Jordan Peterson - The Keys to Growth, Emotional Resilience & Finding Purpose

predators are one thing but predatory people other tribes man they're brutal they're brutal what about your predatory friend oh that's pretty bad too the friend who stabs you in the back the person who betrays you well how about when you betray yourself oh yeah what's the ultimate predator what's the ultimate predator what's the enemy you harbor in your own heart who hates you that's the ultimate predator dr jordan peterson welcome to the show all right chris good to see you how's the tour going it's going great it's um the crowds are well dressed extremely positive there for good reasons apolitical in in the most in the best sense of the word uh welcoming the theaters are packed the lectures are going well to extremely well the time i spend afterwards meeting people is it's like being in a wedding celebration i would say that's the closest thing i could what do you mean well you know you go to a wedding and you meet all sorts of people you don't know generally and everyone's happy to be there and they're all looking good because they dressed up for the occasion and it's a positive event and and that's the closest analogy that i that that i can think of that would describe what's happening so and uh people that are there are there because they're trying to put their lives together and they are putting them together and it's working and so everything about it is as positive as it can be fundamentally so your hat's going great i saw you took a trip to the tesla factory what were your thoughts after meeting elon musk did he get to speak too much uh i wouldn't say much we we spoke probably for 20 minutes in total not purely privately because there's other people around but you know i just that just barely gets you to know the surface of someone like musk because he's an amazing person and god only knows what's what's up with him all things considered we saw his new truck he was taking people out for a ride i i didn't i didn't go out for a ride the truck's an amazing piece of engineering the factory is massive um you know what do you say about someone who built a functional electric car then shot it into space on a rocket he's a singular person but i i thought it went very well it was a very interesting evening so i was pleased to be there and you know we sort of walked around each other a bit and it was just fine you guys interact a fair bit on twitter we seem to yeah yeah what do you think that is why are you converging i don't know i don't know exactly um we're both well known and i suppose to some degree that that increases the probability of that kind of convergence but maybe he's aiming up me too he seems to be he's aiming up literally he's aiming up very literally yeah definitely didn't he put a wasn't there a spaceman a model of a spaceman in the driver's seat of the car that he put out into the schools that that's certainly possible he's got a theatrical uh twist there's no doubt about that and a great sense of humor because that's really funny to shoot your own car out into space on a rocket that's a pretty damn good joke what is it what is it that's or why is it that someone like elon has got himself to the stage where he can say things that almost every other see he's the richest man i don't think he's got himself to that stage i think he's always done that and so now he still knows how to do it i mean you know people think i'll say what i have to say when i get to the point where i'm protected and secure it's like first of all being protected and secure does not give you the courage to say what you have to say that's that's a completely that theory couldn't be more backwards you think you're going to get braver and braver as you get more and more protected you think that's how the world works i mean i've watched university professors think that at some point they're going to say what they think as they develop their career but by the time they're protected and secure they've spent so much time not saying what they think that they aren't even who they were and they don't know what they think so no he says what he says because he's always done that and people who are like him are like that and so steve jobs i presume was exactly the same way i mean i know people who knew him he always said what he thought and and he was pretty damn cut and dried about it which is why the apple products are such miracles of of technological mastery he had a unbelievably canny design eye and was very uh he cut whole projects without a second thought in some sense when they weren't working he did that when he came back to apple the second time refined the entire product line got rid of a ton of different things instead of focusing on this yeah right right so that was proof i mean maybe it was fluke the first time which it wasn't but coming back and doing it again the second time showed pretty clearly it wasn't same with same with elon right he's refined down what he does to a couple of very very tight parameters now he seems to have although his hit the enterprise he's put together is unbelievably high functioning i mean to produce a an automobile sub industry that's actually competitive and to bring down the cost of space exploration by a factor of 10 and to invent reusable rockets and to have developed this boring technology it's it's miraculous he's probably an alien yeah probably probably there's only two probably a reptilian american car companies i think that haven't gone bust ford and tesla and tesla came very close a number of times yeah it's an amazing accomplishment so go elon as far as i'm concerned yeah he's a remarkable person what color skin emoji do you use if i used one it would be black why why not it's so preposterous all of that you know everything that's happened to rogan all this idiocy around race this insistence that we can be reduced to our our race our ethnicity our sexual identity it's so appalling and it's so uh destructive in one of the reasons that i had a lot of reasons for making my political stance in relationship to canada's compelled speech laws i had a lot of reasons for making my views about that known one of them was the fact that my government had introduced a bill that required me to say things a certain way which was an unparalleled move in the history of western democracies and something the americans had made strictly unconstitutional i believe in 1942 so that was part of it part of it was i knew that this top-down mandated belief that confusion around gender identity was a positive occurrence to provide that freedom let's say i knew that for every person that saved that would doom a thousand people primarily girls to a kind of psychological contagion as confusion about sex and gender identity ramped up i knew the literature on psychological contagion uh it was it's what is that psychological contagion you could think about them as psychological epidemics so the last one the last one of any real size was the satanic daycare scares in the 1980s but you're probably not old enough to remember that but the largest longest senses in u.s criminal justice history were handed out often to women who were accused of late onset female sexual predation of children in daycare centers the fbi invented a whole new category of perpetrator category that didn't exist because there are no late onset female sexual child sexual predators they don't exist but there were women who obtained prison sentences of several hundred years for hypothetically being involved in these satanic daycare abuse rituals and there was a it just swept across the whole country like the salem witch trials except at a much larger scale there's a book called satan's silence that was written by a lawyer and a social worker that documents it it's just unbelievable there were stories about underground tunnels where children were being taken down and being well every possible thing you could think of was happening to them all in the name of like satanic ritual it was a contagion and those things happened it happened with cutting behaviors it happened with uh eating disorders this is almost all among girls because their teenage girls are most prone to this they called it hysteria back in freud's time but there's a book by a man named henry ellenberger called discovery of the unconscious that traces back psychogenic epidemics to about 300 years and i knew that you know people in adolescence especially people of a certain personality configuration um have some trouble settling into a stable identity and for a variety of reasons it can be high negative emotion which is associated with low self-esteem those are more or less the same thing and then in all likelihood high trait openness which is the creativity dimension and the high trade openness people they're the ones that are more likely to have green hair and red hair and lots of piercings and lots of tattoos and dress in a somewhat in a non standard manner let's say that's all associated with creative behavior and they have trouble catalyzing a single identity and then if you throw in categorical confusion which is exactly what you're doing when you declare that there's you know an endless number of gender identities then people who are prone to identity dissociation and to psychogenic uh um contagion they're you're gonna demolish them there isn't abigail schreier has documented that quite nicely in in her book irreversible damage and it's way more girls than boys and it's thousands and thousands and thousands of them so you think well perhaps a few people who are transgender benefited from this new reality but for everyone who's benefited and you know i'd like to see the data just showing how much they actually benefited that'll take a long time to accrue there's a thousand people who've been just demolished by this so and then what else on the well that that's basically that on the political front i could see all that coming i talked to the canadian senate about it when they put in the legislation they didn't listen they just thought racism bigotry sexism it's like yeah have it your way but you know so what all these girls that have rapid onset gender dysphoria and disfiguring themselves and taking hormones and you know wreaking havoc with themselves and their families and the broader culture these people that were so woke and so permissive you think they're gonna have that on their conscience they're on to something some other noble venture so give me your thoughts on the modern dating market well i'm too old to really have any thoughts on it in some sense not from a personal perspective well i don't understand that level of detail you know i i do know some things that are happening perhaps at universities where there are far more girls than boys or women than men what happens in those institutions this is what it looks like anyways possibly so females are hypergamous which means they'll mate across and up hierarchies uh socioeconomic hierarchy but competence hierarchy is really at the bottom of it and so when you set up a situation where there's far more women than there are men in a given domain say where mate selection can take place most of the men still don't do very well because most of them are still rejected by women but a small minority of men do extraordinarily well if you think well means unlimited sexual access and so what's happening in the universities is that a small minority of men have sexual cart blush in some sense and most men are in the same position that most young men are always in which is they're in a state where they're not particularly desirable to women and then the women of course are terribly frustrated because the minority of men that they would really like to have long-term relationships with it's it's a it's a seller's market for those they're not settling down that's the sex ratio hypothesis yeah and the reverse happens right that you see whoever the more scarce sex is gets to determine the rules of the game so the men if they are in high demand because the short supply you get uh more short-term mating yeah you get um an increase in relationship dissatisfaction from women and when the reverse happens you get more dates before sex you get more long-term mating you also get more sexual violence in that situation as well when there is a surplus of men and a scarcity of women i think this is far more unstable societies you know i was pilloried a few years back from my comments about enforced monogamy because they were taken out of context and twisted in exactly the way that things like that get twisted now but what did you mean by that i mean that one of the one human universal is the construction of societies to both mandate and reward monogamy and there's all sorts of reasons for that it's because it's the best long-term solution fundamentally but one of the reasons for that is that when women are scarce men get violent now you know that was read to say well i thought that this society should be distributing women to undeserving men which is of course absolutely utterly preposterous and bears no relationship whatsoever to anything i ever said or thought or anything anyone saying would ever think or say or has ever thought or said because i don't know anyone politically ever who was insane enough to think that this state should distribute women to men like that's just never happened so to be accused of that belief and then for that to you know be put forward as a credible representation of what i thought was just one of the preposterous things that has happened to me it's an unfortunate name enforced monogamy because it's a term from anthropology right but it what you mean is culturally celebrated monogamy culturally and norms that are supporting people and raising that opportunity and supporting and punishing both but mostly supporting i mean the punishing is that there's there's a moral uh disapproval applied to say cheating right to adultery to especially running around behind your partner's back if you're married particularly that but even if you're even if you're in a long-term stable relationship it's like well that's all enforcement it's not police with jack boots but that's not the only type of enforcement it's not the only type of sanction or threat or punishment or disappropriation or disgust or contempt or shame or frustration or disappointment all of those things and all of that because monogamy is a good long-term solution but in some sense a troublesome short-term solution if you have other options then all of those elements of social support let's say need to be put into place and that is it as far as i've been able to determine by looking at the anthropological literature norms surrounding monogamy are a human universal there are exceptions but they're very there are very specific situational reasons for those exceptions so you see the ons data that came out a couple of weeks ago that said for the first time ever since records began 50.1 percent of women are childless by 30. so there are more women without children at 30 than there are women with children the first time well so this is somebody clipped a part of one of my podcasts i believe it was where i was talking about what what our society does to 19 year old women or 18 year old women 19 year old women we just lie to them all the time you know the first lie is there's nothing more important than your career more or less by definition so that's the first lie the second lie is there will be nothing more important to you in your life than your career so that's the second lie and then the third lie is there should be nothing more important in your life than their career so that's the third lie and then the implicit in that is the idea that children are a burden and that the idea that women should have children is part of the oppressive patriarchy and should be resisted and who are men to tell me what i can do with my body and hey fair enough and etc etc now i've worked in female dominated occupations my entire life i worked for example i worked as a daycare uh worker way back when that was like 19 probably 80 something like that and there were no men doing that but i really liked kids and so that was fun and i worked for social services in alberta in the in the child care department and uh then i've been working as a psychologist either training or as a psychologist since then and that's been a female dominated enterprise increasingly as the years went by but even when i was first when i first entered it so i i'm in the post female in the workplace generation firmly i never experienced the world except as that and so i've watched women progress through their professional careers at every level of attainment from the lowest to the highest and observed what happened and relatively i would say bias free because i didn't know and what i've seen is that as women progress towards their late thirties no late twenties they there's a psychological transformation and what happens is that they place less emphasis on their career and way more emphasis particularly on having a child and that really reaches a crisis point around 29 or 30 for the vast majority of women and and their attitude flips and i've seen it flip very dramatically with many women and i suppose the most signal single most uh convincing evidence of that i worked with high-end lawyers in toronto for about 10 years i was part of an organization we went to law firms high-end law firms and said send us your most productive people and we'll help them iron out whatever wrinkles there might still be in their life and the advantage to them is that things will go better for them and the advantage to you is they'll be even more productive and there's a good management dictum which is pay the most attention to your most productive people because they're bringing in the bulk of your revenue disproportionately and so i worked with men and women who were at the peak of their careers in a very difficult enterprise and so these were women who were generally very attractive um well put together physically pretty stable psychologically extremely conscientious very very smart and high achieving from like junior high all the way through high school university law school onto the top firms rocketing up through the ranks full partnership by the time they were 29 or 30 and all the law firms all the women bailed out all of them the law firms couldn't keep them and i i was really and i talked to the women a lot about a lot about this because i was very interested in it because i knew the law firms were bending themselves over backwards and tying themselves into knots trying to retain these women because why wouldn't they you know just just being greedy capitalists is enough you know we don't want to lose their high performing women because they're performing at the highest level and they couldn't keep them the women wanted to have nine to five jobs they wanted to bind the job so they could have a life and that was especially true once they got interested in having a child or had one and what what they really came to was a very uh interesting realization so because they were highly conscientious women they sort of did their duty and and worked hard and diligently and didn't pop their head up to ask questions they're in junior high they got the best grades they were in high school they got the best grades and so on all the way through right till they reached partnership but that's sort of an apogee right you hit partnership in a senior law firm it's like you're at you're at the top of your profession well then what well so then they looked around and they thought here i am with all these like hyper competitive men perfectly willing to work 80 hours a week non-stop to stay at the top what the hell are they doing because that's the real question what is it what is it that characterizes this small percentage of hyper-competitive men it's not you can assume that that's how everyone should be but first of all that isn't how everyone is or you can flip that and say well there's only a small minority of human beings that are willing to do this to work flat out eight hours a week i mean they're getting they're certainly being paid for it let's make no mistake about that but what about the rest of life well that's what the women asked why am i doing this and that's a great question well for men there's a different answer than for women it's a really different answer and it isn't like the men are exactly thinking this through it's it's more like this is an integral part of male motivation the more successful you are as a man the more women like you but the problem that you have now is that as women are getting better educated with more employment more stateless more prestige they compete themselves out of their ability to find an attractive mate as women raise up through the dominance hierarchy and this is competence competence hierarchy sorry who's going to tell women the equal access to opportunity that you have recently just acquired actually what that's doing is it's making it more difficult for you to find a mate that you're fundamentally attracted to yeah well it it it does a lot of things i mean it does provide women with a lot more uh opportunity on the economic front it does decrease their dependency on their mate in relationship to economic security and educating educating women countries that are willing to educate women that's the best predictor of their future economic success so if you look at developing countries and you want to find out what about a developing country is most likely to predict the fact that they will continue to thrive economically it's their attitude towards the education of women and but a couple more things women's educational status predicts their children's educational status but men's educational status doesn't so that's also an important multi-generational effect i i released a video i was going to conclude that other story i released a video or someone released a clip of me talking about some of the things we just talked about and it went out on youtube shorts and it's got like five million views in a month or something like that and the comment section is unbelievably vitriolic it's every single comment is vitriolic and it's all from women it's like who is this old white bastard telling us what we should do with our bodies you know when i wasn't being judgmental i was just saying exactly what i said to you which is well i've watched women over the entire course of my life with i would say an affectionate eye you know i love my sister i love my wife i have a daughter i love my mother i'm pretty happy about women all things considered i don't have an axe to grind in relationship to how they should conduct their lives i don't even know how they should conduct their lives i've watched what happens and i've also watched what happens to women who hit 29 or 30 and then can't conceive and that is not a fate i would wish on anyone it's awful and 30 of couples fall into that 30 of couples have difficulty conceiving it's a lot and the probability that you'll have difficulty conceiving increases with age and so you know c'est la vie and but it's very interesting to me to see how vitriolic those comments have been and how how uniform that is because usually on my youtube channel in particular 95 of the comments are positive and this is completely the opposite of that so and then so you brought this up at the beginning you said fifty percent of women now at thirty point fifty point one the childless by thirty yeah yeah well you know that's uh that's not good that's a sign of something profoundly wrong with the entire culture at an extremely deep level i don't think that women need to take it as us trying to tell women what they should or shouldn't do but i think that it would be very fair to say that you need to be an incredibly unique woman to make it to 50 without a family and look back and think yeah i did this right that's not to say that those women aren't out there they absolutely are i know some of them but i think overall that it's well it's the same with everyone for everyone i mean this is another example of how our culture has just lost its moorings it's like well what's life well you have a job or a career and hopefully you're productive and you contribute something to the community and you provide yourself and your family with the necessities of life that's a quarter of your life or a third of it something like that you have an intimate relationship you have a family that's life and if you don't have one of those that's one-third of your life you don't have now some people maybe they're doing so well on the other two fronts that they can cope with not having that or maybe they're doing so well on one front they can cope with not having two of them compensates yeah maybe it's pretty hard because if you want to have a great career it's hard to do that if you're alone in without a family right i mean the the people that i've seen who've been best situated in their life all things considered even in relationship to their career have a pretty solid monogamous relationship that stabilizes them and then they have a family that also stabilizes them and broadens out their life and you know exceptional people do exceptional things and good for them but they're by definition given that they're exceptional they're a tiny minority this is always the argument between conservatives and liberals right because the liberal types they're more tilted sometimes towards what would you call it uh compassion or appreciation for the exceptional and fair enough the exceptional is necessary but on average what everyone does on average is the thing to do and so you just look you see well what do people do well if they have a job or career they have an intimate relationship and they have a family and if you don't have any one of those things well then you're treading water harder doesn't mean you can't do it and it doesn't even mean possibly that you shouldn't try but as a default presumption it's just utterly foolish what else are you going to do with your life well maybe you're wildly creative fair enough you know that's extraordinarily rare as well subject to the power law problem in any case which is even if you're hyper creative the probability that you're going to be successful at that economically is extremely extremely tiny to the point where it's almost non-existent it's so difficult now it does happen and some and you can have spectacular success if you become successful but wasn't it did you say last night of the 100 000 most recently printed books only a thousand have sold more than a million yeah something like that it's something powerless all the way down everywhere everywhere power law that's you know a tiny minority of people do all the work a tiny minority of people get all the benefit a tiny minority of athletes score all the goals a tiny minority of men get all the women etc a tiny minority of stars have all the mass a tiny minority of rivers have all the water a tiny minority of cities have all the people etc etc etc everywhere always you know and and we're so clueless in our culture that we blame that on capitalism it's like how does that account for the mass of stars people so or the you know the volume of rivers or the population density of cities or rolling the clock forward you and elon tweeted recently about population collapse what do you think is going to happen there oh well i've thought for at least 10 years that the biggest problem in 50 years will be that there's just not enough people i remember hearing you say a few years ago that you thought we'd peak at about nine billion yeah we probably won't hit nine yeah and i think about stats because think about how crazy it is to think that we might be living on earth right now at a time with the most number of humans that are ever going to exist at one time ever yeah that's highly probable and you know in the past the population collapse in developed countries is precipitous right it's like it fall we fall off a cliff because it's the same everyone knows this from the pandemic the arnold number if fewer people are reproducing next generation you have fewer people to reproduce as fewer people are reproducing and it yeah yeah yeah yeah well i i worked on un committee it's got to be 10 years ago now to help draft the un secretary's general's report on sustainable economic development and so i looked at all sorts of things like that i was very curious for example about because people have been beating the overpopulation drum since well it really kicked in in the 1960s you know because there were dire predictions by the year 2000 the club of rome came out and said well there'll be riots and mass starvation and mass movement of of migrants and all the things you hear about climate change because there's too many people on the planet and that just didn't happen at all that was just that it wasn't just wrong it was anti-true it was absolutely wrong what happened instead was that everyone got way richer and the bottom section of the population in terms of economic distribution got lifted out of poverty inequality still exists but that's that power law phenomena we already talked about not that that's trivial it's just unbelievably difficult to determine what to do with there are solutions but certainly getting rid of capitalism isn't the solution and so i looked at population trends and first of all found not that this is an act of genius or anything that as soon as you educate women and the the size of family shrinks precipitously like below replacement and that's partly because women have other options that that's a huge thing is play oh yes i mean all the all the countries in the west are way below replacement korea's way below replacement south korea japan way below replacement yeah yeah i think the number one good uh number one on the planet it might be chad chad the country in terms of growth uh eight children on average yeah i think nigeria will have more people in it than china by the end of the century so yeah yeah yeah and musk you know he's a far looking man and and so he's looking around the apocalyptic corner let's say like oh we're running out of people and what that means of course is that you run out of young people right you don't run out of old people first because everyone who is here now is going to be 30 years older in 30 years and it'll be young people we don't have enough of and of course young people are the ones who do the innovation and are going to do most of the heavy lifting etc and so there's going to be a terrible shortage of young people well you see this with some of the things that i i posted that ons data the 50.1 percent of women childless by 30 and both men and women are replying to that tweet saying well good there's too many people on the planet in any case i'm thinking how this npc midwitary is so dangerous because it makes people believe that they actually have something grounded backing up their claims yeah yeah well and that this idea that the planet has too many people on it this is there's no sentiment more implicitly genocidal than that statement [Laughter] so what do you mean too many people exactly and what do you mean the planet and what do you propose to do about that exactly mass abortion is that your answer or should we do something a little more dramatic maybe we'll just shame people out of having children and i've seen people do that literally i saw a professor when i was at an um [Music] a ted i think it was it doesn't matter it was a number of professors talking to a couple hundred students and one of the professors who was an environmentalist activist type and he got up on stage and shook his finger to the whole young crowd saying that him and his wife had only decided to have one child which was in my opinion one child too many for him and told all the young people there if they had a shred of ethical decency that they would lim severely limit their reproductive potential and i stood up and said that i thought that was the most one of the most appalling things i'd ever heard anyone in academia say to young people which is really saying something because they say plenty of appalling things and it was a very uncomfortable moment and he huffed off the stage but you know in a frenzy talking about how you couldn't talk about such things without being pilloried on ethical grounds and yeah that's for sure you come out as a what emissary of the academic establishment you tell young people that humanity is so corrupt that they should seriously consider not propagating because that violates the deepest of ethical norms and you think that's a good thing and that that's your right and it was just beyond comprehension it's beyond comprehension but it's associated with like a deeply rooted existential self-hatred and i mean hatred at the level of humanity is like a virus on the planet that we're a cancerous group alex epstein calls this human racism right right right it's that yeah well we're a cancer on the planet you know unchecked growth just like a cancer it's like that's us a cancer it's okay we know where your heart is located because what's what's the implications for for a doctrine like that what do you do with the cancer cut it out yeah that's for sure poison it or whatever whatever there's nothing you don't do to a cancer so you're gonna use a metaphor like that there's too many people on the planet you're gonna use a metaphor like that you know and then you're gonna you're gonna also decide that you're virtuous while you're using it because you're on the side of the planet whatever the hell that means so yeah it's it's unbelievable and a huge part of it's rooted in this existential shame and and and horror at the condition of being human and the fact that life is rife with suffering and a lot of it's unjustified and you know it's a mephistophelian position so mephistopheles was laid out portrayed in kurthus faust that's the story of a man who sold his soul to the devil for knowledge it's a story of intellectual pride and gurtha stands in relationship to german literature in the same manner that shakespeare stands in relationship to english literature and girth is mephistopheles says straight out twice in in the play once in the first his two books and once in the first book and once in a second gareth has restated twice existence is such a foul thing because of all its suffering essentially that it would be better if it was merely enough annihilated and that's the mephistophelian stance this whole show should just come to a halt look at how corrupt people are evil reigns everywhere it's nothing but will to power we're destroying the planet um with our unchecked ambition all of it rooted in greed and and and machiavellianism and jockeying for position and we're so contemptible that we should just roll up and die and we should shame women into not having children and we should shame men so they never manifest any planet destroying ambition and it's it's unbelievably appalling it goes all the way down to the bottom the bottom of things that's what's tearing our culture apart this dispute about the nature of existence at the most fundamental level so and the universities have come out on the wrong side so talking about the individual one of the things that i see holding people back is comfort so it's easy to get life to a stage where it's not that bad it's not that good either at least when you have a full-on breakdown there's only one way to go right you're only going to go up from there but i think it's possible to wallow for years in a just about passable life right sedated by comfort and i see this temptation in myself as well to give up the good for the great what would you say to people who are trying to escape this curse of mediocrity well if you're satisfied with it in some fundamental sense i mean there's there's something to be said i suppose for walling off a private space for yourself if you can maintain it and detaching yourself to some degree from the troubles of the world and maintaining your own little private garden the problem with that is the snakes tend to seep in from the outside right it's it's pretty difficult to wall yourself off in any real sense from the concerns of the world so it isn't clear to me that that's a viable solution it also means that you might justify to yourself lack of civic engagement you know i shouldn't go to church i shouldn't take part in the political process because it's also corrupt i should hide myself from all the annoying noise that's generated constantly on the media front i have some sympathy for that viewpoint but i don't believe it's really possible because you can't have you can't have a walled garden independent of independently of the health of the broader society it's just not possible maybe you can have it for a very short period of time but so but if you're if you're comfortable with what you have and it's gin it's genuine comfort then i think hey but generally it's not i think for the most part it's it's people that have become sedated you know they've forgotten their dreams but they've forgotten that they've forgotten them pink floyd's comfortably numb is about this right they've become comfortably numb i think most people i had i have this friend and this this story really hit me so um during the pandemic running a podcast i was able to have the thing that i feel i'm good at my artistic pursuit and outlet that was available for me to continue it was actually increased because i didn't have other stuff to do i have a friend that's a barber and he got a job at a supermarket barbara's shut down for a long period of time he got a job at a supermarket stacking shelves overnight and i asked him i was like man how are you how are you finding the new job this is a big a big change he's like do you know what it is i actually don't mind the work i mean the people that i work with but man i miss being good at something right right right well dude that hit me yeah so hard right i missed being good at something yeah yeah well people need the opportunity to be good at something it so then you might ask yourself well what's the best antidote to the discomfort of life and you might say well it's comfort and i suppose that's what you act out when you swaddle a baby but a better antidote is something like adventure to excellence and that's far better antidote to suffering than the mere absence of suffering so not to say that the mere absence of suffering that's not nothing you know stepping out of that sedation from comforts difficult though especially if you've become routine eyes to it yeah well that's the difficult difficulty of maturity you know the freudians said very wisely that the good mother necessarily fails it means she stops providing the comfort that insulates people against the need for adventure i heard you say recently that um a mother's ability to let her child go out into the world knowing that they're still vulnerable and that it's now down to them and the world to look after them that's one of the bravest things it's the female crucifixion so and that's exemplified best in well the best portrayal of that i've seen is michelangelo's pieda now it's it's a statue of mary and she has christ's body on her as an adult on her lap and she's broken and destroyed and you know she's displaying that and that's that's the bravery of a mother to allow that to happen but not only that to to facilitate it facilitate it so what about where you go kid where you go where you go well why it's dangerous out there it's like yeah no kidding it's more dangerous here if you stay with me by a lot so you might lose your body out there in the world but if you stay here you lose your soul how do you see that as an individual let's say that there isn't the mother there that's pushing you along well you know one of the things jung carl jung was very interested in the eatable complex and that's basically that overprotective maternal and he he criticized freud for presuming that it was really something the mother did he says it's more relational than that first of all it would be something the father would allow to happen assuming there was a father around so let's not forget about the paternal contribution to allowing that to occur because in some sense it's the father's role to serve as the antithesis of that maternal overprotection so a woman is extremely bonded with her infant say between zero and nine months and the infant is utterly helpless and so complete compassion and the provision of comfort is the only job that matters and that's really the case and then the woman has to switch gears to some degree the mother has to switch gears as the child starts to become more more mobile fundamentally and more independent she has to let go of the infant which is a real grieving process and she has to start to facilitate this movement towards independence but that's a hard shift and so partly the role of the father in that is to be an advocate for the child's independence and to comfort the mother to let her know that that degree of security provision is no longer necessary but also to act as an advocate for the child's outgoing uh outgoing desire and so so it's the edible situation is not only the mother it's also say the weak father but then it's also the child so you can imagine because you young belief that these negotiated agreements were were relational so you know you're six you're in grade one maybe you're feeling a little ill maybe you're not maybe you're playing with being a little ill and maybe you're playing with exaggerating how ill you are and your mom comes downstairs and says you know you've got a test today at school maybe you haven't quite prepared for it maybe you know you should have and she says but you know you you seem to have a tummy ache maybe you're too sick to go to school and the kid thinks maybe i could just stay home and you know mom could tuck me in and i wouldn't have to take that test and i wouldn't have to confront the world and he says yeah yeah my stomach really hurts and and away we go and the child has made a choice and you think well that's and that's a catastrophic choice and you think well children shouldn't be held accountable for choices they make at that age it's like that child's soon going to be an adult that's going to make very similar decisions the the choice has consequences and to be held accountable for that is to recognize purely that the choice has consequences and that it is a choice now you know you could say well 95 of the blame is to be put on the mother and maybe that's an overestimate i think it probably is but the child could say mom you don't have to worry about me i'm gonna get up and go do this and that's choice and that's the right choice so these are always chicken and egg problems obviously but that that fleshes out the complexity of the situation you know if you're if you're being enticed down a pathological road you can accept or reject the invitation now some people are better at enticing and some people enforce it more harshly and you know there's all sorts of individual variability in situations like this but just because you're offered debate doesn't necessarily mean that you have to take it so and i'm not a determinist i do believe that people have free will whatever that means that's a murky subject and it gets complicated the more you look at it but whatever it's still a good shorthand way of describing the fact that we seem to be cursed with responsibility for our own destiny at least to some degree how do you advise people that are dealing with imposter syndrome oh everyone deals with that every time you make a status shift as you move upwards of course you have impostor syndrome because when you first make a transition into a new role you are an imposter because you're a beginner you don't know what you're doing and that doesn't mean you're a liar or a fake and it doesn't mean you should presume more knowledge than you have it's what did nietzsche say every great man is an actor of his own ideal and that's that's that's that feeds into the imposter syndrome in some sense if you want to move to the next stage at some point you have to act like you're already there when you're just barely started and that's not a lie you know it's it's the willingness it can be and it can degenerate into a lie especially if you presume more than you know but if you move you know let's say you move from being an undergraduate to a graduate student well every all the other graduate students and the professors know that you're just a beginning graduate student they're they're not going to expect as much from you as they would from a more seasoned graduate student so you have some leeway that's genuine but you are you know the low rung occupier of that role and of course you're going to feel like you're an imposter if you have any sense because you're just barely there you just made the transition that's okay you know that's not a problem first of all you have to understand that everyone with any sense who isn't narcissistic feels that and it's actually an indication of your mental health and your competence as long as that doesn't become crippling it shouldn't knock you out i'm such a phony well don't be a phony that's the first thing if you're dealing with competent people and you admit your ignorance the competent people never judge you harshly for that as long as you've been paying attention so in my classes for example people were often afraid to ask questions and so sometimes i would point to people and ask them if they had a question especially the quieter types and they'd be afraid to ask the question because while they're revealing their ignorance and they would assume they're the only person in the room that's that ignorant but they're not because if they were paying attention and they had a question the probability that half the class had that question was really high that's different if you're not paying attention and so you can be ignorant you can be an ignorant newbie and you can even ask the questions that are necessary to ask in that position and sort of reveal your inadequacy and as long as you're dealing with competent people and you've been paying attention they're they're just gonna answer your questions then you only have to be ignorant once that's the thing about asking a stupid question you only have to ask it once then you're no longer stupid to well balanced people that intellectual humbleness is endearing right really endearing yes so one of the things that i i want just because they're always asking questions too they always have imposter syndrome too if they have any sense like what do you what are you more what you know or what you don't know well if you're competent you know you're more what you don't know and so you're always asking questions you see someone else asking questions you think oh you're asking questions you probably are competent so and there's the trajectory that's the trajectory of a person that will become competent or more comfortable in the future too right so that what i would hope with imposter syndrome and this is something that i noticed first off in myself but then in other people as well um i've bro scienced my way into something called imposter adaptation so hedonic adaptation is the phenomenon where your happiness level tends to reset after a change in circumstances so you buy a new car or get a new house or get the job promotion and it feels good for a while but then it resets imposter syndrome being that you never feel fully worthy of any achievements that you get in your life and you don't feel like you are worthy of being there imposter adaptation is a real nefarious version of this where no matter how many times you disprove your lack of self belief it continues to persist in the real world and this there is a kernel of truth in this because what you said if you're trailblazing if you haven't done this thing before but you also have to think well how many times have i done something analogous to this how many times have i done something that's kind of like this but not not quite yet well people who are high in trait neuroticism are more likely to feel that way because so neuroticism is the negative emotion personality trait and it's a index of sensitivity to threat and punishment essentially so imagine that it's very difficult to calibrate how many units of physiological preparedness you should manifest per unit of threat right because how big's the threat the answer is you don't know you wake up in the morning and you have an ache in your side is that nothing or is that the cancer that's gonna kill you in six months and it's pretty low probability that it's the latter but the probability is not zero so why shouldn't you be panicked out of your mind and the answer is some people are and sometimes they're right so the calibration of threat especially when it's associated with novelty is virtu an impossibly difficult computational problem we have like 10 different mechanisms to try to solve that and one of the mechanisms is well there's tremendous variability in response and if you're higher in trait neuroticism you're going to have the problem you're described all the time you're going to be doubtful about your competence and the validity of your position and the only treatment we really know for that is to expose yourself to things that you're afraid of voluntarily and to become braver as a consequence of doing that but some people have to live with that more than other people the thing that i realized was that after a while if you continue to disprove your imposter syndrome in the real world yeah you have a challenge you're adamant that you probably won't or might not or don't deserve to get past it and then you do after a while you have to admit to yourself that your imposter syndrome has nothing to do with your capacity and everything to do with your addiction about feeling like an imposter yeah and well and that that does change as people age generally speaking they become more agreeable more conscientious and lower in negative emotion and some of that is that adaptation you see that you've survived through various challenges and then you can review that evidence to yourself but also the people around you bolster you because they have confidence in you and so their anxiety doesn't trigger your anxiety and they'll remind you too you know you've got this you've done things in this such a wealth of data you know you've done it so many times yeah and yeah i think and that and that does help i mean it does help people get more confident as they get older and they accrue experience because of that but it's subject to that underlying trait variability and sensitivity to negative emotion i mean there there's been good psychometric analysis of self-esteem scales and neuroticism scales and they're that pretty much the same thing reversed and so are you confident in yourself self-esteem do you lack confidence trait neuroticism and so it is harder for some people because it takes more evidence for them to dampen down their their response to threat so and and it's partly because we're all adapted to some degree to the failure of induction right just because something happened multiple times in the past does not mean necessary that it will happen the next time and that's a big bro it's the farmer and chicken problem right farmer's always feeding the chicken chicken thinks the farmer's his best friend but one day the chicken is dinner and that's induction there was a stable pattern in the past you come to rely on it but at any time that axiom can be disproved and so the fact that we have variability and trait neuroticism is a consequence of the the the probability of the failure of induction it's it's a very difficult problem to solve how to regulate negative emotion you know and uh but i would say that the best way we know is to keep facing challenges voluntarily pay attention at a rate that works for you develop your competence that actually stabilizes the environment around you so it's a it actually is less predictable and less threatening plus you accrue that evidence and you get the social support for doing so that's your best pathway forward you said that a harmless man is not a good man a good man is a very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control how should people become more dangerous oh 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 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 and 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 marshall your arguments right some battlefield metaphor to get everything in order get all your information straight no to marshall your forces and so i mean that's part of the reason that rap artists are so popular especially among disaffected young men black and white alike because they're unbelievably articulate 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 was it alder suxley that wrote doors of perception yeah yeah so this is kind of an equivalent of that right that you have a experience which many people struggle to articulate you take the best of us the one that has the most precise most articulate erudite language you drop them in and you say okay show us what you've learned this is the equivalent but for just a different community a different sort of life that maybe you don't have the ability to describe what it feels like to live on a council estate in manchester or in you know the one of the neighborhoods of brooklyn or whatever it might be and then this person can and it feels like it's your voice yeah well you still if you're a young man you still feel alienated from your place as rightful heir of the proper kingdom i mean that's an existential truism for everyone for every particularly for every young man because he is an outsider in many ways he's young and juvenile and not very highly valued and and then is is in some sense hurt by the inadequacies of the current king the current culture and and is easily turned against it because of that and that's the machinations of the evil uncle that's the king arthur's story that's the story of horus horus and osiris it's an ancient ancient story it's the story of sauron and it's there all the time and you see in that in rap music in hip-hop the all of that alienation being given an articulated voice in an artistic sense and that's a good example of the power of verbal facility and that's the route to let's say marketing education to young men it's like you want to you want to take your rightful place in the kingdom it's like get your tongue straight man get it under control in the highest possible sense we went to a comedy club tammy and i and in uh new york the comedy cellar it's a great comedy club and the last comic was an english guy and uh he was not particularly physically pre-possessing and he he made a lot of jokes about that and it was quite funny and then he divided the audience into five sections and he asked each section to toss up a topic just to yellow the topic and they were like random topics like the kennedy assassination and electric lighting before 1890 those were two of the topics and the other three were just as diverse and then he put on some beats and he did about an eight minute wrap with every verse rhymed and he tied the whole thing together at the end and ended at the end of the music all spontaneously it was unbelievable and that's logos man that's the redemptive power of the logos right there the magic word the sacred word it's just manifesting itself on stage this is very impressive something about that that does feel dangerous as well and not in a i need to be concerned and this should be contaminated and walled off but in a way that you think that person has so much competence that it it's flowing out of them and you almost feel competent by being around them so you certainly feel competent by appreciating it yeah right because it speaks to the part of you that is capable of appreciating such things you think wow that's really something that's really that's an amazing display that's an amazing thing to see amazing right a very interesting word amazing and you're you're trapped and you're trapped by the charisma of that and that charisma that's not nothing that's that's a signal of something redemptive occurring that that accounts for virtually all of the attraction of hip-hop and rap it's the articulate articulated voice of the struggling but worthy underclass i suppose that's a good way of putting it but those who are alienated from their rightful place and so that verbal prowess is one of the ways they struggle up towards the light you know and and that that's a good example of that uh of having that danger under control because it's a dark genre in many ways right it's it's a there's a there's a there's a real undercurrent an era of violence that surrounds that and its culture like the punk movement in the in in in the uk back in the late 70s same same sort of thing but that that capacity to express that in a poetic manner in a compelling manner sid or johnny rotten was great at that he's so intense his he worked with pil afterwards public in public image limited as that is a public image i think so he has a song called rise which i used to show my my clients all the time when i was starting uh assertiveness training with them i'd put on johnny rotten's rise and the line in there is anger is an energy and he's got these unbelievably intense eyes anger is an energy you bet and john lyden man he could channel that like almost no one i've ever seen he'd get that anger built up inside him and then it was completely under control and he expressed it in his music and he's absolutely captivating unbelievably charismatic and i really liked his music that raw anger in the music that but it was it was in the bloody music wasn't it it wasn't some random riot you know he transmuted that into something you know you can argue about the poetic merits of um of punk rock although i don't think you should i mean i did it my way sid vicious version of i did it my way my god that's a work of genius that it's so it's so brilliantly satirical what someone's doing is they're refining it they're distilling it down and then they're directing it so i went to a powerlifting competition a couple of years ago there's this one guy there lifting he holds a bunch of records in the squat and he's a normal working class guy from a normal working-class town on the outskirts of newcastle and watching that man warm up is something else he's got a sacred playlist he never listens to the songs apart from when he's about to step on to the lifting platform he's got these headphones on and he's just walking up and down in the same way that you'd see a bull ready ready to go out ready to go and chase something and he steps out on stage and the hares stand up on the back of your neck you're watching this guy channel ray fury that's the god of war that's mars yeah he's in touch with that unbelievable and words man you go to war with words and you think that's what young men should be taught there we go bit of fury um i want to talk about your recovery can you explain how it felt in the first few days when you realized that it might be over when the clouds were lifting you know what happened very incrementally over a period of months well things were slightly less catastrophic in the morning it was taking me three and a half hours to stand up and then it was only taking like three hours so that looked like maybe something had improved it was very slow like the question about when did you get old yeah yeah exactly one day at a time exactly so you know and i still have a lot of pain i mostly feel like i have a bad flu all the time but that's way better than it was so what's changed on the other side of that do you view the way that you should be in the world different do you feel like you have a new purpose after being ill for so long hopefully i'm more grateful for the mere absence of catastrophe you know and i'm i guess i'm possibly more pleased to be out say doing this lecture tour i mean i was really pleased about it in 2018 i was already pretty damn happy about happy isn't the right word um overwhelmed grateful uh in a state of constant disbelief thrilled about the fact that people were responding so positively amazed about the fact that this had like a religious dimension um [Music] overjoyed to see people come and tell me that they had got their lives together and that they were very happy about that i had all that already maybe i feel that more now i i wouldn't say that i've learned so much that all the pain was worth it but that's that's i suppose in some sense putting a happy ending on something in a way that's just too trite it's like it it was uh most of that time i would have far rather been dead for all sorts of reasons so now i'm perfectly happy that i'm not but i haven't forgotten what that was like there's a lot of people that are very glad that you're not yeah well that's that that's great really that's great you know and i'm thrilled that i'm about being able to be uh not terrifying to my family let's say and i'm really happy to be back out in public and to be to be doing what we're doing my you know along with my daughter and my wife and with the support of my family it's great i love this tour it's so nice to meet all these people it's so positive it's ridiculously positive and in a world where so much is negative and ridiculously negative um that's that's a lovely thing to see and to see these thou i'm gonna see 150 000 people in the united states you know between when the tour started which was about two weeks ago and the end of i think it's the end of april before we go to canada and then to the uk and then to europe and then to australia new zealand and southeast asia and russia all of that's on the table and to see 150 000 people who are committed enough to trying to make their lives better to come to the lectures and to listen to them even though they're essentially philosophical treatises or at least the best i can manage in an hour and to watch people be committed to this and to hear their stories it's you can't imagine anything could be more positive than that and so that's wonderful if there's something to come back to after having that that's not much better that you could have arrived back into a world to find no no i mean the the the downside of it is that there's such a need for it you know because part of what i think i have to offer perhaps is encouragement because i don't think the planet would be better off with fewer people on it and i don't think that the ambitious motivations of young men are nothing but the manifestation of the corrupt will to power etc etc and the fact that so many people are pining away nihilistically in some sense in no small part because of such accusations because they're being taken out by their own conscience i think that's absolutely appalling and seeing how positive people are in relationship to what i'm doing has that as its shadow which is well isn't it so awful that that's necessary yeah so but it is necessary by all appearances at least to the people that seem to be listening to me and so c'est la vie and you know i do believe and i think my family is firmly behind me in this belief that you know this the idea that the planet has too many people on it's sort of a group idea you know there's too many people is like the mass of people and the mass is too big i don't think of people as a mass i think of people as individuals and so there are not there's not a mass of people it's the wrong level of analysis as far as i'm concerned the right level of analysis is each person and and i i think that that's a core tenet of the of western civilization to the degree that the west is actually civilized let's say the more it's civilized the more the emphasis is on the individual and the idea that the individual is sovereign is the core axiom of western civilization democracy itself and i believe that that statement is as true as any statement we've managed to collectively formulate and so if it's true then it is the real battle is at the level of the individual or even within the individual and that's fine with me and so mostly what i'm doing is attempting to make connections with individuals even though i'm talking to thousands and thousands of people i'm never talking to them as a group ever i don't even look at them as a group i never look at the crowd when i'm talking to my audiences i always look at one person you know it's not always the same person because that makes them uncomfortable they're happy to be singled out for a second or two but it gets weird if it's 10 minutes so i'm always looking at you know one person or another but i'm always talking to one person i learned that in part from kierkegaard you know because kierkegaard believed firmly that as soon as the truth was embodied by the mob it was no longer a truth the truth was in and of itself something that was always manifested at the level of the individual people know this they know this in their own lives that you have wisdom on your own you go into a group and you compromise that wisdom for some reason social norms or the way you've dealt with past traumas or the the things that you think of the people want to hear from you you know that's diffusion of responsibility right because when you're when you're buried in the mob you can do and say things that that the mob hides from you in the world whereas if you're just operating on your own that the consequences of your actions are manifested pretty quickly no place to hide so we have to keep you know every group of people isn't a mob either i mean there are groups of people that are decentralized highly functioning aggregates hierarchies composed of individuals and that's working at every level of analysis and that's a properly functioning society that's not a mob at that point there's a dynamic that permeates the entire hierarchy that keeps the individuals let's say at the bottom of the hierarchy completely in touch with those smaller that smaller number of people who are at the top and a good how well-functioning democratic political state has that nature is that there's constant communication upward and downward just like the way the brain is organized the brain's a hierarchy but information doesn't just propagate from the bottom up or from the top down even with your visual system so for example when information first enters your brain from your eyes at the foveal level each foveal that's the center part of your vision that's high resolution every cell in your fovea is represented by 10 000 cells at the first level of visual processing and so there's a tremendous amount of input from your eyes to your brain bottom up but even at the very bottom of visual perception there's more top down connections from your brain so the visual system is hierarchical but each level of the hierarchy communicates all the way down the hierarchy and a good political system is structured that way and so you can have a group of people that's not a mob and it's a different way it's a different organization and a democratic a democratic polity is not a mob not if it's functioning properly you know it's something that was really brought home to me when i went to england because i went into the lobby of the house of parliament this great domed building that's more or less at the center of the parliamentary cross and that's where citizens of of great britain can come and lobby to to to speak to their representative so that's where the voice of the people meets the voice of the representatives and that's how it should work is in some sense there are emotions and concerns that are stirring in an inarticulate manner at the bottom of the of the hierarchy where where the problems first manifest themselves because they always first manifest themselves at the bottom of a hierarchy those problems aren't necessarily easy to articulate and so people stumble forward with their concerns and the job of their representatives is to take those stumbling concerns and aggregate them and to give them voice and to transmit them up the structures of power to transform the laws into the new body of laws which is what we act out to to reconcile the bottom with the top and that has to just happen continually because it's it's a living it's like a living organism well it is in a sense it is a living organism because it's a meta organism that consists of living organisms so you know for all intents and purposes it's something that's alive i really really hit me in the lobby that's where the word lobbying comes from by the way so it happened there and and people are cynical about lobbying but people are cynical about lots of things and it's not that helpful is it possible to have too much responsibility to take too much responsibility for yourself like one thing i've been thinking is that the victim mindset where you want to you believe that you have no control over the outcomes in your life i wonder whether there's an opposite where you believe that you have an infinite amount of control over them and you lose faith in your innate ability to just carry you through i've been thinking a lot about releasing the tiller which is a jed mckenna quote he's talking about the fact that the best way to ride a boat through a storm is to actually release the tiller and it allows the boat to maneuver best through the swells and i think that a lot of the time going back to the imposter syndrome thing that we were talking about as you start to accumulate more and more competence the higher level of overthinking the higher level of neuroticism the more of an attention to detail that got you from naught to 50 isn't necessarily the thing that's going to get you from 50 to 100 you know you had to get across a river and it was it was bad and difficult you don't need to carry that boat across ground to then get you across the next one and i wonder whether the opposite of a victim mentality where you take responsibility for the things that occur in life i wonder whether you can overshoot you can for sure yeah definitely i mean you know dostoevsky said that every man was responsible for everything he did and for and for everything that everyone else does which is kind of an insane statement but also somewhat it's true in in in a certain sense you do have an indefinite responsibility and you do have an indefinite capacity to bear that responsibility but that doesn't mean it can't be crushing and then i would say the antidote to that is that you're not in this alone as your responsibilities mount and your opportunities increase you have to delegate more and more there's enough for every there's a it's important that you do everything you can but there's enough for everyone to do and so you might say well the heroic path is one that leads to universal redemption and that's true and you might say well that's all on you it's like it is in a sense but then the problem that you just described comes out children too much better well it can crush you it can be unsustainable right you can torture yourself for not doing it well enough and it is up to you but it's not up to you alone it's not up to you alone so you delegate you and you you build you help build people around you so that they're all working in the same direction it's an effort it's an effort multiplier in any case and you make sure that they get credit they and i they get they get credit isn't exact credit's good enough it's it's not exactly right the rewards are are in accordance with their efforts and you can distribute that you know because there's also a narcissism that can come along with that which is well it's all up to me and even if you're working in a very competent manner it can seem that way but there's plenty of work to go around and there's plenty of credit where credit is due and so what you do as you attain more responsibility and opportunity is you delegate more of that and you do that continually i mean one of the roles of a good manager is to make him or herself irrelevant absolutely yeah right so if you're not a good manager if your company would collapse if you disappeared that should all be delegated out and it's not because you're abdicating responsibility because also what happens is that if you can recognize someone something and parse it off to someone else say here's a little kingdom for you and it doesn't have to be little and it's something that can grow but here's a kingdom for you well then you can go off and do the next thing you need to do which is extremely important you know and you might think there's there's a kingdom and then it's broken into little kingdoms and so the farther you are down the hierarchy the smaller the kingdom you get but that's only true if you think the world's a zero-sum game because you could also think of it as a place of indefinite a place with an indefinite number of the largest kingdoms possible and i think what why do we think this is exhaustible in some sense what we're doing it doesn't look exhaustible you know that's the limits to growth mentality it's like economists don't believe in that because they think well no we can just get more efficient which we certainly are we're way more efficient than we once were and those gains in efficiency when they're not being interfered with are increasing at more than an arithmetic rate why do you think people have a tendency toward that zero-sum mentality when i find myself thinking that it's one of the first things that i check myself on that is that is cancer yeah well i mean there are elements of life that have a zero-sum element i mean if you're competing with another man for example to marry a particular woman that's a zero-sum game if you only think of the game as including you two and that woman so you can set up circumstances that are zero-sum but then port them across into situations which aren't yeah well then but to take take that metaphor of zero sum game where there has to be winners and losers because there's a finite number of resources is to assume that the rules of that game are the rules that govern all game the set of all games and that's just not true there's games are infinitely multipliable i mean you can invent a new game people do that all the time the man who invented catan which is a game i really like to play it's very popular board game that didn't exist until he invented it now you know thousands and thousands of people play it and he made a fortune from it's like that game never existed so there doesn't seem to be any limit to the number of games we can invent and it's a complicated problem because we are on a single planet and and some resources are more zero-sum than others but we haven't really run into any actual zero-sum limits in terms of our you know the probability of us living an abundant life on the planet we've we've stewarded some resources very stupidly we've done a very bad job of of managing oceanic production for example although fish farms have alleviated that on the production side to some degree but it's a tragedy of the commons that we could address and should address as far as i'm concerned one of the good things the trudeau government has done i think to give the devil is due let's say is to put a lot of the coast of canada into marine protected areas and that's smart we have to be smart about our resources but that doesn't mean there's zero sum and certainly doesn't mean the world is a zero-sum game and that's a malthusian idea you know that population will grow till it consumes all available resources and precipitously collapse and then why do we think apocalyptically it's well because things do come to sudden ends people die people get fatal illnesses like the world you so carefully constructed can be blown apart at any moment by a random occurrence genetic mutation that causes the cancer that kills you like life has a life has a fundamentally apocalyptic aspect and we do understand that because we're self-conscious and then it's very difficult not to apply that kind of apocalyptic reasoning to things as such the world's going to burn up the climate's too hot what about runaway positive feedback loops because that's what the climate types are afraid of it's like hey they happen how do we bind our apocalyptic thinking that's a good question man that's a good question we do that through truth we do that with the truth that's how we do it through dialogue through investigation through exploration through discipline all of that the logos is the antidote to the apocalypse of course that's central christian dogma isn't it that the logos is the apoc is the antidote to the apocalypse [Music] fancy that and so what does that mean well love and truth is the antidote to the apocalypse not the planet has too many people on it you said to me when we went out for dinner a couple of months ago i asked you what i should be doing with my life and you said what you're doing right now i think is pretty good and then you said truth in the service of love what do you mean by that he's brought it up again 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 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 well 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 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 it's like it'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 that 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 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 and 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 so if that's love love yeah truth truth in the service of love [Music] well truth to begin with is well okay we could take that apart a bit what you talked about letting the tiller of the boat go well imagine that you treat so we're having this conversation let's say i want this conversation to go the best way it can possibly go okay well i don't know what that way is but i have to want that to begin with so i come to the conversation i think i'm going to try to have the most engaging conversation that i can have i'm going to say what i believe to be the case during the conversation there isn't something i want from you except that hopefully we can meet in that endeavor i'm not trying to craft outcome i don't know what we're going to talk about you know we talked a little bit about possible broad themes although i don't think we touched on any of the things we actually discussed that doesn't mean we didn't need to do the preparation no and then you think well whatever we accomplish in the course of a genuine dialogue is for the best and that's to let go of the of the tiller and truth does that it's like because you can't craft the outcome and so what you're doing by engaging in truthful dialogue is letting the wind blow where it's going to blow and you do that if you've decided at some fundamental level even if you don't know you've decided that that the truth will set you free and the truth is what is in the final analysis redemptive and we tend to think of truth we tend to think that truth resides in a set of accurate facts that's actually the weakness i would say of the materialistic atheist position that axiomatic presumption about the nature of the truth but the truth is a process it's it's it's and it's often a dialogical process so the truth is the thing that emerges in the course of the search for the truth it's something like that and true truth is to be found in the search for the truth that's the process that continually revitalizes things and so and then if your orientation is towards the good to the degree that your orientation is towards the good and your belief that the good can prevail which is which is an article of faith right the good can prevail it's like what's your evidence for that there's evidence for whatever position you want to hold on that so it's a decision and you let go and the truth takes you away and you think that it's going to go where it should go you put you commit yourself to that idea and then that's your adventure that's the thing that's one of the things that's so cool about that it's like you need this adventure to buttress you against tragedy there's nothing more adventurous than the truth and in fact it's the only true adventure obviously you just have to think that through for 20 minutes how could it be a true adventure if it wasn't true and then why is an adventure if it's true because you're not crafting the outcome and so what does that mean it means you've decided that the truth is what will set you free and and that's independent in some sense of the evidence one of the things my family has learned this has taken a lot of learning is that there's been at least i would say 50 times in the last five years where we thought we'd be taken out by what was happening around us sometimes those were big things there was probably 10 of them like they were public and famous and then there was like 40 things that weren't so big but were still plenty big it was always the same thing it was hot as hell for weeks but flipped always always but that doesn't mean it was pleasant to live through the part when it wasn't flipping it was horrible but so far so far we've been able to let go of the tiller and let the waves take us where they'll take us and not flip the boat do you think that there's a usefulness in having a nemesis to motivate you talking about some of the situations that you've been through not particularly those ones exactly but i try to avoid making enemies of people or groups or ideas or whatever yes don't make unnecessary enemies but there is an extra level of fire that gets lit underneath you when you're going up against someone and i miss it sometimes there's a price that you pay for peace yeah well then you just have to look at yourself harder and find the nemesis because it's there all the time right i mean there's always parts of yourself that you can overcome and so that's william james moral equivalent to war essentially now if you need something to grapple with and you probably do you can find that you just look inside you'll find something to grapple with you know inadequacy weakness susceptibility to temptation narcissism pride envy revenge resentment frustration lack of faith all of that that that'll keep you occupied if you really grapple with it and yeah i mean that's an ancient theological question you know what's up with the devil why why is that why does the possibility of evil exist why is there an eternal adversary you see that reflected in cain and abel right at the beginning of the genesis stories essentially the first two human beings are good set against an adversary and that's that's what opens history that story you think well why would god construct such a why would god construct a reality where an adversary exists and maybe it's because all things considered a world with an adversary is a better world just like a garden with a snake and it is a better garden these things aren't easy to understand no no snake no necessity to contend with snakes so why be awake at all no adversary no challenge why be challenged because maybe you're better for the challenge and maybe that's the challenge to see if you can be better for the challenge but that should be internal well fundamentally well if it isn't you'll find it externally because you'll demonize someone to turn them into satan so that you can find an adversary and then that's very unfortunate for you and for them that's just not as big a battle it's like you you battle with someone external who's malevolent let's say or you think they are and usually you've got that mostly wrong but not always but if the battle is inside which is where it's supposed to be most fundamentally then well then it's the ultimate it is the ultimate challenge and that's the infinite game the external battle between good and evil on a playing field of chaos and order that's the eternal game and you know you can play that out in the external world but part of what the religious enterprise is about and the christians have really contributed to this is the notion that that sacred battle is fundamentally spiritual which is to say in some sense fundamentally psychological it's to be it's to be fought on the battleground of the soul internally it's a subjective issue how do you defeat evil you defeat the evil in your own heart that's that is how you do it and so if that's all being acted out for you in the world well you you've misplaced satan that's a good way of thinking about it this is another weakness i think of the atheistic position because you can it's pretty hard it's an easy in some sense to dispense with belief in the highest good but it's not so easy to dispense with belief and evil so that's a big problem so then where do you localize it and you can find evidence of it everywhere certainly in institutions i mean that's the whole systemic racism corrupt patriarchy narrative is that satan is to be found at the core of our institutions and to some degree that's true because everything we do is corrupt to some degree and so then do you fight it sociologically you're the good person and the the institution is satan so you're so good are you you're so sure of that are you you've got everything in order or do you and you might say well do you have to have everything in order before you fight evil on the sociological front and the answer is well no because you're never going to have everything in order but you still shouldn't put the cart before the horse it's really it's a spiritual battle and it's taken people thousands and thousands of years to figure this out now first of all it was the snake what's what's evil what's malevolent the predatory reptile fair enough man i mean we've been fighting with predatory reptiles for 60 million years as mammals 60 million years so it's a good first pass approximation it's the snake the poisonous snake the external enemy the predator but what about the predator and other people oh yeah that's even worse man it's like how predict predators are one thing but predatory people other tribes men they're brutal they're brutal well what about your predatory friend oh that's pretty bad too the friend who stabs you in the back the person who betrays you judas god maybe that's the ultimate snake it's like well how about when you betray yourself oh yeah so you want to see there's this association that's very strange that occurred in the development of christian thought between the snake in the garden of eden and satan there's no indication in the original story that the snake has anything to do with the lord of all evil it's a very weird conclusion that's been drawn it's almost extra biblical because there's almost no mention of satan in the bible at all much less any direct connection between the serpent and satan it's a very very strange idea but it's part of this psychologization of evil it's like what's the ultimate predator what's the ultimate predator what's the enemy you harbor in your own heart who hates you that's the ultimate predator oh and when there's these images of mary uh with her head in the stars and baby in her arms and her foot on a snake it's like well that's the eternal feminine head's in the stars because she's oriented towards the highest good and she's protecting her infant from predators that could be an actual predator but that has been the case throughout not just human history but mammalian history could be other people who are predators it could be men who are predators could be her who's a predator a devouring mother it's like well what's what's the ultimate locale of genuine evil well the highest religious answer is that's in you that's the proper place to battle it out and i think that's true i think that's lit it's literally and metaphorically true and i i was convinced of that in part because of social instance writings because solzhenitsyn identified the totalitarian state with the willingness of the subjects of that state the subjects and the perpetrators at the same time to live by lies no to no law no totalitarian state if people don't lie every time you lie in support of the totalitarian state then you're the perpetrator and that's a psychological issue it's like you're going to lie to get along or not say well what does it matter i'll go along with it it's okay we'll see how it matters because it matters and that's all psychodrama as far as i'm concerned but fundamentally when it's properly placed you've got plenty of problems to take care of on your own front and that's where you should concentrate your efforts one of the things that i've realized is that people that are self-reflective that rely on cerebral horsepower that pay attention that think in a detailed way the more nuance that you're thinking is the fewer people are going to be like you which makes you feel more alone how do you think people can overcome this well i would say that hasn't been my experience exactly because as i started to make my thoughts more public they seem to appeal to more and more people and so i don't know if that's a threshold phenomena because maybe it is you know as you start to become specialized as a scientist in some sense your vision narrows and narrows although it gets more high resolution at the level that you're operating but you kind of pass through a needle let's say out the other side where the thing you're studying starts to become everything again and so maybe that's maybe that's that developmental progression further more yeah specialization and then generalization again yeah yeah i think that you might be right there the deeper into the breach thing the show that i went to go and see you do in manchester in 2017 or 18 someone asked a question about um the depth of my consciousness causes me to suffer and you said you take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that girdles the world around you and i think that this is something you see here as well that when you start to think differently when you start to consider the way that you're living your life in a more detailed higher resolution more unique more nuanced way you will probably receive pushback especially you know speaking from personal experience in a normal working-class towns people born live die in these places it's insular there isn't a huge culture of especially in the uk tall poppy syndrome is a huge problem the biggest difference that i've noticed actually between american people and english people is that american children are told that they can be anything that they want to be they're told that they have blue sky vision they can achieve whatever they want and that gives them a lot of confidence when us brits stuffy stiffer brits see americans on tv it sounds like everyone's had media training because everybody's just so enthused about whatever it is even if it's a 18-car pileup and then the equivalent in the uk is that deviating from the norm is very very very quickly mocked and there's a lot of that in canada too tall puppy syndrome it's a big deal now the japanese have that saying too except it's um the nail that sticks up above all the rest is the first one to be struck down by the hammer and there's some truth in that too there's some truth in that but some and all are very different words when you roll the clock forward what you end up with is american children that then become adults who look around at the world and say well hang on this wasn't what i was promised i was told that i could be anything that i wanted to be i was told that i could have anything that i wanted to there's a difference between you can earn everything that is earnable and you deserve everything there is so that message can become what you say it can become misinterpreted in a narcissistic manner and i think that has happened to some degree especially as people have had fewer and fewer children you know jonathan height and luke enough talk about the coddling of the american mind and they think about that in large part as a consequence of an ideological transformation and some of that's true but it's also useful to look at more fundamental phenomena people have children when they're a lot older they have way fewer children they have way more resources when they have children on average you know if you're one kid of eight you're pretty much battling it out for attention for a very finite amount of parental attention with a lot of intense competition and the probability that you're going to come out of that entitled and narcissistic is pretty damn low because your siblings will definitely punish you for that but if you're the only child especially of older parents who are also more conservative because of their age and also less willing to take chances with you because there's only one of you and then you have a lot of resources at your disposal well that's a whole different that's a whole different developmental milieu and we have no idea what the consequences of that are but the idea that children in that circumstance are more likely to be overprotected and dependent and structured it's like well yeah undoubtedly and you know that that would even be an overabundance of parental virtue in some sense right well we just did nothing but pay attention to our child okay but too much what did you expect it's so strange because i'm an only child right and all of the well maybe my friends might say differently but a lot of the commonly held presumptions around only children i just and i have a couple of friends who are as well and i don't know whether it's where we're from that the northeast of the uk is very spit and sawdust it's salt of the earth people it's you know grab your boots straps on your boots and start pulling and i just haven't i haven't seen that what what is it through your clinical practice would not be a primarily working class phenomena you know that the coddled mind phenomena that could easily be a middle class an upper phenomena is there something is was there a common trend or from your reading have you found that only children tend to be one way or another no no i just get huge variants in them as well i don't know the answer to that at the level of individual psychological data there might be a literature i'm not aware of it that for me that was more response to heights book on the caudal mind i thought okay fair enough coddling of the american mind what's driving this it's not just ideas it's a huge demographic switch it's a huge transformation in the way we raise children we're 10 years older when we have our children now that's a lot older you know when you're 18 you have a kid you're still a kid and that there's some wildness that's perhaps not so good about that but there's also perhaps a higher proclivity to go off and live your own life and then you know the how how much children how much should your children be left on their own the answer is as much as they can tolerate and how much is that well you find out with each child but it's certainly possible to not deprive your child enough so i've realized that it's scary when you find a thing that you're going to fully commit yourself to the pursuit of especially if it's excellence that you're going after because there's no more room for your inadequacies to hide anymore you can't decide to change direction and do something else if things get tough there's no more rejecter seat right i've committed to this this is my thing and this is one of your rules you know commit to something is committed to at least one thing as hard as you can yeah and see what happens yeah precisely 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 seeing as we're 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 it might not matter in some sense exactly what the apprenticeship is as long as it is rigorous right and so that's sort of a bridge between moral relativism and moral absolutism there's lots of games you can play it's not that obvious a priori 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 you have to become an expert at at least one of them and then that's not a relative proposition and i 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 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 temps yeah and then no one's happy about the fact that they quit and they berate themselves for it and we know that we need to go through a disciplinary process 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 it's like 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 a good game good game isn't oppression and slavery we saw was it being on time being punctual was laid at the feet of some oppressive super supremacy yeah obviously yeah that's utterly imbecilic i mean even at a scientific level there's no that's trait conscientiousness by the way to be punctual part of orderliness and dutifulness industriousness there's no evidence whatsoever that that varies by ethnicity or race or supremacy yeah or supremacy and it there is evidence that if you are like that you are more like supreme well you are more likely to succeed it's one it is the most determinating it's the most it's the most potent personality predictor of success in algorithmic domains managerial administrative domains so hard work works and in fact the degree to which hard work works is actually that one metric of the health of a society the higher the correlation between conscientiousness and outcome the healthier the society well obviously why well you want the bulk of the credit to go to the people who are the most productive i mean not because not even in some sense because they deserve it because what does deserve mean exactly it is because they deserve it but that's a black box that word it's because if you want them to keep making stuff you have to do that and you want them to because well or what you don't want food you don't want shelter why would you not reward the people who provide it differentially just your own even your own narrow self-interest would require that so talking about committing to one thing and the inevitable pain of there not being an easy get out anymore i've decided that this is my thing i'm going after it yeah it's just useful to stick a temporal parameter or an accomplishment parameter on it that's one of the reasons for yeah yeah well i'm gonna get this degree no matter what well it's a time limit it's not your whole life but you're committed to that and then you do box yourself in it's like well i'm in this box i have to make the best of it that's right you're in this box and you have to make the best of it and you might say well i don't want to be in a box like are you so sure you don't want to be in a box a box is a fortress the walls keep the dragons away you want to be in a box paradise is a walled garden it's not a garden without walls it's got walls right you have a house it has walls you have a room it has walls you don't want to be outside of a box pick your damn box and then figure out how to make it into a garden well i want a box without walls no you don't it's nothing but snakes yeah you spoke about this last night in relation to relationships and you said that when you commit to somebody there is the uh inevitable pain that any future catastrophe is going to need to be worked out in a difficult way between you and the person that you've committed to as opposed to you being able to go oh well cool i'm out of here the side chicks are warm on tinder in any case i'm off yeah right right right well that was something i really learned from reading carl jung he thought about marriage as he used alchemical symbolism as requires heat heat and pressure and so you have a container and it gets hot and that's when you want to leave that's when the changes can take place and sometimes they have to be radical to maintain the relationship very radical but hopefully those radical changes are positive but what makes you think you'd make them if there wasn't a fire lit under you and one of the fires is i can't escape from you here we are locked in combat right here we are in this adversarial relationship beneficial exactly beneficial adversary yeah there's no out except through and there's no evidence that through will work but and so that's part of the utility of the vow is to turn the temperature up and you know you could say well i'll escape but the problem with that is escape to where you're not going to have another relationship and if to the degree that you brought the catastrophe to the previous relationship which is at least a 50-50 probability right what makes you think you're not going to bring it to the next relationship you're the common denominator between all of the experts right i've had i've had many bad relationships like really i've never met anyone i can trust okay everyone's motivated by power what's the common denominator here exactly so you know it's tricky because i've i mean lots of people in my family have been divorced which is the case in virtually every family and i don't feel like i'm in a position to shake my finger at people and say you know you failed and with more effort you could have succeeded that's not up to me to decide and many of those people have gone on to have more successful relationships the second time around but that doesn't belie the initial point and besides even the people who went through a divorce wanted to get married again they still see utility in the vow and the container so you know you can't make these things into inviolable absolutes zero divorce zero drugs zero climate change no that's that isn't how the world works partly because there's always the snake in the garden right there's no zero not without the application of increasingly totalitarian force it has to be some leeway but you don't blow the whole systems apart just to provide some leeway it's a very difficult thing to negotiate you know i've had clients who had partners that really couldn't be negotiated with the whole idea of negotiation wasn't negotiable and i didn't see they really had any choice to either maintain the millstone around their neck and drown or to leave it's an awful choice but that doesn't mean that marriage is a prison that no one should ever enter it just means that things are complicated optimizing for absolutes always ends up in carl newport says this about email really interesting insight he says that one of the problems that you have with anything is when you drive the cost down to literally zero you end up with a ton of very weird externalities that you didn't think of right and he made some argument that every email should cost five pence right right if every email cost five pence you would receive ninety percent fewer right right right yeah yeah the proper it's very we've wrestled with that very frequently building these um programs to help people so with my colleagues both who are psychologists one a clinical psychologist one a research psychologist we built personality tests to help people understand their personalities which also produces a couple's report so that you can understand the differences between you and your partner at a temperamental level and we produce this suite of writing programs that help people write an autobiography and an analysis of their virtues and faults and a plan for the future and you know one question is well why not give it away and the answer is because zero is not the right cost now what the right cost is that's really tricky well that's why you have markets is to determine what the right cost is zero it's like we've sold way more of these than we would have ever given away partly because people presume that if it costs nothing it's worth nothing and partly because it isn't free like we actually worked well one of my partners were pretty much full-time for 15 years on this at sub-par wages making a tenth of perhaps of what he could have made in the private domain like if he would have gone out and marketed his skills because he's a brilliant programmer he has a phd in psychology extraordinarily educated unbelievably accomplished he could have made a fortune in the private in other private endeavors he worked at subpar wages for 15 years before we had any success on this front at all so it wasn't free by any stretch of the imagination it was unbelievably expensive for us to do this and so then to and then to say pillary because somebody might say well if you were really interested in the welfare of the human race you wouldn't be making money off your redemptive endeavors it's like what do you know about it exactly have you ever tried to build something and market it do you have any idea what that entails like first of all have you built something that works that's scalable that would help you've demonstrated that it worked you've done all that and that's like you're five percent of the way there buddy because you think now you've got a good thing that people will line up to use it 95 percent of the problem is marketing and communication have you ever tried to communicate about a product that you've built no and you're telling me that somehow i'm malevolent because i'm trying to make enough money off this to justify its existence to make sure that i've designed it in a way that people actually want you can tell that because they'll pay for it in a way that will sustain it and allow it to grow while simultaneously trying to reward the people that developed it that's all wrong is it and you know that so no i'm i'm i have a set of empty headed axioms about inequality and i'm judging you morally because of their what injudicious application because that's easier than thinking that's where that argument goes it's just irrational p price is an indicator of quality and it's a commitment device it's a rough indicator but it's better than any other indicator we have yeah you know generally if you want to buy a suit a more expensive suit is better but not always people hack this right this is yeah that's right in the online space they decide to ratchet up the price of something that should have been 1 10th or 1 100. i thought this about um james clear's atomic habits it was the best-selling non-fiction book in the world last year 2021 and it's great and he sold this book for whatever eight pounds on kindle and 12 pounds for a paperback if he decided to release an online course of atomic habits 60 days to a new you or something it would have been 500 pounds or a thousand right right you know so there's this odd tension now that's happening between people who have the capacity to improve other people's lives where i know a lot of authors who are coming into the writing space from the online course space that they're thinking right okay well i've i've made the money yeah now because there is so much disproportionate um fee that people are prepared to pay for an online course the reason i think this is the case is because people are looking for outcomes with a lot of personal development books and they feel that they are closer to the outcome by doing a course because it's going to be more applied well it's also the case that hardly anyone reads and listening and watching is way more accessible to people way more like 10 times more and this is actually going to start it is already affecting the the author market i would say i mean i talked to sam harris about this a while back but whether he was writing something and he told me i hope i get this right and certainly not a criticism of sam in any case um that the opportunity cost is too high i mean look with a video the video we're making right now is probably going to be watched by a million people if i wanted to write another book that reached a million people it would take me two years of writing and then a year of marketing and the probability that will happen even though i'm already a successful author is still extremely low whereas we can do this in two hours and reach a million people was it some studies perpetually uh perpetually finding more urgent things to do right something like that right right right and and i mean the degree and the repetitive communication online is insane think about your uh who was the guy that you did that watched you do the lecture series on in nashville he was the psja psja yeah right how long did that take two two half days plus three or something like that three half days plus a week of prep or something like that right right power loss man yes absolutely well and and and then there's no lag to publication right and and that's an ever-growing platform and it's accessible to 10 times as many people and it's just as permanent as a book now you might say why ever write a book that's actually a real question it's a question i've asked myself because some of the themes that i'm exploring in my next book i've already talked about in youtube videos let's say and they've had quite an explosive reaction to some of the ideas i talked about the nature of the crucifixion and uh and the snake the relationship between the image of the crucifixion and the image of the snake i talked about that on rogan and that was like two weeks ago and i think probably 500 000 people have seen that clip like that's more than a best-selling book instantly so why am i writing the book and the answer is there's nothing that requires you to think more deeply than to write a book and so there's still an intellectual advantage to that and a lot of the things that i'm able to say so quickly let's say like i did on rogan you know it took 30 years to think because you wrote those exactly well i find this my newsletter i do it once a week and it it synthesizes whatever i've learned over the last seven days right it takes me you know a couple of hours to write or whatever and it's less than a thousand words you can read it in three minutes three minute monday [Music] and so much of the stuff that i value now that i talk about with friends or on podcasts is something that imposter adaptation you know that was something i've been thinking about i wonder if i can write this right in 500 words i wonder if i can get it down in casual language but does it concretizes what you do this is why i say people that don't have an outlet where definitely if they don't have conversations but also potentially if they don't have the opportunity to write about what they do about what they think is that you just your thoughts are just notions they're just this it's like a low resolution ephemeral very difficult to grasp wishy-washy thing put it into words outside of your brain put it into words say it to someone or write it to someone see what happens then it concretizes things well it also edits it because so when you're writing part of it is revelatory you write down what you think but you select what you think from the multitude of revelations you don't write down everything you think because you can't so you have to select right away and that's editing and then when you actually technically edit what you've written the same thing happens you shrink it you you organize it you make it coherent you get rid of what's irrelevant and so that's tightens up your thinking and then if you're speaking with someone about what you're thinking it's the same thing because they'll object or they'll reward some of it and so that's all that dialogue is some of it's the generation of new ideas but a tremendous amount of it is editing what what's already you've already revealed to yourself in this very vague sort of dreamlike way so anything you want to say before we finish up i'd like to thank everybody who's watching and listening and to thank you and your crew for making this possible i mean you guys you know you've put a lot of effort into this come over from the uk with your crew and you set this up professionally and uh and it's a straightforward interview with no tricks and so that's not an easy thing to manage and i appreciate the opportunity and that's about that jordan peterson ladies and gentlemen thank you good to see you chris what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe peace

Channel: Chris Williamson

Views: 4,929,343

Keywords: modern wisdom, podcast, chris williamson, Jordan peterson, Jordan b peterson, dr jordan b peterson, dr jordan peterson, JPB, Jordan Peterson podcast, Jordan Peterson interview, Jordan Peterson chris williamson, Jordan Peterson modern wisdom, jbp podcast, jbp modern wisdom, jordan peterson 2022 interview, jordan peterson 2022 motivation, jordan peterson 2022 joe rogan, jordan peterson 2022 tour

Id: laSK7Pxh0_8

Length: 129min 25sec (7765 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 17 2022