fog again so let's say because of the reasons you already laid out you don't want to make your conditions for failure conscious because then you know when you're failing and that hurts you don't want to make your plans for the future too clear because then if you then if you don't attain what you're looking for it's very clear that you've lost it which is somewhat different than failure right and then there's also the problem that if you make your motives clear to other people then they really have the ammunition to hurt you because like i can hurt you by depriving you of what you want but i can hurt you even better if i really know what you want and can deprive you of that so you have reasons to keep these things unclear but then and then you but the problem then is is that you don't have a a direction that's powerful right because you're not consulting yourself watching yourself learning about yourself figuring out who you are and figuring out what kind of route through life you would have to take to be engaged okay so then you get weak because you're not integrated you're all over the place you're scattered um well then anybody who is has power for one reason or another or can compete with you for your own attention and win and so if you don't have your own plan painful as it is to develop one partly because you have to take your own inadequacies into account oh yes and you also mentioned you know you you posit an ideal this is what i want or this is who i could be the farther away that is from you the more inadequate you feel in relationship to it you know so that's another reason to avoid it but yes well that's why every ideal is a judge there's no getting away from that now if it's too much for you i might say well make a lesser ideal like try to pursue something that doesn't intimidate you into paralysis right start with something closer that's more manageable huh so you can even prove to yourself that you can do it exactly well what you really want to do is you want to lay out a a plan that has a pretty high end aim but that also consists of steps that aren't too intimidating that that so you have to ask yourself um i would like to do this um i should do it but would i do it and the answer is likely to be no often because you know what you're like you're supposed to go to the gym but you don't it's like okay well maybe you won't go to the gym but maybe you'd walk half a block every second day something like that and you have to ask yourself i write about this in the first chapter about the advantage of being a fool you know if you notice that you're not so good at something then you can calibrate down the goal until a fool like you can manage it and then you can attain it and then you're not quite so much of a fool and so okay so you have to build a plan i have a tool for that that i often recommend for people called self-authoring yeah yeah yeah i'm very familiar with it okay well and it is it it was developed in an attempt to help people write out well an account of themselves past present and future but relevant to this discussion is to to make a plan it's like what is it that you need to thrive in the world or at least not to become bitter and if you don't have your own plan that you're committed to right and honestly committed to what that means is that you will be the pawn of other people's decisions especially now more than ever it feels like do you think that that's true well that's that's that certainly seems to be the conclusion we're reaching in the course of this conversation it's like as the powers around you become more and more invasive but also also of more utility to you to some degree i mean we don't want to be completely negative about computational power right as the forces around you have more and more capacity to grip your attention it stands to reason that you're going to have to be the captain of your own ship to a greater and greater degree otherwise you'll fall you'll fall prey to those who wish to monetize your attention so it's time for it's time to make a plan if you haven't made a plan it's time to have a plan it's a really it's a really good time to have a goal and to have a plan yes yes i think i think that's it's always been the case that it's been good to have a plan but you know i think it's particularly the case when things are changing so rapidly around you too you know because then it's your own ship you have place for you in in this maelstrom of constantly transforming opportunities and possibilities i do think it seems to me that we're increasingly being called upon to act as independent moral agents now you know informed by tradition obviously because it's very difficult to become wise all on your own but but and i suppose it's partly because we have more possibility and more power so we have to take more responsibility i i can't see a way out of that right yeah i think that makes sense i mean and it's hard if we if we think about our own story it's scary to make ourselves the hero of our own story in a lot of ways it feels i mean it feels like what we would want to do but it feels scary because you see what a hero has to do you know yes what he is presumptuous doesn't it you know like who are you to be a hero well you know we used to maybe now it feels like it's a necessity almost though a little bit more it starts to feel like it's becoming more of a necessity that if i want to really get through this and not only get through it but do it well and be a leader and be someone who can affect others and be positive and be a part of what's good then i need to at some point admit that maybe i do want to be my own hero you know yes well and i also think you have to deeply consider the alternatives you know it's so as a clinician i frequently saw that my clients were afraid to make a move um i talked about that a little bit oh yeah i think it's in that's in chapter five again do not do what you hate which is full of sort of practical advice i suppose in relationship to career people are often afraid to make a change to make a plan to make a decision to take responsibility and the right response to that is yes no wonder you're afraid it's not this is frightening people you know they they want to get a new job so they have to um they have to form format and update their their cvs their resumes well just that alone is is enough to stop many many people cold because first of all you have to gather up all that information and then second you have to make a coherent narrative account of your life and third you have to face all the things that you did in the past that didn't work out the way they were supposed to you have to take account of the gaps in your in your resume like to make a resume is to take a cold hard look at yourself it's like oh god who the hell wants to do that like an inventory kind of yes exactly and but but and so you're afraid of that and you put it off and you put it off oh yeah and you you can't say well don't be afraid of that what you can say i think that's more useful is okay you don't like your job you don't like your current position you don't like your status you don't like your income you don't like your trajectory that's why you want to change okay well let's say you don't make your resume then what does the world look like in five years like frightening as it is to make a plan um unhappy stasis just disintegrates right and so one of the things we do do in the self-authoring program in the future authoring program is say well um if you deteriorated according to your own vices and that went that got out of hand what would that look like five years down the road you know everyone knows some people some people flirt with with alcoholism or drug abuse or um or uh sex addiction yes yes yes that's right fractured relationships even candy whatever and then you know you have a sense in your mind of what you'd be like if you let yourself go oh well i'd be sick man i'd be under a bridge or something i'd probably be behind like a i don't know living behind a tim hortons or something you know some type of place i'm trying to make it local to you but like some yeah i'd be living you know i'd just be doing drugs or just probably listening to aerosmith i'd be outdoors i bet no real home i'd have no fear so for you so it's for you it's a vision of homelessness and and substance abuse yeah yeah well you gotta ask yourself like okay think about that is that what you want and i don't i mean think about it imagine that that's what awaits you well then you have a better thing to be afraid of it's like afraid as i am of of gripping my own destiny here's the alternative right now you've created the now you've created a reality of what that looks like so now you have something to battle against right yes exactly right you need part of part of being motivated is to be afraid of the proper things you know afraid as you might be of success and fair enough it's possible that you should be more afraid of stagnation and failure but you have to make those things real for you before they have any power yeah as you're talking i'm even realizing that if i don't make the the the lowest if i don't make the reality of what could happen if i don't take care of myself and if i were to like devolve and disintegrate into my worst place if i don't make that a reality it almost lets me stay in the fog even more because now even the there's not even the the end hasn't even been created i've left it all just so vague that i can just kind of meander around it's like um it it reminds me a little bit i didn't want to quit smoking for a while because if i quit smoking then i would have to actually then do something else good for myself or i would have to then be a non-smoker and a non-smoker might then go for a run or he might like you know uh then achieve a different goal so one of the reasons i realized for a while that i didn't quit smoking was because if i was real honest with myself i wanted to always have an excuse of why i couldn't do other stuff right i think that's a really good that's the kind of observation that's necessary so you've made three observations so far about you know sort of nefarious dark motives that keep you down you said well there's the unwillingness to take responsibility um the the fear of the distance between you and your ideal and then now you had another one which is well it isn't just quitting smoking because that's part of the decision to be healthier well what does that mean well it doesn't just mean quit smoking it implies other things and and those things are effortful in the moment right they pay off in the medium to long term but they're effortful in the moment and so and it it that your ability to do that is exactly part and parcel of that process of pulling things out of the fog it's like and these are really good questions to ask yourself it's like well what what reasons do i have that i don't want to admit that they're stopping me from doing those things that i want to or know that i should i'm afraid of judgment mostly usually afraid of judgment yeah yes yes i'm afraid i'll fail uh i'm afraid i'll realize that i'm not good enough or i was never capable enough in the first place right that's a really big one right there it's like um i watched this simpsons episode recently where bart had to get a c on one class or or be held back and he actually studied for like two days and then he failed and he broke down and he said well my god this is so terrible because i was failing before but i wasn't trying and so i could always it wasn't really failure because i never tried i never tried but this time i really tried and yet i failed and well it turns out that you know it works out for him in the end but that's not the point i thought it was a very apropos episode because it is much different to fail when you've gone all in you know and that's that's very frightening where does that fear come from inside of us is that a fear that's just built into like it's part of the human journey as a human it's part of the journey of the spirit um is that something that's just built into us from birth kind of or do you think that some of that fear is learned over time what do you what do you think about that well i think i think fear of failure is part and parcel of of being human um the particulars of that can be changed a lot by by uh by your upbringing i mean if you were punished unduly for failure or perhaps protected too much from it so you have no uh experience with it then that can certainly elevate the danger your own temperament can do that too because you know sometimes some people are more prone to catastrophize as a consequence of relatively trivial failures and that can bring them down so but we are future oriented creatures and that's a deep part of our nature and so that fear of failure fear of judgment all the things that you've raised so far um are are there deeply central to our nature so you also mentioned you know we talked a little bit earlier about how not clarifying your future goals can keep you in the fog you pointed out you can do that equally with the future that is the failure and i think that's equally true is by you know you're smoking and you cannot think about that it's quite easy to not think about it'll plague you now and then but to think about something generally speaking is effortful and often you also have to talk to other people and so you have to put some time and energy into it whereas not thinking about something is pretty easy and so you'll be you know you wake up in the morning and cough and feel terrible because you smoked way too much and if you thought about that for a little while you could see quite quickly where that's probably leading but you can just not do that distract yourself think about something else um oh yeah think about it yep play a game think about a puzzle think about a friend think about it yeah do there's so many things you could do so then you leave yourself undefined well the problem with all of that too is that i think then in some sense you you're destined to fail in the most fundamental sense because unless you believe that you can get what you want without being sophisticated about failure and being sophisticated about success and i don't believe that because being successful at anything is actually rather unlikely although being successful at something you have a decent shot at but any particular thing is quite unlikely and then if you put obstacles in your path well and you're facing competition because you're definitely always facing competition yeah there's people that want to define themselves there's people that want to make that effort that want to you know like open their eyes in the fog and really try and see themselves you know um yeah that's gonna be competition yes and in all likelihood they're going to get there before you unless unless you think that you can stumble fortunately into what you desire and i don't think virtually no one believes that if pushed you know they might assume that in some ways and act like that in some ways but if you push someone and say look you know if you tried harder would you do better they think well yeah probably yeah and so it's hard to deceive yourself about such things is it more of a western kind of philosophy that we can like the fog is almost uh is it more of a um luxury almost of western civilization to even be able to have a fog i feel like in some cultures and societies a fog would be a luxury maybe because you have to face real elements of survival more often well we could say maybe that it's a a danger of right in a better way right right well i've wondered this you know so let's say you're a parent and you're reasonably well off well how much do you do for your kids and the answer to that is surprisingly complicated because on the one hand you want to do everything you can on the other hand if you deprive them of necessity then you deprive them of the opportunity to no you deprive them of the motivation that that necessity often provides and so you know you said well in cultures where you're living more hand to mouth you you don't have the luxury of making things unduly complicated and there is some advantage in stark motivation you know if you're really hungry you don't have a lot of existential angst around eating you just eat and so that that that definitely is a problem it isn't obvious to me what to do about that either is it it's one of the diseases of of of wealth what should i do well i don't have to do anything well why should i do anything or what calls to me that's that's also a problem that's going to become increasingly relevant do you ever wish sometimes like if you could do it again that you got to be in like a more of a primitive kind of life where you just like where things just felt like if you saw an animal it kind of felt like y'all maybe knew what each other was thinking or something like that like sometimes i feel like i love being in america and i think it's really cool but sometimes i'll see like something a national geographic or something i'll be like man that really looks it looks a lot more real you know like a lot more visceral like like i've been to africa before and i remember looking in the eyes of a man one time and it felt like he was like no joke doctor it felt like he was like three million years old like it just like his eyes it just felt like man you could just dive into his eyes and never hit the bottom man you know i just do you ever think they get how how neat it would be maybe to have more of a primitive type of i don't know if primitive is right people people obviously have a nostalgia for that you know i mean that's why we camp that's why people have a cottage in the woods there is something about about that more direct existence that is obviously attractive to us um it doesn't mean that we're likely to produce it for ourselves although it is strange that we'll do that when we're vacationing yeah it is strange that we'll like kind of go back to almost like we'll kind of flirt with having nothing kind of yeah and it isn't it isn't exactly obvious well and it's also interesting that we regard that as a break and i think part of the reason for that look there isn't a lot of evidence that people in industrialized societies are happier than people who are in non-industrialized societies in fact the evidence is actually quite the reverse i would believe that and i think the reason perhaps not the reason our reason because there's usually many reasons for anything is that it requires constant it requires a certain amount of constant deferral of gratification to maintain an industrialized lifestyle you're not living in the moment you're always putting off the moment so that well so that you'll live longer so i mean one of the advantages of being in an industrialized society is that your life expectancy is much longer but there is something that's more primordially satisfying about or there seems to be about um a lifestyle where the re the actions and the rewards and the punishments aren't so separated you know you're going to medical school you're slaving away let's say the reward for that is deferred far into the future and you're you're giving up all sorts of momentary pleasures and there's a cost there's a cost associated with that as well now and it isn't an easy one to well it's the constant battle that we have between what's good in the moment and what's good over the long run it's a very difficult thing to get right yeah and our existence here is more about what's good over the long run maybe it's a little more like well that's yes well at least the culture is built that way right right yeah yeah it's built on deferral of gratification and and and and so on and so that makes it kind of insipid in some ways it isn't as adventurous or exciting yeah yeah or it doesn't seem that way so interesting though i mean it seems that people who are in less industrialized countries and have a less industrialized existence will trade that quite rapidly for the opportunity to progress so to speak economically so yeah all right let me crack in a little liquid death here as i hit these ad reads uh covered spring break is right around the corner people gonna be running out there coughing coughing down your daughter's neck coughing on your son's back and legs who knows what's going on spring break you better tighten up your pants tighten up your crotch and you know who can help manscaped here to ensure that the party in your pants never stops even veronica corningstone wouldn't say no to this pants party that's a joke from um that movie look manscaped is dedicated to helping you level up your body grooming game i recently got my buttocks waxed and also tightened up around my crotch with a special trimmer that does not cut you do yourself a favor and always use the right tools for the job get 20 off and free shipping by going to manscape.com theo a lot of free gifts they send you get 20 off and free shipping by going to manscape.com t-h-e-o that's 20 off with free shipping by going to manscape.com theo say aloha to your new beautiful hairless body with manscape fabletics mens that's what you want to be a fabletics men's fabletics represents for every guy who wants to look and feel his best without breaking the bank and that's all guys that's all men's these days to get the best activewear at the best prices get at least 20 to 50 off retail prices every time you shop go to t i www.fableticsfabletic s dot com slash t h e o for access to an insane deal deals that are not sane get your first two pairs of shorts for just twenty four dollars when you become a fabletics men vip member at checkout do it i'm wearing their stuff it's great to work out in you feel good that's right all types all colors no exclusions it's an insane deal because they know that once you try their gear you'll be hooked like a fish go to fabletics.com theo for access to an insane deal that includes free shipping that's right on all orders over 49 and free returns on exchanges within 45 days support the podcast get athletic where fabletics yeah it's interesting also too that you would think you would find happiness in in um not goal scoring but like i noticed in my own life in the past year since i spoke to you last you know i've probably had some a decent amount of success and life kind of got a little bit more exciting with doing some touring and um you know was more financially rewarding and i always but i found that i was really not unhappy i was grateful but i was i guess i was a little unhappy i think i always felt like when i got to a certain level of success that the questions that i had inside of my heart or inside of my brain or the the discomfort i felt like everything would go away like like life would hand me some like like magic answer book that had a couple decent answers in it you know but i mean like beyond order yeah yes yes like beyond order like there would be okay you did it you know like somebody comes out from behind the door and they're like all right bucko you know like finally oz comes out you know and um right but it and says good job but that never happens no no well you know that's that's another indication of of the perverseness of human beings to some degree so look there are there are two kinds of reward technically speaking there's satisfaction and there's incentive reward and satisfaction is the reward that you were sort of dreaming about it's it's the so you're hungry and you have thanksgiving dinner and you're no longer hungry that's a reward that's satiation it's satisfying it it stops you from being hungry well you think while i'm hungry i don't want to be hungry anymore but hunger did give you something to do and there was the anticipation of the meal you know and sometimes on thanksgiving day people will not eat all day just to heighten the anticipation right because that that increases the incentive reward and incentive reward is what you experience when you're moving towards a desired goal rather than when you attain it and we do have this vision it's a vision of utopia and probably is what motivates utopian thinking motivates ideas of the promised land which is milk and honey that if we just turn the corner and get to here everything will be all right yeah and that that isn't the case um we're wired up so that the pursuit is often more engaging than the than the acquisition yeah i wish i had to realize that though as i was trying to acquire i didn't there were it's like it's such a tough thing i i missed some of the moments of the pursuit because i was so focused on i think on this end goal that would make any of the uncomfort or all it would make all the pain of the the sacrifice it would make it all worth it kind of right right right well that and that there is some utility in that sort of dream too because it having that image of the future also motivates you to pursue it but the problem with that kind of thinking i suppose too is that this is dostoyevsky raised this in notes from underground it's a great short book and he created short i'll give it a chance man it's a great book it's a great but it's really it's a real punch that book and it contains a very powerful critique of the idea of utopia and dostoevsky's and he was talking about the sort of precursors to the russian communists and their notion if you just gave everybody enough material resources that all of a sudden the problems of the world would disappear dostoevsky first of all points out that that's nonsense because um for reasons that are similar to the ones that you laid out but also that even if it was true people are so perverse in a sense we're such peculiar creatures that we would smash our happiness all to pieces out of sheer boredom just so something new and exciting could happen so that we would have something to do again and wow i read that and i thought wow that's exactly right it's that it's this searching that's part of our essential nature is not only insatiable but it's actually desirable because well what do you do you shake hands with oz and then you die it's like done i'm over well you don't because you want to get on to the next great adventure and so it is i you know the sermon on the mount seems to address this to me this fundamental problem and my reading of it anyways is something like um align yourself with the highest good that you're capable of imagining and so for all intents and purposes that's god the sum total of all that's good and you live in relationship to that and then concentrate on the moment and see it it seems to me that way you get to have your cake and eat it too right because you're aiming at something that's like the promised land this proverbial utopia it's it by definition is the best possible thing and maybe your view of that's going to change as you mature but it doesn't matter that's still going to orient you and having that in mind so now you're pointing in the right direction you can attend very carefully to the details of the pursuit and that's i think that's that's the best we can do well i i certainly haven't well i did come from the sermon on the mount so hypothetically it's a reliable source you know but i think it makes a tremendous amount of sense psychologically yeah i mean why would you not aim at the best that you could conceptualize if you were going to aim right um and having done that well then it is reasonable to concentrate on the present and then you can then you can immerse yourself in the present and enjoy it um and and then you don't perhaps have those regrets that you described of missing the voyage because you were so focused on on the on the say the material luxury yeah and material luxury is a strange thing too you know i mean um it isn't obvious often whether you own something or it owns you and and i don't mean that in a flippant sense oh i wouldn't at all recently i was investing in you know people doing cryptocurrency now it's like invisible i don't even know what it is you know but it's people are excited by it and i started to notice those markets on this crypto thing and uh and i didn't mean to interrupt you dr no please go ahead um thanks um so but i noticed like i'd wake up in the middle of the night and i would check this thing and finally i realized like whatever monies i'm gonna possibly make in this portal this gambling portal of cryptocurrency um which no judgment on it i don't know enough about it to really judge it but i'm spending like important time checking it i was just i realized i became a slave to it like and so i just sold it all i don't want i just it did i in in my heart and in my chest it didn't feel good having that distraction to check all the time about what was going on with this money it just felt like it owned me and um and i immediately decided you know what i just don't want to be owned by this maybe something else but just not this you know right and was it specifically the worry about it that was bothering you or what what do you think triggered or or alerted you to the fact that that pursuit wasn't for you that's a great question i think it was um i couldn't control myself this is the truth i couldn't control myself from checking it and so the only alternative i had was to eliminate it because i was really having trouble and it doesn't fully answer your question but i was just having trouble stop checking it so i just said i have to get rid of it well it answers it to some degree you found um to your surprise see this is partly what i what we were talking earlier about not hiding things in the fog this is part of the process of coming to a clearer vision of yourself is noticing exactly that because your theory was well i can buy this cryptocurrency and maybe i'll make some money but regardless one way or another this is going to make my life better you had a theory of yourself and you had a theory of the money ah yeah well it turns out that that was wrong now why exactly we don't know but the consequence of that was that you became a slave to a set of impulses that you didn't find enjoyable in the least yeah and that is and and so then you stop doing it and and and and fair enough that seems to be the right right solution yeah and that's a kind of a simple scale i think and that scale evolves as i get a little bit older of does this make me feel good like does it really make me feel good like even sometimes making some money doesn't really make me feel good you know um you know like does it make me feel good as like a human as like a something that has to be alive do i does it feel like it like brightens that part of me that makes me feel proud you know i guess i i don't know i'm trying to explain it no that's a it's a great thing to explain as far as i'm concerned because look you said does it make you feel good and then you started to investigate what good meant and well both of those things are really worth doing they're not foolish in the least because what's good you know when you brought in the idea of being alive which you know you might think well why did you bring in the idea of being alive obviously your life but you're you're there's a theory there that's emerging too which is well i'm a living creature and i'm a well this african that you saw who was so old you're that old you're really old you know life has been around for three and a half billion years we're really old and god only knows what we're up to or who we are and so you say well we're going to pursue what's good and what is that well it has something to do with the fact that we're alive we have to serve our own biological reality we we have to address the good in a manner that's that's right for for for us as as living creatures and so you say well we have to pursue the good but we also have to figure out what it means what the good means you know and that's partly what i'm trying to do in well and beyond order my other books i looked a lot at traditional ideas of the good most of those are grounded in religious conceptions you know what does it mean to to pursue the good what does it mean to be a good person well these are very complicated problems and and but they're you you don't you don't get a free pass on them you if you're if you're murky about them then while you're you're ill-defined and vague and inarticulate in your own life and that's not there's comfort in that it's comfortable yeah oh it's very comfortable it's like a nice very it's like a nice shawl or something you know it's almost it's merino wool i mean it's nice you know it's really nice to be comfortable and not have to ask myself am i happy am i being of service do i feel like i'm contributing anything to the world do i feel like i'm being honest do i love myself you know do i love others am i being a good brother am i being a good son if some of the answers aren't what i want them to be am i trying in some way to maybe get to answers that i'm more happy with um you know am i proud of myself am i ashamed of myself um where does my shame come from you know yeah well that's a good question that's a really tricky question that's when i feel a lot when you i just feel a lot i feel you know shame really it's such a powerful thing sometimes i'm carrying a shame i don't even know if it's my own yes well that's why there's the concept of original sin you know the shame is such a universal human emotion it's it saturates our existence it's partly because we're so social you know and so the sense that we have a responsibility to ourselves and to others is really built into us at a very very profound level multiple in multiple ways and we've we we exist in relationship to that shame all the time and it's easy to say well you should dispense with it you know and but it's not so easy to do and it's not even clear how you should go about dispensing with it you know i've seen people in my clinical practice who had what seemed to be seem to be counterproductive levels of shame right they would do things that someone else might do and then punish themselves far more than seemed appropriate and i i started to think about what does it mean to punish yourself appropriately philosophy of punishment which i outlined to some degree in the first book on the chapter on children which is don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them well you have to stop them well how do you stop people well you punish them one way or another even if it's just withdrawal of attention there's a so then well how should you punish assuming there are standards etc well one rule at least with regards to yourself is you shouldn't hit yourself harder than is necessary to teach you right so if you've learned your lesson good enough and i think that's also often a prefer condition for forgiving other people it's like well you know did they learn their lesson yes well then maybe you can let it go because additional punishment what is it going to make them learn their less the lesson even more well why will i forgive myself why will i forgive other people before i forgive myself i wonder well that's a good question because it isn't obvious that you should right you you because you know we tend to think that people are selfish and they put themselves first but it's just as common the reverse is just as common where they'll be better to other people than to themselves yeah i feel that a lot it isn't yes i i i think it's more common than the reverse actually although people can act selfishly from time to time i do think that most people punish themselves more than they punish other people and that's that's also something to be aware of and to see if you can regulate that because it's not it's not necessarily for the best even if it might be associated with the willingness to take responsibility yeah i think it just comes from having to take a lot of responsibility growing up and so you would be hyper you know you would have to be very stern on yourself um but i don't want to get away from shame because it's really important um well shame is a good pointer to the good too hypothetically because you could ask yourself um well why what am i ashamed about what is shame what should i do about it those are all good questions maybe you can dispense with the shame that's excessive but if you're ashamed well does that mean that you did something wrong well if it does that means that there's such a thing as doing something wrong that seems to imply that there's such a thing as wrong that seems to imply that there's such a thing as right and so shame in principle can also be a pathway to to what is good say well if i'm engaged in something that's good at least i won't be ashamed and that i mean everybody has to answer these questions for themselves but i think that's something that's very much worth considering what would what would be the case if you decided to stop engaging in all those actions that made you ashamed yeah yeah no it's good and it's nice to think that shame can be a direction and anything can be a direction that could lead us then to the reverse which is like yeah if if something is wrong then there must be something that's right and so well it's the best evidence for some it's the best evidence that i know of for for something that's right right it's it's it you can you can find people who will debate the existence of the the true or the good they're cynical and they're nihilistic let's say um they're not naive maybe that's their advantage but it's very rare to find someone who doesn't believe that there's such a thing as what's wrong and so and an untrue and so that's a good starting point it's like if you want to discover what's right you can first discover more easily discover what's wrong look i think that's partly why we like anti-heroes in in movies and in fiction you know what's the purpose of a dark character well he shines a light on what the reverse is and sometimes that's very powerful in the batman series for example the joker generally was was a better bad character than batman was a good character he was more realistic and more thought provoking yeah yeah there was more i want to say more depth there but there was more depth there there was there was like salmon yeah well i think it's partly because the joker especially heath ledger's version was pretty realistically evil in a psychological sense whereas batman well he's a he's a he's a vigilante and yeah whereas being a vigilante might be you know one pale reflection of what the good is because it requires courage and and and is involved with justice it's still a pretty pale reflection of what the good is so i do sometimes go ahead sorry doctor no no you you had a thought i'd like to hear it i sometimes think maybe that's why it's almost interesting to be the joker in the world sometimes to be to to delve in that turmoil of the darkness and stuff because it's a more complex character in some ways there's almost some appeal to it well you know there's a notion derived from the psychology psychological theories put forth by carl jung and and and he derived some of this from nietzsche a philosopher and nietzsche famously claimed that most morality was not morality but cowardice it was merely the fear of getting caught wow or the or the fear of public humiliation something like that that's what keeps you in line so then if there's a riot and there's no police around you're perfectly happy to throw a rock through the window because the probability of getting caught declines precipitously so and then if your morality is all persona so for jung a morality that was nothing but conformity and adherence to social norms and fear sort of a narrow constrained i'll never dare to do anything wrong and therefore i'm good yeah that wasn't that wasn't good at all and we have a lot of that these days yes definitely definitely and so under those conditions if if you're nothing but a persona and so you're an obedient coward let's say then your dark side is actually the pathway to salvation because it's what breaks out yes precisely it's what breaks that that tawdry banal morality into pieces and leads you forward that's crazy so sometimes you need the dark side to even see what's going on on the ah it's tricky it's very it's very very frequently the case and i mean it's it's a it's an axiom of of jungian psychotherapy that the pathway to development is through the shadow so for example um you might have somebody in your clinical practice who's um being raised by by extremely conservative and religious parents which i'm not criticizing by the way but you know they're 27 years old and still a virgin now look there's utility in fidelity and promiscuity isn't a plus but it might be that if you're still a virgin at the age of 27 that it's necessary for you to investigate your lust in order to progress past your mere childlike obedience right right yeah because you may have some hang up there that's even preventing you from engaging and getting settled down you know oh you in all likelihood because for example if you're terrified of that then perhaps you're not very good at sophisticated sexual suggestion like flirtation and so then you're nowhere near as attractive as you might be so no one is going to be you know interested in you as a potential mate yeah you know and it you might also see someone who prides themselves for example on never getting angry maybe they had an overbearing father who was angry all the time i never get angry well that person is constantly being pushed around by his or her boss at work and maybe his wife or husband his or her wife or husband and that that i'm too good to be angry persona is stopping them from manifesting the aggression necessary to even tell the truth about their situation man there's so there's so many boxes and places we can put ourselves we have to be careful everything is kind of a little bit of a trap sometimes yeah well that that's why we pay attention to being bored i suppose to some degree you know that's a sign too that the box has got a little bit too tight yeah and then you need to make arrangements with the part of you that can break things because things need to be broken just like they need to be fixed and something that's old and and and and ready to fall down sometimes needs to be leveled before something new can come along look there's nothing more obvious in the world today than the fact that you might need help and i know i know i need help because i get help what i'm talking to you about today is getting help that is better than what you've been getting you could ask your boy sidney for some information and that little bit shall tell you some or you could ask a little daniel over there for some information and you know he's over there he's on he's hitting him winston's and he's been locked up in his own backyard for doing family crime but better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist real help we're talking real help the service is available for clients worldwide better help want you to start living a happier life today you know i tell a story a while back i was going to see my friend chris dillio yeah it's about a year and a half ago and i was not doing well i was probably crying and driving and i wasn't even listening to uh country music so you know just natural and i wasn't doing well and i needed some help so i pulled over on the side of the road and i called better help and in no time i was facetiming with a real human female psychotherapist visit their website and read their testimonials that are posted daily go to betterhelp.com theo and join the over one million people who have taken charge of their mental health you can get 10 off your first month at betterhelp.com theo this podcast is sponsored by better help in this past weekend listeners get 10 off at betterhelp.com slash theo if you need some help and you don't want to go to a person in you know in your town or you're scared or whatever give it a ring bug up your head is a unique spot you know and you could do little things you could do a uh ear wax cotton handle thing see what's up you can do other stuff put other put a hat on your head comb your hair all those things are unique but none of them are going to change your life wouldn't it be great if they were a pocket-sized guide that helped you sleep focus act and be better there is and if you have 10 minutes headspace can change your life headspace is your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations in an easy to use app headspace is the only meditation app advancing the field of mindfulness if you're not being mindful you can be mindful and that's called headspace you know there's so many different little uh meditations on there it teaches you how to meditate some people say why i sit there and you know i don't know what's going on and i can't relax and i got ants suddenly i got ants on me damn headspace is backed by 25 published studies on its benefits six hundred thousand five star reviews and over 60 million downloads you deserve to feel happier in head space is meditation made simple go to headspace dot com slash t-h-e-o that's headspace.com theo for a free one month trial one free month of headspace with access to headspace full library of meditations for every situation everyone that's right this is the best deal offered right now head to headspace.com theo today you've probably tried meditation before and it didn't work or maybe you felt like you were doing it wrong if mental health is part of your self-care plan this year you owe it to yourself to try headspace and now back to mr peterson so lucky to have him you know what one of the things i learned from reading nietzsche was again in relationship to morality is that um a man for example someone who is incapable of violence is not moral because they keep it under control right right because they're not doing that's right they don't have the capacity it's like well i wouldn't engage in a fist fight well yeah right precisely and and i can parade that as my moral virtue i'm i'm non-violent i'm non-aggressive and this is completely independent of the morality of violence or aggression you know i mean obviously we think it's moral in cases of self-defense and so it has its necessary place but you have to ask yourself all the time is like are you law abiding or are you just conventional and cowardly yeah dang man more questions you got to ask ourselves we gotta we gotta ask ourselves questions i think that's just such a big thing we have to like people we have to learn to get into places and ask ourselves questions and really come up with some answers and one thing i notice is the habit of it gets it helps you fine tune the practice of it just even the practice of it helps you fine-tune the ability to do it because at first it feels very impossible when you first start asking yourself questions to really think you're going to get somewhere and get answers yeah well to begin with you don't necessarily get you you don't get going very quickly right right right and that's again you have to have some patience with yourself when you first take those stumbling steps you said that since we've talked last that you know your life has progressed positively is that the case yeah yeah yesterday so what to what do you to what do you attribute that what have you been doing right or what have you been doing wrong less well one thing that's helped me i think is just i've had more exposure to people that are more capable in a lot of different fields than myself so i think that's made part of me want to rise to the occasion a little bit more not to be equals to them or anything but just to it's made me a little more worldly i think in some ways in other ways my brother made me promise i would go to therapy even if i didn't want to so that's made me have to like commit to going and speaking to a therapist every week so that makes me have to um just talk about stuff a little more and i think slowly in some of those moments i've had to like you know i've had moments where if i'm really feeling something i'll kind of ask myself what am i feeling right now like am i feeling sad am i feeling disappointed am i feeling dejected am i feeling tired you know i just start to really kind of like it's almost like using a metal detector over my feelings when i ask questions and then sometimes one of the words will kind of spark up and like okay i'm feeling uh dejected um and then why what who's making you feel dejected what's making you feel dejected it's almost like i'm like sherlock holmes but i'm the crime scene yeah that's perfect that's a that's perfect well that is exactly that process by which knowledge emerges that i was referring to before it's like you have an emotion but you don't even necessarily know what it is yeah it's just a clue it's like bubbles that come up in a river or bubbles that come up in a lake right and sometimes there's a monster down there dude and that gets scary when you start to really get some of the answers you're like oh my god and some of them will make me just sometimes break down crying because it'll be such a real unearthing of something that i didn't know was going on inside of me yes well that's another reason why people don't look is that there's a monster in the depths and and that metaphor of the bubbles that's that's that's a perfect symbolic representation the depth because look you can't see what's in the depth so the depth is what's unknown and something lurks in the unknown and when emotions arise as you mentioned it's a manifestation of something that's underneath you can see this in you see this very clearly in intimate relationships you know where one person will get annoyed at the other for some minor transgression and soon they'll be fighting about something that happened or didn't happen 10 years ago and then they'll get to the point where they're investigating the structure of the entire relationship and then that'll stop people from ever having a dispute at all because they're so terrified that any pathway into a dispute will lead down into you know is this relationship worthwhile that's actually part of the reason i think that it's useful to have divorce difficult if not forbidden because otherwise that question it's like do you really want to be tortured by that question for the rest of your life at some point it's it's nice to just say well i'm not going to go there that's off the table yeah i um i want to we talked a little bit about shame and i wanted to kind of take it into a different direction and um you know i feel a lot i've kind of felt some shame um like i don't feel ashamed of my country like i live in the in the united states and i don't feel ashamed of my country but i feel like more recently there's been like i'm supposed to feel ashamed of my country like i know like the olymp the olympics is going to be coming up sometime i don't know when but i know it keeps coming up and i'm it's like if i cheer for america it almost feels these days in america like you're wrong um and it seems like there's a ton of animosity and resentment uh from americans in but who are enjoying like the comfort and the privileges and the the the opportunities of of america um towards america and towards like its history and stuff um but i but like if we didn't have the battles and we didn't have like the social revolutions that have happened in america over time you know then half of the world would still be enslaved and you know there'd be a lot less opportunity for all types of people and all types of genders and everything so it just feels like such a weird time there's like a lot of shame being cast on people in america for for i think supporting like a traditional idea of america maybe yeah i think i think you're dead on with all those observations and and especially with regards to the sort of questioning attitude you have towards it it's like well look let's see if we can sort that through a little bit all right well there's some real complex existential problems there because you you pointed out well with any complicated nation there's the bloody history and the accomplishments and the question is well what do you make of the relationship between the bloody history and the accomplishments and it's complicated so you're you're cursed and blessed by your history right and what's the right attitude well okay let's look at patriotism for a minute now in principle pride is a sin and i think the reason for that's more like arrogance and arrogance is a sin because an arrogant person is convinced that they're absolutely right and that can make you a tyrant to other people but also to yourself it makes it very difficult for you to learn for example and so you might say well i'm a patriot and you and then if you're if you criticize that you could say well that's a sin of pride and um look at the bloody history of your nation and how dare you be proud of that and and it's not easy to figure out how to argue your way out of that but by the same token to have no affinity for your community and your country seems also seems to lead you places that aren't particularly good so it seems to me that um one attitude you could have towards your country is gratitude that's not pride exactly right that's so you could be a patriot of gratitude and you could say well look man i go outside and hey look there's a highway and there's a bridge and there's a school and a university and i didn't make these things and i can walk down the street without fear of like mass thugs most of the time and i can pursue what i want at least compared to people throughout history and right a lot of opportunity yeah and a lot of security a lot of security i mean the probability that that a person who isn't involved in criminal activity is going to be the victim of a violent crime is extremely low so and far more than at any other point in history and so i think from animals like animals used to attack people all the time but they don't even that that hardly even happens anymore here yes well way back when this is millions of years ago there was a cat in africa that had two large teeth in the front and one large tooth on the bottom that exactly fit over a hominid skull yes bro yeah right absolutely and it turns out that we're not eaten by many of those anymore and the problem right and you know we've kind of dealt with the predator problem to the point where we actually feel sorry for the predators you know maybe we want a few more wolves and a couple of lions and tigers which is easy to say if they're not eating your children at the time but right right so it seems to me that you know security we're definitely secure we are definite well comparatively speaking and for sure you compare us to the rest of humanity in the past and the rest of humanity at present it's like you can be grateful for all those things and still so look when you're a kid you kind of have a naive patriotism the same way that you have naive trust when you're a kid as long as no one's abused you you kind of trust everybody and but that's not really trust you know it's it's not trust in the sophisticated sense trust in the sophisticated sense is more like look i know that you're as full of snakes as me and that if i enter into a relationship with you there's a possibility of deceit and betrayal but i'm going to put an honest foot forward anyways and take you at your word partly because that's an encouragement for you to manifest your best and hopefully you'll do that with me and so that's an act of courage that makes the world better and you still might get stabbed in the back for doing it but you're not a fool under those conditions you've taken a calculated risk and i i would say the same thing about patriotism it's like when you're a kid you know you're you you you stand up when the american flag shows and you sing and you're you're an unquestioning participant in that and then maybe when you're an adolescent you start to learn about the sawyer elements of history and that takes a hit but then maybe you get beyond that and you think yes well human history is a complete bloody nightmare it's a bloody tragedy it's a it's a catastrophe but i'm still look at all the things that have been produced as a consequence and you're grateful for that and and that's a more mature form of courage i would say rather than the unthinking patriotism or unthinking anti-patriotism for that matter it's discerning gratitude right and i think you can be discerningly grateful for what the us has to offer and if you're not moving away that's sort of evidence that you feel the same way yeah well sometimes i think a lot of people would like to move away but there's just nowhere left to move you know i think a lot of people sometimes would love to start a new country or something but they just there's nowhere left to go kind of well it's good in principle you know i saw i went to an airbnb out on vancouver in the vancouver island vicinity a few years ago oh there you go on one of these islands you tried it but populated by mostly by hippies yeah and we came across this couple who rented this little cabin that my wife and i stayed in and they had decided to sort of go back to the land well they bought something that owned them because they were on this island it was pretty isolated and it could be self-sufficient but do you know how much work it takes to make you self-sufficient wow like just keeping yourself in chickens is no simple task it's it's a it's a daily grind and that's just chickens right and maybe you're training eggs and so on yeah that's right it's and so they were really in trouble this couple because they wanted to go start a new country but they had no idea just how difficult it is to well to have a chicken let's say which is something we take for granted because it's so unbelievably simple yeah all these problems are solved for us we don't even notice how difficult it was to solve them have you seen there's that television show alone that was actually filmed out on vancouver island do you ever see any episodes of that show no no what's its theme it's they take i think maybe 10 people and they put them onto like an uninhabited place and they have to survive for themselves by hunting and fishing and trapping and so it's kind of reality television but they the contestants have to film all the footage themselves so there's no crew there so i mean you have people really like killing aardvarks and ox i mean hunting down bears it's pretty intense um it's about as like real as i've ever seen a show get but the first two seasons were on uh vancouver island and it well it turns out doing things like hunting and fishing are actually incredibly difficult technical skills because animals don't like to be eaten and they're actually pretty smart so you have to know a tremendous amount before you can manage that with any degree of success yeah um so patriotism so so i if so if we're out of time what do you think about that i think i mean i think your comments about i think the idea of patriotism is under assault because you know it's an oppressive culture and all of that and there there is an element of that that of course is true but i think well i like hearing what you said to have a gratitude uh you know to have a thankful gratitude of where we are and of the place that i'm in to think of history in a little bit of a longer term instead of just in maybe some of the simpler terms that maybe i saw in commercials um growing up and stuff like that um and just in some of the simpler terms of like saying the pledge of allegiance and stuff but i um i really like having the feeling that everybody is on the same page even though maybe that's just a uh a creature comfort that i've had growing up and maybe that's changing some in america um it just used to feel like everyone was on the same page yes well that that that brings us back to the technological revolution to some degree you know there does seem to be a certain amount of fragmentation of the narrative let's say and that is unsettling because it is when everyone's on the same page they're not at each other's throats you know and you might you can put that down and you can say well that's just conformity it's like well first of all let's not get too casually critical about the idea of conformity i cover that in chapter one do not casually denigrate social institutions or creative achievement it's like it's really hard to get everybody on the same page and it's really hard to get everybody to conform especially when they're doing it voluntarily and there is not much difference between that and peace and if you don't think that that's a good thing then you should think really hard about failed states where no one's on the same page and you get an instant proliferation of warring gangs of armed thugs and if you think the utopians are going to win the armed thug battle you've got another thing coming yeah because they'll be the first ones on the chopping block and so you know you're you're a comedian and an open person and not likely to have a great taste in some ways for pure conformity and and i'm someone who enjoys artistic creation and and revolutionary ideas but by the same token i'm not someone who despises conformity you know well you said in the book i mean you said that we're always going to have as humans we're always going to be searching for revolutionary ideas it's something that um is constantly the way that we've always been and it's the way of like just a a liberal way of thinking is to keep moving forward and progress and try things that are new and want to do that but i just feel like you have to have a foundation of comfort to be able to do that from because some of that is a luxury of being comfortable um or at least tremendous amount of enough um and to feel at all and when things get really uncomfortable that feels a lot scarier place to be creative from almost well the first thing we should point out is that being a conformist isn't the highest of moral virtues but being unable to conform is worse now refusing to conform that's in a different category you might have valid reasons for especially if you're exceptional and you know you could say well virtually everyone is exceptional in some regard and should perhaps not be conformist there and we could say fine but the rest of the 95 percent of them should go along with the crowd because that that's going along with peace and we also don't ever want to confuse the inability to conform with the ability to produce revolutionary ideas because just because you can't conform or are rejected doesn't mean you're a genius what it most likely means is that you're just incapable and then you're going to be highly motivated to confuse your incapability with creativity and that's not helpful and then you pointed out something that's also very important um just how many dimensions do you want to be exceptional on anyways you know you're you're a comedian and you have to take substantial risk to do that and it's quite threatening it wouldn't be such a bad idea if the rest of your life was well maybe secure enough to allow you to tolerate that yeah yeah to have some more sense of yeah like um i guess i worry on like a bigger like picture as a nation that like if we start to like if the fabric of some of the textile of the past if some of the tapestry kind of i guess or tapestry of the past starts to come apart like i'm all for making new tapestry but i just feel like i just get scared i don't know if i feel but it's more a fear i get scared that if we do that that things could just tear and and i just don't know what's going to happen i guess i'm just i'm scared a little bit i don't know what the future of this country that i live in looks like and i used to feel like i had a little bit better idea but i don't know if the idea of what i thought it looked like was just a comfort based upon like my skin tone and growing up with at least food in my house you know i i you know some stuff like i just don't know if i don't know if maybe my idea was just a luxury or something i i don't know do you know what i'm kind of saying a little bit i'm just kidding well i think that's a question that's a question that everybody's being driven to answer partly because there's intense moral pressure to ask yourself that question you know to what degree was your privilege unearned well there's an easy answer to that actually lots of it yeah but the same holds true with virtually everyone else yeah you know and so um who's who's got privilege depends a lot on what group you're willing to use as a comparison yeah yeah so um even impoverished people in in north america are rich by world standards yeah yeah they're in the top one percent generally speaking and they're certainly in the top one percent by historical standards the problem with with hammering home the idea of undeserved privilege is that there's no one who can't be crucified on that particular cross right right you know unless you're born naked in the middle of a field with nothing yeah everyone is the undeserved recipient of of the fruits of the past the fact that you have a mother is is a privilege you didn't earn that and so when you say you deserve nothing because of your privilege what makes you so sure you're not saying that to everyone for all time in which case no one ever gets anything that they are that they can have for their own so it's a very dangerous game well i don't see where it can end it's not it's not obvious because imagine each person is multiple has multiple identities that's intersectionality we all have multiple identities you're privileged along some of those identities and relatively speaking and less along others so if you're young and black and female well you're young right so so that's not deserved it's not like you earned being young and so right how are you gonna be some way of prayer there's always gonna be some form of privilege in every regard yeah i certainly didn't feel privileged growing up i mean i feel like a lot of what i've had in my life has certainly been earned um i felt disadvantaged in a lot of ways um you know emotionally and some there's always yeah i think everybody would have their own uh discussion their own like not their own parameters but yeah i could see how everybody would have pluses and minuses well that's why i think the right level of analysis is the individual you know and when you move away from that it gets danger it gets dangerous quickly and it gets dangerous for everyone and and the the reason why is the reason that you just laid out you take any individual person you can point to the advantages that they had now look i understand that some people i mean i was a clinician for a long time and i saw people who had lives that were so hard that you can you could barely even imagine it you know i had one client who was impaired intellectually she had she lived with an aunt who was schizophrenic who had an alcoholic boyfriend who was extremely violent and also schizophrenic who used to bother her about being possessed by satan she was so um uh i hate saying shamed ashamed that she couldn't look anyone in the eye she would walk down the street with her hand like this sort of bowed down because she felt so um so unworthy she wasn't an attractive person she looked like a street person so people treated her badly all things considered now look she i saw her at this hospital that i was working at where the inpatients were people who were in even worse shape than her they were people so hurt that they couldn't be de-institutionalized and i saw her because she had decided that she wanted to take one of these institutionalized people for a walk when she was out walking her dog so despite all her her catastrophes which were plenty you know she could still see outside of herself to someone who had it even worse it was really something you know yeah well and so this privilege game it's like well look to your own privilege and that isn't i'm i'm not saying that there aren't historical injustices but of course there are many of them right there are for everyone in a lot of ways yes but if we only look at the victim side of things anyway even as a human if i only see myself as a victim i'm really going to have a tough time i can see myself i can respect that i'm a victim of some things but if i only see myself as a victim it's going to make the rest of my life pretty tough i feel like well it also enjoys what it matters what you want to do about the fact that you're a victim do you want to take away from other people you know it isn't that and that i don't know i kind of put us on a lot of different planes here at once oh that's okay well that was a very complicated problem and it's one that you know i think is particularly uh relevant to your particular country at this particular time and place because that the tapestry is under assault and the thing is it's a lot easier to burn something up or to cut it up than it is to knit a new tapestry it's really hard and has there been is it is it okay where we are right now from an outsider's perspective is it scary like based on like historical um civilizations and stuff like do you think we're in a place that is like still kind of safe judging from an outside like or from a you know i mean you're still in western civilization canada's not extremely different than the us um do you feel like we're in a scary place or do you feel like it's just a lot of pomp and circumstance and at the root of things we're were still at a very uh realistic place i think there are always dangers that threaten the stability of societies i think that those dangers are real but i think they're always there i think that i have faith in the robustness of say american institutions all things considered it seems to me that you your country has weathered crises of at least this magnitude and often far worse many times in the past and and that's worked out um so i think there's reason to be alert but not hopeless i mean on the broader scale the broad scale world scale let's say it's hard to make a case that things were ever better than they are now and it's almost impossible to make the case that there was ever a time in the past where things were getting better faster than they are now so it's reasonable to assume that everyone on the planet will be out of abject poverty as defined by the u.n by the year 2030. wow it's half well it already have from 2000 to 2012. and so and that was the fastest transformation in human history by a huge margin yeah i've been seeing less poor people i feel like honestly well there there's there's variance because in the western countries that the working class hasn't kept up as well as they were in the 60s let's say in some ways but globally speaking there's lots of reasons for optimism but it's a difficult problem to settle because there's always the possibility that any given problem will get completely out of hand you know that's the the case that people make with regards to climate change you know well there's a small percentage of complete catastro a small percent probability of complete catastrophe well we don't know what to do with a problem like that because it's impossible to calculate how many resources you devote to something that's absolutely catastrophic but that has a small probability of occurring right right you know like what if the greenland ice sheet melts right well then the oceans rise you know multiple feet and that's a catastrophe well how much is it worth to stave that off it's very very difficult to calculate yeah and plus we're still a lot of people are still surviving a lot of i think there's still that a heavy survival instinct in a lot of people where it's more of short-term survival that i don't even think it's it's our fault for thinking that way it's just built into like our limbic system or a brain stem or something like it's hard it is yeah it i agree with you it's an archetypal story that's the apocalypse yeah you know the end of the world is always upon us you know i well go on sorry doc well it's because things can fall apart for us completely and they do in our own life there's illness waiting there's death waiting like we we have a built-in sense that things can come to a cataclysmic end and it it and that also makes us prudent and careful and able to look at the future and first all catastrophes but the problem is is that we can also generate false positives and be unduly worried about things that are very unlikely to occur yeah yeah and sometimes it's like some people will start to become unduly worried about things that they don't even know if they can occur it that even becomes an addiction for some people like they're just addicted to problems you know like um i noticed that a lot like people are just addicted to problems um especially on social media in in in the us and and and i had a question about social media sometimes i feel like tech is like the new fossil fuel kind of um like like bandwidth is like the new oil and like youtube is like the pipelines and like um you know like wi-fi is kind of like this is this natural gas like it's all kind of um i don't know there's like these platforms that we need to be able to survive these days um you mean they've become part of the infrastructure right they've become huge parts of the infrastructure especially in communication um yes and communication has become one of the main uh uh i mean especially even since we talked last like last time we spoke you were talking about how um video and uh podcasting has become such a new form of communication how people are using it and the platforms that we're on are now like even probably twice as popular as they were two years ago when we spoke um so i sometimes i find for myself like i get afraid to kind of speak up and even ask questions like on so on on my podcast and and to talk about certain topics because i'm afraid of being um d platform like the platform can be taken away and they never i just wonder have they ever had that in history like in the past like you know people you you might you you might not be afraid to write something because no one was going to take away the trees to make the paper you know um but now it feels like if you don't and i may be wrong but i feel sometimes like if i don't say the right not say the right thing but if i don't evade certain conversations and raise my hand and ask certain questions that if that if i do do those things sorry that they could take away the forest they could take away the the paper the youtube the instagram they can take away the platform where we basically has become our english language kind of in a lot of ways well you know i mean in societies that weren't free and that would be most societies the probability that your voice could be taken away was very high because you could just be killed or imprisoned wow and i suppose all things considered it's better to have your youtube channel shut down than to be imprisoned or killed right right it is it is new i suppose in that we're dependent on these technology companies increasingly dependent for our interpersonal communication i don't feel like the fear that you're describing is unwarranted i certainly feel the same way about my podcast and youtube channel is i've had guests on recently where i've been extremely uncomfortable talking about the topics that we've been talking about and i think reasonably so you can face de-platforming or worse they can just shut you down completely and it's arbitrary and very very complicated and costly and hard on you and and then there's the constant probability of being swarmed on social media which is in some ways a new phenomenon partly because of the sheer volume of it yeah and the degree of exposure so there are reasons to tread carefully that's for sure and it is quite terrifying no doubt about it have you run into trouble with your podcast no i haven't run into trouble i think a lot of it for me has just been fear um you know i had on uh robert f kennedy who's a friend of mine and he's not an anti-vaxxer but he is a lot more about safe vaccines and making sure that vaccines have been tested properly and he's an environmentalist you know since he was a child and so it makes sense that he you know he cares about the environment around us and the one that's in our veins you know going into our bodies he's just an overall environmentalist man but um but i know he was his instagram was taken away for being i don't know if he was anti-vaxxed but certainly for like bringing up a lot of topics and and questions about vaccinations um so i don't know i guess i just see it happening sometimes and so i just get i just get worried i just get like um you know i just wonder has there ever been a time and place in history but but i guess you answered it that some people used to be killed for being for saying with that oh that was the norm wanted to say like free free expression is that's not common but do you worry that we're we're like kind of cornering our any of our freedom of speech or anything or am i just just scared well i worry enough about it so that it scares me to talk about certain things and it isn't obvious to me that that's for the best i don't think your fear is unwarranted i also think that freedom of speech is sufficiently threatening so that the probability that it will be curtailed is always high and and that we have to what is it the price of freedom is eternal vigilance i think i've got that right i don't remember who i said it but who said it but and then so you might think well what should you talk about and what shouldn't you and i think that depends to a large degree on your conscience you know if you're interested in something you're trying to figure it out if you thwart that then you thwart the part of yourself that's interested in things and trying to figure them out and i can't see that's for the best for anyone and i do believe that all things considered free speech is a lesser evil than constrained speech because someone has to decide what the content of the speech is going to be and it's i don't see that we should give that power over to someone um lightly no matter who they are partly because things change too just because something happened to be the case a year ago doesn't mean that it's the right solution now and so we we we have to engage in these sorts of discussions to keep everything up to date you know there's conformity and that's back to rule one there's conformity in social institutions hooray abide by them but the underlying environment shifts around and so sometimes the traditions of the past are no longer functional and have to be updated and the only way we can figure out when that's going to happen is by communicating about it and so you don't want to constrain that because we all end up out of date and and paralyzed yeah so yeah i think there's a feeling of maybe a fear of like paralyzation or something i guess it's not as much a reality now that i think more about it as much as it is just kind of a fear um but also a fear to speak up so i think i just feel afraid to talk about things sometimes or to even raise my hand and ask questions because of things i've seen of people being you know you know deep certainly more like that than yes it's certainly more like that than it was ten years ago or twenty years ago i certainly feel that way much more so that's what happens in history when that happens is that does things usually like uh work out okay i guess so because we're here that's what we hope for i guess it depends on whether or not we let the fear stop us yeah right and if enough people let the fear stop us then that won't be good yeah so we'll try not to do that and hope that suffices yeah i'm gonna try not to do that um i had a question about um so i noticed uh whenever i was young growing up like um i was thinking about like my first kiss when i was growing up you know when i was a kid and and um and i noticed as i get older and get involved with women and that sometimes i i i feel like i spend so much time trying to kind of recreate the initial moments that i had like in that initial kiss moment that i had you know like i remember my first kiss like when i was moving towards her face i just remember feeling like like the ships were crossing the troy and i remember feeling like you know like sparta and just like you know like denzel washington was there like everything was going on inside of my body you know it was like every the whole like you know the like everything was there you know the grand canyon was there and everything was there in this moment like watching me just being a part like it was in my skin waiting to see if i could land this kiss with this girl and i think i romanticized sometimes like moments like that that's great in my future that i'll never be able to get back to those moments you know like um that was great look like i still chase that high i still chase that novelty you know what i'm saying like even now and no moment now will ever live up to those initial moments but sometimes i'm obsessed with the feelings that were in the the novelty of youth and it's like i'm constantly trying to recreate those and nothing ever suffices and so everything sometimes feels like a little bit of a exhale yeah well i i wrote about that in two chapters in in beyond order in it's rule eight i believe which is make one room in your house as be in your home as beautiful as possible and rule 10 which is plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship and both of them focus to some degree on the nature of the experience that you just described you know there's a certain pristine um there's a pristine and transcendent reality to experiences of of being in love and experiences that are associated with childhood before everything becomes stale with repetition yeah and part of the question of life is to how to rekindle that so that so that you can and it's even associated with what we were talking about earlier which is that nostalgia for more primitive conditions um i in in rule eight i suggested that people cultivate a relationship with beauty because that is one way of inviting that that feeling of awe i mean i think you did such a great job of describing how significant that first kiss was you know oh yeah even tarzan over there what's that even tarzan was there now that i think about it right right well all romance all the the romantic tropes all the movies focus on exactly that experience you know can you recreate that within the confines of an ongoing relationship well it takes a tremendous amount of effort it's not that's the thing about youth is you get these gifts right when you're older you have to work at it but it's worth working at and you can you can set up romance in a permanent relationship that can be extraordinarily intense if you're if you want that and if you're willing to work for it yeah and it's worth it because otherwise you abandon it and that's not good and the same goes for beauty one of the great things that artists do is remind us of what's right in front of us because as you get older what you see is more and more memory and less and less of the thing itself and an artist comes along if he's a real artist just whacks you on the side of the head and says no look at it this way and you look at it that way and you think oh yes that's now i remember yeah and yeah i like chapter go ahead sorry and i haven't gotten to eight and ten i'm stuck i'm stuck in three i'm not i didn't mean to be but there's a lot of big word you gotta be it's a time it takes a little time hey no problem um um i like chapter 8 i think better than any of the other chapters because it does concentrate on this experience of of youth and and the the ability to be immersed so completely that's characteristic of childhood and and does there's an idea you know that the kingdom of heaven is something that's already inhabited by children right unless you become as little children you'll know you'll know in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven and that is a it's a poetic echo of the fact that those experiences are possible but with effort and discipline and aim you can reduplicate them at least to some degree in your adult life and that's definitely worth that that can be worth the effort especially if you find yourself longing for it yeah yeah a lot of i mean even i remember after our last conversation a lot of things come down to effort really and really living um you know uh effortly living you know because living after a while it becomes sometimes especially in this in in in our country that you're kind of floating in a you know in a little bit of a cushy river kind of you know so i think yeah if you really want to live if you really want to challenge your soul and get into whatever's in you or or experience anything experience some things more than the gratis that is kind of like cloaked on us each day in america then you have to really make an effort um one of the things i noticed in that's relevant to that um i think you need a meaning to sustain you in life because life is difficult and so the meaning has to be proportional to the difficulty i think everyone knows that and wants that um whenever i talk to audiences about that and pointed out that it's through the adoption of responsibility that you're most likely to encounter those meanings the audiences would generally go silent because that isn't an equation that's often made right is that well you need meaning that's better than happiness happiness is a consequence i would say a fortunate consequence of the pursuit of something deeply meaningful but almost everything that's deeply meaningful requires the willingness to adopt responsibility and so that's a good thing to know because you might ask yourself well why should i adopt responsibility and the answer to that seems to be something like wow well it it deepens your life because i want meaning i want something more no it's a great because i think a lot of us are swimming around thinking that something meaningful will show up there's so many there's so much advertising and so much this is important this means something this is valuable and a lot of it is um is pyrite man it's pyrite um do you remember your first kiss dr peterson was it in canada yes it was certainly in canada my man i remember the first time i held hands with my the woman who became my wife wow were you guys outdoors or indoors it was high school graduation and she had been a friend of mine but that was our first date and that was an unparalleled thrill i would say so but i was able to duplicate that many times in our marriage thank god with her cooperation and participation it was something we really concentrated on making time for romance once you get married romance sort of becomes number 11 on a list of 10 um necessities you know it's still up there but it gets pushed out by everyday concerns work and domestic responsibilities and children and all of that um you have to force it back up into the top three or four and you know that also stabilizes your relationship across time and is good for your kids and good for you so that's that's worth that's worth the work and it's really useful to know that it is work you need it is work it's not just going to happen and the fact that it isn't happening for you it doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you it just means that it's it's work you you have to aim at it you have to aim at it do you remember if you kind of did you reach for your wife saying or did she make that first initial move do you remember no yes i do remember actually she took my hand that's cool man she was much more confident in that regard at that time than me and probably still now for that matter i know you speak a lot about your granddaughter in your book like not a ton but there's a couple moments so far that i've noticed where you kind of reference her or watching a child grow um and some things that they learn what is that your first grandchild that you have now yes i have another one now i have two but she was the first how um has it changed any of your views of being like alive or the importance of family or just maybe just any of your do you notice anything different in your heart or your brain obviously there's going to be some stuff in your heart that's obvious but has any of your it's mostly cemented home the notion i had that there's there's really nothing in the final analysis there's there's your there's the car your career and your family you know and your family is half your life or more and i don't know what you do when you're old if you don't have grandchildren you know i mean it's not like they occupy all my time but it it would be it'd be such a hole there yeah oh i can imagine yeah sitting there by yourself and just doing solitaire maybe or something you know well and not being able to interact with children yeah because children are revitalizing as well as being exhausting and frustrating in all of those things but but they are revitalizing and they're like fire you know if if you put a two-year-old among a group of 75 year olds the 75 year olds don't do anything but watch the two-year-old they're fascinated by by the child and to see all that new potential coming to manifest itself i mean those are the sorts of things that cultures tell you you know get married stick together well why well it's for the children but that's to your benefit as well and then it's for the grandchildren because that's to your benefit as well it's a it's a good long-term solution even though it's very difficult and requires all sorts of sacrifice and but you lose that and you get all fractured up and it isn't obvious to me what what you do then when as you age so it's made me more aware even of the of the great privilege of having a family that loves you and how valuable that is above everything else yeah that's powerful man it's uh i can imagine i don't have that yet but sometimes i feel myself like i constantly kind of feel myself coming to some of the same like i'm in a cul-de-sac and i think sometimes it's what i'm looking for is probably a family of my own you know i'm actually i've had fear about kind of taking some of those next steps but i think some of what i am looking for is just more a sense of like this is my tribe or this is my group or this is i don't know something i can feel it kind of um yeah well if you didn't people who felt that had children and that's how we're all here so yeah yeah it's a it's a huge part it's a huge part of life and it gets a bad rap it's a responsibility wrap again it's like well you know can you really be with one person for the rest of your life and is that realistic now that people live so long and well i don't know if it's realistic or if you can be with one person for the rest of your life but there are definite coming up with a better alternative is no simple matter and it's a blessing to have young people around that care whether you're alive you know as you get older and so i wouldn't i don't think it's a good idea to deny yourself that that's been a real gift yes well and you should you know [Music] this chapter about romance in relationships might be particularly useful to you if you're thinking about having a family because i do believe that it's possible to keep that romantic vision alive you have to make it a name like you have to really work at it you think well what do i want how would i like to have a date with my wife well what would you like to see her wear how would you like to arrange the music you know all of these things people are afraid to attend to them but if you attend to them you can get good at it and then you can make something magical and then the magic that you can create with the same person over and over stops you from being frustrated that it's the same person because yes so and i think you need to know that that's possible yeah yeah man i think sometimes we just don't hear that kind of stuff enough you know no i don't remind her i know we don't remind um all right one more question i wanted to ask you this was about uh you know i've i've been in recovery for like five years i guess and i've struggled recently in the past year during the pandemic um but i'm still a strong believer in recovery and in the 12 steps of recovery um why do you feel like the 12 steps of recovery or the 12 steps work well for so many people and do you think that that's the best modality to uh to obtain sobriety for um for for addicts well it isn't obvious that there's a good alternative so that's the first thing if aaa doesn't work it isn't like there's a preferable treatment most people cease alcohol use on their own without medical intervention we don't know why although religious transformation seems to be one and of course the 12 steps capitalizes on that i think that it's quite an intelligent program psychologically speaking you know first of all you have to make a moral inventory you have to figure out what's wrong in your life which would obviously include the alcohol misuse you have to rectify that take responsibility for it try to try to chart out a new course also provided with a social structure which is really useful when you're trying to stop drinking because it's all very probable that most of your friends are going to be drinkers and so that leaves not only do you stop drinking but you stop associating with your friends or maybe even with your family members that's really hard yeah so you know an aaa doesn't seem to be an exploitative organization it's all volunteers um as and speaking strictly clinically there it isn't obvious that there's a better alternative if you were being strictly scientific you'd say well there's never been controlled trials of a a where you randomly assign people to the aaa group and to the non-aa group or another treatment to see head to head which works better and there's the problem that many people drop out and so you can't tell exactly what the success rate is but but that's it in some sense a technical argument um it also isn't clear to me that aa does people harm right right which is also really important because many medical treatments can produce harm and so the worst you could say is well maybe it won't work um so yeah and that's not that big of a risk especially already comparatively speaking yes yeah if you're already all sick or something you know even or so what do you think what do you think it was that enabled you to stop drinking like why did you manage it what did you use as an alternative well i noticed when i went well my problem was cocaine but i worried that if i drank i would do cocaine i never had a problem drinking but i was worried that one could lead to the other yes undoubtedly i think well one thing it gave me a place where i realized that other people were sharing their thoughts and feelings and i'd never been in that kind of environment before and so to so that was one of the big things was the emotional sobriety um and then it helped me having a relationship with a higher power which i'd never really had right and what difference did that make do you think man that made it was the first time in my life i i really i i felt like something cared about me unconditionally and you experienced that oh and i experienced at a level that shook me man like i've got electrocuted like it was yeah that a god just that this invi that some invisible thing cared about me at a level that i could never even imagine and that no matter if i was good or bad or if i did something naughty or nice or cinnamon or spice man that this thing loved me and that was uh i just never felt that before so for there to be a way to get to that feeling that's what made recovery feel like important to me i think yeah well to have an experience like that is a real gift yeah it was just it was powerful um dr peterson i don't want to take up a ton of your time man but i just i think once again it just reminded me that life is a program of effort you know um and if we want to see changes and if we want to experience something different than the circle or the even the the figure eight that we're in or even the trapezoid that we're in that we have to that we gotta uh we gotta make an effort you know we really gotta make it good talking to you like it was last time appreciate it very much you too jordan thank you so much for your time and uh congrats on the new book and i look forward to finishing it and um you look great congratulations on your continued success you too brother i'll chat soon all right all right cheers good talking with you thank you now i'm just floating on the breeze and i feel i'm falling like these leaves i must be cornerstone oh but when i reach that ground i'll share this piece of mind i found i can feel it but it's gonna take a little time for me to set that parking brake and let myself on my heart shine that light on me i'll sit and tell you my story [Music] and now i've been moving way too fast on the runaway train with a heavy load of my pants and these rails that i've been riding on they want so thin that they're damn they're gone my gum

Channel: Theo Von

Views: 1,853,454

Keywords: Theo Von, This Past Weekend, TPW, comedy, podcast, comedian, interview, talk show, stand-up, stand-up comedy, jordan peterson

Id: NSjEqM7USgA

Length: 137min 3sec (8223 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021