How to Actually MOTIVATE Yourself in LIFE! | Jordan Peterson | Top 50 Rules

it's like you really are your only comparison group especially as you get older because your life is so idiosyncratic and peculiar I mean look you have to care what other people think it's stupid to think otherwise because you have to be social and you have to be aware of what other people are doing and all of that so this is a psychopathic individuality but it is genuinely true that no one has a set of opportunities and limitations and so the comparison just isn't real it can't be sufficiently multi-dimensional I've met many people who are very very rich and you can look at their lives and they have these huge houses and material planting and they're shielded from many catastrophes that would hit someone without those resources harder but their lives are still full of exactly the same troubles that characterize human life in general and so you compare yourself on one dimension you don't see while the person's worked 80 hours a week for 40 years and it's blown all his relationships out of the water it's like yes he's rich but he's also old now and one of the best predictors of wealth is age you know really do you want to be young and poor or old and Rich it's like I'd pick young and poor because you can't by you and that's something that's worth considering but you don't know what burdens the people you're jealous of so leave it be it's not helpful to you to be envious need motivation what are the thing with believe Nation hey it's Evan Carmichael and I make these videos because you are probably the most ambitious person in your circle but you know you're capable of more and you get that Push by surrounding yourself with the with them from one of the best Jordan Peterson and my take on his top 50 rules of success enjoy 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 um 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 a obviously a price to be paid for that so that chapter that's chapter three do not hide things in the fog 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 and 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'd 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 diff more difficult than just sitting there doing nothing because creating knowledge is active and difficult the best advice that you can really give to people who are young is that unless you have very good reason not to you should do what all people have always done and so what does that mean I I when I see my clinical clients although I'm not practicing anymore when I saw my clinical clients I would evaluate their lives across a number of Dimensions um did were they immersed in a network of friendships did they have a family that could be their family of birth but also the family that they've produced their own husband or wife and children if they were of an age where that was appropriate did they have a career or at least a job and was their job productive and um match well with their abilities and their Ambitions were they educated to the extent that their intelligence and curiosity might demand were they in reasonable physical and mental health independent of those other areas all of those things need to be established and you don't want to question them so much that you don't establish them you might think of yourself as a rebel and someone who's particularly unique and it's all it's also possible that you are unique in one or more ways but but fundamentally speaking if you don't do what everyone else does then the probability that you're abdicating your responsibility and that you will miss out on something important is extremely high so I mean you know our culture virtually every movie that's made for children now you see this coming out of the Disney Studios constantly always concentrates on the special child who's got abilities that no other child has and is being crushed by Society into being you know unpleasantly normal and and and and there is a fair bit of crushing that goes along with being socialized because part of being socialized is to become like everyone else but you don't want to underestimate the benefit of that it's it's very very difficult to tread your own path and you're only going to be able to do that in a limited number of areas you blow apart the social routines um you'll find yourself out there in a domain of chaos that will overwhelm you and that's not pleasant you do not want that with regards to your goals let's say you don't know what to do well maybe you're high in openness and so you're pulled in all sorts of directions or maybe you're low in conscientiousness or you're confused because you're anxious or you haven't had any direction you haven't had good mentoring etc etc there's lots of reasons well I would say pick something right pick something a nameable goal and then try to implement it and what will happen is you'll learn a lot by trying to implement it and one of the things you might learn is what the a slightly better goal might be you know because if you try something diligently and you succeed or you fail you're going to learn from the the effort expanded in the detailed implementation of the goal is going to inform you it'll also transform you physiologically it does that at a very basic level neural neurophysiological level you will be slightly different as a consequence of the attempt and what that'll mean is that the next goal you pick will be a little more suited to you and so it's this kind of pathway right it's like maybe the goal you should be attaining is here but you don't know that because you're clueless and so you aim there well it's better than there and it's not nothing it's not cessation of movement and you know if you if you're supposed to go there and you go here but you walk diligently towards it you're a little closer once you get to here than you were here and it's this oscillating self-corrective process that leads you to the final star and you have to be willing to engage in erroneous experimentation to to manage that but it is a self-correcting process and so one of the things I always talk to my clients about is well well let's try something you know and and we'll Reserve to ourselves the right to alter our trajectory and then I would use as a corrective there because you might say well how do you know when you're not just giving out right instead of thinking maybe you need a different goal and I would say well you can if you're really concerned about your proclivity for self-deception you can enter into a contract with yourself that you won't replace any goal you've set with a goal that's easier and so you can switch your goal but it has to be a little harder so that you check yourself against that tendency to withdraw and avoid and be self-deceptive and that works like a charm and if you do that with some degree of diligence your goals will get better and more attainable and you'll get happier too because you don't experience happiness except in relationship to a goal and that's really worth knowing you know and that's another thing to think about too if your life is meaningless while you're not pursuing a valued goal I mean you might be depressed too and sometimes that can be like an illness you know something that is really wrong with you but A good rule of thumb is that if you find new joy in life there's a very low probability that you're pursuing a goal that you regard intrinsically like in the depths of your temperament as worthwhile and that's technically true because we do in fact experience most of the positive emotion let's say that's associated with with uh with emotions like joy we experience that in relationship to a goal so well then you want to find a goal that regulates your negative emotion and that brings you a certain amount of positive emotion and that expands your competence as you pursue it and you will experience that as meaningful that's really what meaning signals meaning signals you're doing all those things you say well that's not real it's like okay don't listen to the semantic Chatterbox so much right there's levels of you that are far wiser than that and you can watch what happens to you instead of noticing what you think also to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video the worksheet will highlight all the Lessons Learned in this video as well as pull out our three favorite learnings and quotes that will inspire you to actually do something the worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results if you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video absolutely for free there's a link in the description below go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business I'll see you there if the goal of life is to live a life which in retrospect we are glad that we lived it's important to give ourselves perspective to develop that metacognizance to step away from the Urgent to step away from the phenomenological day-to-day existence because the present self is a petulant child it's lazy and it wants the path of least resistance and that glass of wine and that new movie on Netflix and the couch looks really comfortable very rarely does it yeah well that's the danger with impulsive happiness is that it does have that present bound quality and in retrospect that can lead to a life that's not well lived generally that yes yes life definitely places philosophical demands on you whether you want it to or not and so it is just useful to step back I mean that's likely why the trade openness evolved that's the creativity Dimension that's the dimension that that allows people to engage in philosophical discourse and to think laterally and it it does allow you to step back and look at things on a broader scale and to generate creative Alternatives the problem with examining your assumptions is it's very disquieting you know because you want things to act the way you predict and desire them to act and you work within a set of axioms and you act them out in order to maintain that predictability that desirable predictability if you mess around the more fundamental the Axiom that you question the more uncertainty you release and some of that can be positive but a plenty of it can be anxiety provoking I mean just imagine that you're in a relationship and you know it's it's maybe a year into it you haven't formalized and finalized it but then one day you allow yourself to ask the question is this the relationship I want to be in well that's a fundamental question but just imagine now you're destabilizing your entire future you're destabilizing your present you're destabilizing your past because while engaging in the relationship you're acting out the assumption that it's the proper relationship but now you question that that means the story you told yourself about what was happening well it happened even though it's already happened was wrong and something else had happened and then you have to think through what actually happened so it's unbelievably demanding and the more axiomatic the Assumption the more certainty is cast into into Troublesome chaos now you could say yeah but the alternative is worse and I believe that often that's true but but the thing about the alternative is that you can always forestall it right that question tomorrow you bet you bet and it's a very powerful Temptation and no wonder you know do you want to dig up the body now or do you want to wait a month it's like well it'll be more rotten in a month but but it's not a month it's not now right it's not now and so I I understand why people don't want to delve into things even if their emotions indicate that they should I mean I would see this all the time if you're trying to settle an important issue with your partner let's say that can be a tremendously Troublesome excavation process and there's no shortage of pain but if you sort it out then maybe things can be better doesn't mean it's easy or or or uh or Pleasant quite the contrary it's like surgery it's not it's like surgery to remove something you know that shouldn't be there it's necessary but man it's still surgery on that point of understanding my inadequacies or someone's inadequacies I really believe um that it's really difficult to undergo self-development if you don't have self-awareness and I was I was really trying to understand from your writings how someone is to build their self-awareness it's almost like the unknown are known if you don't have how do you build the thing I know a good exercise for that It's Like a Prayer in some sense in fact I would say it's proper prayer if you want to know something about yourself sit on your bed one night and say to yourself you got to mean this like you got to be desperate this is no game this it's like my life is not everything I wanted to be and perhaps it's not everything that I need it to be and by need I mean my life is so unbearable that the suffering that's attended upon that is make me nihilistic cynical bitter resentful homicidal genocidal unable to have a good relationship Pro prone to punish people for their virtues because of my jealousy uh driving the proclivity to see evil everywhere except within my own Heart Like These are problems man and you ask yourself you sit on the bed and say okay man I'm ready to learn something like what what's one thing I'm doing wrong that I know I'm doing wrong that I could fix that I would fix it's like you meditate on that you'll get an answer and it won't be one you want but it'll be the necessary one you know and it's often something that will point you to small things so Carl Jung said people in the modern worlds don't see God because they don't look low enough and so imagine you're in your messy bedroom you know and you're sitting on the edge of the bed trying to have an honest dialogue with yourself and the little voice says you know it's pretty disgusting in here and you think well I'm way above Such trivial niceties as organizing my room it's like well that's Pride that's arrogance if you're above organizing what's actually yours how in the world are you ever going to organize anything else and so you get on your knees and you think well it's time to you know take a brush to the toilet and maybe that's where you start and so and that works like that works you start making those micro improvements like real micro improvements real on the ground actual micro improvements to things you know that are wrong you'll improve unbelievably rapidly thoughts on the drug epidemic well I'm not sure there is an epidemic any more than there always has been I know that there is now a tilt towards drugs in in the U.S in particular like meth and and um Fentanyl and the other opiates now it's quite a catastrophe um a lot of that is occurring among people who don't have meaning in their lives I would say you might think that's a facile answer but it's not you know like here here's the rap Literature Like It's if you take a Rat Lab Rat typical lab rat is you know genetically Brad uh to be identical with many other lab routes and he lives alone in a cage and he he's got a pretty miserable route life because rats are social animals and they don't like to live in cages by themselves and you can get a lab rat in a cage addicted to cocaine in no time flat and he'll he'll like press a lever for cocaine reward pretty much to the ex to the exclusion of all else including sex and often including food but if you take that same rat and you put them in a rat family you know in a rat social hierarchy in a rat environment and give him something that rat rat like to do so that he can be satisfied it's very difficult to get him addicted to cocaine and so I would say the reason that people take psychomotor stimulants and all the drugs of serious abuse are psychomotor stimulants regardless of what else they might be they activate the dopaminergic system which is the system that tracks reward and that that is associated that's activated when you pursue valuable goal directed Behavior if you don't have that if you don't have a valid goal if you don't no real valid meaning in your life you don't have a valid ambition then you don't have any way of activating that system and why the hell wouldn't you take drugs it's like you have to have something better to do to not addict yourself you know so so I would say that a huge part of the current epidemic in in the U.S in particular is is Manifest among broken men who have no real place in society and providing them with money isn't going to help that they need a productive and meaningful existence and which is the Paramount the Paramount goal should be the Paramount goal of social of social policy for example we it isn't the alleviation of poverty that's really the issue because people in the west aren't poor there might be a bit of a distribution problem but we're not poor what we have is a uh what would you say a we have a problem of meaningful engagement and that's what has to be addressed and that's why I do the work that I'm doing how much do people have to kind of date around to find somebody though because it does take a bit of exploration to find somebody you're compatible with so what's a reasonable amount of exploration and like by what age should people have figured it out because I mean there's always the grass looks Greener so at some point maybe you should just settle down but what are your thoughts on that oh life isn't very long and so you don't get to evaluate that many relationships you probably only have a five to ten year period to do that something like that and then the reason you only have that amount of time is because it gets more and more difficult as you get older rather than easier partly because people your age are increasingly in relationships so I would say get at it don't don't overestimate the degree to which you have to find someone versus create the relationship you know there's many cultures and I'm not I'm not suggesting that this is necessarily a desirable alternative but there are many cultures that arrange marriages and those arranged marriages frequently work it's not obvious that they work less frequently than relationships or marriages that are predicated on romantic attraction which has its own pitfalls is that no matter who you find there are going to be full of flaws like you are and so a lot of it is something you create I think you want to find someone you can trust and someone that you're attracted to and perhaps someone who shares the same ambitions as you do or at least has Ambitions that are compatible with yours and then well then pretty much all of it after that is what you create rather than what you find is part of the reason that arranged relationships or arranged marriages work is part of it because there's a societal pressure to not get divorced and because it's somebody your parents have chosen there might be an expectation that you're supposed to uphold of course I mean that's partly why marriages in the west work too or marriages and cultures where the primary impetus for the marriage is romantic or sexual attraction part of the reason those marriages works is because work is because of social pressure it it's very difficult to sustain a relationship across time and you need all sorts of social institutions as well as conceptual schemes operating to help ensure that that's the case because life is so difficult you're going to go through periods of time where your relationship is extraordinarily difficult but there's no escaping that and if the pressure to stay together wasn't there the relationship might fragment prematurely and then Not only would you have your problems you'd also not have any relationships and that's not helpful so you go through thick and thin together and it can be very thin the thin times can be very thin but that the collective Judgment of the human race so far has been that long-term monogamous relationships are the best that you can manage and that's true cross-culturally with there are exceptions polygamy is is relatively common nowhere near as common as monogamy but there are exceptions made for polygamy but the problem with polygamous societies is that they tend to be more violent especially the young men in them tend to be more violent because they are more Shut Out Of The Mating Game and that makes them very frustrated oh that makes sense so it'd be mostly yeah that makes sense that'd make me pissed off too why is this why is this guy over here have seven wives he'd be better off dead yes yes and I might be the one to help them along with that yeah I mean that's part of what monogamy does is stabilize societies and that means that fewer stable unstable societies fewer people die and so All Things Considered our species has decided that that's a good trade-off how is it the discipline and the straight and narrow offer the best chance for a good life and and how is it that we have forgotten that is the case well the reason that discipline is necessary is because you're a massive competing short-term interests and so the question is then well which short-term interest should win out and the answer to that is well none of them they need to be organized into a hierarchy that makes them functional across time and across individuals so like a two-year-old is very likely to act out his or her proximal impulse but of course a two-year-old can't survive in the world you have to Reagan you have to bring your your primary instincts let's say under the regulatory structure of a higher order value system that allows them to manifest themselves without undo Mutual sacrifice across large spans of time in the presence of large numbers of other people so that requires a very sophisticated ordering it's like we already talked about the fact that a metanarrative is necessary to unite subcultures say so that they can operate peacefully and harmoniously within the same space the same thing applies within you because you're like an you're an internal Coalition of Warring single-minded tribes and they have to all be brought under the organizational structure of long-term Collective Vision let's say and in order to do that you have to be disciplined and any discipline speaking you know technically speaking is an attempt to bring all those competing short-term impulses under a large a larger scale and more inclusive framework and so you do that and then well that's actually what gives you freedom being impulsive and being free aren't the same things because if you're impulsive you're just the slave of your impulses right there's no freedom in that that's that's just that's the same Freedom so to speak literally that a two-year-old has because a two-year-old isn't socialized yet so it's not it's a completely it that doesn't function in this in this sophisticated World it doesn't work right everyone knows it my father gave me an Abiding and then the other thing I should say about him is he spent a tremendous amount of time with me when I was very young say before I was five or six he taught me to read he did that every night for months and I remember that very vividly and instilled in me a love of books and affluency in Reading um he believe that I could do what I set my mind to and he really believed that and to have someone there believe that of you that's something man and you know it was something that I wanted to offer to my clinical clients you know because I did believe that there was more to them than the suffering person that was sitting there and that you know with joint diligent effort we could sift our way through the chaff and find the wheat and that things could be better and one of the lovely things about practicing as a clinician was that that was that almost inevitably happened and sometimes really radically and and then of course later it started started to happen on a broader scale and I was seeing that happen in the lives of maybe thousands of people we're built to walk uphill and when you reach the Pinnacle of the Hill you want to stop and appreciate the vision but the next thing you want is a higher Hill in the distance because it's the uphill climb that it's it's from the uphill climb that we derive our value and I mean this technically so almost all the positive emotion we feel especially the the the the emotion that fills us with enthusiasm and that's to be filled with the spirit of God by the way because that's what enthusiasm means that's experienced in relationship to a goal and so in some sense and this is part of the religious Enterprise you want a goal that you can never Attain right so you can always move closer to the goal that recedes as you move towards it you think well that's frustrating it's like Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill but it's not because as you pursue that goal you put yourself together and your life does get better and richer and more abundant that's why the highest levels of virtue and goal are in some sense Transcendent you want them to be above everything you're doing so you can continually move towards something that's more Sublime and better that's what you are you're here to live not to not to sleep and the problem with the vision of my Ties on the beach is that well first of all that's an Envision that's a vision of of drug-induced unconsciousness second it's only going to work for about a week third you're going to be a laughing stock in a month and depressed and aimless and and goalless it's no that's not it's it's you want a horizon of ever expanding possibility and so it does happen to people as they because they've staked their soul on the attainment of an instrumental goal and it can be a pretty high order goal it was in your case but then you think well I've now I'm there now what well the answer can't be well I'm going to live in the lap of luxury and never have to leave the what do you want to be a giant infant with a gold with a gold bottle you never have to do anything but lay in your back and suck it's like well you see the problem with that as a as a as a conceptualization it's no you want to be like an active Warrior moving uphill with your sword in hand and that's that's Dynamic that's exciting and that's why so many young men disappear into video games it's that's all acted out in the video game so they have to act that out in their own life not that I despise video games because I don't but they're not a substitute for life they might be good training under some conditions for life you go to a party your heart's beating why the party is a monster why because it's judging you and it's judging you it's putting you low down the dominance hierarchy because that's what a negative judgment is and that interferes with your sexual success and that means that you're being harshly evaluated by Nature itself right so you are confronting that the dragon of chaos when you go into the social situation and so what do you do you're like this right you hunch over and that's low dominance I'm no threat it's like oh that's not going to get you very far you know but that's a logical thing to do in in the in in the face of a tyrant so I'm no threat you know you look at the king and you're dead I'm no threat I'm hunched over and then what's happening internally how what are people thinking about me what are people thinking about me am I looking stupid am I looking foolish you is I'm awkward I hate being here man I'm sweating too much it's all internalized right it's all self-focused the the eye isn't work the eye isn't working what do you tell people stop don't stop thinking about yourself because you can't it's like don't think of a white elephant white elephant white elephant white elephant you can't tell someone to stop thinking about something because they get caught in the loop what you do with socially anxious people is you say look at other people look at them right why because if you look at them you can tell what they're thinking and then you you unless you're unless you're terribly socialized and some people are some people have no social skills and so the reason they can't go to a party is because they don't even know how to introduce themselves like they're just no one ever taught them how to behave and so they're really good candidates for behavior therapy because you walk them through the process of how you actually manifest the procedures that are associated with social acceptability but most people aren't like that they have the ability so if they're really introverted in higher neuroticism they can usually talk quite well to someone one-on-one why because they look at them well if I look at you it's another thing to do if you're ever speaking to a group of people never speak to the group of people that doesn't exist you talk to individuals and then they reflect for you the entire group because they're all entrained so you look at one person they broadcast you what everyone's thinking and you know how to talk to one person so it's easy so as soon as you focus on the person not you you push your attention outward use your eye you push your attention outward and you start watching well then all your automatic mechanisms kick in and you start being awkward because if we're talking and I'm looking here I don't know what you're going to do next and I'm going to put disjunctions into the like they're like uh bad cords in The Melody of our of our conversation and the reason is I'm not paying attention so that's why the eye is the thing at the top of the pyramid it's like the thing that enables you to win the set of all possible dominance herkies is the I pay attention pay attention that's the critical issue that's why the Egyptians worshiped Horus that's why Horus was the thing that rescued Osiris from the from the depths it's the capacity to pay attention what do you pay attention to most what your right hemisphere signals as anomalous it attracts your attention it's like this isn't going quite right I'm not looking at that wrong that's what you look at that's what you look at what's not going right because that's see that's the terrible monster that might eat you but it's also the place you get all the information so that's why it's useful to have discussions with your enemies because they will tell you things you do not know and that's such a great thing because if you don't know them well you're not very smart are you you know there may be a time when you go somewhere that that's the thing you need to know and maybe your enemy will tell you why you're such a fool you know and a bunch of other things that aren't true too but even one thing that's accurate it's like yeah thanks very much man maybe I'll do some work on that and I won't have to carry that forward so and then that's part of the reason again why that terrible Predator it's always the terrible Predator that has the gold it's like it's the person who delivers the message you do not want to hear so it's rough it's rough but it doesn't matter life is rough responsibility That's What Gives Life Meaning it's like lift a load then you can tolerate yourself right because look at you're useless easily hurt easily killed why should you have any self-respect that's the story of the Fall pick something up and carry it make it heavy enough so that you can think yeah well useless as I am at least I could move that from there to there well what's really cool about that is that when I talk to these crowds about this the Man's eyes light up and that's very like I've seen that phenomenon because I've been talking about this mythological material for a long time and I can see when I'm watching crowds people you know their eyebrows lift their eyes light up because I put something together for them that's what mythological stories do so I'm not taking responsibility for that that's what the stories do so I say the story and people go click click click you know when their eyes light up but this responsibility thing that's a whole new order of this is that young men are so hungry for that it is unbelievable and one of the things I've been talking to some of the people who've been running for the conservative leadership in Canada and I've been talking to them about well the difficulties they have communicating with young people because conservatives what the hell are they going to sell to young people right because being conservative is something that happens when you're older they can sell responsibility aim yourself in One Direction and I had a rule with my clients because you know you might say well I've gone halfway down this path and I found out it's wrong so how do you distinguish that from just giving up well that's a really hard question right it's it's a moral hazard because it's inappropriate to continue in a direction you now realize to be wrong but it's also inappropriate to give up and use that rationalization as an excuse and how do you distinguish especially students will not transparent to ourselves well right exactly so that is genuinely a moral hazard so one of the principles that I tried to abide by in my therapeutic discussions was you can change course as long as the next thing you do is equally or more difficult because that's a check against just giving up so you want to discipline yourself so you can get yourself organized so that you can go in a particular direction so that when you find the right direction you can really go in that direction and that does require an apprenticeship of sorts and it might not matter in some sense exactly what the apprenticeship is as long as it is rigorous right and so that sort of a bridge between moral relativism and moral absolutism there's lots of games you can play it's not that obvious a priority which is the best game so that's kind of a morally relative stance there's multiple playable games but then the absolute is yeah but you have to play one of them you have to learn to play one of them F become an expert at at least one of them and then that's not a relative proposition and I believe that's true that seems to me to be the case so you want to commit to something and then you you have when you commit to something you require yourself to bring all of your disparate disparate components moving in a single Direction United in a single Direction so it's a unifying it's a unifying Act and then once having been Unified well then you can bring that Unity to bear on a variety of different tasks but you have to bring it together first so and that that makes sense developmentally you see children start out as a disparate bundle of motivations and emotions sort of Warring with one another and then they can integrate that into single games that they can play with themselves and then they integrate that with games they start to play with other people and all of that is integration it's it's not subjugation it's not repression not if it's a good game it's integration you want to get integrated because then you have all the horses that are pulling your chariot pulling in the same direction and you're much more likely to get to where you want to go then and also much more likely to specify a good place to go so that's another re that's something else conservatives have to teach young people which is well get yourself disciplined well why well not so you're a slave but so that you could be a master to use a terminology that you're not supposed to use anymore but you know this is in relationship to yourself not to others so yeah and to begin with you have to accept an external Master because you just don't have the wisdom to do that for yourself or the ability or the opportunity often everybody knows this you know they feel bad when they they decide they're going to put get themselves in good shape and go to the gym and lasts like three the attempts yeah and then no one's happy about the fact that they've quit and they berate themselves for it and we know that we need to go through a disciplinary process and we need to subjugate ourselves to a disciplinary process that's part of the problem with the constant harping about the you know oppressive patriarchy so you need a disciplinary process so well that's just oppression and slavery it's like no it's not no more than a game is not not a good game a good game isn't oppression and slavery you're going to have to put some effort into your life and you need to be motivated to do that and so what are the potential sources of motivation well you could think about them in in the big five manner you know if you're extroverted you want friends if you're agreeable you want an intimate relationship if you're disagreeable you want to win competitions if you're open you want to engage in Creative activity if you're high neuroticism you want security okay so those are all sources of potential motivation that you could draw on that you could tailor to your own you know your own personality but then there are dimensions that you want to consider your life across and so we ask people about well you know if you could have your life the way you wanted it in three to five years if you were taking care of yourself properly you know what would you want from your friendships what would you want from your intimate relationship how would you like to structure your family what do you want for your career well how are you going to use your time outside of your job and how are you going to regulate your mental physical mental and physical health and maybe also your drug and alcohol use because that's that's a good place to Auger down you know because alcoholism for example wipes out you know five to ten percent of of people so you want to keep that under control and then and then so maybe you know you you you develop a vision of what your life what you would like your life to be and that Associates the so the goal once the goal is established and then you break down the goal into micro processes that you can implement the microprocesses become rewarding in proportion in relation to their uh causal association with the goal and that tangles in your your incentive reward system you know we talked about the dopaminergic incentive reward system and that's the thing that keeps you moving forward and the way it works is that it works better if it produces positive emotion when it can see you moving towards a valued goal okay well what's the implication of that better have a valued goal because otherwise you can't get any positive motivation working out and so the more valuable the goal in principle the more the micro processes associated with that goal start to take on a positive charge and so what that means is well you get up in the morning and you're excited about the day you're ready to go and so as far as I can tell what you do is you specify your long-term ideal maybe you also specify a place you want to stay the hell away from so that you're terrified to fail as well as excited about succeeding because that's also useful you specify your goal you do that you do that in some sense as a unique individual you want to you want to specify goals that make you say oh if that could happen as a consequence of my efforts it would clearly be worthwhile because the question always is why do something because doing nothing is easy you just sit there and you don't do anything that's real easy the question is why would you ever do anything and the answer that has to be because you've determined by some means that it's worthwhile and then the next question might be well where should you look for worthwhile things and one would be well you could consult your own temperament and the other would be well you kind of look at how look at what it is that people accrue that's valuable across the lifespan look look what so you do a structural analysis of the sub-components of human existence and already did that you need a family you need friends like you don't need to have all these things but you better have most of them family friends career educational goals plans for you know time outside of work attention to your mental and physical health Etc you know those are that's what life is about and if you don't have any of those things well then all you've got left is misery and suffering so that's that's a bad that's a bad deal for you when I was 25 or so I probably weighed about 138 pounds I smoked like a pack of cigarettes a day I drank tremendous amount of alcohol I was from Northern Alberta this rough little town up in Northern Alberta called Fairview and you know there were long Winters there and my friends were heavy Drinkers and most of them dropped out of school by the time they were 15 or 16 went off to work on the oil rigs and you know it was a rough town and we drank a lot I started when I was 14 and you know um and so I was I had a lot of bad habits let's say and uh things that were and I wasn't in great shape physically and I was also still intellectually obsessed by as I am now and uh so that would have been that would have been an 85 but when I but I decided around that about 85 84 something like that maybe a little earlier that I was really going to try to get my act together and uh so I started doing that I you know I first of all I I quit smoking Well that took a long time because I eventually had to quit drinking too in order to quit smoking and I started working out starting playing sports which I'd never done I had a fine time when I was a kid and but I needed really to get disciplined and I had to do it because I was working on these hard problems that you know that I've been discussing with all of you and I've been working on them really you know obsessively since I was probably about 18 maybe even earlier than that and got to the point around 25 when I was in graduate school trying to get my phds doing all my research like I published 15 papers by the time I graduated with my PhD which was by I think by a fairly large measure the most papers that any graduate student at that time had ever published at McGill I think that's right might have been twice as many or maybe twice as many maybe even three times as many and at the same time I wrote maps of meaning which was a terrible terrible terribly difficult thing to do because I was writing about three hours a day doing that and I couldn't do all that and continue with my misbehavior you know my sort of my what what would you say my my my hedonistic my hedonistic my massive hedonistic consumption of alcohol and all of that I just couldn't keep it up and also work seriously on the issues that were at hand so you know I had to stop that's the sacrifice I had to stop messing about and straight myself out becoming more articulate is definitely I would say that's the primary array of weapons so I mean physical prowess is something and it's not nothing that physical confidence that comes along with that as well but the same thing replicated at the level of the ability to communicate and to think that's a way broader field of of battle and opportunity so this is one thing that isn't taught well especially to boys it's more important to teach it to boys I would say because they're more uh skeptical of such of the educational Enterprise in general generally speaking partly because they're less obedient partly because they're less agreeable that's particularly true for disagreeable boys an agreeable boys get higher grades independent of their IQ and their and their academic achievement because they're easier to deal with so what do you tell disagreeable boys there's nothing that makes you more formidable than verbal competence than being able to articulate be able to think to Marshal your arguments right some Battlefield metaphor get everything in order get all your information straight you know to Marshal your forces and so I mean that's part of the reason that rap artists are so popular especially among disinfected young men black and white alike because they're unbelievably articulate like they have this incredible verbal prowess it's unbelievably attractive you know and it's associated with genuine artistic and Redemptive activity often focusing on something that's approximately the voice of the underclass let's say but a powerful voice right and it's interesting to see how many young white guys identify with that because people think that the purpose of memory is to remember the past and that's not the purpose of memory the purpose of memory is to extract out from the past lessons to structure the future and that that's the purpose of personal memory and so you're done with a memory when you've extracted out the information that you can use to guide yourself properly in the future so if you have a traumatic memory for example that's really obsessing you if you analyze that memory to the point where you figured out how you put yourself at risk and you can determine how you might avoid that in the future then the emotion associated with that goes away so memories has a very pragmatic function and cultural memory is the same thing is that we need to extract out stories from our past that structure our future and we need that because well first of all if you don't have a purpose let's say it isn't that your life becomes neutral in a meaningless sense it's that your life becomes characterized by unbearable suffering because the Baseline condition of life is something like unbearable suffering and what you have to set against that is a noble and worthwhile purpose and hopefully hopefully your determination of that purpose is buttressed to some degree by the wisdom of the past because you can't conjure something like that up on your own and if you provide people with nobility of purpose then they can tolerate the suffering of existence without becoming entirely corrupted by it and cultures that don't do that it isn't even so much that they die it's that cultures that don't do that are dead they're done they don't have a story anymore they don't have a call to Adventure and then well then everyone suffers stupidly as a consequence it's a very bad thing so Churchill made the same observation that many of the Great psychologists and and philosophers made in the early part of the 20th century it's like bring the story forward and and propagate it and make it the most noble possible story and then you motivate people to do to transcend themselves which they need to do so yes he's exactly right in his diagnosis there's an entire what literature psychoanalytic literature on the dangers of over compassion hyper protectiveness helicopter parenting all of that when you have children you have to encourage them you have to encourage them to take risks because they have to grow up and take their place in the world you can't protect them too much because if you do you destroy them that's the motif of Hansel and Gretel right two kids lost in the woods they find the gingerbread house that's a little bit too good to be true right it's not only shelter when you need it but it's candy what lives inside the house that's too good to be true the witch that devours you right that's excess compassion so you don't want your mother to do everything for you that's for sure there's a rule if you're dealing with the elderly and like Extended Care Homes don't do anything for your clients that they can do themselves because you undermine their autonomy and so there's a certain amount of harshness that goes along with that just as there is if you're a good mother because you have to separate yourself from your child and allow them to make hurtful mistakes right I mean it's very difficult if you're a compassionate person to stand back far enough to let your children take necessary risks but one thing I'm not getting there's a big difference between letting people do something for themselves and saying men should be dangerous by dangerous that implies I should be ready to threaten someone to hurt somebody no you should be capable of it but that doesn't mean you should use it there's nothing to you otherwise like if you're not a formidable Force there's not there's no morality in your self-control if you're incapable of violence not being violent isn't a virtue people who teach martial arts know this full well right if you learn a martial art you learn to be dangerous but simultaneously you learn to control it both of those come together and the combination of that capacity for danger and the capacity for control is what brings about the virtue otherwise you confuse weakness with with moral virtue I'm harmless therefore I'm good it's like no that isn't how it works that isn't how it works at all if you're harmless you're just weak and if you're weak you're not going to be good you can't be because it takes strength to be good it's very difficult to be good well it's a hierarchy of virtue I would say you know there's an old idea that God is the sum of all that's good I don't think some is exactly the right metaphor it's more like imagine there are Eternal verities truth beauty Justice love courage fortitude compassion think of all those things as virtues so virtue is what all virtues have in common virtue is what all virtues have in common that's the relationship of God to the good God is the essence of the good so well we put that aside for a moment or you may think how would that manifest itself in your life well that might be pursuit of the good and that's the pursuit of the good that unites all proximal Goods and what is that exactly well it's something like the belief that it would be for the best that all things flourish to the degree that that's possible when I was a clinician I thought of that as the good in me serving the best in my clients and I think the desire for that to happen that's love so that's the desire for you say well you take a human bent broken miserable malevolent hurt corrupt weak pathetic contemptible frustrating disappointing all of those things that we can lay on ourselves because of our inadequacies like what's easy to dismiss that and part of that dismissal is what drives the notion that the planet has too many people on it and that we're a cancer on the face of the Earth it's like it's not easy to love that but what do you want you want the broken people to rise up out of their Brokenness rather than despise them for it and then you Orient yourself towards that and try to pull that out of people and yourself and and you have to have that frame first that's what you're aiming for and maybe that would be the opposite of hell this is one thing I would say that unites Sam Harris and I despite our differences in in belief in some sense at the level of detail Sam is very acutely aware of the reality of malevolence and hell now he wouldn't frame that metaphysically or religiously but doesn't really matter he is doing his best to aim away from that as hard as he possibly can I didn't realize till the last time I talked to him that Sam identified the religious tradition the dogmatic religious tradition with the totalitarianism that produces atrocity now I think that's a misidentification the same way the marxists blame inequality on capitalism inequality is really a problem but it's not the fault of capitalism and totalitarian atrocity is really a problem but to identify that reflexively with religion or even with religious Dogma that's a mistake Dogma maybe but even that's tricky because what's the difference between Dogma knowledge you know today's knowledge is tomorrow's dogma and drawing the line between those two is extremely difficult you can't just abandon everything you think even though it's arbitrary you need it to guide you and it can transform into totalitarian dogma and promote atrocity in the Servants of in the service of it's no longer valid maintenance but that's a very complicated problem pick up your damn suffering and bear it and try to be a good person so you don't make it worse well that's a truth you know I read a lot about the terrible things that people have done to each other you just cannot even imagine it so awful so you don't want to be someone like that now do you have a reason to be yes you have a lot of reasons to be God there's reasons to be resentful about your existence everyone you know is going to die you know you too and there's going to be a fair bit of pain along the way and lots of it's going to be unfair it's like yeah no wonder you're resentful it's like act it out and see what happens you make everything you're complaining about infinitely worse there's this idea that hell is a bottomless pit and that's because no matter how bad it is some stupid son of a like you could figure out a way to make it a lot worse so you think well what do you do about that well you accept it that's what life is like it's suffering that's what the religious people have always said life is suffering yes well who wants to admit that well just think about it well so what do you do in the face of that suffering try to reduce it start with yourself what good are you get yourself together for Christ's sake so that when your father dies you're not whining away in a corner and you can help plan the funeral and you can stand up solidly so that people can rely on you that's better don't be a damn victim of course you're a victim Jesus obviously put yourself together and then maybe if you put yourself together you know how to do that you know what's wrong with you if you'll admit it you know there's a few things you could like polish up a little bit that you might even be able to manage in your insufficient present condition and so you might shine yourself up a little bit and then your eyes will be a little more open then you can shine yourself up a little bit more and then maybe you could bring your family together instead of having them be the hateful spiteful neurotic infighting bats that you're like doomed to spend Christmas with so then you fix yourself up a little bit kind of humbly because you know God you're a fixer-upper if there ever was one and then you've got to figure out well can you figure out how to make peace with your Idiot Brother and probably not because he's just as dumb as you so how the hell are you going to manage that and so then you've maybe you get somewhere that way and your family's sort of functioning and you find out well that kind of relieved a little bit of suffering although it reduced the opportunities for spiteful revenge and that's kind of a pain in the neck and so then you get your family together a little bit and you're a little clued in then at least a bit because you've done something difficult that's actually difficult you're wiser and so then maybe you could put a tentative finger out beyond the family and try to change some little thing without wrecking it it's like our society is complex and we teach our students that they could just fix it it's like go fix a military helicopter and see how far you get with that it's like you're going to get a dude you're like a chimp with a wrench whack oh look it's better it's like no it's not better things are complicated and to fix things is really hard and you have to be like a golden tool to fix things and you're not so and that's the other message of the West it's like how do you overcome the suffering of the of life and I'm not saying it's only the message of the West how do you overcome the suffering of life is be a better person that's how you do it well that's hard it takes responsibility and I think you know if you said to someone you want to have a meaningful life everything you do matters that's the definition of a meaningful life but everything you do matters you're gonna have to carry that with you or do you want to just forget about the whole meaning thing and then you don't have any responsibility because who the hell cares and you can wander through life doing whatever you want gratifying impulsive desires for how useful that's going to be and you're stuck in meaninglessness but you don't have any responsibility which one do you want well ask yourself which one are you pursuing and you'll find very rapidly that it isn't the majority of your soul that's pursuing the whole meaning thing because well look what you have to do to do that you have to take on the fact that life is suffering you have to put yourself together in the face of that well that's hard I stopped wasting time that helped a lot I stopped drinking I stopped going to bars I really didn't spend a lot of time with my friends when I had young kids in particular I had friends and I I saw them you know with some degree of regularity but where I cut Corners was more with social life outside my family so I spent a lot of time with my wife and I spent a lot of time with my kids and I spent a lot of time on my career and so you have to make choices and I think those were reasonable choices I'm not displeased with them don't abandon your friendships but um but you can certainly look at where you're wasting time and just stop doing things that you know would be a waste of time so and I did and so I had enough room for my marriage and I had enough room for my kids and I had enough room for my career and you know sort of a multi-dimensional career and I was always a challenge to me too to see how efficient I could get um and you could also and I've really recommended this for relatively higher income dual income couples who are trying to pursue dual careers kids in marriage you can Outsource you know higher hire a cleaning lady if you can afford it um buy restaurant food if you can afford it Etc no you can Outsource get you can have someone do your laundry then you can concentrate on your marriage and your kids I know that that you know is only an Avenue available to people who have relatively High incomes but people who have dual incomes have relatively High incomes and so Outsource what's unnecessary so that you can concentrate on what's necessary I mean I didn't do that when I was beginning my career because when I lived in the United States when I was in my late 20s and starting my family we had one income you'd think a Harvard beginning Professor makes a lot of money and I suppose that's true in some absolute sense but relatively speaking you know we didn't have enough money to buy magazines we we all our money went for for housing costs and and the basic necessities of living I had a car that was 20 years old 25 years old I think it was old it was bloody thing the doors fell apart on the person I sold it to you know like six months down the road they knew it was a wreck at that point but we drove that thing right into the ground so I know that's not necessarily possible for everyone at the beginning of their career but if you have two incomes you can manage it um I concentrated on my marriage and making time for it I concentrated on spending time with my kids consciously and I concentrated on developing my career those were the three elements of my life and I had some time left over for Creative Pursuits and and and for friends but most of it was a matter of getting rid of time wastes of any sort you know and I just push that out of my life you know day after day until I wasn't wasting any time or virtually no time and you know I've asked my undergraduates frequently how much time they waste per day and general estimates are like six to eight hours of time they regard themselves as wasting like that's a whole career right there right so if you just stop wasting time you can do a tremendous amount especially if you also try to maximize efficiency and I always found that incredibly motivating you know I'm motivating game how much can I do in the least amount of time possible that was that's fun to try to do that as far as I'm concerned I know you know that's maybe it's undoubtedly a temperamental thing but but if you're built if you're wired that way that's a great meta strategy become efficient I always ask my graduate students when they were designing experiments they'd come with a proposal I'd say to them you know is there any way you could do this ten times faster what would you have to cut what would you have to change to do this 10 times faster and you can learn to do that I also learned to Force the task to fit the time you know there's this dictum work expands to fill the time allowed for its completion work expands to fill the time allowed for its completion well there's a corollary to that which is work becomes more efficient in proportion to the restrictions of time placed upon it so if you say well this could take me two weeks but I'm going to do the best job I could in one day you'd be amazed you can get 90 percent of the way or 95 percent of the way or sometimes even farther in that day so that's another way of becoming efficient you know if you only have 10 minutes to do something that should maybe take you two hours maybe you can figure out how to do it in 10 minutes you can get dreadfully efficient so that's very much worthwhile in my estimation if you want to do a lot of things what what else are you going to do you know rather than become efficient if you want to do many things you don't have much choice but it I found it extremely entertaining to try to do that and when I was healthy I could do a tremendous amount in a very short period of time I'm very frustrated that that's not so much the case now although perhaps it's coming back to some degree if I've got a friend in my life or a you know partner that I want to encourage to come out of that place of Despair into a better place how do I effectively do that without overpowering them or stifling them or making them feel inadequate which is sometimes the consequence of trying to change someone you love well example is good but then I would say disabuse yourself of the notion that you know what is best for this person you don't not only do you not no you actually don't want that responsibility for two reasons let's say they do what you say and something good happens to them well whose Victory is that yours are theirs and if it's yours did you just steal it and then let's say they fail following your advice well they pay the price for that and you can skip away merrily and say well I should have spoke more carefully it's like you don't mess about with people's Destiny you do not know where they're headed now having said that you do what you're doing in this interview in this podcast you ask people questions real questions you know like how are you feeling I'm not doing so good today well you know what's up what's going on and you can't think well I'm going to ask questions to lead this person in a particular direction because that's the same game the same instrumental game you have to see what it is that you want to know I see this when people ask me questions after my lectures you know now now and then or during a q a now and then people get up and they'll ask a real question it's part of the ongoing dialogue something struck them they stand up there's something they really want to know so honest question and that goes real well but not infrequently someone stands up with a little prepared speech that's packaged as a question so I get this from Christian traditionalists fairly frequently they get up and they ask me about my religious convictions but really what they want to do is Corner me into admitting that I should accept Jesus Christ as my savior and and join a particular let's say uh um denomination it's not a question it's just a manipulation and so your questions like your statements your questions should be honest and if you ask people questions and you really listen they will untangle themselves and that's partly why people love to be attended to you know like if I meet people on the street you know I ask them their name they're all usually flustered when they come up to me they don't really want to interrupt me and then they're flustered and the first thing I do is shake their hand and ask them their name and I listen you know not that good at remembering names but I listen to it and and they know how to say their name and so it kind of settles them down and then it sort of marks them out as a person against the background eh and then if I pay attention to them and listen they will tell me something in like 10 seconds that I need to know because they are they have something to say you know and then if you listen people tell you what they have to say and then you get wise because you collect all that and so you want to help someone well first of all you would decide that you're aiming towards help right and and that you do that in the spirit of ignorance this is what every good clinician learns is I don't know where you're headed I don't know what's wrong with you this is a hard problem man it's like what's your problem I don't know what your problem is so let's find that out first and then let's find out one thing you can ask people this is actually useful in an argument with someone you love they're they're upset with you what are your preconditions for satisfaction now I wouldn't state it like that it's like if I could give you what you wanted right now in the context of this argument and I wasn't doing it in a manipulative way what is it that I would have to say or do that would in principle satisfy you and that's a hard question you know and the person might say well I think you should apologize and about this and you know and then I will say what words should I use and they'll say well if you loved me you'd know and I would say no I'm stupid and ignorant and I don't know what the right words are to satisfy you so why don't you give me a hand with that and I'll utter them inelegantly and awkwardly in a good faith demonstration of my commitment to peace and that won't be so good because maybe it would have been better if I came up with it myself but maybe next time I can do slightly better and that works it it requires the person who's after you to think through the question even of whether there's anything that could be said or done that would satisfy them and if the answer to that is no well probably the relationship is over but certainly the person that they're accusing has been put in an absolutely impossible position but usually almost inevitably if the person meditates on it for a bit there is something that would satisfy them that can be negotiated as long as they're willing to give you the opportunity to do it you know stupidly and badly so listening man Jimmy Carr I talked to Jimmy Carr two weeks ago the Irish comedian yeah it was real interesting um he said comedy is the most dialogical of of the entertainment forms and I thought well what do you mean by that because you just talk it's a monologue right now I do monologues but I pay attention to the audience right I'm always talking to individual people in the audience and watching the reactions and listening to the audience as a whole so even though it's a lecture let's say or a talk I'm watching the audience and responding so we're in a kind of dance well Carr pointed out that comedians before they hit the road and this is virtually invariably the case they have their new routines so they're they're Corpus of potentially funny jokes and then they do 200 shows in front of small audiences and the audience either laughs or doesn't and if you're listening you collect all the jokes that people laugh out if you do that 200 times you have nothing but hilarious material but you listened and then you can go out on the road and that was very interesting to me because humor is a mysterious phenomenon experientially and conceptually and it's sort of precognitive and instinctual but it's also extremely sophisticated then there's an element of transcendence about it right because you can laugh at yourself and that's in some sense the highest form of humor and so it's so interesting that we can criticize and Elevate ourselves at the same time and that we find that intensely pleasurable and so a good comedian collects ways to do that shares them with the audience and he's listening and so if you want to help someone the best way to help someone is not to give them advice but to listen to them life has proximal meanings right there's the meaning that you experience when you're engaged in a piece of art or when you're reading or when you're engrossed in a movie or in a conversation there's the meaning that emerges within your relationships with people that you cherish or are enthusiastic with there's meanings of security and predictability there's meanings of Duty and responsibility and active engagement with your job and your career there's meanings of aesthetic pleasure now all of those have their value and each of them has their place and you know maybe there's a hierarchy of value there as well so that some of those meanings are deeper than others and then you might say well what characterized the deepest of all meanings and it would be something like relationship with the Transcendent and that would establish a relationship between you and what's always been conceptualized is God which is generally supposed to be something ineffable right it's not definable but you might think about it as the central animating Spirit of the age or the value around which all other values are organized or the wisdom of the ages or the creative spirit that possesses you when you're inspired or what grips you with enthusiasm at a sports event or at a musical event all of those things and we need a relationship with that and we find our deepest meaning in that relationship and if we don't find it I think if we don't find it in something that's explicitly religious then we tend to magnify something of lesser value say something political into that to fill the void so yes life has proximal meanings without god without eternity but at the ultimate level something's lacking and it's the desire to fulfill that lack that and maybe the lock itself that's part and parcel of the religious instinct so you can kill God but you can't that doesn't rectify the hunger for God and then that hunger seeks out Replacements that's how it looks to me so and then you know you you might also say well does that mean you have to believe in God and uh I don't think of the proper answer to that is that you need to agree with a propositional statement does God exist yes no like does this is this table there yes it's not that kind of relationship it's characterized in the Old Testament as a struggle so Israel means those who struggle with God and you have to participate in that struggle and you can do that weirdly enough as a Believer as a non-believer maybe sometimes more intensely as a non-believer the issue might be more Paramount than the issue of virtue and and the issue of the ultimate orientation there's so many rules that are great but what do you think is probably if if somebody was to read those books and there's one rule that you like this rule out of the 24 I've given you over these past few years I you can absolutely not get this one wrong which rule would that be tell the truth or at least don't lie because you can't tell the truth right because who are you to tell the truth that's a that's a mighty tall order man but you can stop saying things that you know are lies and that will change your life if you do that and it's crazy well how can you adapt to reality when you falsify it and you think well I'm just lying to other people no you're not you can't just lie to other people because what you say becomes you especially if you practice it because we build ourselves out of words and that can be lies in action too it's like don't don't say things you know to be false that's a that's a good start man and it aligns yourself with the truth and that like how can that be a bad idea imagine that what is true reflects reality which is sort of the definition of true how can failing to align yourself with reality work how is that possibly going to work well you say well I can you know if I lie I get away with something it's like no you don't you know I I tell you I swear this is true in all of my clinical practice I have never ever seen anyone ever get away with anything even once you think the chickens won't come home to roost it's like all that that means is you're too stupid to see what your lies caused or too blind or too self-deceptive you just don't see it and so you don't get away with anything nothing it's terrifying to actually understand that it's terrifying what if you can't get away with anything ever you know well that's the judgmental God fundamentally that's a very old idea and it's an old idea for a reason and of course you can't get away with anything because imagine that you took a flexible plastic comb you know when you bent it backwards and you say well I got away with that it's like well what's going to happen when you let go it's going to snap back and hit you in the face and that's that's life man you warp the structure of reality you think you are someone who can warp the structure of reality with your words and get away with it really no man that should that should terrify you right to the core of your soul you're not God your perceptual structures are determined by the goals that you have at hand I mean some of that's that's not completely true because your perceptual systems also have limitations right there's things you can't see or hear even if you need to so there are limitations built in but within that set of limitations you're still trying to tune your perceptions to your motivated goals and that's also very useful to think about when you're trying to understand artificial intelligence because for human beings without goals there's no perception because there's no filtering mechanism that you can use to determine the level of resolution at which you perceive anyway so there's the there's a thing made of smaller things which are made out of smaller things and it's so it's kind of my iconic representation of the complexity of the world and then you could think well what is this how can you see this object and I think if you just look at it you can detect it's like a Necker Cube you know those cubes that that are line drawings that you can see the front of and then it'll flip to the back have you seen those so this is kind of Necker Cube like or at least it is for me in that when I look at it my perceptions play around with it sometimes I focus on the kind of cross-like shape in the middle and sometimes I can see these other lines and then sometimes I'll focus on that square and sometimes I can see the little dots there maybe one dot and my perceptions are going like this trying to fit a pattern to it and I you can kind of detect that when you're watching it and so I would say well you have the options of perceiving this in its full complexity or you can simplify it essentially there's lots of ways you can simplify it but some of them are laid out there so you take the comp complex thing you make a low resolution representation of it so that's it's rough that's the rough area that all those dots occupy that's the rough area broken down to its four most fundamental quadrants that might be how you would look at it if if this was a map of an orchard and you were trying to walk from south to North that would be a useful representation this combines this and this that's the that's the highest level of resolution that you can perceive this object at that's lower resolution than the object itself so the first issue is how should you look at things well that's a problem that intelligence has to solve so that's one of the problems that intelligence goes after and then I think what happens is we have the thing in itself and then we simplify it with a perception and that's like an iconic representation and then we we nail the iconic representation with a word and that's how we compress the world's complexity into something that we can manage we take the complex thing make it into an icon and represent the icon with a word and then when I throw you the word so to speak you decompose it into the icon and then decompose it even further into the thing if you can't if you know the icon and you know the thing and so then we can use shorthand right because you have representational structures and so do I and I'm just tossing you markers about your representational structures and you can unfold them that's what you do when you're reading a novel because the novel comes alive in your imagination in your own idiosyncratic way and it wouldn't if you didn't understand the references of the novel right the novelist has to assume that your basic perceptual structures and your intuitions and your instincts are basically the same as his or hers because otherwise they have to assume that because otherwise they would be lost in an infinite regressive explanation so and it's problematic often for example if you start reading Victorian novels you may find that it takes a while to get into them because the presuppositions the expectations are slightly different and so is the language you have to update the representations you have to make a decision in your life and this is this is a decision and I would say that it's a voluntary element of Faith because it isn't exactly evidence-based it's more like something you decide before you even look at the evidence it's more like you decide to stake your life on this like you know if you decide to get married to someone you don't really do it on the basis of the evidence that you're going to have a happy life because you don't have that evidence you do it you decide that you're going to make a happy life with this person and that it's worth the risk so you you get married as an expression of faith okay and and so Faith doesn't mean believing things that no one with any sense would believe Faith sometimes means putting a stake in this sand and saying here is where I stand in some sense regardless and you do that when you get married you do that maybe when you you know pledge allegiance to a friend you have a best friend and you want to maintain that friendship as long as you possibly can it's it's it's a decision of Faith um maybe you do that when you decide a career when you go to university because you could have done something else right but you chose that so that's where you put your faith um and like I said that doesn't mean believing what no reasonable person would believe okay so back to God is love well I'm going to talk about being first instead of God um and being is the totality of experience that we're going to Define that it that way for the purposes of this discussion being is what there is instead of nothing and you experience that as a conscious creature being is what you experience as a conscious creature it includes all your emotions all your motivations all your subjective experience as well as everything that's objective Okay so it seems to me that all things considered it's a useful move of Faith to act as if you love being and if you love something then you want the best in it to flourish and so maybe you decide deep in your soul that it would be better for you to act towards an end that makes everything that's good better that that's the best way to live to make everything that's good better and maybe to restrict the development of everything that's malevolent and evil within yourself and in the broader world insofar as you're able to do that and so I think that's an expression of Love is that because when you love something you care for it and the proper attitude towards being I think is care and so so that's one element of God is love God being analogous in some way to being um now we could look at God more classically as the creator of being if you assume being as good well it's not much of a leap to assume the creator of being is good and maybe you adopt an attitude towards the creator of being and that's also love and you open your heart to existence and maybe that's the most effective means of having existence open its heart to you so for example you know if you love other people you want the best for them you want the best and you deserve the best in them if you love them and you trust them courageously so you open yourself up to them I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that that's how you elicit the best from them the best that can be elicited you're going to get hurt sometimes and betrayed but that's going to happen no matter what approach you take I think that's the most effective approach and that is perhaps the most effective approach to existence per se to approach it with love and courage and and so that's how that looks to me is it a feeling like loving a person yes I think it is I think it is a feeling like loving a person it's it's the generalization of that care that you would have for a child your child your your brother your sister a family member it's the generalization of that to the broader domain of of existence to broader domain of domains of existence and I think that's a skill in some sense right I mean if you're good at loving and caring for your family but you can expand that outward so that more people are brought under that umbrella then well assuming you can manage that it's very difficult it seems to me that that's laudable it seems to me that we spontaneously admire and would like to imitate people who are capable of that and so you see that when you have a job or you and you encounter a boss who takes you under his or her wing and helps develop you or you find a teacher who's particularly inspiring or you work for an entrepreneur who's inspiring and who also opens doors for you um they're acting with love as far as I'm concerned they want the best in them to serve the best in you and that's very very motivating for everyone and that's the proper basis of our social relationships not power for God's sake so can love balance out the crushing responsibility that's a sophisticated question I don't know the answer to that love is warmer than responsibility love is the is part of empathy and agreeableness it's a different dimension than responsibility which is more part of conscientiousness and sort of a cold virtue I don't know if it balances out the crushing responsibility but I think it's the emotional analog to the crushing responsibility right so maybe there's love and Duty and and they run parallel in in if you're an ethical person that's not all there is to ethics but you know love and Duty they're they're important and and maybe they're better together than they would be as independent um entities then you can imagine I have this Cottage in Northern Ontario and we're fortunate it's dark there and so you can go down to the dock at night and in the clear sky you can see the vast array of the infinite heavens arrayed above you you know and it's something that people who live in cities really don't get to experience anymore they don't experience the sunset which we also go out on our boat and watch pretty much every day and that puts you in in touch with what inspires awe now when that's not a propositional experience that's a pre-propositional experience and it's it's a deep biological experience it's in it's embedded in the prey response to a predator in part you know because if you if you feel awe sometimes you can feel that with music a lot of people are high in openness to experience will feel that quite frequently under the effect of aesthetic experiences interestingly enough their hair stands on in that's pilo erection that's what a cat does when it's frightened by a dog like the little boy at the beginning of the story you know the cat puffs up to look big to be like medic hat so that it can contend with it can contend with dogs or at least it can look like it might and so when when it sees a dog the sight of the dog calls the best fourth out of the cat well that's what happens when you look at the night sky you know it calls to you right Dr Dawkins sent me a paper last week in preparation for a discussion that we're going to have tomorrow and it was very interesting paper and I think I read it about 25 years ago and he said any functioning animal has to be a microcosm a model of the environment within within which it finds itself well that's true of us and so when you look at the night sky and that sense of awe grips you and calls something out of you right to respond to your encounter with the infant and even your encounter with mortality you're encounter with finitude and limitation all of that in relationship to the infinite that sense of awe is also the calling forth of something out of you that can respond to the challenge of that infinite well that's the microcosm within no it's a reflection of the structure of the cosmos itself that's the Divine ideal and we either imitate that or we fail to imitate that or we pursue the opposite path those are the options you know and it's given our technological power and our capacity for wholesale atrocity it's time we woke up and realized it what's the most effective way of overcoming self-deception the problem of self-deception is extremely thorny and it's Tangled Up with the issue of ignorance as well right how do you know when you just don't know something and how do you know when you're being willfully blind and how do you know when you're outright lying all of those things are especially to yourself all of those things are very complicated so to some degree the answer is well you have to develop a philosophy of life that's detailed that contains within it an assessment of your thoughts about the relationship between truth and deceit so for example do you believe that it's okay to lie is it okay to deceive other people to get what you want are there occasions when it's okay to deceive other people if that helps them get what they want so that would be and an instance for example of what people perhaps call White Lies right lies that are designed to be of benefit are they appropriate do you feel that it's okay to deceive yourself or or other people in the pursuit of things that you believe are valuable and none of those are trivial questions and and they can't be answered with trivial answers so to some degree you need a moral philosophy that privileges the truth above all else if you wish to cease engaging in self-deception and then you might ask well how would you develop such a philosophy and some of that might be well reading about moral philosophy Reading literature because it often deals with questions of Good and Evil and deception thinking about it writing about it reading about it well I said that um and and also contemplating how Central issue this is for your life how important is this and and why is it important if it's important have you lied and got into trouble do you believe that you can lie and get away with it if you don't believe that you can get away with it you still engage in it if so why all right so let's leave the complexity behind though but but that's a necessary part of the answer how do you stop deceiving yourself assuming that you want to stop doing so well I don't believe that you can tell unerringly when you're telling the truth I think that some of the time when you lie outright you know and so what I would recommend and have recommended in my writings in my books especially in 12 rules for life the first of my last two books said tell the truth or at least don't lie and I added that codicil to the phrase tell the truth because it became evident to me when I was writing that you know I don't know the truth certainly not in its fullness and so I can't say to someone tell the truth but I can say if you believe that the truth is valuable and if you believe that living your life according to the dictates of the truth is for the best for you and and everyone else let's say then you could at least stop lying and then I would say that as you pay attention to what you say so that you're attending to your deceptive statements and trying to stop making them some of them maybe you know outright they're not true some of them make you feel uneasy and weak that would be a less uh evident criteria falsehood but still a reasonable one um you stop doing that and then your eye for such things are here ear for such things or your embodied capacity to evaluate such things developed just as everything develops with practice and your intent which is to maintain truth in your speech become sharper and more focused across time and perhaps you get as you eliminate the obvious untruths you get better and better at detecting the more subtle untruths and better at better and better and better at avoiding being entangled with those as well so the first issue I guess is the decision that it's best to live in truth and then you have to decide how far you're willing to take that if that becomes an absolute for example or if it's a you know an important guideline but you know perhaps to be superseded by other things you have to sort that out for yourself once having established that then I believe that you decide and practice not lying and then possibly if you're fortunate if the world smiles on you you'll engage in less self-deception I guess the last thing I would add to that is that there's another form of self-deception that I wrote about in my the second of my last two books so the last one Beyond order there's a chapter in there called don't hide things in the fog that really deals with self-deception too so you might say well there's one form of self-deception that occurs when you say something that you know not to be true and pretend even to yourself that it's true or even act as if it's true or base other statements or actions on it as if it's true but there's a more subtle form of self-deception which I think is more pervasive which is the unwillingness to look at or the willingness to turn away from evidence that you know would undermine something that you want to believe or make things inconvenient for you you know I think I got cliched example is maybe someone runs a company and they have a Chief Financial Officer and they know that person is not exactly straight but it's convenient not to look at the books so maybe when they're around that person they feel guilty and and uncomfortable and that's a sign that you know something's wrought in the state of Denmark so to speak but then the self-deceptive ACT is to not look where you know you should look and you know that's the sort of thing that people refer to when they talk about the elephant under the carpet or the skeleton in the closet and sometimes to mix metaphors terribly it's better to let sleeping dogs lie but often you know if you have this sense that there's something more to the story it's painful and difficult to delve into it but to not do so which is the easy route is a form of of self-deception a very common self-deception and I don't think my experience as a clinician and my personal experience as well is that when you have a sense that something's up and you fail to act you almost inevitably pay a much higher price for it at some point deferred into the future so you have to think that through for yourself and ask yourself if you believe that's true and if it is true unless you want more trouble in the future then perhaps you investigate when your moral unease let's say makes alerts you to the fact that there's something to investigate wherever I go in the world people come up to me and they're usually I wouldn't say they're happy to see me they're often in tears you know and they often have a pretty rough story to relate you know they were suicidal or nihilistic or homicidal or trapped desperate you know and they tell me that real fast and then they say I've overcome that to a large degree and thank you for that and and you think well that's really something to have that happen over and over in some ways you might think well how could anything better possibly happen to you than to have people come up to you all over the world strangers and open themselves up like that like they're old friends so quickly but at the same time it's an awful thing because you see even in the revelation of their Triumph the initial depth of their despair so I wouldn't change that but it's not nothing it's certainly not just happiness it's better than happiness but it's almost unbearable at the end of God's creation describing how order emerges from chaos or being from potential there's this strange line which is probably the most important line that's ever been written in our culture at the basis of our culture and that is that men and women are made in the image of God and what does that mean well if God is that which confronts potential with truth and courage and makes what's good out of potential that seems to indicate that we have the same faculty like on a smaller scale we're not omniscient but we're not bloody well nothing our conscious is integrity tied into the structure of being in some manner we don't understand and it certainly is the case that we take what isn't and turn it is into what is that's something man that's that's quite the trick we've been able to manage and so we're made in that image and so what are we supposed to do well that's what we're supposed to do we're supposed to type our letters and make our phrases and construct our sentences and build our paragraphs and put our chapters together and make our books and communicate to people and straighten out the damn culture and constrain the malevolence and ignorance that besides each of us and push nature back and extend ourselves out into the unknown and confront the potential that's there in the illimitable quantities and make the world better than it could be otherwise to Move It Away From Hell which and it can certainly become that and toward heaven to the degree that we can manage that and that is a good enough goal that's the thing you need something you know because your life is tough It's hard you need something that you know you need something to get out of bed for and fight for and that's something right to fight let's say against hell and for heaven that's something to fight for you want to be convinced about this like read a little bit about hell read the gulag archipelago or read ordinary men or read the rape of Nan King or read about what happened in Nazi Germany during Auschwitz and all the catastrophes of the 20th century and see if you believe in hell and to see if you think well maybe not not having that happen anymore would be a good idea and then think about maybe that's something you could contribute to then it wouldn't have to happen anymore and that would be a good thing and God only knows what great things we could manage under such conditions we're becoming incredibly technologically powerful what would it be like if we became equally wise well that would really be something God only knows what we could manage in the next 20 years or the next hundred years you know we're running at 40 percent most of us you know because we're half in and half out and it's not surprising because life is difficult it's like well what if you were 90 in or 95 in or or all in because you're all in anyways right it's a it's a life and death game no one gets out of this everyone dies you might as well commit yourself and you might as well commit yourself to the highest good that you can attain because why not it'll imbue your life with meaning it's hard the responsibilities there but all the meanings in the responsibility and that'll make your life better it'll make your family's life better and it should make your culture better maybe make the world better it's like that'll justify your damn miserable existence at three o'clock in the morning when you're wondering what the hell you're doing here and that's a good thing because there's going to be days when you're aching and tired and sore and there's people in your family that are sick and you're cynical and bitter and you need a reason to get up and you think yeah well a little more heaven and a little less hell maybe I can pull that off today and tomorrow and next week and that's worth struggling forward for so that's how it looks to me my rule too is treat yourself as if you're someone responsible for helping and it's sort of predicated on the idea that regardless of your inadequacies and your malevolence which you know I'm sure you have many inadequacies and no shortage of malevolence just like everyone else regardless of that you have a moral obligation so that would be a responsibility to assume that despite all evidence that there's actually something of intrinsic worth about you and that as a consequence your duty bound to treat yourself like that is true and then it turns out that if you do that well then your life gets better and and I don't mean happier exactly although I would say it gets happier I mean it gets richer and more meaningful and deeper and and more worthwhile and and you become more educated and you become wiser and and and you treat yourself with more respect and you're a better model for other people and you're a better father or a better sister or a better mother whatever it happens to be it's and you're less ridden by that guilt that's that gnaws at you and shame that's there otherwise saying you're not what you could be you're not what you could be and that's a hell of a voice to get rid of and it's certainly not one that's easy to ignore so that's a pretty good that that idea that there's something Divine let's say that resides within you of ultimate worth um even as a philosophical statement or a psychological statement rather than a metaphysical statement it seems to be a precondition for establishing properly harmonious relationships with yourself and that's that's man that's worth thinking about a lot you know that you have to because you think you couldn't think that in some sense you just own yourself you know because people do kind of make that claim especially when they're trying to justify for example their right to Suicide that you know it's it's your life it's your body your yours to do what you will with and if that was true well then it would seem to me that life would be a lot more straightforward because you would just tell yourself things that you would instantly obey and believe so first of all you'd tell yourself all the things that you were going to do and then you just run off and do them which you don't obviously because it's much more difficult at that and then you'd also say well enough of the guilt and the shame and the negative emotion and the disillusionment and the vengefulness and all those things that make life hard especially the self-recrimination it's like what the hell do we need that for and if we're our masters of Our Own Destiny and owners of our own fate then why can't we just command to ourselves that that be dispensed with and like that doesn't work I've never seen anybody able to do that so I mean you can fool yourself for very brief periods of time into thinking that that might work but but it doesn't work and and that's strange and this is one of the reasons I love the psychoanalysts say because they were really the people apart from the religious types who figured out that whatever you are you're not a unitary Spirit that's under your own dominion you know you're something like a loose Unity of a multiplicity of spirits many of which are doing their own thing which you're striving to bring into some form of unity but even that Unity isn't something that's under your control in any real sense it's it's a Unity that has its own nature that you have to exist in relationship to and I would also say that that's one of the things that keeps people people's feet firmly on the ground because otherwise you it's easy to become egotistical and narcissistic you know if you if you think that you're the center of your own being you know in some fundamental sense then you're only what you're only beholden to yourself you're sort of a self-created creature perhaps you could think about it that way but it doesn't work like that it's like the ideal that constitutes the unity that you might become then sort of manifests itself is something that you could strive toward but aren't and it it also serves as a judge it's the thing that keeps you up at night saying you know there's some things you're just not attending to and you should get at it because life is short and there's no shortage of trouble that you might end up in and a wise person would attend to the dictates of his conscience and and lay out his actions in the world according to what he knows to be true and correct and that is how people think and it isn't obvious that we why we think that way that this is part of the reason that it seems to me so obvious that we have a religious Instinct because I can't think of what else you would possibly call that other than a religious Instinct the notion that our morality is linked to our desire to survive is I'm perfectly fine with that the devil's in the details to some degree I mean one of the fields of endeavor that I've been particularly struck by is uh the work of people like Franz DeWall and friends the wall has written a series and also Jacques penk said hey I'll tell you something cool about rats some of you I'd like to do that some of you have probably heard this before but this affective neuroscientist named Jacques penkseb he studied rats for a long time and he's very sophisticated researcher and I think he was one of the greatest neuroscientists who lived in the last 50 years sorry I don't think there's really any question of that he might have been one of the top three might have been he'd be in the top three be a tight race up at the top three he did this great experiment was so smart so juvenile routes like to play and they like to wrestle they like to engage in rough and tumble play and you might say well how do you know a rat likes to do something it's like are you anthropomorphizing and the first thing I would say to that is you should anthropomorphize unless there's evidence to the contrary because we share a biological platform with rats and they're a lot like us and a rat is a lot more like you than your stupid model of a human being is like a human being so you try building a rat it's hard so anyways you can tell rats want to play because if you put them in a little Arena where they can Rough and Tumble play and wrestle and then you bring them there the next time and you make them work to open the door to play they'll work and so that's how we know you like something you'll work for it you know so you can apply that to rats and they'll work hard for it and rats deprived of play their prefrontal cortexes don't mature and they they're kind of hyperactive which might tell us something about boys in school but we won't go into that if you take a rat of the same age as another rat and you put them in a play area but the other rat has a 10 percent weight advantage the big rat will pin the little rat and they actually pin each other pretty much like dogs do when they're wrestling while they don't pin quite as much but humans certainly do it and pin means dominate dominance or that's one interpretation you only make that interpretation if you think that the hierarchies that rats live in are dominance hierarchies predicated on the expression of power and we all kind of think that because we use the term dominance hierarchy but you know that's a political term as well as a scientific term and it's predicated on the notion that the fundamental basis of hierarchical structure among mammals and other complex organisms is power and that's wrong it's not just wrong it's it's corrosively wrong it's misleadingly wrong it's like it's seriously and not acceptably wrong anyways you pair the rats once and you think hey big rat wins over little rat establishes dominance That's the basis of the relationship but the thing about rats is like people they don't just play once because they live in social groups that are reciprocal they play repeatedly and Banks up being a very smart researcher realized this so he paired rats to play the same rats over multiple occasions and the first thing he observed was the second time the rats got together the little rat had to invite the big rat to play you know when rats do the same sort of thing that dogs do when they want to play and and that that play behavior is so cross-species common that all of you know when your dog wants to play you know you can you can take your dog and whack him like that if you do it right and he goes and tries to bite you but not really right he plays in his Tails wagging and and when dogs are playing it kind of looks like dominance Behavior like it does among boys because boys really like to rough and humble play by the way although girls like it too but not as much you can distinguish the play behavior from aggression and if you can't that means you never had any friends I mean no I mean that that's that I mean that that's what it means it means that's what it means because part of being able to have friends is be to be able to identify aggression versus play and and part of playing is to pretend to be aggressive quite aggressively but still be playing right there's a tremendous social skill in that anyways the little rat has to ask the big rat to play which I imagine is somewhat you know humiliating for the little rat but he's the little rat so tough luck for him and the big rat contained to play and then they play and then you can observe how they play over repeated boats if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win at least 30 percent of the time even though he could win 100 of the time the little rat will no longer invite him to play and you think yeah it's like no not yeah like the emergence of morality in rats through play that's a big Discovery man that's a big Discovery and that's there's that reciprocity eh that that exists within the rat hierarchy and stable hierarchies in complex mammals are not predicated on power so friends the wall has shown quite clearly that you know that so chimps have a pretty rough hierarchy and it's pretty male dominated now barnables are quite different we won't talk about them because it's not germane to this particular point but you might think you know the biggest chimpanzee with the biggest teeth he's the Tyrant he's the winner and that happens sometimes there are tyrannical chimpanzee societies but what dewal has shown quite clearly is that I don't care how big and tough you are if you don't play fair two guys 90 your size can get together one day when you're not feeling so well and tear you into bits and that's exactly what happens Among The Chimps so tyranny you know that can be a route to dominance it can even be a route to sexual access because it is the case among chimpanzees that males who are higher in the power hierarchy are more likely to farther Offspring not because the female chimps choose them because female chimps aren't choosy unlike human females it's a profound difference between the two species but because the big that more uh superordinate male chimps chase the soup subordinates away so but the wall is shown quite clearly that the males who managed to occupy positions of authority and competence longest in chimpanzee hierarchies are intensely reciprocal with the other males more so than the other chimps in the hierarchy they do a lot of mutual grooming and are preferentially attentive to the females and their infants and so even among chimps and chimps can be damn brutal right Jane Goodall discovered I think it was 1975 another landmark in in late 20th century scientists at science that and this was a real blow to to the social constructionist utopians juvenile chimps Patrol the borders of their territory and if they come across chimps from other troops and outnumber them they will tear them into bits and chimps are unbelievably strong and it's unbelievably brutal and so good all basically discovered that chimps have the human equip or the the equivalent of human tribal Warfare and that's quite frightening if you're sensible because you know you might be the kind of optimist who thinks that human conflict is caused by capitalism or some bloody Daft notion like that and that wouldn't that be lovely because then it would be you could just get rid of it by getting rid of capitalism which you wouldn't be able to do anyways but you know what I mean it's but if it's I mean we split from chimps about seven million years ago and if the problem of Intergroup aggression is that deep it's a terrible problem this is another thing you can do in your own household this is so useful man if you get good at doing this your life will get so much better you can't believe it is watch the people around you and whenever they do anything that you would like to see repeated on a regular basis tell them exactly what they did in detail with you know be positive about it obviously and and just indicate that you noticed and because I saw this when I was grading student essays you know and so I taught this seminar for a long time and I was trying to teach kids how to write they were in their fourth year of University in the honors psych program you'd think they'd bloody well already know how to write but they didn't and so I'd have them write a four-page essay on a given topic and then they had to rewrite that to a six page essay and then they had to rewrite that to an age eight page essay and the first essay I graded I was only five percent of their grade and I told them I'm going to cut you into ribbons but it doesn't matter because it's you know five percent of your grade and so they could tolerate that and generally by the third essay they had written the best thing they'd ever written in their life and they learned so fast it was unbelievable but one of the things I noticed was that they did a little testing with the first essay they'd hand in something it was just like God formulaic boring they weren't in it at all you know there was nothing of the person in there there was no thought there was just the kind of cycle Babble that they'd learned especially if they were in faculties of education and and it was dry and dull and and everything about it was wrong and so those are hard to Great rights like what's wrong with my essay well the words aren't right the phrases they're not so good they're not organized well into sentences the sentences aren't sequenced well in the paragraphs the Peregrine's paragraphs don't make a coherent argument and the entire thing is empty but other than that no problem it was often easier just to rewrite those essays than to grade them no so in any case though one of the things I did learn was that even in an essay like that there is usually like one sentence or two sentences buried on like page three that was an actual thought and reasonably clearly stated and somewhat gripping you know it was like the person popped out from all the background rubbish and said well what about what about this hey and if you saw that and checked it and said hey you hit the mark right there the next essay would be like two-thirds that and that was really fun to see and then maybe by the third essay maybe it was all like that and then they were really thrilled it's like wow I wrote this you know and sort of the culmination well it was a fourth year seminar it was the culmination of their their career as a psychology undergraduate so that was great fun but you can do that in your own household if if if if the envious part of you isn't jealous of the revelation of the goodness of the person for me as a clinical psychologist I in some ways from the opposite perspective of most maybe even most psychologists like it's never been a mystery to me why people are depressed it's never been a mystery to me why people are anxious and unsettled it seems obvious why they're concerned and hurt and anxious and unsettled I think the mystery is how it is that we can conduct ourselves so that that can remain under control I mean people deal with very heavy burdens in their life you know you you don't have to talk to someone for very long someone you might might be thinking is doing quite well in the world and and sometimes people are but you don't have to scratch very deep beneath the surface before you find out that they have a family member who has a serious illness or someone who's suffering through a economic crisis of one form or another or or who there's some source of genuine tragedy yeah one degree removed from them if it's even removed and most people even as individuals have at least one serious problem that they're dealing with and so it's no mystery that people find it difficult to orient themselves in the world and the Mystery is well what can you do about it and we do know what you can do about it and you know Jonathan height wrote a book recently um uh oh no I'm afraid that it's uh the name of the book is escape me it's about the college situation and and the snowflake culture and um one of the things that he pointed out along with Logan off who's his co-author was that if you're a psychotherapist of any sort particularly a behavior therapist what you help people do is to identify their problems that's the first thing is to confront what's there the reality of what's there and as bluntly as possible and so you often end up as a psychotherapist talking to people about their array of problems as it's as if they're putting their cards on the table and and you sort out their problems it's like and no they often decide that many of the things that are bothering them are not really that important they can wait but that there are crucial life challenges that present themselves to them and they're not just psychological problems although sometimes they are they're they're problems in life right existential problems and then what you do is you help people break them down into manageable units let's say strategically and confront them voluntarily you know and there's an echo of that idea there's an echo of that in in Christian thinking and the echo for that is to pick up your cross voluntarily which is that you have a you have a an unavoidable mortal burden to bear in life there's no escape from it except to directly confronted and to take it on voluntarily and what's so fascinating about that two things one is that psychotherapists of every stripe understand that this is one of the primary reasons that Psychotherapy works there's no dispute about that among all the different psychotherapeutic schools is that the confrontation of existential problems voluntary confrontation is Curative and that's really something and so and and and and and and the Practical aspect of that is quite straightforward it it it it also indicates practical and philosophical it also indicates to you that there's far more to you than you think because it turns out that you have substantial problems genuine deep problems of malevolence and suffering but that if you decide that you will take that on as your responsibility that you can put yourself together psychologically just the courage and you can actually solve the problems and and that seems to be true it's it's it's it's not a naive wish it seems to be well within our capacity and I mean that's part of the message I would say of 12 rules for life is that dark as things are there is more light in you than you know what to do with and there's more light in you than you can possibly manifest and and the way to find that out is to to challenge yourself against these massive problems and to find out that you're the one that can deal with them I don't know how many of you have read dostoevsky's crime and punishment but I would highly recommend that in crime and punishment the protagonist commits the perfect murder and he has his reasons for it and many reasons because Dostoevsky didn't mess around when he wanted to give someone reasons he gave them reasons and he was called nikov that main character had reasons for murder and then he commits his murder and he gets away with it but things don't go well for skolnikov because one of the things he finds out is that the riskalnikov that you were before you committed the murder is not the same as the riskolnikov as you are after you've committed the murder and there's a dividing line there that you don't it's like the red pill I guess right it's like it that's the Matrix correct the red pill and once there's certain actions once you take them there's no going back and so that's what crime and punishment is about and riskolnikov tortures himself to death well not literally but metaphysically psychologically because he cannot tolerate breaking the great moral code and so it's a great book it's truly a great book and and it's also extraordinarily like it's a it's a it's a it's a murder mystery thriller as as well as being a deep philosophical book so if you're in the mood for you know a murder mystery thriller that's also a deep philosophical book then that's the one for you you need that instinct for meaning too so and we should get this real straight why do you need it well you need it because life is really really difficult right I mean people have a rough time of it there's plenty of suffering in life and everyone is going to encounter it right there you don't you know you learn this as a clinical psychologist and you know this generally you know unless you're an extraordinarily fortunate person um you don't have to talk to someone for very long and and really talk to them and get beneath the surface until you find you know there's a tragedy or two or three or ten lurking not very far beneath the surface someone in the family is very ill there's a childhood history of extreme pathology alcoholism somewhere in the family maybe a touch of insanity someone has cancer you know someone someone older relative is dying there's financial trouble there's economic trouble there's marital trouble it's like life is trouble and now you know that doesn't mean it's all trouble but man it's trouble and sometimes it's it's a lot of trouble and sometimes it's so much trouble that you can you can barely stand it and and you see that because people you know people get depressed and they commit suicide and the reason they do that is because they think not being is better than being and that's quite the decision you know so and and it's not that uncommon among people who are depressed and so it's it's a it's a very it's a very important thing to consider and it and it isn't just a matter of depression and suicide that's bad enough but you know if you're unhappy because your suffering has pushed you past the point of your ability to cope then there's all sorts of other things that can happen to you that aren't directed towards you you can become cynical and you can become bitter and you can become cruel and you can become narcissistic and deceitful and arrogant and and it's like everything's for you and then you're out for Revenge that's a nice one I don't know against who but maybe everyone maybe even including you because you're not happy about the rule you've played in generating your own misery I mean there's a lot of Darkness underneath the suffering and so and and that's that's an ever-present existential danger for human beings you know we're aware of the future we're aware of our fragility we're aware of our mortality it's something that makes us truly unique truly conscious in a way that no other creature is and capable of things that no other creature can do but also bearing an unbelievably heavy existential load were the only creatures that have to always contend with the fact that we're finite and that everyone we know is in the same position that allied with the suffering and so that's there all the time and and you know even even in in the brightest moments in some sense you know in in Renaissance paintings in still lifes they used to put a Memento momento Mori often in the in the still life like a skull somewhere in the corner or sometimes sometimes in in a very strange perspective so that you could only see this skull if you were standing like right beside the painting instead of dead on but the idea was to always remember you know that everything that exists is Tainted or touched with the with the with the with it with the taint of mortality and you know that's rough but there's some useful things in it it keeps you awake and it keeps you focused if you're careful but it also does indicate to you if you think about it the necessity of having a meaning in your life because because if it's true intrinsically that life has this unbearable element of suffering which seems to be completely in in what would you say indisputable as far as I'm concerned and it's worse than that too because it's not just suffering it's suffering contaminated with malevolence right it's it's bad enough to have something bad happen to you and it's likely that that'll happen but it's even worse for you to do it to yourself and to know that you did it that's rough and it's also extraordinarily rough to be betrayed by someone else or you know tyrannized by your own culture and so and that's that's not just suffering that's like unnecessary and pointless suffering that's been directed at you by something that wants that to happen and so both of those are very very powerful let's say archetypal forces suffering and malevolence and we have to deal with them at every level of reality and you need something to you need something to push back against that it's not optional if that's the D default position and I think it's the default position like a meaningless life isn't meaningless it's suffering and malevolence that's not good and and if that's acted out you know that that's the other thing if that's acted out and I've read the accounts and the actions of people who've taken a very vicious turn into the darkest parts of the underworld consequence of their resentment and their malevolence and then their desire to make everything in the world suffer for the outrage of its existence man I mean that's how we turn things into hell if you want to know why totalitarian States take the brutal twists they take and why people are motivated to do the absolutely terrible things that they do well that's why is that the suffering and the malevolence that's intrinsic to life overwhelms them and and they turn and they turn in a very bad Direction and then they make everything that's already bad way worse and we're very very inventive at such things and so that's not good unless that's the path you want that's a bad idea you need an alternative and that's meaning part of the cultural battle that we all find ourselves enveloped in is partially due to the claim that there's virtually nothing other than the lust for power and you know I would say fair enough in some limited sense which and that's that bears directly on your question because you see that as a Temptation that might be powerful enough to bend and distort you as you attempt to make your way through let's say the halls of power well [Music] I heard recently from a reliable source that Putin's conversion to Orthodox Christianity might be genuine and then you might think well if you're atheistic well that's not necessarily a good thing or maybe you think it's a bad thing or maybe you think it's an irrelevant issue and you may also think it's a lie but I would say that I would be more inclined to trust someone who thinks there's something higher than himself and then you might say well what is it that's higher than ourselves and that's we're thinking about and we all need to think about this regardless of the particulars of our religious belief and I would say foreign from a clinical perspective service to others is really something people who are depressed tend to use the pronouns I and me much more frequently than people who aren't depressed and I'm not saying that people get depressed because they're selfish I'm not saying that at all I'm saying that one of the way out one of the roots out of depression appears to be an increase in service to other people and I think the reason for that is because we aren't power mad demons at the core even though we may be tempted by such things and that we find the genuine meaning that offsets genuine suffering in the genuine service to others and I think it's a big mistake to be cynical especially prematurely about such things as political activity because they're necessary despite let's say they're adversarial and uh and uh party-centered nature partisan nature you have to be clear about what you serve and why and that has to be held higher always than mere Victory mere operationalized Victory or instrumental Victory it's a very very difficult thing to to negotiate particularly because in the political Realm in some sense you have to defeat your enemy right because you have to win the election and the other people have to lose it's a binary choice but so often I see in partisan discussion the proclivity to assume that all the ill will and malevolence resides on the other side of the chamber and that's a big mistake and you can think about that more deeply too is that we all have to put we all need a place to place the existence of malevolence right because malevolence clearly exists and we're all suffer from the weight of malevolent history right because even the grounds we walk on here which this is a remarkable and wonderful place I mean English soil is soaked with blood just like the soil of every place in the world that's part of the human Heritage and all of us bear the marks of that conflict in some sense in our souls partly because of the possibility for us to engage in that but also partly because part of the reason we're here in all this privilege is because of all that catastrophe well the best way to localize that malevolence is inside you right and to remember that the enemy that you're fighting with the greatest enemy that you ever fight with is in your own heart and that'll also stop you from confusing that true source of malevolence let's say with your mere political enemies and that isn't to say that you won't encounter malevolent Behavior although most of it in the political sphere as it is everywhere most of it is more ignorance than malevolence although willful blindness certainly plays a large role and so you need to know what it is that you're serving and I would say one of the ways to do that practically are a couple of ways to do that practically is you need a good team around you the people you really trust and who can watch you and who do it with a certain degree of impartiality and who are disagreeable enough to talk to you when you do something wrong so you need trusted advisors and then the other thing I would say is you really need to listen to your constituents because they will tell you what the problems are if you listen to them and if you really listen to them well then you'll have your feet on the ground which is where they should be and you'll know what the problems are and you will win elections because what people really want from their leaders is to be listened to and then for those leaders to articulate what they've heard in the halls of let's say influence and Power and so if you know those things if you know you need to listen you need to get in touch with the people you're representing as regularly as you possibly can and mostly to listen um I knew a man in Canada who started a political party which is a very difficult thing to do and not only did he start it but he wrote it to sufficient success though that he became the leader of the opposition in Canada within about 10 years and I asked him how he did that because it's like well really how did you do that that's actually really hard and he said he would go out from constituency to constituency and make his stump speeches but what he really liked was the Q and A's because people would tell him what their problems were then he knew what the problems were and out of the dialogue would also emerge the answers that the audience found compelling and so not only would they tell him what the problems were but they would tell him the answers they would like to have it have have what instituted to solve those problems and it's the same thing that comedians do when they when they finast finesse their acts in front of live audiences before they practice them in front of a large audience they lit they tell jokes and the audience see their laughs or they don't if they laugh then you keep that joke and if they don't you throw it out and soon you're just as funny as the audience can possibly manage and it's the same thing you can also do that in a dark manner by the way which is what Hitler did so he could utter terrible things and wait for response and collect those and so then you become the embodiment of The Shadow of Your people so I would recommend that you probably don't do that you speak about the concept of the Soul um do you associate this with any psychological constructs not any psychological constructs that are more valid than the notion of the Soul you know there's there's I would say what we mean by soul is something like animating spirit and you might say well what's a spirit and well that's actually rather easy to answer so when a child of four is playing house let's say what a child of four is playing house she acts out the role of the mother but acting out that's a strange thing right because she doesn't literally duplicate in her actions or her Perceptions in the game what she observed her mother literally doing so for example she didn't go into her mother's bedroom when her mother awoke and watched her turn her head in a particular way to awaken and count the number of blanks so that she could mimic that in her play and you know you think that's absurd but it's not absurd if it's just mimicry it's not it's unbelievably sophisticated so what the girl does is she watches her mother manifest maternal Behavior across a vast array of instances and she integrates that with the image of the mother she's received from all the books she's been read and all the little movies she's watched the Disney movies and so forth and she abstracts out the animating principle of the maternal and then she embodies that in play and usually with a little boy and that's practice for what's going to come later it's unbelievably sophisticated and she's embodying a spirit and the spirit there is the abstraction of the central animating principle from multiple embodiments of its manifest station and if you think children can't do that well then you don't know anything about children because they do that all the time in their pretend play which is a necessary precursor to healthy psychological development and so part of what we refer to as the soul is the presence of that Spirit or maybe even the capacity of embodying such spirits and it's very difficult to know how deep that goes you know I had a vision at one point of all the men in my life who've been particularly influential in a benevolent way you know and so and you think well just a mirror notion of the idea that there could be a benevolent way that would unite the acts of benevolence across a series of men that's all comprehensible to you that's you take that as a matter of course when you say that there are such things as good men and you can identify them right something stable about whatever is good across multiple manifestations of of incarnation let's say and I saw that transform into the the father person of the Trinity as the embodiment of that benevolent Spirit now I don't have any idea what that means metaphysically because who does but but that that Spirit manifesting itself within is certainly part of what we refer to when we talk about the soul and you can see that shine through people I mean it's part of what gives someone Charisma it's part of what elicits the instinct to imitate in you you know when you see that even in simple things when you see a remarkable athlete do something incredibly athletic to put the goal to put the soccer ball the football ball through the net to score the goal and everybody leaps to their feet in celebration of that well that's that's a celebration of the Divine capacity to hit the target dead on and it grips you at such a a low level way down inside your soul that you're compelled to your feet to cheer and you don't even know what you're doing but you enjoy it that's for sure and that enjoyment is also a sign of the depth and utility of that response you see this in all all the things that people do that are you know so-called popular entertainment it's unbelievably sophisticated the soul is participating in that in the fullest extent and you know you can say well there's no use for the religious there's no necessary use for the religious terminologies like well until you come up with a better word there's plenty of use for it because it's a very complex and deep phenomena and to you know just casted into the realm of superstition in some casual manner is it's just not helpful not in any possible it's not helpful scientifically it's not helpful ethically it's not helpful existentially try treating someone for a while as if they don't have a soul just really I mean it just you know treat them like a deterministic machine if that's your belief really act it out you'll be like the most hated person in town in about 15 minutes well I mean what do you make of practical evidence like that I mean you interact with people as if they're free Souls capable of choosing between good and evil that's what you do all the time and maybe you can Addle yourself out of that by some ridiculous rationalist ideology but that just means you're kind of a gabbling fool and it's just going to make you trip over things you don't even notice in all of your social interactions and you tell me I don't care how you think philosophically or ideologically you bloody well know that what I just said is true so and that's true even when you're interacting with an infant or a small child it's true when you're dealing with someone who's elderly and virtually incapacitated in every way you still see that Divine spark for lack of a better term and we do lack a better term by the way you see that everywhere if your eyes are open and if you're willing to see it and to the degree that you're responsive to that then your actions are Guided by love and your words are Guided by truth human consciousness is that faculty that confronts potential itself I think there's good neurological evidence for this by the way for those of you who are scientifically minded because uh we build circuits within us for habitual action that we've practiced many times that seem to run in a very deterministic fashion and we are a strange combination of deterministic and non-deterministic as far as I can tell but what our Consciousness seems to be for is to encounter those things that we have not yet encountered and those things that we have not yet encountered seem to me to be those things that have not yet been brought into being and so you could say that what our Consciousness is for is for the encounter with potential you know that our Consciousness is further it's not for the past it's not even for the present it's to transform the future into the present and and really that that's what our Consciousness does when you wake up in the morning you have a new day ahead of you and the day could take you in very many directions and and the weeks and the years all of that can take you in very many directions and you have some apprehension about what those directions might be you have some apprehension about what role your choices might make in transforming that potential into one form of actuality or another I mean you certainly know that there are Dreadful mistakes that you might be very tempted to make that would produce all manner of hell around you and still be tempted to do it it seems like it's sitting there right in front of you as a possibility you also know that you know you could haul yourself up out of bed and attend to your duties and do the sorts of things that you're supposed to and said a few things right that day and that week and that likely things would at least not be worth and they would probably be better and I I believe that I do believe that I don't understand how this can be the case I don't understand how it is that Consciousness Consciousness can function in that way because I think to understand that we would have to understand what it means for the future to be only potential rather than actuality and who the hell understands that I mean no one and then we'd have to understand how it is that our conscious choices and our conscious ethical choices transform that potentiality into actuality into reality into the present and the past and we certainly but we certainly act as if we believe that that's what we do we upgrade ourselves for example when we do a bad job of it we're upset with our children and those we love if we don't believe that they're living up to their potential we're guilty and ashamed when we make choices that we feel are inappropriate we understand to some degree that the manner in which time lays itself out has something to do with the ethics of our choice and again I would say that's a very deep idea I think it's a I think it's I think it's the most true idea I know it's very emphasize that idea emphasized in ancient religious stories such as those that are outlined in Genesis or in Genesis with its strange insistence that you know God is that which brings order out of chaos formless potential generates the world out of formless potential and that we're somehow made in that image which which seems to me to be the case and that the proper way by the way to go about acting in that image is to act in relationship to the potential that confronts you with truth and with courage with careful articulation that's the logos and that if you do that then what you bring forth is is good you know there's a gospel saying which is of course impossible to comprehend or believe knock in the door will open asking you will receive seek and you will find and people think well no way the world's not constituted like that it's like it goes back to the idea of aim if you don't aim at it you're not going to hit it and you know it might also go back to a question about what do you mean by ask and what do you mean by want because it isn't just some casual request you know you're praying to God I wish you know I wish I could find my wallet or something like that as if he's the Casual granter of Magical Wishes like like the like a fairy with a magic wand you know it's not that asking means something like this I am willing to give up everything that I'm doing wrong so that I can put things right if I could know what right was and that's a non you're on your knees when you say that man and maybe if you're on your knees you get the answer and so that's worth thinking about so you know if you knock and you wanted to walk through it you asked and you wanted to learn you know and you saw it because you wanted to find maybe you would receive and be answered and find but not without aim if you don't have some notion of the Divine then you'll believe any damn thing yeah yeah right I think that's right and that's what the kids are doing yeah well I mean dostoevsky's comment on that was if there's no God everything is permitted you know and he did a lovely job of analyzing that in well in crime and punishment and the brothers karamazov and I think it's true I think you'll if you believe nothing you'll fall for anything and I really do believe that's the case and you know you might say well what what do you mean you mentioned earlier that people like to ask me if I believe in God and I always think well who are you to be asking that question first of all you have some notion of what you mean by believe that you think is just accurate because you know what believe means and so you have a a priori theory about belief and now you're asking me if my belief in God fits into your a priority Theory it's how about we start by questioning your a priority theory of belief because I don't even know what you mean by believe and neither do you especially when we're asking a question not profound because it you know do you believe in God there's two Mysteries there well three you believe God all three of those are subject to um question I think people act out what they believe and so when people ask me if I believe in God I say generally that I act as if God exists or I try to act as if God exists and they're not very happy about that because they want me to abide by the rules of the implicit rules of their question which is no do you believe in the religious view as a pseudo-scientific description of the structure of reality it's like well I don't even know how to answer that question because it's so badly formulated I can't get a handle on it um do you believe that there's something divine well let's try to Define divine here we can do that for for a moment most of us have some sense that literary stories differ in their depth that's that I don't think that's an unwarranted proposition some stories are shallow and some stories are deep some stories are ephemeral in some move you deeply whatever that means it's a metaphor but we understand what it means imagine there are layers of literary depth and one way of conceptualizing the layers of literary depth is that the deeper an idea is the more idea other ideas depend on it right and so you have fundamental ideas that are fundamental because if you shake that idea you shake all the ideas that are dependent on them and then I would say well the realm of the Divine is the realm of the most fundamental ideas and you don't get to believe in that or not because the alternative is to say well all ideas are equal in value it's like okay well try acting then and you can't because you can't act unless you prioritize your beliefs and if you prioritize them you arrange them into a hierarchy and if you arrange them into a hierarchy you accept the notion of depth and so that's a no-go when we use language of the Divine we're talking about the deepest ideas and so I believe that the notion that each individual is characterized by a Consciousness that transforms The Horizon of the future into the present that's a Divine idea it's so deep and our cultures necessarily I think functional cultures are necessarily predicated on that idea so I don't just think it's a western idea I don't think you can have a functional culture that in some sense doesn't instantiate that idea because you interfere with the mechanism of adaptation Itself by not allowing it free expression you know and you can be like my prime minister and you can say well I really admire the Chinese Communist party because when it comes to environmental issues they get things done and I think I I couldn't begin to tell you how many things are wrong with that statement that would take like 15 years to tell you why your uh an inexcusably narcissistic idiot but we can start like simply if you know what you're doing and you have power if you know what you're doing maybe you can be more efficient in your exercise of in your control over movement towards that goal let's just assume for a minute that you do know what you're doing well maybe if you have power then you're efficient fair enough man what about when you don't know what you're doing how about then where do you turn because what that means is your ideology failed you and do you have a mechanism for for operating when you don't know what you're doing well no because we always know what we're doing because we're totalitarian and we have a complete theory of everything and don't say anything to the contrary or else we've got it all wrapped up yeah except when you don't and so what do we do in free societies when we don't know what we're doing well we let people talk and out of that Babble out of that noise and American culture is particularly remarkable in this regard you have this immense diversity of opinions most of which are completely useless and some of which are absolutely Redemptive and one of the things that's so remarkable as a Canadian observing your culture in particular is that you know you guys Veer off in weird directions fairly frequently and things look pretty unstable and then there's some glimmer of hope somewhere that bursts forward in in a whole new mode of adaptation and Away you go again and that just happens over and over and over and that's a consequence of real diversity of real diversity and it's definitely a consequence of like freedom of Association and freedom of speech because it enables all that you're at a crossroads right here entering a new phase of your life you can you're someone different than you were four years ago and hopefully someone better likely someone better and you have another opportunity now to be the next iteration of yourself that you can be at a Crossroads you know the metaphor works because you make a decision you go One Direction or another and there's an old blues idea that you meet the devil at the crossroads I always wondered why that was I thought it through it's a really compelling idea you know it's a it's an image that has a good narrative fit and it sticks in your memory once you hear it why do you meet the devil at the crossroads at midnight maybe that's when you let examine your conscience or it examines you and then you might ask well why do you meet the devil at the crossroads and the answer is most fundamentally because when you come to a place in your life where you have to make a choice and I think this is actually true of every choice we ever make but it's more evident when the choice is more weighty let's say as the choices that lay themselves out now in front of you are waiting you aim up or down and there is always an agent of Temptation at every choice Point enticing you to aim down and I thought a lot about what aiming down means and so all run through that for a bit the spirit of Temptation manifests itself for example in the story of Cain and Abel and so Cain Falls prey to Temptation and God bluntly informs him when he complains about his fate that the Temptation was freely Chosen and that he could have done differently and better and Cain becomes this is in the aftermath of the improper sacrifices that he makes the sacrifices that he makes that are not everything they could be they're not in the service of the highest good that are deceptive and arrogant simultaneously because when we make improper sacrifices we believe in the deepest part of ourselves that we've pulled one over God and Isis suggests that that's a Temptation you might want to avoid that presumption and then you might say well if you're tempted to aim down you're tempted to make improper sacrifices you're tempted to arrogantly presume that you are going to get away from it with it that you're not going to be called on it what are the pathways down that might manifest themselves in front of you and I think the the two stories that follow the story of Cain and Abel detail that so after Cain and Abel Comes The Flood and that's no accident The Narrative placement of those stories is definitely no accidents it's unbelievably sophisticated from a literary perspective a philosophical perspective theological perspective existential perspective one form of Temptation is the nihilistic chaos that's symbolically represented by the flood right it's the proliferation of sins and sin is a word both its Greek and its Hebrew derivation are related to archery so the Greek derivation I hope I haven't got this wrong because I know there are Greek scholars in this audience so um the the word is derived from the Greek word hamartia which means to miss the mark and it's an archery term it's lovely I it's a lovely notion to know that because to sin therefore means to miss the target which implies that it has something to do with aim or the lack thereof I love that I think it's so apt and the derivation of the word sin from the Hebrew Source actually relies on the same imagery and so to sin is to aim wrong or to miss the mark and there's a variety of ways you can miss the mark right don't aim at all that's a good one assume there is no such thing as aim assume all aims are equal well you sin you missed the mark what can happen well one way is you can descent into a kind of nihilistic hopelessness and that's not you can understand that you know you meet people in life whose lives have been so hard you know you hear their stories they've suffered so much and they're bitter and they're hurt and they're resentful and you think oh my God it's no wonder you're bitter and hurt resentful I mean look what you've gone through and but you also notice that their bitterness and their resentment and their hopelessness and their chaos and their anxiety it's not helping right it's worsening the problem it's not making it better and I'm not saying that people can always resist that but I I have certainly seen that it's not helpful but I've also met other people you know who have had stories equally catastrophic sometimes more catastrophic sometimes so catastrophic you can't even believe that they survived who are not embittered or made residential by those experiences and who continue to aim up and so that makes a mockery of the of the of a kind of casual determinism right is that you end up chaotic nihilistic hopeless anxious Etc merely as a consequence of the unbearable tragedy of your life because if that was the case then everyone who had a series of unbearable tragedies which by the way will be almost all of us in one way or another at one time or another would end up in that catastrophic chaos that that once that if manifested broadly enough in a society produces a flood of that ends everything and that's well that's the story of Noah in large part and Noah you know he's wise in his Generations was a lovely phrase because it means for his time and place he was a good man and that's that's a lens through which history might well be viewed you know we're very presumptuous as moderns we look back and we think well you know this person who did all these remarkable things said these things that we now regard as inappropriate and therefore can be dispensed with it's like well what makes you think that you're above that criticism 100 years from now that you know the best you can do is to be as good as you can in your time and place and if you could manage that well good for you if you can transcend that well then maybe you're some sort of Saint and you're probably not so aiming at just the first is not such a bad upper aim first of all I do believe that I don't think science is possible outside of an encompassing judeo-christian ethic so for example I don't think you can be a scientist without believing as an axiom of faith that truth will set you free or that will set us free so we don't know the conditions under which science is possible you know and we tend to overestimate its epistemological potency it's only been around I mean you can stretch it back to the Greeks if you're inclined but in a formal sense it's only been around for about five centuries and it's only thrived for a very short period of time and it's perfectly reasonable to assume that there were particular preconditions that made its rise and descendancy possible it is a historical phenomenon yes it happened at a specific moment in time right and for and at least yeah and I think one of the conditions well there's a bunch of them one is for example there there's an intense insistence in the Christian tradition that the mind of God in some sense is knowable yes so we could say well the structure of the cosmos and you have to believe that that's the case before you're going to embark on a scientific Endeavor you have to believe that there's some relationship between logos logic let's say but logos is a much broader concept than logic that's for sure you have to believe that there's some relationship between that and the structure of the cosmos you have to believe that the pursuit of truth is in itself an ethical good because why would you otherwise bother you have to believe that there is such a thing as an ethical good and those aren't scientific those are not scientific questions which is why I think the arguments of people like Hitchens are weak it's like yeah Hitchens Dawkins people like that they have a metaphysic which they don't know and they assume that metaphysic is self-evidence like well sorry guys it's actually not self-evident and they assume that it can be derived from the observations of empirical reality and the answer to that is no there's going to be axioms of your perceptual system that aren't derivable from the contents of your perceptual system and you might think well that's not very scientific and I would say well take it up with Roger Penrose and see what he thinks because I just talked to him for like three hours about partly about this topic about say the role of Consciousness and and the structure of Consciousness and it's by no means obvious that the materialist reductionists have the correct theory about the nature of Consciousness and not surprisingly it's like we we don't understand the relationship between Consciousness and being at all and so they're you know these are hard hard questions well they're the hardest the hard question for Consciousness researchers is uh why is there Consciousness rather than why aren't we just unconscious mechanisms acting deterministically they call that the hard question I don't think that is the hard question I think the hard question is what's the relationship between Consciousness and being itself and because I don't I can't understand what it means for something to be in the absence of some awareness of that being so when we say being there's an awareness component implicit in the in the idea of being itself Consciousness is integrally tied up with being in some mysterious Manner and so and I also don't believe that the the most sophisticated scientists are by necessity reductionist materialists like get as far as you can with that no problem it's it's Occam's razor clear if you can reduce and account deterministically no problem but don't be thinking that accounts for everything because I don't think there's any evidence that it does so imagine that you're in Amsterdam during World War II and the Nazis are everywhere and you have a Jewish Family in the attic and you're up there with the baby and there's 25 Nazi officers on the ground floor the baby starts to cry do you smother the baby you save all the people upstairs and Claire who is a mother of a very young child at that time said her response was don't ask me such stupid questions which I think is actually the right response and it's more embodied response right and you you can trap your philosophical cognition into weird corners but that doesn't mean that your fundamental intuitions are affordable this is right with this nosik thing it's it's like well if you could not have a body yeah you know you're grounded out in the world that's that's the rejection of Derek parfitt right so Derek parfitt's entire moral theory is the trolley problems and you can decide how morality is constructed based on trolley problems and people like well that's not really how morality is constructed it's not all based on edge cases not really how it's constructed at all it has to be embodied for example and that's a crucial issue you know and so the the notion that a set of semantic philosophical propositions even coherently organized constitutes the ethical world and that ethics is top down from magic space into your body space that's there's some truth in that because there's feedback loops right we think about ethics and we can we can move around the edges of ethics and so forth but it's within a game that's already established and that game is actually established through embodied negotiation first so when you see Moses leading his people through the desert they're all fighting and scrapping away right and then he sits as judge of them for a very long period of time it's months or years even so much that his father-in-law says you have to stop doing this because it's exhausting you right it's after that he receives the revelations from on high and so my sense of that psychologically is it's a story about the fact that morality is encoded in our behavior in a deep level and so deep we actually don't understand the morality but then now and then we get an imaginative insight into the moral pattern and then we get a semantic representation of the imaginative insight and that's this Revelation it's like here's a moral rule it's like wolves suddenly becoming semantically conscious of the Authority relationships in their pack oh that's really good I like that a lot yeah that's quite good like 20 years ago put a lot of effort into that yeah no there's a there's a there's a big kind of Rich debate in Jewish philosophy over whether Moses is right to listen to Jethro so Jethro comes and says you need to you need to devolve authority to lower levels you need the the prince you need the judges of the tens and then the judges the hundreds yeah yeah which is a lovely way of thinking about it too because it parse out I thought that's what should have happened in Iraq right kill the Tyranny well what do you do you have to establish a hierarchical local Authority exactly so centralized control doesn't work but one of the big questions is whether in doing that is Moses setting the stage for all of the chaos that follows because once you give up the authority that he has the direct Authority and you have now layers of of authority below him how much Authority can you devolve to layers below you without giving up the the prime Authority at the top right that is like one of the Cardinal questions of life isn't it you know if you have a family you want to devolve a Authority and facilitate autonomy and the question is how much can you do that without without generating disunity and I would say it depends on the value of the goal that unites you and and then that brings up another question and this is a question I would say for the moral relativists um I was talking to Rupert sheldrake in in Cambridge he has lots of wild ideas but I was conducting a seminar there on the nature of the uniting ideal so it was imitation of the Divine ideal say you need a higher order aim to unite subordinate drives right so the question then is what becomes the highest order epic great it's like the pyramid with a gold cap on the top or the Washington Monument with a pyramid on top of it with this aluminum cap on something's at the top and the thing that's at the top is actually qualitatively distinctive from all the things that are subordinate to it so the question is what's that highest order uniting principle and well one answer to that that the three religions that are based on books have proposed is it has something to do with the authority of the word and Christianity that's developed into the notion of the Divine word and you see that saturating Judaism as well and that's at least in part because the thing that has to be superordinate is freedom of it's not freedom of fight exactly it's more like freedom of Consciousness because logos isn't thought it's not logic either it's much broader than that it's more like Consciousness itself and the reason I think that's true technically is because we imagine that Consciousness and attention are in some sense isomorphic right I mean when we pay attention to something we become conscious of it okay Consciousness Consciousness is the mechanism that generates proximal Solutions and dissolves and regenerates them and so all the proximal Solutions have to be made subordinate to respect for the process that generates old okay yeah yeah exactly well I think it's a cardinal presupposition of psychotherapy because what you do in Psychotherapy is you allow people maximal freedom of expression right you don't impose your views on them even you the freudians use free association say whatever comes into your mind and it turns out that that process of untrammeled expression in good faith is actually Curative it actually makes people better it leads them to what they're afraid of that that's one of the consequences of free speech right because you sort of you tend to circulate around what bothers you and what disturbs you and so untrammeled freedom of expression will lead you to the source of your fears and then you can confront those fears and then in confronting them you can get more courageous that's all part of that the other thing that that ideology does and the the radical leftists are all also very good at this is that it provides you with a local a convenient Locale for the for the uh existence of evil and so if you reflexively identify the patriarchy with evil well first of all that's a powerful idea it it independent of its broad Merit it's a it's true now it's not the only truth and it's not the complete truth but it's true the reason it's true is because every hierarchical system hierarchical system degenerates tends to degenerate in the direction of power and all hierarchical systems are less than they could be and that's partly because of the possibility that power and deceit will corrupt them but also partly because we're willfully blind and deceitful in our own personal lives and so when you tell young people that the cause of the trouble they see around them in the world and maybe even the disquiet in their own heart is the malevolent inadequacy of their society that Rings true and they don't hear the rest of the story you know and it's the rest of the story that I've been trying to tell they don't hear this story that yeah don't forget about the evil and Corruption that exists in your own heart and don't forget about the fact that nature in this wondrous goddess as portrayed by the anti-human environmentalists and I by that I don't mean all environmentalists by the way that wonderful goddess nature is also trying to make you ill and kill you at all times and so but the story that corruption exists in hierarchical structure and that that's a consequence of malevolence the malevolent use of power and deceit that's true so it's very motivating especially if you're young and you're looking for an invention now it's also too convenient which is one of its tremendous dangers Because unless you're taught to look within and identify the malevolence there as the primary moral obligation then you now have an excuse and a moral justification to take out all of your negative emotion your hostility your resentment everything about you that's unexamined on the Demonic Enemy and of course that's that that degenerates with extraordinary rapidity as we as we've seen over and over and over so it's up to the it's up to the centrists on both sides to to deal with this I've been talking to a lot of The Optimist rationalist Types on my podcast Matt Ridley and Bjorn lomberg and well and height and and Pinker more more distantly but more recently uh Bloomberg and and Ridley and and uh Marion tupi who who's written a lovely book on uh human progress uh 10 things everyone needs to know about human progress it's something like that huh anyways one of the things we discussed consistently was the difficulty in promoting the message that all three of these men are very aware of which is that from a material perspective in terms of absolute privation worldwide humanity is way better off on virtually every Dimension you could possibly measure than ever and and most of that Improvement has occurred in the last 40 years and it's been revolutionary in its speed and no one knows this and so it's very important to note to try to think through why that is like that's such a positive message now I talked to Russell Brand about this and I'm bringing him up for a reason he's he's a lefty by temperament and by heart and his first objection but he's very thoughtful and quick his first objection you know I pointed out all this data showing that by every possible objective measure everything is way better than it was certainly a hundred years ago but certainly even 20 years ago even on the environmental front in the main and he said well what about disparity of distribution so there's the problem of absolute level of wealth let's say now it's improving but there is still tremendous disparity and of course that that is fair enough you could even point out that the role of the left is to provide a conscientious voice for for that's constantly attending to the fact of continuing disparity regardless of absolute level of wealth and fair enough but but having said all that it's a great mystery that incremental optimism is not sufficiently motivating and you can't just wish human nature is going to change it's not going to change we got to tell a better story and I also think that's why I'm a Target I think is because I am actually trying to tell a better story and I'm actually having some success with it I think faith is a form of courage you know if you're hurt by life and you will be it's understandable that you might react in a nihilistic and hopeless fashion and become anxious and depressed and cynical and bitter and all of that uh that's a bad pathway and I think part of what helps you through that is Faith and and part of that faith is that it's incumbent upon you and actually in your best interest and everyone else is to maintain faith in the fundamental goodness of existence including your own despite the evidence to the contrary right because you can draw conclusions from suffering in two ways right one is that you have a duty and perhaps the capability to transcend the suffering is still serve the good or you can derive the conclusion that life is so unbearable that it would be best terminated which is the conclusion that girth is Mephistopheles derives for example in Faust he says well the world is Rife with suffering and it's so unbearable that Consciousness itself all being should cease to exist that would be better nothing is better than something if something is right with suffering and you can derive that conclusion and you'll be driven to it in some of the farther reaches of your life when terrible things happen to you but I would say faith is the courage to not take that path despite the evidence that that might be justified and so I think it is a form of courage in the highest sense and I also think it is a redeeming form of courage one of the things I told my daughter who was very very ill for a very long period of time and in tremendous pain and suffering the high probability of continued slow painful inevitable degeneration was do not let your illness do not take advantage of your illness as an excuse and I told her that when she was in grade two you know it's no joke to tell someone that because I knew she'd had every reason to be embittered but I also knew that if she was in combination with realness the two things might be worse than fatal and you know if you don't think there are things that are worse than fatal you have not suffered because there are things that are much worse than fatal and that's certainly not something you want to do near a child to so one of the things I've been talking to my audiences about is the relationship between responsibility and meaning which is what would you say it's a it's a constant refrain in the book it's one of its underlying messages let's say or themes is a better way of thinking about it you know if you start with the presumption that there's a baseline of suffering in life and that that can be exaggerated by as a consequence of human failing as a consequence of malevolence and betrayal and self-betrayal and deceit and all those things that we do to each other and ourselves that we know that aren't good that amplifies the suffering that's sort of the Baseline against which you have to work and and and it's contemplation of that often that makes people hopeless and depressed and anxious and overwhelmed and all of that and and they have the reasons but you need something to put up against that and what you put up against that is meaning meaning is actually the Instinct that helps you guide yourself through that catastrophe and most of that meaning is to be found in the adoption of responsibility so if you think for example if you think about the people that you admire well you think about when you have a clear conscience first because that's a good thing to aim at which is something different than happiness right um a clear conscience is different than happiness that's better yeah that's better guilting yourself you're not feeling bad about yourself that's right you feel that you've Justified you've Justified your existence right and so you're not waking up at three in the morning in a cold sweat thinking about all the terrible things that you've involved yourself in what you said to someone that you shouldn't have said or are you acted or what opportunity you lost or or or or yeah or or the things that you've that you've let go that you should have capitalized on and all of that and so if you think about the times when you're at peace with yourself with regards to how you're conducting yourself in the world it's almost always conditions under which you've adopted responsibility right at least the most the most guilt I think that you can experience perhaps is the sure knowledge that you're not even taking care of yourself so that you're leaving that responsibility to other people because that's pretty pathetic and I unless you're Psychopathic and you know and you're living a parasitical life and that that characterizes a very small small minority of people and an even smaller minority think that's justifiable but most of the time you're in guilt and shame because you're not you're you're not only are you not taking care of yourself let's say so someone else has to but you're not living up to your full potential and so there's a existential weight that goes along with that I came about the idea is that I'm going to relate to you by a variety of roots oh conducting investigations in a variety of disciplines uh scientific disciplines to the degree I was capable of doing that and inquiries into literary reality because literature has its reality I mean not only its existence as literature which is obviously real but in what it portrays which is very interesting because we all know that literary portrayals are fictional and we all know that fiction isn't true but we all know that literature is true and deep literature is particularly true and so that's seems to pose somewhat of a problem um I came to the ideas that I'm discussing too because I noted the emergence of a problem across multiple disciplines and it's a very serious problem in fact I would say it's a problem so serious that it took three and a half billion years of evolution to solve um and that would be the problem of perception you know the world is given to us in our perceptions and we confuse the world that we perceive with the actual world and we have to because we're stuck with our limited and ignorant perceptions and so it's necessarily the case that we bump up hard against the underlying reality that those perceptions are trying to represent I read a paper in the MIT Handbook of cognitive science a while back it wasn't the first place I'd encountered this idea but it was stated pretty briefly and so it's a good way of laying out the problem the problem is really one of interpretation and it bedeviled or artificial intelligence researchers who were attempting to produce functional robots that could operate in real world environments and you'll note we have none of those yet although we are getting much closer um it bedeviled cognitive scientists and and psychophysiologists who are trying to understand visual perception which turns out to be complicated Beyond Comprehension I mean we devote about half our brain it's really more than that to just seeing and it's interesting to contemplate why that might be if the world in some sense is given and composed of self-evidently apprehensible objects which it's not at all and the problem also emerged in in literary criticism and interestingly enough it's emergence there sparked I would say the culture war that we're all engaged in at the moment and so this is not a trivial problem and the MIT researchers that I described met in an Aguilar said it is possible to categorize a finite number of objects in an infinite number of ways and you think well that doesn't sound like too serious a problem but it's actually a really serious problem because it means that any snapshot of reality let's say any visual snapshot of reality certainly any conceptual snapshot of reality like a book is subject to an unending number of potential interpretations and we could perhaps quibble about whether that's actually infinite but I don't think that's really matters there's all sorts of mathematical discussions about the true nature of infinity and that's the point the point is there are lots of them way more than you could ever sort through and so how how do you do it and how do you do it in such a mat in a manner that really makes it simple in some sense because there's the step and there it is and I walk down and no problem except like I said took three and a half billion years to evolve the platform that made that perception possible and so if it took God himself you know three and a half billion years to manage it then it's a rather difficult problem to solve so I started studying cybernetics neuropsychology animal behaviorism literary Theory psychoanalytic theory existential philosophy biblical studies physics to a limited degree evolutionary biology evolutionary psychology measurement Theory construct validation Theory all these different diverse domains of inquiry trying to triangulate this problem although more than triangulate because I was using more than one reference point it was a good methodological it's a good method by which to proceed if you can find an answer that manifests itself in multiple historically detached disciplines simultaneously it's some evidence that that idea is valid you're you do that with your senses you have five senses if all five senses which are quite qualitatively distinct point to the same thing then you can be reasonably but not certainly sure that it's there up by reasonably but not certainly I mean if that was all there was to specifying the objects of perception properly we wouldn't have to talk to each other and find out what other people think but we do because even with that quintangulation let's say we still Orient ourselves unreliably in the world what I think is at the core of the postmodern critique um I don't think you can look at the world except through a structure of value and the the English so you think well how did the why is literary criticism so relevant well or become so relevant and so powerful and I think well I believe that we see the world through a narrative framework and so that if that's true and we could talk a little bit about that what I mean by that I think you need a mechanism to prioritize your attention and to because attention is a finite resource and it's costly so you have to prioritize it and there's no difference between prioritizing your attention and imposing a value structure those are the same thing and then I think that the mechanisms that we use to prioritize our attention are stories and that means that the people who criticize our stories actually have way more power than you think because they're actually criticizing the mechanism through which we look at the world and so the postmodernists would say look you even look at the scientific world through a value-laden lens and I think yeah you do uh they're right but what they're not right about is that the lens is one of power and now for someone like Nietzsche the thing about a word like power is you can expand the thing the borders of the word to Encompass virtually any phenomena you want and so that's why I tried to Define power as my willingness to use compulsion on you or other people because power can be Authority power can be competence I don't mean any of that I mean you don't get what you to do what you want I get to tell you course exactly and uh and I do think the Marxist types view the willingness to use coercion as the driving force of human history and that's really saying something because that means it's the fundamental motivation and uh that's a very caustic criticism and it's easy to put people back on their heels about that you know one of the things you see about capitalists because I've been stunned to see the CEOs of major corporations like roll over in front of these Dei activists I think well what the hell is wrong with you people you know you're not even making use of your privilege and why are you um well it's not very powerful if you're the CEO of a major corporation you can't even withstand some interns who have Dei ideology it's like it's doing you a lot of good and uh so and why would you produce a fifth column within your organization that's completely opposed to the entire manner in which you do business and the capitalist Enterprise as such and one answer would be well we don't think much about ideas it's like well maybe you should and and you know you can be cynical about it and say well it's just a gloss to keep the capitalist Enterprise going while appearing to to meet you know the new demands of of ethical re of the new ethical reality which I think is a bad argument too but more importantly it's that people are guilty and the the radicals who accuse us all historically and as individuals of being motivated by nothing but the desire for power strike a chord especially in people who are conscientious you know because if you're a conscientious person and someone comes to you and says like a little mob of 30 people who says you know you could be a little more careful in what you say and do on the racist front and the sexist front Etc you're likely to think well I'm not perfect I probably could be a little more careful and it's no doubt that people have been oppressed in the past and it's also no doubt that in some sense I'm the undeserving beneficiary of historical atrocity and so you know maybe I should look to myself and that's weaponization of guilt and it's very effective and it's not surprising but it's not helpful so you know so so there's a resentment that drives this like a corrosive resentment that's able to weaponize guilt and it's very difficult for people to withstand it make friends with people who want the best for you and that's a meditation on my own childhood and Adolescence to some degree I had friends who wanted the best for me and friends who didn't and you know they were friends who some of them were aiming up and some of them were aiming down and if you have a friend that's aiming down and you do something that's aiming up then they're generally not that happy about it you know they try to top your accomplishment with one of their own hypothetical or real or put down what you're doing or offer you a cigarette if you're trying to quit and you've kind of done that successfully or a drink if you've been drinking too much and are trying to stop being an alcoholic you know or or yeah they're cynical and bitter and and devoted towards no good and sometimes that's family members too and sometimes it's even part of you you know but this chapter is a injunction to people is like like you have an ethical responsibility to take care of yourself you have an ethical responsibility to surround yourself with people who have the courage and and faith and wisdom to wish you well when you've done something good and to stop you when you're doing something destructive and if your friends aren't like that then they're not your friends and maintaining your friendships with them might not even be in their interest and so it's a tricky argument to make because I'm not saying you know whenever anyone's in trouble you should you know push them into a ditch and then give them a couple of kicks that's that's not the idea the idea is that but I had a couple of rules I didn't write about one was be careful uh be careful about whom you share good news with and another was be careful about whom you share bad news with and everyone those rules ring in people's minds quite quickly a friend is someone you can share good news with you know you go to them and you say hey look this good thing happened to me and they say look I'm so happy that that happened to you like way to be and they don't think God damn it why didn't that happen to me and like you know you didn't deserve it here's a bunch of reasons you're stupid and why it won't work it's like that's not helpful and so I would say like if people are you know what the other thing people are doing if they're trying to drag you down let's say is they're trying to see if you'll put up with it because they have this idea that maybe life isn't worth living and things aren't good and then if they can be smirched let's say to use an archaic term something that's pristine and good then they demonstrate to themselves that there is no true ideal and that there's no necessary reason to be responsible and to strive forward and so they use you which is a test case you know I'll just push you down into the low Lobster bin and see how you respond and if you put up with it then yeah my cynicism is fully Justified because you made it this far in a video I want to celebrate you most people start and don't finish most people never actually follow through most people say they want something but they don't ever do the work to actually get it but you're different you are special believe Nation you made it here all the way to the end and I love you so as a special celebration if you put a hashtag believe down in the comments Below on this video I will showcase you and celebrate you somewhere on the screen in a future video because you are awesome for 10 more amazing rules from Simon Sonic check the video right there next to me I think you'll love it continue to believe and I'll see you there there's a great story of two Lumberjacks where every morning they start chopping wood at the same time and every day they stop chopping wood at the same time and every day one of The Lumberjacks disappears for about an hour in the middle of the day and every day he chops more wood than the other guy and this goes on for months

Channel: Evan Carmichael

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Id: w8b-mnzYzsc

Length: 197min 0sec (11820 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 20 2023