Jordan Peterson - Take Control Of Your Life | Modern Wisdom Podcast 307

you're in this job you hate and it's 10 years from now how does that look think about that you already know you're in a little hell you know perfectly well it's going to get worse which is more frightening action or inaction dr jordan peterson welcome to the show hi chris thanks for the invitation have you got bored of people telling you that they're glad you're back yet no you i think you'd have to be foolish to be bored about that i mean i don't ever want to get to the point where i take people's sincere well wishes uh you know casually i'm always stunned and grateful that people care and so no it's definitely not and i'm surprised that i'm seem to be moving towards some health and so no definitely not i'll add another one to the list i'm glad that you're back thank you thank you i'm i'm looking forward to this to to to being back and to doing all the things that are in front of me that i could do if i was healthy so we so we what's the story with you and red skull well i don't know i mean i came across this last week and and someone tweeted me this this cartoon this comic captain america comic and i saw this screenshot of red skull looking at a computer screen and it said ten rules for life that was one text box it said order and chaos and there was a couple of other boxes and i thought well that seems to be making a reference to my work i mean 10 rules for life is pretty close to 12 rules for life and of course the main themes i discuss are order and chaos i mean one book is about order and the other is about chaos and my first book is about both so as a joke you know associating my ideas with this arch villain magic super nazi red skull and then as i looked into it more deeply and as people sent me more information it became clear that at least some of the inspiration for this red skull character in this captain america uh variant was appeared to be targeting let's say or satirizing or warning about my ideas and so i've been playing with that ever since i suppose on twitter people are producing memes now of red skull oh superimposed upon the picture of him things i've actually said instead of the hypothetical things that the people who don't like me wish i said and then purposefully misinterpret and so that's that and uh it's i'm trying to make it into something playful it's so absurd it shocked me to begin with i couldn't believe it to begin with it especially when i found out who the author of the comic book was so um you know he's uh intellectual figure among the leftist community uh relatively well known um and politically correct and i i didn't expect it it it really threw me for a loop to begin with i mean it's really something to see yourself portrayed let's say parodied satirized um as a i've been called a nazi before it's not pleasant but this is one step beyond that i mean nazi apparently isn't enough i have to be a magical super nazi and you know by implication well really it's so it's so it's so surreal and absurd that that i couldn't believe it to begin with and it and then i think what's happening with it is so comical because red skull is a demonic character i mean he's a satanic character and in his looks and in his actions and people are putting my words over his representation and there's a jarring discontinuity between the visual image and the actual words especially for the quotes that have been derived from my talks that are in some sense more straightforward and and commonsensical like you know clean up your room or or don't lie um they're not exactly the sorts of messages that the most malevolent imaginable nazi super villain would dream up and promulgate so i think we're doing a t-shirt based on this image a kid developed in eastern europe which is a variant of the hail hydra logo except it's transformed into a lobster we're going to market a limited edition poster and then donate all the proceeds to charity that's that's today's plan that should be launched by tomorrow so that'd be what's today's thursday april what is it today 11th or so i don't even know what date it is april 8th it is the 8th so yeah i think that'll be up on the 9th or 10th of april so well if i'm playing with it if that's not turning chaos into order i don't know what is well it's kind of an interesting challenge you know and and when because i've been so ill it's been very difficult for me to maintain my sense of humor which is a terrible loss um you know it's the best response to that sort of thing is is a deft play you know rather than than outrage even though it it is outrageous it's it's outrageous to the point of being surreal and that's partly why it was so shocking to me i couldn't believe that that could possibly be real but there was you know and many people who fancy themselves as my enemies have pointed out that well i'm probably so much like this red skull character that i'm just imagining that it's a parody of my ideas but i'm afraid that's a pretty weak argument given the you know virtual word for word similarity of ten rules for life and chaos and order no that's not a coincidence sorry we can just add it to the list of weird things that's happened over the last 18 months or so that you've now ended up in a marvel comic yeah well it's like a weird thing seems i i don't know yes my life seems to predictably consist of unpredictably weird things and i don't really know what to make of that and neither my family as well because it tends to throw them for a loop as well although my daughter at the moment is having some fun playing with this she's also healthy enough to have regained her sense of humor so she's quite enthusiastic about the opportunity that this lays out but it is quite interesting that well it's i guess it's an indication too of the the affordances provided by this new technology you can respond everyone can now respond you know for so long have access to broad scale media meant that you were a corporation and generally a very rich one and now everyone has that at their fingertips and it's and it's a whole new world like so new it's so different no one knows what to make of it everyone's a tv producer everyone's a radio host it's stunning it's stunning i've been looking at tik tok lately um you know because i try to investigate all these social media forms as they arise because while i'm interested in communicating with people and i'm curious about the technologies and one of the things i've seen on tick talk is there'll be a a video clip say of something i said uh something went viral and tick tock the other day i was talking to my daughter about this study that indicated that for every 15 points in iq a woman gains over a hundred her probability of being married declines by about 30 percent and the opposite is true for men and so that's only about a 60-second video which is par for the course for tick-tock but then people are pairing it with a video of someone listening to that and reacting to it and so all of a sudden you have this possibility for dialogue in video and that's a you know that's that's never been the case so what does that mean well god only knows it's a whole it's a whole new means of broad-scale communication it's two-way video two-way permanent video with no bureaucratic infra interference so it it radically levels the media playing field it and and you can see and i see this so interesting too that the legacy media uh types are they're done they're so done it's it's happened so fast i noticed among young people that the legacy media the big magazines the newspapers the tv stations the radio stations for that matter all of whom had a monopoly on this kind of information flow are so dead to people under 30 that it's as if their death isn't even noticed and that's fascinating and yesterday i i interviewed richard trombley and richard trombley is a is in his 80s and he's a scientist who studied male aggression a research scientist who studied male and female aggression for 40 years and he's one that criminologists equivalent of the nobel prize and the order of canada which is canada's knighthood for all intents and purposes um hundreds of publications a very distinguished scientist and we had a two-hour conversation and i thought afterwards i thought you know i've only been able to have conversations like that in graduate seminars in the highest quality graduate seminars in the most elite universities now and then even though i was pleased to have those conversations two hours on a single topic covered in as much depth as possible um by someone who's a world authority and now i can have that conversation with people and 150 000 to a million people can have access to it instantly it's like i think god only knows what that is going to be the consequence of that so it's so fun to to play around with this and to experiment with it and and it's such a privilege to be able to do it and there's so much possibility in it so and i've also been trying to figure out what i'm doing with the podcasts themselves because that's really what i've been doing a lot of for the last four months and i listened to this i was interviewed by a wall street journalist last week and i asked him what he liked about podcast because he listened to them a lot and he said i really like to see where they're going and i thought yeah that's exactly it because in a legacy media interview everything is scripted and you're never talking to a person you're talking to the corporation essentially and i'm not being cynical about that it had to be that way because bandwidth was so expensive but now you can sit down with someone and you can risk exploration of course that's what joe rogan has been doing so well for so many years you can risk exploration you can have two people having a genuine discussion about a complex issue and so they're they're engaging in dialectical thinking and if they're good at it they're modeling it so they can model high quality dialectical thinking and pull people along on an exploratory journey and make it permanent and that's completely revolutionary that's never been possible before and and and the possibilities are um limitless and then sorry i'm going to rant about this a bit because i i am so continually staggered by this the next thing is you can take those conversations and you can chop them up into 30 second pieces of minute long pieces five minute long pieces 20 minute long pieces and each of those can find a specialized home that can attract millions of views and so it's as if you could write a book and sell it by the sentence it's it's really something so well so that's you know all response to red skull i suppose the interesting thing that i think i enjoy about podcasts and a lot of audiences do as well is that unscripted nature but it's not just the fact that the topics are unscripted it's the the cadence and the the timbre of the the tone of the way that the conversation flows as well if you struggle to work something out if you're battling at the forefront of your own cognitive capacity to try and get something from brain to mouth we get to hear i'm brought along and where it's almost like a football match or a sports game we're willing the person to get to the goal absolutely yep it is exactly like that it's a it it it it's it's a you're the analogy is directly appropriate that's why people like football and soccer games look those they the players are trying to put something into the goal well that's what you're doing when you're having a genuine dialogue you know it isn't necessarily clear what the goal is it's more implicit because you're you're starting to make that more and more clear too but but and and there is something engaging about participating in that apparently as a listener as well as a participant and i can tell perfectly well when a podcast discussion is going well and it's a dance right i mean there's there has to be this continual reciprocity and that requires you to attend very carefully to your guest and to listen i have some trouble with not interrupting because for a variety of reasons but some of that's the technological lag produced by the by zoom and skype it makes you a little less uh what the dance is a little more awkward because the timing is off but it's it's really fun when it works and it's working much of the time when i'm talking to my guests it's really exciting i have all sorts of people lined up i'm so excited about it yeah yeah long may it continue i really do think that it's it's such an answer to so much bad media and bad thinking and it gives a platform to people who can't hide behind media training anything and script can't hide behind anything no there is no play style i don't think i think no there's no place to hide i think that if in two hours you reveal your hand and everyone can see it you reveal the weaknesses and strengths of your argument you reveal the weaknesses and strengths of your character you know but but in some sense you can even if your character is flawed like all of our characters are you know if you're engaged in something genuine and in a genuine move forward you're forgiven for that right it is if you're if you're actively rectifying your evident flaws during the discussion people will forgive you for your flaws but youtube and podcast long form seems absolutely unforgiving of any falsity as far as i can tell i mean sometimes we do some editing there's two conditions under which we'll edit one is just to edit out some technical glitch we also allow our guests the option of not having something they said broadcast if they believe they've made a factual error or addressed an argument in a misleading way and that's a little bit more of a moral quagmire but our thought is that if we allow people that veto power to begin with they're much more likely to be loose and to take risks in the exploration and we've had to cut virtually nothing except i think two factual errors of a few seconds but it's so interesting because in the comments section if we ever edit anything there's skepticism right away and so and so that's another indication of how unforgiving the medium is with regards to falsity i'm trying to get politicians on my podcast i senator mike lee who's probably the most conservative senator in the united states the i'm releasing a podcast with him this weekend and i think he acquitted himself well um and i'm hoping that i'm i'm i've been in contact with a large number of democrats and i'm hoping that they'll take the big leap because they can talk directly to their constituents they can talk directly to the people who they're responsible to with no intermediation of bureaucracy if they dare that's that's the thing because when it's unedited when it's a flowing conversation for a long amount of time the precipice on either side you are walking a tightrope as you said there is no opportunity to go away and check what you actually want to say and rewrite it in a script it is riding the crest of now constantly surfing the wave of the crest of now um i think it's going to find out who it's a genuineness test like a canary in the coal mine for how genuine someone is because there's no way that you can hold up a persona for two hours straight yeah well or or or maybe somewhat more forgiving than that it might be a canary test for how genuine they're they're attempting to move towards because like i said i think you can make mistakes but but but if if you're bargaining in good faith the audience will forgive you for your for your mistakes so but but you're punished brutally if you're false so and i don't know about you but i'm really attentive to the comments i watch how people are responding and you know if 10 people point out something i'm still working on this proclivity to interrupt but if 10 people point out something i try to address it my team tries to address it because well why not you know i mean you're probably doing something wrong at some point and enough people will tell you it's tricky but it's at least worth considering it it's really exciting moving on to the book your new book is about the excesses of order i've been thinking a lot about the perils of over-optimization for the individual so as you sink into the productivity in the personal development world it can lead to never feeling like you're done alan watts has this quote where he says we can become so consumed with trying to improve our lives that we all together forget to live them is there a way that people can learn to let go of this compulsion a little bit that that's a really good question um i think my my second book implicitly answers some of that um and explicitly some of it as well but the implicit part is there's an increased emphasis on social ties and so for me i snap out of the improvement slash productivity trap to the degree that i'm able when i'm playing with my family let's say when we're joking when we're sitting around a meal time together when when there's peace there and we can joke and play and i'm trying as particularly as i'm trying to regain my health i'm trying to really rekindle that capacity to play and enjoy the moment even if i'm not doing something productive in and that that's a very difficult balance to attain optimally like any optimal balance is difficult to attain um you know it isn't obvious to me how much of i have no idea the the multiple sources of my health troubles i was diagnosed this month with severe sleep central sleep apnea and so that was a great relief because i have a machine now so i breathe properly i was waking up uh 25 times an hour apparently my sleep was so i was getting no restorative sleep and so that was one contrib major contributor and since i've been breathing at night i've actually been feeling quite a bit better unsurprisingly but i've been scouring my conscience to determine if you have an undiagnosed illness especially if it's severe it's very likely that you're going to tear yourself apart looking for what you did wrong to have this arise and you know i think that it so i've been considering did i take on too much responsibility did i work too much et cetera et cetera i don't know the answer to that yet but what i do know is that since i've been trying to regain my health i've been doing a lot of walking and that's been really good and i'm not working while i'm walking i'm walking and i've been working out more and i've been playing more and i've been dancing more and that's all useful and that has to be balanced with that productivity because what you're looking for a you're looking for improvement but you're looking for sustainable improvement and so if you push yourself too hard you you destroy the sustainability across time and and you want that sustainability there so you can't push yourself any farther than you're capable of going in the long run i found for example because i've written diligently for a long time daily and i learned quite early on that writing more than three hours in a day was counterproductive whatever i gained from a four-hour writing session i'd lose the next day or two so but i also think you have to kind of push yourself past your limits before you can retract to the optimal place and that can't be sort of defined a priori because each person's limit is different and i think so i think what you do when you're young in your 20s if you're perhaps if you're operating in an optimal manner is you push yourself to your limits and then pull back and adjust for sustainability and i helped lots of people do that in my clinical practice like i worked with lawyers who were at the pinnacle of their profession and the demands on them are incredible they're working 60 to 80 hours a week um generally what i did with them was get them to take more days off they couldn't work shorter days but they could plan four day weekends two months in advance and they could do that every two months then inevitably if they did that the number of billable hours they produced went up not down so they maybe doubled their vacation time and increased their productivity so it was a really good deal for them they got their cake and eat it too they got to have their cake and eat it too so do we lean to need to learn to play in a way play can be uh we need to remember how we all know right i mean play is so deeply embedded in human beings it's it's one of our primary modes of of of cognition and adaptation mammals have a specialized play circuit that's that's that's it's biologically what would you say specialized precisely for play and so and it's an interesting circuit because a lot of this has been discovered by people who study animal behavior especially among rats but play in rats produces prefrontal lobe development and that's the highest that's the part of the brain that's responsible for highest order cognition so rats have to play a lot to mature properly and they play socially and social play is social integration there's no difference between the ability to play socially and being socially integrated um like a good conversation at dinner time is a form of play because there's wit involved and there's banter and there's timing and there's a dance and there's you know there's the matching of your physical responses to the physical response of the other person it's it's play but play is very easily inhibited by almost any other motivational state and so you can also tell that if you can get yourself into a playful mood that that you're in an optimal place otherwise you wouldn't be able to do it so it's a good sign that things are going right in rule two you say to imagine who we could be and then to aim single-mindedly at that but reality gets in the way of you reaching that potential and it can hurt how can people cope with the pain of unreached potential well part of oh that's a really good question look every ideal is a judge right so you posit an ideal and instantly you're in inferior position in relationship to that ideal and that can be crushing okay so what do you do about that well one answer is no ideals well that's not a good answer because then you don't have anything to do right so so and that deprives you of a main source of pleasure which is observed uh generated as a consequence of observed movement towards a valued goal so if you have a high goal and you see any movement towards it there's a potential there's a really powerful potential kick there so you don't want to dispense with that but then if you set up an ideal it can judge you very harshly so then you have to rearrange your reward philosophy and instead of punishing yourself from as a consequence of perceived distance you reward yourself for incremental movement forward and that's not just theoretical look i was stopped by three guys on the street this week three separate occasions and they all told me the same thing they you know they they said that they had read or something i wrote or listened to something or watched something and that it had been helpful and whenever ever anybody says that to me i always ask them okay exactly what was helpful and what changed because i want to know what's helping so that i can understand the target and hit it better and so and generally people are are pleased to tell me although sometimes it takes them a while to formulate exactly the description but they all three of them said um i stopped comparing myself to other people so i'll stop comparing what i didn't have to what other people had i left that off the table and then i started to reward myself for improving over what i was yesterday so they and that's profound change because it means that you actually get your reward structure transformed and that's a big deal because that's that's your source of positive emotion and enthusiasm encouragement all of that so now you can start to encourage yourself for for genuine improvement and it's also pragmatically extremely intelligent because incremental improvement repeated is virtually unstoppable and i that's like the hallmark of behavioral therapy that idea because what a behavior therapist does is you come and you say to me i'm not things aren't the way i want them to be and then i say well well how would you like them to be and how are they not that so we lay out the problem the territory and then the next thing we do is lay out a trajectory which is okay well here's something you're lonesome you don't have a partner okay so what are the what are incremental movements can you make towards that goal that you would do that would be helpful and so maybe you you you negotiate with the person because that's what you do if you're a reasonable therapist and you say well look why don't you uh you decide as a consequence of the conversation why don't you write out a description of yourself for a dating site don't post it or anything just write it out and and then let's see if you actually do that and so then the person comes back next week and they say i did that and not only that i posted it and you say great what's the next step or they say geez you know i just kept avoiding that and then you say okay well we need to break that down you avoided it well could you write one sentence about who you are right now while you're sitting here and sometimes they can do that right away or sometimes they can't and then you you make a microanalysis of that and what you do is you you reduce the magnitude of the move forward until you hit the point where you actually will do it and that's like the secret to good negotiation and as well if you're negotiating with your wife maybe you want one of her behaviors to change and then obviously she has to be on board with that and hypothetically that's going to be reciprocal process but what you want to do is find a small improvement that is measurable that's implementable that will be implemented that you can then reward and and that's that's that's how you can have your ideal you you can have whatever ideal you want as long as you're willing to reduce your movement forward to achievable increments but that's okay because they compound so and i really learned this as a therapist it was one of the things that was so fun about being a therapist is you can take someone through this process and start them on just the tiniest goal you know and it just seems trivial but they'll do it and then they start moving fast aft faster and faster after that point once once the direction has been established and people make incredible improvement over you know not unreasonable spans of time a few months maybe a few years but which is not nothing but it's not decades you know it's i saw that time and time again so aim high but reward yourself for small incremental improvements especially ones that repeat every day i think that's one of the challenges we have in the modern era because social media shows us the highlight reel of everybody else's life but we get to watch our own failings from a front row seat right we watch ourselves blunder through life we realize just how far away from our potential we are but nobody else actually knows that no one else knows the podcast you could have recorded the business that you could have built the book that you could have written in a very very real sense you are only ever competing against yourself but because yes that's especially it's absolutely right that's why the individual that that's exactly why group categorization of people is so dreadfully wrong it's like you really are your only comparison group especially as you get older because your life is so idiosyncratic and peculiar that any compare i mean look you have to care what other people think it's stupid to think otherwise be because you have to be social and you have to be aware of what other people are doing and all of that so it's this is psychopathic individual individuality but it is genuinely true that no one has your set of opportunities and limitations and so the the comparison just isn't real it can't be sufficiently multi-dimensional you know because maybe you see someone who's re i've dealt with i've 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 plenty but j 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 you compare yourself on one dimension you don't see well 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 you know he's 60. 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 buy youth and so and and that's something that's worth considering but you don't know what burdens the people you're jealous of are carrying so leave it be it's not it's not helpful to you to to to be envious i often tell people that we don't know the price that you need to pay to be the people that you admire so we look at elon musk or conor mcgregor or kim kardashian and we want the success that they have within a very narrowly defined domain of competence tiger woods fantastic example the greatest golfer ever but his dad mistreated him so much as a kid that they had a safe word they had a safe word like you do during rough sex that tiger could tell him if he'd had enough and it was called the e word it was enough and tiger never once said it his dad would racially abuse him while he was on the golf course telling him that these white people are never going to let you on here but then when we look at tiger's golf game only then can we even begin to see what kind of looks a bit like child abuse but only when he's able to perform in that way but the question is would you pay that price to be tiger woods would you have so little self belief outside of the golf game that you have the most public marriage failure that anyone's ever seen he's on antipsychotic drugs and being pulled over by police at the side of the road because he's fallen asleep at the wheel he's spent half a decade off the game because he's been injured because of how hard he's pushed himself do you really want that because that's the price you have to pay to be tiger woods you can't just get the golf capacity without having everything that comes with it this isn't pick and choose like clothes off a rail this is a wholesale sale you pick everything warts and all you need to pick their sleep patterns their self-body image all of the genetics they've got the way that their brain feels when they go to bed at night a lot of people i think if they were able to see the full package they wouldn't pay that price yeah and and that could well be the right decision no who who knows what price you pay for hyper specialization you know and i learned that looking at you know power mad c-suite types first of all they're generally not power mad because power is actually an unbelievably unstable way of establishing authority you you get you get slaughtered if you're not reciprocal in most reasonably functioning organizations and if you're in an organization that only rewards the um exercise of power the probability that that organization is going to fail in totality is extraordinarily high because it's a tyrannical organization it'll lose touch with its customers so the c-suite types um they're they're working non-stop corporate lawyers in new york you know they make 700 an hour but they work all the time all the time and there are people who are suited for that but it isn't obvious that that's for everyone or that it should be or that it's even desirable now it's a temperamental issue to a large degree you know many of those people are hyper conscientious and so if they they'll work whatever wherever you put them what they would do is work that's who they are and it's biological as well it's you know it's not all biological because traits are affected by learning and by environment in complex ways but a huge chunk of it is that you're born like that and that has advantages and disadvantages so conscientiousness is a good example um it's a good predictor of long-term life success but people are conscientious tend to tear themselves apart if they become unemployed for example you know sometimes you get laid off you worked hard but you get laid off well people who are conscientious will tear themselves into pieces with guilt in that situation because they tend to attribute so much responsibility to themselves and so there's a price to be paid for conscientiousness it it opens you up to a certain set of vulnerabilities so you know and you might be somewhat unbearable to your family too because all you ever do is work you know you think well you you want to be a good you want your father maybe your husband perhaps your wife to be a good provider but you want them to do that at the expense of everything else generally no talking about the price that we have to pay do you think that having a deep consciousness and the ability to reflect on life is really something that we should be thankful for like is it a blessing or a curse to feel everything so deeply it's both i think it's a blessing and a curse so i suppose it's it's it the benefit it delivers is an expanded scope of experience and it's possible as well that if it was done well it would be better than anything but if it isn't done well it's very very punishing so i think you can make that case about self-consciousness in people i mean self-consciousness as a trait loads on neuroticism so you know and when people say i became self-conscious they usually mean they've become embarrassed or anxious right and those things do overlap to a tremendous degree so self-consciousness per se as an experienced phenomenon is associated with negative emotion well but do you want to dispense with it well no because it's really informative but you don't want to experience it so if you're made self-conscious by one of your inadequacies you want to remove the inadequacy you don't want to remove the self-consciousness but i mean it can get out of hand too you know people can be so self-conscious and so self-critical that they can't move forward so it can definitely be you can have too much of you can have too much of that that's for sure and it's it's one of the things you do as a behavior therapist again a cognitive behavior therapist is if you have someone who's particularly self-conscious there'll be a litany in their head of all of their inadequacies and so it's like they have an inner tormentor that just constantly natters at them about how useless and weak and what inadequate they are and there's a lot of stock arguments that repeat and one of the things you do with someone who is in that situation is you have them write down all their self-critical thoughts and you do that dialectically you know you help them over many sessions make a complete account and then you help them develop counter arguments not false counter arguments but you go after it's like well is that really true you know and here's the here's the evidence that it's not and so you can bolster people against the consequences of self-consciousness gone amok and that's often quite effective when is that difficult where does that voice tend to come from well it's probably um at least in part the inevitable consequence of being a creature who's continually being socially evaluated so you have a voice inside that something like the abstracted average of everyone's criticism of everyone and that's useful because it reminds you not to do things that other people are going to object to it it also assuming your culture is reasonably functional it also reminds you not to do things that are going to be counterproductive and so that's one source it's like interiorized public opinion and then other sources are well it's also the voice of your ideals and that so that in that sense you might consider it your conscience and that can be well that's extraordinarily useful because it points out your shortcomings now one of the things i've analyzed this the movie pinocchio sort of ad nauseam i would say but but it's been very useful to me um one of the things so that's so remarkable about that movie is that the voice of the conscience which is portrayed by jiminy cricket is symbolically associated with jesus christ in the movie and but interestingly enough there's a dialectical relationship between the puppet the wooden headed puppet whose strings are being pulled by external forces and the conscience so despite the voice of the conscience being symbolically associated with christ the conscience has something to learn during the journey as well and so there's like a dialogue between the conscience and the developing individual and the consequence of the dialogue is the conscience gets more effective as the person becomes more developed and i think that's right because imagine that you have the average ideal inside you speaking to you and you have the the average social voice inside you speaking to you but it isn't really speaking to you it isn't taking your particularities into account and it isn't until you engage with your conscience that you can craft it into something that's actually speaking specifically to you and then that's that's much less burdensome and much more effective and so and i i think that's reasonable i because i don't think the conscience starts out infallible i think we need to question our assumptions far more than we think we need to around that there's so much of the source code of what we're built upon the stories that we were told as children the beliefs that we've had and built up around ourselves for a long time unless you actually take time away from the urgent you never get onto the important tasks of thinking okay well i've held this thing like a like a bag like a satchel that i've carried with me for decades do i actually is this serving me is there anything even in here does this bag need to be with me can i dispense with it but if we're constantly and this links back to the productivity conversation if we're constantly chasing the urgent forward focused gaining and going and getting after it we never actually have the opportunity to sit back and assess the foundations that everything's built upon if you're a building maintainer you wouldn't build the building and then never check on the foundations i imagine they must have to do that fairly regularly because that's what the rest of the building is reliant on to continue standing upright there's an mba program at mcgill that's targeted to practicing managers not not to mba students per se and the man who runs it has asked his students what they found most useful about the program and what they found most useful was the opportunity to get away from the day-to-day fires of their managerial roles and think about the long run the medium to long run because what happens with most managers is they're so bit busy putting out day-to-day fires that they never notice in what direction the entire organization or the part their head their heading should be in what direction it should be going and we that's easy that's it's easy for that to happen in our own lives i mean i think that's actually why at least part of the reason why it's a real loss that people no so many people no longer attend church because you know when i was a kid there was a lot of cynicism and there still is about you know one hour a week christians they'd go to church and participate in this elevated ritual that was at least in principle oriented towards a higher mode of being and then promptly returned to their you know sinful work a day selves the second they stepped out of church and fair enough but an hour a week is a lot more than zero you know and you could object well most people who were going to church weren't engaging in this foundational analysis it's like well at least they were sort of doing it and replacing that with zero doesn't seem to be a very wise move and so i guess that's it's sort of the answer to your own question there too though is you know you asked about the utility of self-consciousness it's like well you can step back from your the traps of your unthinking habits and contemplate the whole journey you know my colleagues and i developed this program online to help people do that to write through their life so it the past authoring program helps people write an autobiography who the hell am i anyways and you think you know but you don't because you're complicated and then the present authoring program helps you identify your faults and your virtues by your own definition it's not imposed on you it's it's a guided process of exploration and then the future authoring program helps you figure out well if you could have what you wanted what hypothetically what would that actually be and yes it's very much worth asking yourself that question because you're always searching for that anyways even negatively because your conscience will torment you for the things you're not doing okay while not doing in relationship to what well in relationship to the implicit ideal of your conscience well what is that and the answer is well you don't know and so if you're just allowing yourself to be tortured into submission then you're at the mercy of some ideal that you don't know you don't and maybe you wouldn't want to pursue if you actually knew you know that's why junk carl jung said everyone lives out a myth but virtually no one knows which what myth they're living and maybe it's a tragedy maybe you don't want it to be a tragedy and then the question what do you want that's a really deep question you know i mean you that's a serious question what is it that you should value and people say well being happy they don't even mean that by the way if you decompose what people mean when they say they want to be happy what it turns out they actually mean is they don't want to be miserable they're way more concerned with avoiding suffering than they are with pursuing you know enthusiastic positive emotion so even the the statement i want to be happy is actually not an accurate reflection of what it is that you want does that not show just how little of our own motivations we get to see we're so good at deception that we deceive ourselves before we deceive anybody else we get to see this tiny tiny little sliver of why we are here why we do the things we do why we think the things we think i saw this quote today from robert wright that said emotions are the executioner of our genes or the executor of our genes all that they're there is to just enact what our biological imperative wants and then we get to glimpse them as they run past on the way to doing a thing and we believe that we're somehow we're peering into the source code of our own mind that's not the case while we're definitely not transparent to ourselves by any stretch of the imagination we wouldn't have to spend decades studying psychology if we were transparent like we're we're tremendously mysterious to to ourselves i'm less pessimistic about the executors of our genes because i i think that you know that that pessimistic biological determinism kind of the pessimism sort of stems from this assumption adoption of the assumption that our genes were tooled by a blind watchmaker and there's this deterministic soulless process at the base of our biological being and i don't buy that i think it's a lot more complicated than that so i think even if we are tools of our biology in some sense the ends at which our biology are aiming are ethical in in an unbelievably fundamental way so and i think all the biological sophisticated biological evidence points in that direction i'll give you an example so i was talking as i said to the scientist yesterday richard tremblay and he studies the development of aggression and it turns out that you don't learn to be aggressive that's there at the beginning you learn how to control your aggression as you're socialized or not so but having said that if you look at so the most aggressive people are two-year-olds they're most likely to kick hit bite and steal and younger children would also be likely to do that except they're not sophisticated enough in their behavior to manage it so it's not like six months old don't experience rage but all they can do is kick and scream so but by the time you're two you can hit someone and you do but but 30 of children virtually never engage in violent behavior 50 engage in some and about 17 do it habitually but all of them do it less as they're socialized there's a subsection that maintain it quite regularly and they tend to become delinquents and criminals so that's how it play okay but the reason that's so relevant is that you know there's this idea that's rampant in our culture that our hierarchical structures of authority are predicated on power but if that was the case the tendency to aggression would be universal among children not only characterizing you know a tiny minority and it would increase with socialization not decrease and so just that evidence alone suggests that however we organize ourselves in society for success it isn't the consequence of mutual exploitation oppression tyranny and subjugation those are actually very ineffective strategies they're only employed by people who don't have the sophistication to do things in a better way and better would mean better for them as individuals but also better for everyone and so i firmly believe that your oriented biologically towards a very pronounced and sophisticated ethic and so it's not so gloomy even if your emotions are the handmaidens of your genes which they are that that's that's true but i don't think that there's cause for pessimism there um we're we're unbroken we're noble creatures i like that talking about the beginning of life there and how we sort of come into this world i want to talk about the end for better or worse life is short how can we add a sense of urgency to it well i i would say by reminding yourself that life is short that's that's that'll add a sense of urgency by noticing you know i calculated i don't know my parents are when my parents were in their 70s 60s perhaps i i usually saw them about once every two years we communicate a lot more than that but we live a long ways apart so i calculated you know well my dad's probably going to live till his mid 80s or late you know somewhere in there um and he's six he's 70 let's say i'm going to see him 40 more times it's like okay 40 more times that's urgent so you better get it right because you don't have it you don't have that many opportunities you know it's the same when you're formulating relationships in your adolescence late adolescence in early adulthood you don't have that many experiments to run you know and you get you get old a lot faster than you think so attempt attention attention attention is an rated um faculty it's not the same as thinking it's watching to see what's there in front of your eyes and and to guide yourself as a consequence of what you perceive it's the it's the faculty that transforms thought if you let it so and your conscience alerts you as well tick tick tick you know you're wasting time and very few people are happy with that some are burdened by it more than others but virtually no one escapes that voice of conscience i suppose to some degree that's that's the willingness not to engage in self-deception chapter three and beyond order is about that people don't really repress the things they don't want to face they just fail to unpack them you know like maybe you're on youtube regularly and every time you shut the computer off you feel somewhat disgusted but you don't pay any attention to that for a while for two years but then you decide you're going to pay attention then you find out well the reason you're disgusted is because you're wasting your life and you know it and that disgust is indicating that but unless you attend to the disgust and unpack it let it reveal itself as informative you don't know what the message is you just have a sense of disquiet it's not easy to transform that sense of disquiet into an actionable plan and often you have to talk to someone about it as well you have to discover so it's not like you're repressing the emotion exactly it's that you don't undergo the difficult process necessary to unpack it it's effortful it comes back to that assessing assumptions that we said before 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 yes life definitely places philosophical demands on you whether you wanted to or not and so it is useful to step back i mean that's likely why the trait 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 while 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 still surgery i think it's possible to develop a cathartic emotion towards that i think it's possible to down regulate the level of discomfort that you feel when you do assess your assumptions on this show a lot of the time i try and present uncomfortable truths so insights that are accurate but disquieting to learn and that to me gradually exposing people and myself to more and more of these and learning that it's not an existential threat it's not going to destroy my ego or learning or learning that it is an existential threat but that you can handle it correct which is really what people learn in exposure therapy that's effective is the thing they're afraid of is frightening but they're tougher than they think and so and and that's very useful to learn it and yes i i do believe well it's also the case that if you decide that you're going to delve into trouble as it rises you're likely not to avoid the delving process more than necessary so the thing won't grow into a monster that's quite so large you know and so once the relationship you have with your intimate partner is reasonably well constituted and you decide that you're going to address problems as they arise then it's less burdensome than the total reconfiguration that might be necessary before any of that has has been has been started it's like meant it's a form of mental hygiene i would say in some sense and so and you do get better at that with practice and um you you perhaps you also get less likely to jump to the worst possible negative conclusion you know so so and that's also useful you don't catastrophize so so much so is there a rule which you didn't write in the original list of 42 that you wish you'd put in there oh set aside some time for play that's probably that's one um can i make a suggestion from your work sure it's from a lecture that you gave and it's written on my wall over there and it's don't practice what you do not want to become oh yes yes that's that's that's that's uh yeah i have a corollary of that too that works in relationships do not punish what you want to have happen so so here's an example imagine that you that that you've married someone that you find attractive and then imagine that other people find that person attractive as well and that that's actually somewhat threatening to you and then instead of dealing with the fact that you're threatened by the very thing that you were attracted to and that you're blessed to have you start to punish the person that you're with when they manifest themselves as attractive well you do that for 10 years and the attractive person is no longer there and then you're going to be angry at them even though it was completely your fault you know because if you punish someone for the manifestation of a desirable virtue it really hurts them and you because people are you know it's so interesting to watch what happens when people stop me on the street especially if they're shy and maybe somewhat damaged they want to tell me about something good they've done but they're very hesitant about it because their experiences being that if they reveal something good they've done they either get ignored or punished and so they don't want to do it they're afraid but it if they do it and then they get a reward well they're they're unbelievably happy about that but that's a good example because it's very common for people to experience punishment for their virtue and you know you can do that with your kids too if you're jealous of them i mean maybe you have a kid who's really bright he's brighter than you it's like are you so sure you're happy about that and how do you know that you're not going to punish that child because you're jealous you know and if you think you're not that sort of person well you should think again because people are that sort of people and perhaps you can train yourself not to do it but envy is a pretty common human emotion and the probability is that you're reasonably prone to it but so one of the things i learned again from animal behaviorists skinner in particular skinner believed that he's the psychologist who was most famous for learning experiments with rats he believed that the best form of discipline so if you want to train an animal to do something was reward you waited till the animal did something that approximated what you wanted and you immediately rewarded it so maybe he would train a rat to climb a ladder and then walk across the top of a ladder down another ladder and well he he just watched the rat and whenever the rat went near the ladder he'd give it a food pellet and soon it was near the ladder all the time and then being near the ladder you know it would put a leg on a front paw on one rung bang food pellet well soon the rat was going like this and then the next thing you know it was going like this and he could i mean a good animal behaviors can train an animal to do an amazing thing any number of amazing things in your intimate relationships if you watch the people that are around you and then you see them doing something that they should do more of and i don't mean this in a manipulative sense because hopefully if you have any sense you're rewarding them for something that would also be really good for them and you say look i saw you do this and that's really good do more of that it's like man you're just opening up the pathway for that person to deliver what you want if you'll admit what you want if you'll reward it when it happens if you pay proper attention if you think you deserve what you desire if you think your ideals are worth pursuing if you have any faith in yourself i mean all those things have to be explored and answered but it's unbelievably powerful and that's all dependent on well moral orientation and the capacity to pay attention absence of cynicism we have an equivalent with ourselves as well right the equivalent is definitely we need to do what we want to become we can afford to give ourselves those little rewards and also to punish ourselves when we do the things we don't want and you oh well you see people people do this all the time so maybe uh you decide that you want to sit down and write oh hell i don't know maybe you decide you want to clean your room and it's a hell of a mess and you're working with the therapist and you know he says look just open one of the drawers and look at it because you've been avoiding it for five years just that's all you have to do this week open it and look at it and you know on the one hand that's so trivial and it's pathetic but on the other hand no it's not and so often the person will come back and say well that i did it but it was just stupid it's like no it wasn't your room isn't clean but you opened the damn drawer and now it's time to give yourself a pat on the back and but to do that you have to admit in some sense you have to admit how pathetic you actually are you know you have to admit how pathetic you are before you can reward yourself and that's okay because that that patheticness well it's sort of built in to your to the fact that you're vulnerable you know and you need a small step and you need a reward that's okay it's okay that that's the case you know when you see people what they'll do is they'll say well that you know that's just a good indication of how useless i am you know that that's all i could do so they punish themselves well then you have an opportunity you say to them look there's two things going on you can't clean up your room that's a problem but you also can't reward yourself properly so we need to take that apart and fix that so that you can reward yourself properly and that's also why you know when i suggested to people that they clean up the rooms the reason i did that was because i actually knew how difficult that is because to get your room in order you there's no way you can get your surroundings in order without simultaneously getting yourself in order at least to some degree and it's exact for exactly the reasons i just discussed what you'll find is the reason the mess is there is because of psychological mess you know assuming it's not you didn't just move or something you know what i mean there might be obvious situational contributors but generally speaking is the mess the external mess is absolutely isomorphic with the in individual mess and so it's really powerful to order and beautify something in your immediate environs it's unbelievably powerful to do that you learn a tremendous amount you also may find for example maybe your family is dysfunctional and part of the reason that your room is such a bloody mess is because if you ever took any steps to address it they would punish you because as soon as you start to clean up your room then you cast a dim light on their mess and so they see you taking a step forward they're going to whack you because now you're an ideal that's judging them so you deal with someone who is in a dysfunctional family and you ask them to do something positive to move forward and then you watch the resistances that emerge and you've got a picture of the pathology in the family and that can help the person start to sort that through because maybe they can say it like you have to do a lot of negotiating and thinking before this is a possibility but maybe you say well look you have to have a talk with your mom you have to say look mom i'm doing something good here and your reaction is to punish me what the hell is up with that now that's a complicated conversation and maybe you have to start with something even smaller than that but you get the point you know these things aren't simple they're not simple at all and luckily though they're right in front of you you can in fact do it and you'll learn a lot from doing it so i asked your colleague john viveki a similar question i asked about if you feel like you're built for more if you want to grow if you want to improve if you want to become a better human but you don't have people around you that also want to you're scared that you're going to lose friends you're scared that you're going to be alone as you start to go out on a journey of self-improvement how can people find the courage to do that well one thing they can do is contemplate the consequences of not doing it you lose friends well you're going to lose the friends who don't want the best for you those the friends you want in 10 years i mean you lose friends well maybe you gain new friends maybe gain better friends or maybe miracle of miracles your friends pick up their their mess too and move forward maybe not and i'm not i'm not naively optimistic about such things but you have to contemplate the price you pay for inaction and this is something i did with my clients all the time it's like well i don't want to change jobs well no wonder it's like you have to go put yourself out to be interviewed you have to send out 500 resumes you have to be rejected 499 times you have to polish your interview skills you have to update your cv which means you have to take a real look at the inadequacies in your preparation um and maybe you won't find a better job it's like no wonder you're afraid of that okay you're in this job you hate and it's 10 years from now how does that look think about that you already know you're in a little hell you know perfectly well it's gonna get worse which is more frightening action or inaction well the thing about inaction is you're blind to it eh so you can hide from it well that's chapter three again do not hide things in the fog do not make the assumption that inaction has no price and so then you think i'm terrified of this but i'm even more terrified of that and you know people have asked me for example i suppose why i was willing or am willing to engage in the troublesome process of objecting when i think something isn't going well because i'm more afraid of the consequences of inappropriate silence it's not that i'm brave it's that i'm more terrified of the alternative so so i don't engage in the alternative and i i don't know maybe i have a knack for that to some degree maybe it's a consequence of clinical training but you know i can walk into people's houses and look around and i think okay there's something up here and i i mean people have that ability you know i walked into a house once and and the dishwasher was in the middle of the kitchen and and it was undone and had obviously been there for a couple of weeks and the fridge had food in it that shouldn't was no longer food and the cupboards had unopened wedding gifts in them like five years after the marriage i thought there's a lot of things in this household that are being swept under the rug and that was all laid out in in the in the practical environs it's like they hadn't negotiated who was responsible for cleaning the fridge they hadn't even been able to open their wedding gifts it's like something's rotten deeply so and so i i could see where that was headed without a tremendous amount of effort on the part of the p and it didn't work they were divorced you know a couple of years after that in a very ugly manner for very ugly reasons well i knew where that was headed you know and under different circumstances i would have said what the hell is that box doing there oh you know it's nothing yeah no wrong it's not nothing that's a little portal to hell i can see it and so could you if you looked but you won't and i mean that literally because people won't look they'll walk into a room like that and they will not look at that thing absolutely and that's because if they look they'd see and they don't want to see and no wonder but the consequence of blindness is worse it's it's worse i mean i have this you know my family is would like some peace because i seem to be embroiled in one thing after another and you know they have a point but peace is very hard to obtain and i can't be blind to what i see in the broader world around me not if i see it if i see it it's like there it is i'm gonna say something you talk about heroes and how they're they're called to do the duty that only they can because they can not because they're willing the person that needs to go and slay the dragon is the person who can not the person who wants to look well look look here think about it this way like some things bug you and other things don't i mean there's lots of things that could bother you that don't because you're obviously not bothered by everything that you could be bothered by right there's lots of things in the world that aren't set right but some of them really bug you maybe they make you cynical and bitter you know oh god look at how the world is constituted it's so awful that i can't sustain my faith in the sight of that it's like well you've got something to do there guy that's your problem why who knows i would say the reason is that it's your destiny calling to you in the form of guilt over unfulfilled obligations you have an instinct for growth that's not a mystical statement it's part of being human we we don't reach the limits of our potential we're we're neotennic in some sense we're continual children biologically speaking uh and so we're always transforming and changing in some direction what direction well your conscience tells you at least in part this bugs you well it's your problem now you may have to investigate that and straighten it out because even your formulation of what bugs you is likely to be ill-constituted but still that's that's something calling to you and you you avoid it at your peril and everyone else is peril too and it is see that's the way that your biology manifests itself in such a sophisticated manner it's beyond you it's like your better self is attempting to manifest itself by torturing you with a set of problems that you need to address and then you can refuse that but but then all the meaning goes out of your life if you do that that that's not good we're developing something now to help people turn problems into goals i have a problem well sure you do okay what's your problem okay well how do you turn that into a goal so that's so interesting if you think about it that way is that that's your goals your problems what should i do with my life well what problems do you have well there you go solve those i'm not being flip about this it's it's that's where that's where the answer is to be found that's not happiness and happiness has those problems you've already described you know it's it's got this now focused impulsivity and and you know i've been hard on happiness as a pursuit and perhaps too much so because i haven't had very much happiness because i've been so ill for the last while and you know i i it's possible that i've undervalued it perhaps not but it's possible in any case if it comes along you're a fool if you don't welcome it but but it's still not the proper pursuit i suppose to some degree it's not deep enough well if the thing if the thing that's pulled you through over the last 18 months to two years has been meaning and purpose and something less ephemeral and less fleeting and grander and more written into the source code of your being than happiness then i think it's a as lifeboat it's been love too it's been loved too you know it's been responsibility for sure but it's definitely been loved a lot of people have taken taken care of me and i also wanted to be around them i wanted to be around because i loved them so and i think that's why the second book has a more communitarian element too because so many people have been so helpful and also because i've seen even more clearly how much of what sustaining is derived from love love and duty that's pretty good i mean duty in some sense is the cool equivalent of love it's it's it's it's it's love shorn of its warmth it's what you should do and it's necessary and and there is tremendous meaning to be found in that but but love has this maternal ah comfort and warmth that beauty locks it feels like judy is pushed from the back whereas love is pulled from the front love pulls you forwards whereas duty can kind of push you sure i mean you it's not unreasonable to say that love entices i don't think duty entices duty might torment and love entices so what's next i know that it's not another book that's got rules in i know that you've said that 24 out of 42 and beyond order 12 more rules for knife is going to be the final rules book are you thinking about writing something else or is it are you focused on the point i'm writing i'm writing no i'm writing um i'm my i have about three or four functional hours in a day now the rest of the day is pretty much preparation so that those hours can be functional but that's expanding and as it's expanding i'm starting to feel the the spaces that are opening with writing and i'm going to write it looks like i'm going to write a series of essays on topics that are of crucial importance to me at least and um and i've started doing that so tentatively it's something like 24 topics worth considering i don't know if i seem to be attracted to you know increments of a dozen but um well 12 is a magic number because it's divisible by one two three four and six you know so there's something about it that's kind of magical but and i don't know if if it's 24s they'll be shorter and i kind of like to experiment with that you know something that would be more like a 10 or 15 minute read that would be really concise uh i don't know if i can do that that's the goal at the moment is to write another book that's 24. i'm going to focus on 24 questions or issues that i think are they're compelling to me and and they're sort of they're at the forefront of my thinking so it might be fun and nice for you as well to have something that's a tiny little bit more there's boundaries between the topics that you're able to go very hard and deep but within a constraint and then we can do it again and we can look at this i think with beyond order though that's the advantage of trying to make it short yep and there's a unifying theme right everything in here had to be about order everything in the first book had to be about chaos i think that'll be that'll be a good use of your time and given the fact that you are strapped for time i'm very appreciative that you've joined me today i'm a massive massive fan you have been a huge huge influence on where i've got to now and i think it wouldn't be too extreme to say that you don't understand the magnitude of the impact that you've had on people because you can't see how the impact you've had on people has had their impact on others you are degrees of separation removed from an undeniably better world as far as i can see it yes and so is everyone else yeah i mean you can be woken up to that and then i can tell you something about that because i do understand it to some degree i think because people constantly approach me and i see because i watch but i can tell you as well that there is nothing that's that's it's so gratifying that it's almost too much you know and it's a funny thing because you could say well what if you could have everything you wanted and then the next question is do you really think you could stand that and so you know i'm in this unbelievably fortunate circumstance where people tell me about the steps they've taken to make their lives better in wonderment and they allow me to see that and it's it's very intimate you know and it's it's stunned it's stunning i'm walking with a friend of mine quite regularly and he's a tough guy man he he's worked with delinquents his whole life so he's he's like a social worker superhero uh very physically tough person and a very masculine male but a social worker and very caring and he's been very helpful to me and he's been walking with me every day and people are stopping me and you know the other day this guy walked by us on the street and he was pretty run down he's probably in his mid 40s and he's kind of street person looking you know and he stopped and he looked at me and he came over and he said i love you and i walked away and my friend said you sure have a lot of men coming up to you and saying that they love you yeah i mean i don't know i just don't know what to make of it it's so the behavior is so completely unusual and you know my wife too she said she's seen a whole different side of men especially since we started touring because of this happening because generally when people approach me and they're not invariably men but they probably are 70 of the time they're very polite and and very careful and she said that's showed her a whole side of men that she didn't even know existed and so it's it's it's something but i do believe that people you know it i do believe that my experience has been that there isn't anything that i guess two things there isn't anything that's more rewarding than trying to do things right all other forms of reward pale by comparison they're not even in the same conceptual universe and there's nothing that's more adventurous than telling the truth you have no idea what will happen to you if you tell the truth and so if you're looking for an adventure a boy that's an adventure you've said that sometimes you feel ashamed because you don't feel worthy of being some sort of sage at the head of a movement of people that are sorting their lives out but in the nicest way possible you don't get to choose if people follow you we chose you like as the prototypical 27 year old directionless guy that stumbled onto your work something in you spoke to something in me you taught me the value of telling the truth and if being responsible and of doing what is right and what is easy it was like um it was like a pebble at the top of an intellectual awakening avalanche it was like a like a gateway drug to integrity and it's not just me that's got better the world is undeniably a better place because of the sort of person that i've become i'm a better friend i'm a better son i'm a better boss i'm a better partner i've had the fortune of reaching tens of millions of people on this podcast and i've given tedx talks and i've improved the texture of my own daily existence because of the process that your work triggered you do not know the depth of impact that your work has had and if the option had been there i and probably a lot of other people would have happily taken on our share of your suffering over the last year if it would have somehow helped as a thank you for how you've helped us so thank you it looks to me like you are doing that from everything you just said so you know hooray great that that's exactly how to do it and and it's a privilege to be uh involved in in this and you know god only knows what the consequences will be so you know we'll aim high and work hard and speak carefully and be appreciative and all of that and then we'll see what happens jointly jordan peterson ladies and gentlemen beyond order will be linked in the show notes below and i'm looking forward to seeing what the next few months holds to reiterate what i said at the start i'm very very glad that you're back thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few months and don't forget to subscribe it makes me very happy indeed peace you

Channel: Chris Williamson

Views: 481,982

Rating: 4.971446 out of 5

Keywords: modern wisdom, podcast, chris williamson, jordan peterson red skull, jordan peterson cathy newman, jordan peterson joe rogan, jordan peterson motivation, jordan peterson debate, jordan peterson interview, jordan b peterson, 12 rules for life, existentialism, beyond order, maps of meaning, jordan peterson feminism, jbp, jordan peterson 2021, mikhaila peterson, captain america, red skull, joe rogan, inspirational video, psychology

Id: TJg9wd8agQY

Length: 90min 9sec (5409 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021