The Assault on Faith, Family, & Science | Dr. Phil | EP 430

hello everyone I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024 beginning in early February and running through June Tammy and I an assortment of special guests are going to visit 51 cities in the US you can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on my forthcoming book out November 2024 we who wrestle with God I'm looking forward to this I'm thrilled to be able to do it again and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon bye-bye and so I learned early on sometimes you have to give yourself what you wish you could get from somebody else and unless and until you can do that you're cheating everybody around you that loves you cares about you or interfaces with you out of all of Who You [Music] Are [Music] hello everyone I have the opportunity today to talk to Dr Phil McGraw who's probably perhaps the world's most well-known practicing clinical psychologist uh certainly on the on the media side of things and he's been doing that with extreme success for decades and that's quite something to pull off and he's come leaping forward once again not only with a new network that's going to launch on cable and Elsewhere on April 2nd but also with a new book called we've got issues which is definitely the case uh both psychologically and socially in the west and so that's what we're going to walk through um he offers a diagnosis he sees that three fundamental pillars of Western society and psychological stability are under assault ideological assault practical assault simultaneously um pillars of faith family and free speech so that's a bit of a diagnostic Enterprise and then he offers 10 working principles to deal with those assaults and some of those are valid psychologically and some of them valid socially uh they all circulate around a central ethos you might say so we discuss all 10 principles we discuss the ethos around which they circulate we discover that we discussed the necessity of principled conception and action for psychological stability and social unity and U that constitutes the discussion so you're welcome to watch and listen thanks very much all right well hello Dr Phil it's it's very good to meet you and uh thank you for agreeing to talk to me today it seems like you're everywhere at the moment and and I want to talk about how you managed that but I suspect it has something to do at least with the topic of your new book which is we've got issues yeah well that certainly seems to be the case and you start the book by outlining in your estimation well by making the case that there is something that's under attack or a set of things that are under attack and you concentrate on Free Speech Faith and family and so I guess the first obvious question is why do you believe that we're under attack so to speak why that metaphor under attack by what and why did you pick those three principles uh as the as the central focus of your of your alert and your defense great question and it's it's so good to sit down and talk to you so thank you for uh having me as a guest I'm I'm honored to be here um listen I I've been doing this for a long time as have you and I've been dealing with the public for a long time and listening to their questions um you know we get tens of thousands of emails you know writing in and I've noticed that they've really changed across time uh because when you think about it um when I started out uh my career in in Psychology uh it was you know way back in the 70s so I've been through the 70s the 80s the 90s all the way up till now when I started out on television was 2002 and the first textt message hasn't even been sent at that point so things have really changed and the rate of change has really accelerated uh across time and you know a lot of this technolog is good I mean there great benefits from it of course but there are a lot of uh unintended side effects as well and when I when I look at what's going on in this country um I I think that the backbone of any Society is the family I think that's the strength of any society and when I say it's under attack uh I I think it's under attack uh in part unintentionally by technology and in part because there are people that are pushing narratives um in current society that have nothing to do with reality have nothing to do with science have nothing to do with fact nothing to do with history they're just running an agenda that's very self-referential and it is not in our best interest at all to sit silently by and allow these people to hijack uh what's going on uh The Narrative of this country and I'll tell you further um that I believe that if if we don't speak up this I call it the tyranny of The Fringe I think if we don't speak up uh they're going to hijack and and and start taking over they're going to take over language they're going to take over uh priorities and um and how those priorities are pursued and I I hear I'm talking about things that I think could absolutely undermine uh Society like this equality of outcome concept uh to me uh I I can't think of anything more destructive to a society than teaching everybody that we're going to work towards an equality of outcome that's been tried uh we've got 100,000 corpses to prove that doesn't work um and so uh I think that uh we've been uh just the same in America and in Canada has been built on a meritocracy where hard work was rewarded Talent was rewarded added value was rewarded and now all of a sudden we're violating some of the most fundamental principles of the psychology uh like just simply don't reward bad behavior uh don't support things you don't want to see more of I mean this is psych 101 but it seems like people ski that course it seems like those that are trying to run some of these agendas uh don't understand um that you you have to have an insight into how people are motivated what gets them passionate what gets them moving forward and when I see these things happening I say well somebody's got to step up and call this out for what it is which is lunacy and uh but you know we're people are three times as uh unwilling to speak up now as they were in 1950 I mean the number of people unwilling to take the risk is tripled since 1950 okay so let me walk through these things again I I'll lay out a bit of my understanding and and then if you could push back and elaborate on that that would be helpful so it seems to me with regard to family so human beings are unique biologically because of the unbelievably extended dependency period of our children and so we are we have a particular reproductive strategy um other creatures have that reproductive strategy to some degree but we are the ultimate exemplars of low reproductive rate high investment strategies and it seems to me that the Cory of that is that raising children is sufficiently challenging and difficult and also important that one person can't do it well on average and so the rule seems to be both morally and perhaps arguably biologically that the nuclear family is the necessary minimum of social Arrangement that allows for propagation it's something like that and so if we fragment the family below the level of the nuclear then things fall apart now maybe the nuclear family is also too fragmented but we could start with it as a minimal basis and so any attempt to for example put forward the claim that all familial structures are of equal value is counterproductive if it's the case that raising children is so complex that a minimum of two people have to engage in it so that's on the family side on the Free Speech side I don't think there's any difference between free speech and thought fun mentally thought can be awkward because critical thought requires that people dispense with their foolish ideas and that can be painful and people who push the no offense agenda would like to believe that we can think and we can think critically without any emotional consequences and I don't think that's true because it's actually painful to have your ideas exposed as foolish and then to dispense with them and so we we seem to be have entered as a situation where compassion for short-term consequences means that we're willing to allow foolish things to propagate even though that will cause long-term catastrophe and there's there's a technical description of morality in there too which I think you kind of point to when you talk about your working principles don't reward bad behavior support conduct conduct you do not value for example that's an injunction not to let foolish things occur in the present if even if stopping them causes some emotional disruption because then worse things will happen in the future and then the last one is Faith and faith is a hard thing to defend in some ways because people say faith in what but my sense is that that we have to move forward in faith because we're ignorant and that means that we have to bet on some things rather than others and so the question there starts to become you know what is it that we should bet on and so with regard to Faith how do you how do you negotiate that you're a scientifically oriented thinker as well and so when you're making the case that if faith is under attack we're in trouble what how do you justify that claim well for me I I think there are there are some things that we know there are some things we don't know there are some things that we can't know and we we have to kind of sort those out and that's where faith comes in uh I think back you know scientifically there was a time that we didn't have the instrumentation uh to see a molecule that didn't mean it didn't exist we just didn't have the instrumentation to observe it and I'm I'm the same way about what you were saying about thoughts um you know I'm I guess if I was going to categorize myself uh value-wise from a professional standpoint uh it would lean more toward cognitive behaviorist than anything and in cognitive behaviorism we treat thoughts as behaviors because they are observable to a public of one and so the fact that it is an observable event even if to just a public of one I tend to treat those as Behavior so um I think we we have to look at what our thoughts are and think about okay uh we see this are we being rational in our thought are we not being rational in our thought and to me it's not irrational to recognize that we are not all knowing we are not the repository of all knowledge and to assume that just because we can't show you faith on an X-ray just we like we can a broken leg is the same thing about depression people don't understand how psychometrics work they think we're measuring depression and in fact we're not what we're doing is saying we're going to give you these psychometrics and what we're going to do is tell you that you have an awful lot in common with people who have obser been observed to be depressed uh they have higher suicidality they spend more time crying they spend more time with flat affect or whatever um so we can't tell you you're depressed but we can tell you you answer these items consistent with an awful lot of people who are depressed and that we have observed and so um you know again there's a there's a certain extrapolation from that that we have to rely on we can't measure it like we do with an x-ray or an MRI with a brain scan and it's not a big leap to me uh to say that I do have faith I mean I I am a Christian I've never seen a conflict between that and my approach to science um I I just look at this as something that uh we don't yet have observ able measurement for uh just like we didn't for the molecule or other smaller units of function so uh I don't have trouble reconciling that but I guess I take it on faith which is kind of defining something by itself and I know that's circular in nature uh but uh it it works for me and I think an awful lot of people um find comfort in the belief system that there is a higher power that I choose to call God that uh is kind of involved in our lives on a as active a basis if as we want to acknowledge um and I'm I'm one of those Christians Jordan that believes in pray to God but Row for the shore um so that's why I don't see it as conflict I'm I'm still going to do everything I can do I'm still going to work as hard as I can can work I'm going to do everything uh because I I I believe that if if there is a God and I believe there is then I think I've been given certain gifts talents skills abilities and and and and free will to do what I can and will do so uh to me I I don't see that there is equity in uh creating a conflict between science and Faith so so I'm going to elaborate on the faith idea here too because you know you pointed out that because we're ignorant we we have to rely on our judgment to move forward and we're we're permanently ignorant because we actually can't predict the future it's the future is actually not predictable it's not the world is not deterministic and we know this for a number of reasons many of which are scientific so we have to move forward in faith and so the monotheistic hypothesis is that there's an ultimate unity and and also that that's what we should have faith in and so I want to run something by you and you tell me what you think about this so there's a there's a uh an autobiographical account in the gospels of one of Christ's reactions to a particular question and so he's being tormented by the scribes and the Pharisees and the uh and the lawyers uh so nothing's really changed the Pharisees are hypocrites the scribes are academics and the lawyers well they're still lawyers and what they're essentially trying to do continually in the gospel account is to trap Christ into making a heretical statement so that they can have him arrested and destroyed and so they're attempting to reputation Savage essentially and so at one point this is a very famous scene and I'm sure you know it um one of the one of his uh opponents challenges Jesus to describe which of The Commandments is the primary commandment and the hope there is that he'll pick one and by picking one will denigrate the others and because he's denigrating the others in comparison they can bring them up on charges of heresy and he says something quite remarkable he says that the Ten Commandments are manifestations of an underlying Unity of moral conceptualization and that they circulate around a particular theme and the theme you can express the theme quite concisely in a two-fold manner you should aim at what's best God you should align yourself with the highest possible aim that's number one so that orients you and then number two you should treat other people's as though as you would like to be treated you should put yourself in their position and work for that harmonious Unity that would emerge if you treated other people the way you would want to be treated if you were treating yourself properly so it's interesting so really what he's doing it's so interesting he's taking a cloud of conception which is The Ten Commandments which were themselves derived from an analysis it's an analysis like you said you conducted in some ways by listening to the tens of thousands of comments that you've received from the people who've been watching and listening to what you've been doing you accumulated all of this um Cries From the people let's say you derive a set of principles as a consequence of that but those principles themselves Orient around something that's Central That central point of orientation I think is equivalent to God and it's also equivalent to what we should have faith in and so I would say do you tell me what you think this is where the question is now you you outlined a set of problems attack on Free Speech Faith and family and then you identified 10 working principles so what do you think of the idea that that which you have faith in and I'm speaking personally here that which you have faith in is equivalent to the spirit that all of these principles point to you see what I mean that there's an underlying Unity there that makes those principles coherent does that strike you as plausible it does strike me as plausible and I and I I leave room for that to be defined differently by each person uh that is sorting through the events of their life you know the the first principle that I have in uh got issues how you can stand strong for America's Soul Insanity which is I think that the the subtitle of this book is as important as the title because the book is very prescriptive uh you know any any jackass can kick down a barn but it takes a carpenter to build one back and I don't like it when people criticize and then don't offer a better alternative if you don't have a better alternative why don't you just shut up cuz all you're doing is just poking holes in something and I think think you need to have a an alternative and I I think it begins with something that um the reason I say that I think it's each person comes at it from a different point of view even though there is a unifying principle is I think we all have a personal truth and and that personal truth is what we think feel and believe about ourselves when nobody else is looking nobody else is listening we've taken off the social mask and we're being honest with ourselves and unless people have made a concerted effort uh to do some repairs we all have a damaged personal truth um and so mean it's I I think about it like a a brand new shiny Yellow Cab rolling out in New York the first day and it looks great and it's shiny and and everything is perfect and you catch up with it 20 years later uh it's going to look like a dog's been chewing on it out in the backyard it's going to be dinged up it's going to had vendor Benders it's going to have people that have thrown up in the back seat it's going I mean it's going to just have taken on a lot of hits along the way and I think we're that way in life and some of us more than others and I think the reason personal truth is so important in getting to that unifying principle is we generate the results in life we think we deserve and so if we think we're a second class citizen if we think we don't measure up to everybody else in some way we're going to generate the results that are consistent with that it and you know this will sound arrogant but I think most people are capable of doing this there are certain people I can see just walking down the sidewalk and without any other information than just what I'm looking at there are certain things that I know about that person I mean if there's somebody that a doesn't take care of themselves uh their clothes are unkempt doesn't matter how nice they are it's just they're unkempt you know they're kind of heads down they're shuffling along it just seems like every step is barely what they can do I I know for one one thing for certain in my mind is that person has a damaged personal truth because they're generating that existence in their life um and they're not walking with their head up and their shoulders back they're not out in the middle of the sidewalk there's kind of skullking along the side they're generating exactly what they think they deserve and I think that 80% of uh Society can wind up in that role if they feel guilty about what they think and believe and we have evidence of this uh in that the number of people willing to speak out has tripled unwilling to speak out has tripled in the last 75 years so there's a lack of passion and conviction perhaps and and a fear of being cancelled attacked um uh having the woke mob come after them um and you I I'm a perfect example of it I I grew up with an alcoholic father um it was a chaotic and often times violent home um a lot of times we didn't have money to turn the electricity on um I had three sisters two of them were married 11 between them 11 times which you think is pretty hard to do unless you start when you're like 14 and then you can get some in fairly early on um and I I lived with all of this and people make this mistake and it's why our young people right now I'll get to that in a minute maybe but it's why our young people right now are experiencing a mental emotional crisis um with high levels of anxiety depression loneliness suicidal ideation and suicidality um because people compare their personal truth with other people's social mask and I could go to school and I know that I just left a house that was in chaos the utilities were turned off we didn't have food my dad was drunk in the street and I'm sitting next to a kid with a pressed shirt on and a washed face and his hair's all combed and if I compare my reality to his social mask I'm going to lose every single time now he may have it worse off than I ever thought of having uh but if you compare your reality to his social Mass you're going to lose no we we elaborated on the idea that you know you elaborated out a set of principles and that there's a unifying theme behind them and then you said you you you bought that explanation but then you pointed to the fact that other people may come to the table with a different set of principles and so there's a there's a way that the universal particularizes itself in each life you know I would say tell me what you think of this proposition so imagine that another person might generate a different list of 10 working principles but that the higher order principle from which those are derived would remain essentially constant and I would think that would be equivalent to the to the undamaged card that you described you know so there's an Old Testament account of the Prophet Elijah and Elijah is the first prophet who posits that God is the voice of conscience now and you you made the case that you made the case at least by inference that people are blessed with the ability to find to establish a relationship with something that calls to them from within that might be slightly might that might happen in a different way for each person I mean that's really the difference between people's personality and their temperament then you made the case that if they deviate from that that becomes so obvious that you can even see it in their day-to-day Behavior you can see it when you're watching people when you walk down the street you know Dr Phil one of the things I've noticed is that most people don't watch other people when they walk down the street right they look at the ground or they're in their own little bubble I mean if you watch people on the street you can get an eye full of who they are very very rapidly and you know if people are particularly angry and bitter and they're walking down the street and you pay attention to them that actually sometimes makes them angry which is why people will avoid eye contact because you reflect back to them the hell that they've trapped themselves in and they find that very unpleasant now part of the reason I wrote in my first book I wrote the injunction to people to stand up straight with their shoulders back was to reflect in the microcosm of their behavior an orientation upward word and towards what the good was and that that is embedded in everything that people do and every glance they make and every step they take forward so so I think it's it is the case that people can have their own set of principles they come to that would be the same in some ways as that they come to they come to what is highest in their own personal way but that doesn't indicate that the landscape is morally relative or that there's no Unity towards which our conscience and our moral orientation point so you know I would even that's way reconciling that plurality go ahead I would even say that they come at it with a different point of view they might not even even want to change the 10 principles uh but they might interpret them differently in how they apply to their own existence um so they may not even change the 10 principes principles and and some of them are so Universal like the the 10th principle I talk about in the book is treat yourself and others with dignity and respect and you know a lot of people can look at that and say uh look doc don't need to buy a book to to know that I that seems pretty forthright and and uh and self-evident but it is not and I will tell you why I think it is not it's the first two words treat your yourself with dignity and respect because I believe you can't give away what you don't have so if somebody uh doesn't treat themsel with dignity and respect if they don't heal that that damaged personal Truth uh you and and however that damage came about maybe it's a woman that has been uh sexually abused growing up by an uncle or whatever and you know we know 95% of molestation is by someone they know to the family it's not the it's not the predator in the raincoat at the at the schoolyard saying you want some see some pictures and Candy I mean it's somebody we know and trust usually in these situations but it let's say it's it's a it's a woman that has been molested and and and and raped in her childhood and that's never been healed in her well if she doesn't deal with that trauma if she doesn't heal that trauma then her children are not going to get 100% of their mother they're not going to get 100% of the woman that is that mother or if it happened to the father they're not going to get a 100% of who he could be who they could bring to the table the mother or the father bring to the parenting table uh unless they heal that damaged personal truth and you know for for me in my situation growing up with that I I had to heal that personal truth my father died when I was 42 years old and by that time I had graduated number one in my class with a double core of PHD programs one medical psychology and one Clinical Psychology and um I had a very successful business I had very successful marriage and children and I'd gone to school on two um athletic scholarships um I you I'm not saying I was the greatest son in the history of the world but I had had some achievement but by the time he passed away in 42 at uh when I was 42 not one time ever did he speak the words I'm proud of you um I I never heard that from my father um and so I learned early on sometimes you have to give yourself what you wish you could get from somebody else you know sometimes you got to step in front of the mirror and say I'm proud of you maybe maybe he can't say that but you can and so you have to go through whatever is necessary to heal yourself and your personal Truth where you say I'm in this this success over here this peace this happiness this Tranquility uh is not just for other people that can be for me too I deserve that as much as anybody else does and unless and until you can do that you're cheating everybody around you that loves you cares about you or interfaces with you out of all of who you are and and I think right now uh what I'm seeing in this country is in this Society is intimidation uh people are not necessarily yet willing to step up and say I deserve for my values to be considered I deserve for my voice to be heard I deserve uh to be considered and and I I I think they are intimidated because we've got these Fringe factions that have weaponized uh certain ideals and turned them into attack strategies and um I I think we we have to fortify these people and then it's and then treat others with dignity and respect but as I say you can't give away what you don't have so you know it all starts with yourself now if you if you do that um if you look at number one which is be who you are on purpose be who you are on purpose live with intention I me I I it it drives me crazy to see people that uh get up and just go with the flow whatever comes their way what are we going to do tomorrow well we'll see no we won't see you you need to decide what you're going to do tomorrow live with intention and own it I mean I people criticize me sometimes um and and I but and I own what I say I own what I do if you want to criticize me criticize somebody's going to criticize you no matter what you do so you might as well do what you're passionate about what you believe in and if they come for you then I'm I'm I'm easy to find I I I realize that so I'm an easy target um as just as are you uh but we we have to decide we're going to be who we are on purpose we're going to live with intention and then you jump to number 10 treat yourself and others with dignity and respect and you know that's a jump from 1 to 10 but to me they're very highly related and no matter what Walk of Life you come from whether you're well educated or you're not whether you're black whether you're white whether you're male whether you're Fe whatever um you may come at that from a different point of view but those principles to me are important to how you live your life and and I think 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[Music] jvp okay so let's I'm going to talk about the your principle 10 to begin with here well to elaborate on what you said the first thing you said was that you could be criticized for putting forward truths that are so obvious they don't need to be put forward and my books have received that criticism too and my response to that generally is is sometimes what was formerly self-evident now needs to be buttressed and explained and so but I'd like to make some counterproposals to your principle 10 just so people know what's even more self-evident right so here's here's some things you could do instead of abiding by your principle number 10 treat other people as if they are the short-term means to whatever end you're pursuing in the moment okay so that's what you do if you're an immature heatonist is you look at other people and you think not only what can I get from this person but what can I get for this person to satisfy the whim that I've allowed to possess me this moment right and the the ultimate expression of that as you know clinically is something like narcissistic psychopathy right where every single other person is nothing but a landscape of of opportunity for for pleasurable and immediate self gratification and that's the core of truly antisocial criminal and predatory behavior or or you can take another perspective that would be other than treating people with dignity and respect and you could say well treat other people treat other people as if they're your pawns if you can exercise power over them now those are both of those principles are in some ways equally self-evident like if I can get what I want from you right now why the hell shouldn't I do it and if you're weak and stupid and I can force you into things why shouldn't I do it and I mean and I and I picked Hedonism and power for a particular reason like one of the things I've figured out Dr Phil recently was that when the uniting principle dissolves so when God is dead let's say in the nitian terms that what comes up immediately to supplant him is Hedonism on the on side and so that's the pull of instinctual whim and and the drive to power on the other and those two have a dance and so your principle 10 is you you aim at you don't treat other people like they're means to your own short-term ends and you don't worship power does that seem does that seem reasonable to you and then you've aligned it with rule one or with principle one and I'll get to that in a sec but is that what do you think of that take on your 10th principle no I I I think it's a good take but it's also not make it's also not challenging everybody to be totally altruistic if there is such a thing right right right and we can talk about that probably till the cows come home but um my point is like I can go make a deal you know you and I could make a deal we could we could open a business and and we could say Okay um Jordan uh you're going to show up every day at 8:00 and you're going to close every night at 8:00 P.M um and we're going to be 5050 Partners um and you can be so excited about it that uh you say well yeah okay well that's not a good deal for me because you're not going to sit still for that for very long it may look like I made a great deal but I didn't make a great deal because you're going to rebel against that in a in a really short period of time because you're going to be thinking that was stupid I'm doing all the work and he's getting half of the the the profits out of this so it it really doesn't work out uh if if you explore manipulate the thing is narcissists just don't learn you know you you can't argue with them and they only see things from their point of view so they don't learn um and they can't generalize from one situation to another but I think most people can and and this isn't really asking for altruism it's asking for people to say look do what works and it really works if you treat yourself and other people with dignity and respect because now you get collaboration and and together we're better than we are separately right well so so what you're saying is that sustainable recipro sustainable reciprocal altruism is not stupid self-sacrifice right that's basically the issue well and I think you pointed to the proper rationale for that is that if if the deal you make with someone that iterates so like a partnership or a marriage it's going to extend across some time if it's not predicated on something like principles of universal justice which would mean equality of worth within the relationship then all that's going to happen is it's going to devolve into a counterproductive bitterness and so if you're establishing I'll give you an example I I set up a business Enterprise with my son and uh we had been working on a project and he was working at another job and but he decided that it might be worthwhile to stop doing his other job in to focus entirely on our project because he thought it had some legs so what I suggested to him was that he go away so he wanted to know because we had worked on it jointly what sort of deal I I would be willing to enter into with him and I said why don't you go away and come back with a proposal for me that you're really thrilled about bringing to me that you think would also Max maximize my incentives now cuz there's a certain utility being associated with me partly because I have a lot of marketing clout let's say if you want to make it just a capitalistic decision so I asked him to go away and come back with a plan that would maximally motivate him well simultaneously maximally motivating me and that's a good like that there's no stupid self-sacrifice in that that's a great thing to bring to a marriage for example my wife and I have got better at this in recent years especially since our children left you know know our deal now the deal I have with her for example about whether or not she should accompany me on tour and how we decide to go about doing the next things we're are going to do is i' i' I've told her and vice versa that she doesn't have to do anything that I don't want her to do anything that she's not fully on board with right now I could force her and compel her and manipulate her and all of that but your point is that well if you do that with someone they're going to kick back and so that the relationship won't be sustainable how long have you been married 30 four years but I've known my wife for 52 years yeah we've been we've had a friendship for 52 years so a long time yeah that is a long time I've been married 47 and we've been together 50 as well so it it didn't take uh didn't take her as long to um make up her mind about me I guess yeah well yeah that that could easily be the case so let's go through this first one then let's turn to this one be who you are on purpose right and so that's very much Akin I would say to your to your principle number five which is conscious consciously choose which values deserve int attention so there's an intentionality there okay so do you think you can differentiate for everyone who's watching and listening what the difference is between between that kind of conscious intentionality and the exploitation of others you know because it's tricky right I like even with this interview I could come to this discussion with an end in mind you know I could say well I want to Leverage The Chance the fact that I have a chance to talk to Dr Phil I want to leverage that to my advantage I want to increase my viewership and listenership um I want to attract his fans and the funny thing is you know there's of that that's actually relevant and important because I wouldn't be doing a podcast with you if I didn't think that it would be of interest to the people that I'm already have listening but also to attract new people but then if I bend the interview to my narrow ends then I'm manipulating you and using you and it becomes so I'm wondering how you how do you help people negotiate that line between developing an intentional vision and consciously Cho Ching their values and yet serving something like a higher order good well you know I think the when you look at number five consciously choose which voices in your life deserve the most attention um you know what you're really what you're really focusing on here is making an informed decision which may be part of number one when you be who you are are on purpose you have to decide um am I going to just pay the most attention to the loudest voice just because they're the loudest if is that what I've been doing um and I if it is is that what I want to do and and when you get to number five it's I'm going to consciously choose which goes up to number one being who you are on purpose which voices deserve the most attention in my life and maybe it's your conversation with yourself maybe it's your conversation with god maybe it's your conversation with uh people outside your bubble uh maybe it's people that challenge what may be a confirmation bias um you have to decide um which voices you choose to make an investment in and and you know I used to think I I I I've I've employed a lot of people in my life because I've always been entrepreneurial and um I know at times I've employed as many as a thousand people um in you know Collective Endeavors um and I used to think for example that if I had two people sitting in front of me that were the same in everything that I could determine and the only difference was that one had been to college and one had not that if there were no other tiebreakers that frankly I would tend to go with the one that had graduated from college even if the degree was in art history or something that wasn't gerain to the job I was hiring them for and the reason was I knew something about that person I didn't know about the other I knew they could sustain the pursuit of a long-term goal I knew they could get along with I knew they could work as a team I knew they could meet deadlines I knew that there were a lot of things about them that I knew that I didn't know about this other person that other person might could as well but I knew that about this person I don't know that anymore I don't know that about college graduates anymore uh because now they don't have the attitude that it's their job to get along with the professor it's their attitude that the professor has the job to get along with them uh it's I have no idea how much their mind has been poisoned by what I've termed intellectual rot from some of these uh Elite universities so what I used to have is kind of a tiebreaker because I knew something about a graduate I didn't know about a non-graduate is not valid anymore so I've had to change which voices I'm willing to listen to and what things I'm willing to give weight to uh and so in being who I am on purpose I've had to make adjustments as a world has changed around me so this in this question be or this principle be who you are on purpose so one question that arises out of that is well who am I okay so I'd like to propose to you that there are default answers to that question the default answers are the immature answers we described earlier so if you're not intentional in who you are you end up being your instinctual whims and your drive to power so basically it's what a two-year-old does and and I even mean that neurologically it's like you know a a 2-year-old isn't very mature they aren't who they are on purpose they're operating on Instinct and whim and they have to be socialized in into the adoption of a higher order self so you might ask ask yourself if you're not your short-term desires or your short-term avoidance your short-term wish to avoid pain who are you right and that would be be who you are on purpose so you might say well where can you find who you are and so I want to ask you what you think about this there's a gospel statement that describes the nature of our relationship with divinity in a very optimistic Manner and it proposes that if you knock the door will open and if you ask you will receive and if you seek you will find and so I've tried to make that concrete let's say when I was operating as a behavioral therapist when I was trying to help people discover who they were and so one gateway to that is to ask yourself this is this is in keeping with your principle 10 too to treat yourself with dignity and respect imagine that you are caring for yourself as if you're valuable right give yourself the benefit of the doubt and then ask yourself this is part of the development of a vision ask yourself if you could have what you needed and wanted in a manner that would be best for you what would that look like and you'll get an answer to that question you'll start to be able to develop a vision of what your life would be like if you were deeply who you are in a way that was sustainable and then you can start doing that on purpose now I'm the reason I'm asking you that that question or and and presenting those possibilities is because the question of who you are that's the question of identity is begged by your first principle you know when people are saying now that they're their sexual identity right that's the biggest claim in in our society and that they should be proud of that claim and to me that just reduces who someone is to well to essentially to a very unidimensional biological drive that seeks immediate gratification it's a very low order conception of Who You Are So when you say be who you are on purpose what do you think you're pointing to in that who you are you I think it is a much harder question Than People anticipate when they begin which is why I say you've got to really sit down and think about this because when you ask somebody tell me who you are and you cannot use your occupation or what you spend most of your time doing um in the answer if I take that away from them like if you're an accountant that's what you do all day 50 60 hours a week and I say tell me who you are and you can't use your occupation in the answer it's astounding to me how people struggle because they identify themselves with labels and you know I'm an accountant or I'm a I'm a welder or a welder's helper um and now as as you say a lot of people have uh adopted a cause and so they put that like they want to tattoo it on their forehead that's not who they are and sometimes do yes exactly uh but that's not who they are who they are is multi-dimensional it cuts across intrapersonal interpersonal uh spiritual uh familial it it cuts across a lot of different levels and I think it comes down to um a real heavy if you're if you're doing a weighted equation you have to give heavy weight to what they believe and what they're passionate about and if in that description there's not something in there that they're really passionate about uh I I really say wow you I I would encourage you to seek that passion uh because I I think going through life without a passionate Pursuit man that's got to look like n miles a bad Road I mean you're just yeah you're just pushing a rock up a s Lippy heill if you're not passionate if you're passionate about something then all of a sudden work becomes something that you you you want to do it becomes something it's it maybe your your work and your your vocation and your advocation can't be the same thing but if you ever hit that uh you've won the you've won the lottery if you love what you do enough that it's it's both your vocation and your avocation and and right well I think that's the I think that's the fortunate circumstance that you find yourself in when you align what could otherwise just be whim with with a higher order calling and I think the traditional insistence you know there's a traditional insistence that the spirit of God is the Divinity in calling right and and you're pointing to that you're you're using secular language and likely purposefully but your notion is that there are things that will interest and compel you in your life and your job is to that's the that's the call of the treasure that the dragon guards that's a good way of thinking about it and that if you pursue that that infuses your life with a kind of sustaining meaning you know when I wrote my first book when I wrote maps of meaning I wrote a chapter in that book called The Divinity of interest and it was really a pan to calling and I knew it was in complete and and so I want to run this by you because I think this is implicit in your principles too you know you say for examp example don't reward bad behavior or support conduct you do not value that's number three um do not stay silent just so others can remain comfortable actively live and support meritocracy those those seem to me to be pointers to integrate conscience with calling right so can imagine that there's two mechanisms that Orient you towards your higher realization let's put it that way one would be the calling that infuses your life with significance and meaning but it can go off track right it can become a a delusional enthusiasm or a whim you need another counterveiling Force that's something like conscience and maybe that's the voice of integrated negative emotion you know the warning voice and so the calling says go this way and the Conscience Says yeah but stay on the path right don't don't don't be tempted by short-term callings stay on the path and watch keep yourself in check and so that seems to me to be manifested for example in this let's look at number six just briefly do not stay silent just so others you could say as well do not say stay silent just so others and yourself can remain what comfortable and you mean temporarily comfortable I would presume in that utterance as well yes so the the qu the question that begs is well look if I can stay silent and other people are comfortable then why shouldn't I stay silent and so so let's let's walk into that what what's your sense of that well my sense of that is that you have a lot of people right now that are going to be uncomfortable if you call out some narratives that are being pushed on society that don't gel with your values don't gel with your sense of of factual base and Science and that's why if you look at number four measure all actions based on results and all thoughts based on rationality and and you you're right I'm I'm describing these in secular terms on purpose but and people think well rationality is not a word I use every day so how can I use that um it's really very simple um number one is that thought based on verifiable fact so if you have a thought and and we tend to believe ourselves right I mean if if if I put a blindfold on you and walk you around uh downtown or whatever and and you believe I've walked you to the edge of a 10 story building and you believe that we tend to believe ourselves and that's what you're telling yourself you're going to fight like trying to put a cat in a sack if I'm getting you to take the next step you're like whoa no I'm not going to do this because I've told myself this is going to be a doozy when I take the step so if you if you're telling yourself that you tend to believe yourself well we've got to start getting people to verify their thoughts um I I say that to people that are suicidal all the time you test the rationality of your thoughts is what you're telling yourself this do you are you telling yourself you want to die or are you telling yourself you want to stop the pain those are two very different things and both of them have long-term consequences so let's really test that out uh second does it protect and prolong your life does it get you what you want I mean there are just some very simple questions that you can ask yourself and um and all of a sudden if it fails any of those simple criteria then you go okay I got to replace this with something that fits the CR IIA uh now uh people aren't just kind of wandering around deciding well I you know I trusted myself but I didn't really know how to test my thinking well I'm just giving them a very simple way to test their thinking number one being is it verifiable fact what you're telling yourself and if it's not don't even go to number two you You' you've got to deal with facts and reality and uh you know people that are rejecting science uh saying biology just doesn't apply we're going to decide that we're we're changing all that you know there aren't men and women we're going to change all that well I'm I'm sorry you don't get to just decide that I guess you can decide that for yourself but you're certainly not going to decide it for me and and if you're pushing that agenda that's where you can't stay silent so others remain comfortable you just can't let them run rough shot over you and everybody else with that agenda um just so they don't get upset with you for saying no sorry I'm not going to let you rewrite biology for me and my family me and my life I'm not going to let you pretend we didn't have slavery in our history just because you've decided that it's not good for kids to hear about that well I've decided it is good for kids to hear about that I've decided they need to know that there were dark times in our history and we can only learn from those Dark Times by acknowledging them you can't change what you don't acknowledge you've got to acknowledge this and and so so I I think I'm trying to get people to start thinking but if you give them some rules for thinking they're going to be more efficient about it we are in the midst of Lent the 40 days leading up to Easter many Christians are choosing to give up alcohol social media and other distractions to focus more on prayer fasting and giving Hallow's annual pray 40 challenge is one of their most popular last year over 1 million people joined this year's pray 40 challenge focuses on surrender and includes meditations on the powerful book he leadth me this is a story about a priest who became a prisoner and slave in the Soviet Union during the Cold War his story is one of Ultimate Surrender and we are called to surrender our worries anxieties problems and lives to God there will also be lent music lent specific Bible stories and other lent in prayers like The Seven Last Words of Christ with Jim cisel hallow is truly transformative and will help you connect with your faith on a deeper level so what are you waiting for join Hallow's prayer 40 challenge today download the Hallow app at hall.com Jordan and you'll get an exclusive 3-month free trial of all 10,000 plus prayers and meditations that's hall.com [Music] Jordan right okay so you're integrating in that answer you integrated principle 3 four and six three was don't reward bad behavior or support conduct you do not value do not stay silent just so others can remain comfortable that's six and four was measure all actions based on results and thought on rationality so if I understand you correctly one of the things you're pointing out is that you're called upon to make your opinion known you're called upon to say something you're called upon to differentially reward and punish based on the concordance of what you're hearing with what you know to be true rationally and so the the idea there would be that part of of your conscience calls you to oppose opinions that are not aligned with the natural order of things right I mean It's Tricky right because you hear all the time in the enlightenment rationalist types they say follow the facts and that's a weak argument because facts themselves don't specify a destination on the other hand there are opinions that fly in the face of what's real so egregiously that if you attend to them you're going to walk into a pit you're going to walk off a cliff and so if you your principle number six the the justification you had for that was that you shouldn't stay silent just so others can remain comfortable when you know that what is being said violates a reasonable understanding of of the natural and social order it's something like that and so that indicates a Bel in an order that's beyond the mere verbal right you know like the Dera in particular I think it was jacqu Dera in in on grammatology he famously said there's nothing outside the text now he walked that back to some degree when he was pushed on it but I think it does get to something that's core in in the postmodernist ethos which is the idea that there's nothing to truth but the consensus of words and that if you can change the consensus of words you can CH you can change the truth but the thing is is that the verbal order has to reflect the intrinsic order of the cosmos or it becomes delusional like a delusional verbal representation is internally consistent right and people can even develop a consensus around it which is what a fat is or a social contagion and so your hypothesis is something like conscience calls us to speak when the when the consensus has become delusional it's something like that does that does that seem reasonable that is a reasonable interpretation and you know from your clinical experience that uh how difficult it is to penetrate a well structured deeply entrenched delusional system uh I mean sometimes you can you can spend months and months and months uh trying to penetrate a a individual's delusional system and think you're making all everyway in the world um I had a woman one time that I was working with that was convinced that she was being uh followed monitored and hearing voices from her walls and I've spent all this time and and felt like I really had made progress and uh she said yeah I'm you've convinced me I'm 100% you you got me cure it DOC I'm I'm great uh and on the way out she said I I did however cut the wires to all the intercom system in the house because that's where I'm hearing the voices so it's like I I'm with you but on the other hand I did strip all the intercom out of the house and I thought you know what I'll take that partial Victory uh but you get into confirmation bias with people and folks don't understand when you're dealing with people with confirmation bias um you know research tells us if you bring them solid evidence to the contrary they just dig in their heels it gets worse not better even if you show them scientific objective verifiable evidence to the contrary they just dig in their heels more so you got to deal with that first before you can get that uh new data to take over yeah well do do do you suppose that's maybe a reflection of something that you pointed to earlier I mean you know in the story of Exodus this the story of Exodus indicates that when people leave a tyranny they enter a desert right they don't leave the Tyranny and go to the promised land they leave a tyranny and they go to a desert and maybe the problem with treating delusions with rational argumentation is that you break down the person's self-imposed interior tyranny but you present them with the desert so I I wonder to what degree maybe this is reflected in the fact you know one of the most effective long-term cures for Addictive Behavior especially alcoholism appears to be religious transformation and part of the reason for that an AA capitalizes on that but AA also provides people with a community that isn't focused on addictive behavior I wonder if the solution to the supplantation of a delusion isn't deconstruction you know isn't just poking holes in the delusion but the simultaneous elaboration of a more comprehensive system of explanation that doesn't have the same flaws cuses the delusion and you kind of you kind of intimated that when you said that it was immoral to do nothing but deconstruct to do nothing but poke holes without providing a solution so I don't know what you think about that clinically and that hadn't occurred to me before with regard specifically to working with delusions yeah well I've I've seen it in the real world uh in working with juries um I think one of the biggest myths is uh the burden of proof is on the prosecution that that's a myth uh that may be written down in the rule books but if you're really going to defend someone you better present the jury with an alternative explanation right right right right just proving a negative is is very hard to do to begin with but they want to hear if we're not down here for the reason we're told we're down here then you better give me a alternative explanation of how this happened and and why we're down here um and until you give them an alternative explanation you're fighting an uphill battle for sure and I think that's true with what you're saying about delusions you need to give them an alternative existence outside that delusional system that's not a desert yeah well I think I mean I think part of the reason people need a people need a coherent belief system because otherwise they're incoherent right and so what happen happens I think this is also why power and Hedonism have become focuses of identity is when that when the higher forms of identity collapse then people default towards narratives of power that's what the marxists do right or this metam Marxism we have now is every single dimension of potential comparison between people devolves into explanation of power right is that all there are is there's an infinite number of dimensions of Oppression and it's an interesting explanation because when systems deteriorate they do deteriorate in the direction of power and oppression so there's almost no system that you can point to that can't be explained in part with a power narrative and alternatively you can have a narrative of of instantaneous gratification something like that and it's better to place that with well that's what we're struggling with in this conversation right is that we you want to replace those narratives of power and and gratification with a higher order narrative that offers more and explains more simultaneously you you at least want to replace it with a social system uh where you're not in a situation where you've I I would and I'm not the first one to say that this and it's been said it's been said better than I can say it uh but I I would a lot rather have questions I can't answer than answers I can't question and right now we're in a situation too often where we have answers we can't question because if if you question and answer you're labeled a hater you're labeled some kind of phobe you're label some kind of of of of heretic just by asking a question God forbid you disagree uh but I I would a lot rather have a a whole set of questions we haven't found the answers for yet then have a whole set of answers I'm not permitted to even challenge question dig in on and I think that's where we are uh when we're dealing with Cults when we're dealing with power mongers so imagine that it's easy to confuse a questioner with a deconstructionist right so let's say I'm in a comfortable delusion and you come along and start asking questions now my objection to you could be you're doing nothing but poking holes now you're making the claim and I think this is actually a pointer to what the higher part of identification should be now is that so for example the ancient Egyptians worshiped the Open Eye right that's the Eye of Horus and their notion was that the force that renews everything is the eye that pays attention and and it's akin to the idea of questioning right the the the the the the Redemptive questioner questions to build he doesn't question to destroy but it's easy for people who are entrenched in the delusion to treat every questioner as if he's nothing but an agent of Destruction and you know you you mention something here which is work hard to understand the way others see things if if you're a questioner and you're using your questioning to do nothing but destroy the other person's belief system to elevate your moral stature right to show that you're smarter to show that you have all the answers that's like the sin of intellectual Pride I would say it's easy to be viewed as a deconstructive agent then you can understand why people get defensive about their beliefs so you need to question in the attempt to replace what's insufficient with something better right so you have to be a builder and a questioner and it it seems to me that that that conception of who you are that's part and parcel of treating yourself and others with dignity and respect or even be being who you are on purpose that means something like the recognition that you're a building questioner right not a destroying questioner and putting that at the center I think it I think that requires you to do something that most people I don't think come too naturally and that is we have to determine what other people's currency is because we assume that people have the same currency as ourselves and that not only is not true it's often not the case for example I think um and you know I work a lot with law enforcement and um I've I've I've done training with law enforcement on U interrogation techniques how to um do deception detection things of that nature and I always love talking to the negotiators um about how to get where you want to get in a negotiation and um Chris Voss who's uh probably the most U experienced negotiator with the FBI um who's now retired uh will will tell you this very thing he will tell you that your best shot of Ever Getting hostages out uh from uh a hostage taker is if you can get that hostage Aker to fully and completely believe that you understand why they took that Hostage to begin with whether it's a whether it's a domestic violence situation or a political situation or whatever if they understand that you get why they did what they did to begin with so they feel heard that a big part of their currency is I want to be heard I want to be understood here I want people to understand and get why I felt driven to this desperate act um that if you can convince them that hey I get it I I I'm not saying I agree with you but I see through your eyes how the world looked and why you did what you did not saying I agree with it not saying you're going to get away with it I'm just telling you I understand how this looked from your point of view and I mean that's true all the way down to a teenager wanting to have a later curfew you know they they can assume well you know my mom and dad just want to control me and they're saying he's just wanting to be more independent and if you really listen you can find out wait a minute they're being motivated by the currency of safety they know that most of the accidents happened between when the bars let out in the next two hours they want me off the street for safety purposes and if they understand he wants to be with his friends when all the fund's happening right at the end of the evening and they could negotiate where they both get what they want if they can just agree you're going to be at somebody's house verifiably hanging out during that time uh then we can negotiate something in between you're off the street but I don't have to be home with Mommy and Daddy so I if they understand they each have a different currency giving becomes much easier and but to do that you've got to really listen and learn from somebody to know what's important to them right well you're well and you're pointing to something there that's a source of inestimable reward in relationship to listening because you know a skeptic might say well for example why should I listen to you if I can just force you to do what I want and there's a couple of answers to that I mean the first answer is well you might be able to force the person now but that doesn't mean you're going to be able to force them tomorrow and it certainly doesn't mean you're going to be able to force them once they come along with all your F their friends and tell you to go to hell and so Solutions imposed by force tend to be unstable so that's very much worth knowing and you know I've looked so you know I interviewed I interviewed Chris Voss by the way but I also interviewed France deal about chimpanzees and he's one of the world's foremost primatologists he's pointed out quite clearly that chimp Alphas who use Force have very shortterm and violent Reigns and they Reign Over very fractured and destabilized chimp troops so you can use Force for a while but it'll it'll come back to haunt you so then you might say well what's the alternative and you laid that out to some degree with work hard to understand the way others see things if if I can understand what it is that you value and then I can negotiate with you a solution that enables you to move forward to what you value while we while I move forward simultaneously toward what I value then we've instantly created a relationship that will survive without supervision all right that's one of the things that's so cool about that is that if you if you pay attention to someone and you understand what motivates them and then that's built into your agreement you don't have to be a tyrant and you don't have to micromanage because you and the person will walk side by side without Mutual supervision right so John P figured this out by the way when he was studying children you know he figured this out technically he said if you put imagine you put two systems in head-to-head competition with one another one system was uh like an aristocratic tyranny to down using force and another system was bottom up using voluntary agreement the system based on voluntary agreement will always outcompete the system based on on Force because the system based on force will waste energy in um enforcement well and he was exactly right and you know PJ also showed that actual learning that would be incorporated and saved was much better from the bottom up than from the top down because people felt a degree of cooperation and PJ was right about that right right right right yeah well that's partly why too even in Psychotherapy you know part of the reason you don't give people advice as a psychotherapist is because if you haven't walked through the process of coming to the conclusion the conclusion itself is rather weak so if I deliver my client a ready you know now and then you know this is now and then you've got someone in your therapeutic practice and they're in a fix and you know how you they could get out of it you could just tell them but if you tell them first of all they they don't get to solve the problem and you can take credit for that you steal that from them and second they actually haven't gone through the effort necessary to generate the knowledge structure that will enable them to solve similar problems in the future it's like you can you can control everything your child does and nothing bad will happen to them but as soon as your child doesn't have you around they're completely bereft you know maybe that was your goal all along if you're like a devouring mother for example but but I wonder how much of that is that Associated that assoc are those ideas associated with your principles seven and eight said actively live and support meritocracy and identify and build consequential knowledge is there a bridge to that that that that what would you say that willingness to take it upon yourself to solve problems and and to and to deal with your own Affairs well you're you're certainly right about the meritocracy I I believe this um we we've made some really bad decisions and I saw it happen um with you know covid where uh the United States government spent $5.5 trillion in giveaways during covid and 4.4 trillion of it went into checking or savings which means it wasn't urgently needed did uh people just tucked it away and said yeah thanks we'll take that and tuck it away um and then they uh they they pay people more not to work than to work and I mean that literally uh when you take all of the bonuses and the credits and uh extending unemployment plus the $600 a week bonus on top of unemployment and the person is able to stay home and not pay what in La was $7 a gallon for gas at one point so they don't have to do the commute and have that expense and they don't have any wardrobe expense and all and they can just sit on uh the couch and and not work and then all that's over and they can't understand why the supply chain is is paralyzed well you know let's think that through guys you pay people not to work and so you get people not working uh hell Lassie could figure this one out uh it you got what you paid for and and I we had so many lifelong businesses wiped out by the mismanagement of covid that it's it's heartbreaking I mean these people that spent Generations building these family businesses that work so hard and the margin was narrow and and a high percentage of those businesses never recovered they never came back and you you see what happened in and one of my problems is we do have a generation that is experiencing a mental emotional crisis with the highest levels of anxiety depression and and loneliness uh since records have been kept and and the agencies that keep those records the CDC and the Department of Education and and others are the very ones that shut the schools down they shut the schools down and as I said early in our conversation I was fine with that for a couple of weeks but then it turns into months and then it turns into a year and in some cases it turned into two years with remote learning uh that they knew did not work particularly uh with low socioeconomic uh and inner city populations uh who didn't have good Wi-Fi connections didn't have parents there to help them along the way and when they shut the schools down for that long they did that knowing these kids were in a mental and emotional crisis and they knew that those schools were a Lifeline to those kids that they needed that for emotional development they needed it for educational achievement they needed it so they had Social Development and they shut it down anyway they also o knew that the mandated reporters the teachers the counselors the cafeteria workers and bus drivers and coaches were at the schools and those were the ones who had their eyes on these children and could report if they saw signs that the child was being molested or the child was being abused in the home they shut all of that down and when they did those referrals dropped 40 to 50% in in some major markets and these kids were sent home behind closed doors locked up with the very abusers it it's not that the abuse went down 40 or 50% it probably went up because of the frustration of being locked up at home behind those doors and they shut the schools down without any plan for bringing them back and you and so you ask questions about it and they say well we did the best we could with what we knew at the time no you did not do the best you could with what you knew at the time you had information that these children were not as susceptible to this disease as everyone else was you knew they were in a mental health crisis you knew this was their lifeline and you yanked it out from under them and you damn well knew what you were doing when you did it so lur lurking behind that the your principles seven and eight I've got about three more questions I hope we can address and so we'll start with this one I think I've been thinking a lot about what might constitute a meritocracy from a technical perspective know and so well the first thing we might point out is that hopefully we could all agree that there are some things that are worth doing in comparison to other things and if we can't agree on that we can't ever get anything done so some things are worth doing in comparison to others doing the things that should be done efficiently and effectively means that we can do more of them or we can do the good thing faster and so that seems to be good and then a meritocracy is it's essentially reward for those things it's reward for those things and punishment for failure to do it right so once you decide that something is to be done you valued it then you value those actions and patterns of attention that will lead to that outcome and that's a meritocracy right and so then you could add a another level of definition there that ties in with what we've been describing is that if the proper you if the proper self is something like long-term Harmony established voluntarily with others then a proper meritocracy is a system that rewards behaviors that are aimed at that and punishes those that aren't right and that's also what you would be called upon to speak about for example when you're not staying silent just so others can remain comfortable so there's a technical issue with regards to meritocracy here now I want to so you you can tell me what you think about that but then want to tie that into something you mentioned much earlier too which is the tyranny of The Fringe right so I think there's always a fringe right and I I think The Fringe generally tends to be people who are pursuing power and people who are pursuing short-term hedonistic self-gratification and The Fringe is much noisier and much louder and much more dominant than it's been certainly that that I can ever remember and I'm wondering Dr Phil do you think maybe it's a been wrestling with this idea you know we're all connected together now and there's no reason to assume that what's pathological can't spread with equal rapidity compared to what's valuable right so now we're all hooked together we could say well good ideas spread faster but we can say well yeah bad ideas bad contagious ideas also spread faster now part of what stops bad contagious ideas from spreading in re in real life is that there's you can identify the people who are spreading them and you can stop them it's because you see them face to face and maybe you in principle continually interact with them right so they can be held responsible so here's here's a hypothesis it's a deep hypothesis you tell me what you think about it virtualization enables psychopathy and the reason it does is because it decouples action from consequences I mean it's almost like a definition of virtualization right I mean if I'm an anonymous sadistic troll I can say whatever the hell I want to anyone whenever I want and not only do I not have consequences I may get attention for it right so the incentive structure so imagine this and I'm asking you your opinion as a psychologist so two questions do you think virtualization might enable psychopathy and if it does then what do you think of the danger that poses well I'll answer both of those questions and I I answer them uh pretty much in the affirmative I don't think that situations create Heroes for example and I don't think situations create Psychopaths I think it reveals who they are and and so you get someone that becomes a keyboard bully you get somebody that goes uh just completely out of control I I would suggest that they probably were just lying in the weeds waiting for the opportunity uh to be who to exploit yeah to just exploit attack and be who they were without the consequences and you know that's why you see people in road rage yelling and screaming with veins popping out of their neck at somebody in a car that can't hear them they would never say that to somebody in an elevator right right right but they've got the also that anonymity yeah exactly exactly and and it's the same thing with the keyboard bullies uh they they've got the anonymity and it may be somebody in their grandmother's basement or it could be um you know somebody that you work with and they have a different identity and they would never say that to you across your desk uh and I I think that's a real problem uh so yeah I I do think it enables them to be who they they probably were to begin with and and and that's that's one of the consequences that's one of the unintended consequences of the technology and you know I hear um you know people talking about you know some of the things with with um um the uptick in uh activity and uh the transgender movement and they say well we don't think there's a contagion effect here well really uh you know you you've got 10 eight nine 10 times the activity uh and with girls uh that yeah right we didn't have before I mean it was typically boys not girls now girls out strip the boys like what 1,00% and I I'm I I'm saying that by recall so I'm not offering that as fact um but certainly by a big number and they say but we don't think it's a contagion effect well of course it is it's it's got to be contagion effect people are seeing that they say well it's they just feel more free to come out uh about it well well it's the pop yeah that's such rubbish the not only is it a contagion effect as we can tell by its insanely rapid spread but we know it's a contagion effect because psychogenic epidemics have always rage through young women like there's a documented history of that going back 350 years there's a great book called discovery of the unconscious by a man named Henry ellenburger which was a canonical text for psychoanalytic training for about 30 years and it truly is a brilliant book and he documents psychogenic epidemics literally going back I'd say 400 years and it's always young women and it's partly young women I think because they are more agreeable but it's also partly young women because they hit puberty earlier and have to wrestle with its relatively dramatic psychological consequences at a slightly less developed at a at a slightly earlier age and that makes a real difference and so the fact that you're pointing to the contagion of the trans phenomena among not its typical sufferers who as you pointed out historically were male but young women is clear evidence to anyone who isn't purposefully stuffing up their ears and blinding their eyes that this is a social epidemic and I'm so embarrassed I'm so embarrassed to be a member really of the psychological community at this point Dr Phil because this epidemic has revealed a cowardice among my peers that I would have never believed possible a level of pathological silence and and enabling that runs against absolutely everything that the psychotherapeutic Enterprise in principle was designed to forall so it's it's a hideous it's a hideous situation well we've seen the U it's more than just silence I'm afraid because we've seen the American Psychological Association the American Psychiatric association the American Medical Association The Academy of in endocrinology uh on and on that have all signed off on it and they're complicit not just silent yeah and I just I've never seen um anything else where people had where these organizations or professions had less evidence that something didn't cause long-term harm before they signed off on it ever um and yeah ever right I I agree so I don't get it and I don't think history is going to be kind I'm not a physician so so I always tell people you know I'm not a physician so um you know take take that for what you will but I the you know I think the thing that got me into this profession to begin with is as early as 12 13 years old I became fascinated with why people do what they do and don't do what they don't do and I can I remember the day that it got a grip on me uh and I was never the same after that day but I've been fascinated with that equation why people do what they do and don't do what they don't do and if you understand that uh I mean that is a great tool in life in in getting things done and understanding uh others and I I just you you can't spend your life focused on that and not see things like a contagion effect you know there are rules for reporting on suicide you know for the media we'll do a story about young girl girls there were two young girls up on the East Coast one time that were in love with the same boy and they had this insane suicide pack so they stepped in front of one of these high-speed trains together and when it impacted them it made the shape of a heart where it impacted them and all these media were were romanticizing this and showing this I'm thinking how could you do that every girl with a broken heart now can see that and say oh my God how romantic is that you're in fighting contagion when you do that and we refuse to report it Dr Phil that's going to happen in Canada like this is what's going to happen in Canada so I told the Canadian government back in 2016 that their bill c16 would produce a social contagion among young women I said that directly to the Senate but now there's something else happening and I'd like your opinion about it so Canada is going to extend its euthanasia operation to the mentally ill now they've already tried to do that it didn't work yet but that's where it's headed so my sense now I've already seen one case report of this but my sense is that this is what's going to happen is that they'll extend made medically assisted death it's the Canadian euthanasia program they're going to extend that to the mentally ill and to minors and so what we're going to get is a death Romanticism of made suicide among young women and it'll eclipse the trans contagion I think and I think it'll happen for exactly the reason that you just described is we'll get romantic accounts of early suicide among attention seeking desperate young women who are also tempted you know this too because if someone does have a pronounced depressive temperament one of The Temptations that's going to befall them is the belief that everyone else around them would be better off if they weren't there number you see how that can take on a it's the number one reason for suicide right they're burden they believe they're a burden right right right exactly exactly and that can easily be romanticized especially if you also want to avoid the responsibility of growing up right because that's another well that's why there are suicidal crisis among adolescents is because know they are deciding whether they're going to take on the burden of responsibility of adulthood and the opportunity and adventure of adulthood as well well how do they easy to romanticize the go ahead how do they answer this question how does that individual if they have a mental illness to this level that they they they want to die how does that person give informed consent if they're incapacitated to the point with a mental illness that they want to die how do they give informed consent oh yeah you and your logic look man how does a 13-year-old give consent for a double ectomy we're already way past that we've blown out the we've blown out the necessity for informed consent long ago and that'll provide absolutely no barrier whatsoever to the to the people who are pushing the ma agenda in Canada like Dr Phil that question won't they'll there'll there'll be there'll be endless academic Papers written by demented ethicists providing an act an answer are in the affirmative which will be something like well they're still they're still they still have sufficient capacity to decide whether they're lived experience indicates that their suffering is such that it would be better if they didn't exist and you have no right to interfere with that there that's how it'll be justified Jordan are we just clinicians that forgot to check our common sense at the Ivory Tower when we were leaving campus is that is that the problem look you know well you know I don't know know what to make of this because I know perfectly well that the cohort of people I graduated with say back in the 1990s were very well-trained clinicians I think that I think that well what's happened to me in Canada you may know this is that my license is being threatened by the Canadian the Ontario College of psychologists it's not just being threatened I mean their plan is to take it now they're taking it because of things I've said now the thing about me is that I don't give a damn if they take it and at this point I just assume not be part of their bloody Club anyways but but you know there's nothing they can do to me I'm not practicing at the moment except on a broad public scale and I have an in multiple independent sources of income and I don't even have to live in Canada so you know I can tell them to go to Hell Without too much damage but I'm watching what's happening in Canada and the colleges the the medical colleges and the psychological colleges have sufficient clout so that Anyone who puts a toe Outside the Lines can be certain that they will be the recipient of anonymous denunciations that they will be subjected to endless expensive laware and that they could well be stripped of their right to practice and those are not trivial trivial punishments and you know generally people can't withstand them so I have a two-part question maybe that we can use to to wrap things up here the first first an observation you've you've been popping up everywhere in the social media World especially in the last couple of weeks and I have a question about that that's personal and also one that's more issues based let's say I've noticed that it's been very hard for people who've made a name for themselves in the traditional media to transition so to speak to the online world it's sort of like watching TV actors try to make it in the movie world sometimes that works but most of the time it doesn't now it does really seem to be working for you and I'm wondering why that's working for you and how you've managed it how that's related to your new book and what you think is driving you forward to continue speaking as you have in your Legacy Media career but now increasingly online so let's see if we can address all of those points what is it that you're doing right to make this transition to the online world and why what is driving you forward to continue to speak on these issues well that's a two-part question and I'll treat it just that way I think the the part about um social media is um probably driven uh from a negative standpoint uh in the sense that I think there are a lot of factions out there that think I'm very dangerous right now uh because I'm talking about things that don't allow them to remain comfortable and I I'm willing to debate anybody anywhere about anything that I'm qualified in my opinion to talk about and I'm not going to tell you what to do with your 401k because I can't add two and two and get five every time but when you talk about the things that are in my book um if you've noticed there are extensive references to the professional literature at the end of every chapter because I do my homework and I know that literature backwards and forwards and I've studied it I've read it I I don't go get my information on Google um I I I get it by actually reading the core articles and understanding why these things are are happening and um I I think when I go out and talk about these things I think it's very threatening to some people I've been shadowbanned I I've had videos that go up and they just go crazy viral for 15 minutes and all of a sudden bang they're gone uh and my cyber security people tell me that they're being targeted and taken down uh things at the border when I've been down there things that I've talked about um uh you know just concerning you know content in the book I I think that um I'm clearly there it's backfiring there's an attempt to silence me on these matters and I think it's backfiring because uh people want to hear uh what I have to say and and people are getting their information differently now they're getting their information on YouTube and social media platforms and that sort of thing so uh a lot of that stuff I'm not posting others are posting from what I've done or said somewhere here there or ywn uh but April 2nd I do launch Meritt Street Media the 24-hour Network and we'll be in somewhere between 75 and 90 million homes uh I think it'll be the biggest launch since Fox as I was saying so I think it's going to be prolific for people to find and um you know you got to take a position and I I'm willing to take a position and I think people find that both threatening and refreshing I think it covers the Gambit uh and and that's okay I get a lot of U hate mail I've had death threats I've you know all that I I took a strong position on Hamas and Israel um I I was sicking to see students on campuses around the United States uh Elite campuses out rallying for what I consider to be uh assassins and murderers it's like we're not teaching critical thinking here how is it I'm hearing rhetoric that I haven't heard since I had read translated transcript of the Hitler youth movement on American campuses what how is this possible uh and and and nobody was saying anything about it so I started saying something about it and um boy did that heat things up you know you're in a position where your words have authority and you have access to much public attention and and that's a position that I'm in and have been for a while and I'm wondering how you differentiate in your own life between the Temptations of narcissistic self-aggrandisement in the public eye let say and your your duty to speak forthrightly about things you believe to be important I mean you have had a long career you have more than enough money for the rest of your life there's no need for you in the privation sense to be in the public eye speaking how do you protect yourself against the fact that you can be tempted towards self- glorification let's say and self-aggrandisement by the fact of your media presence and how do you know that you're speaking for what's true rather than blowing your own horn let's say and you know increasing your own building a Tower of Babel to your own posterity well absolutely fair question and um I I think I I've long believed that too much time in the spotlight Fades the suit and I you know I'm in a position where I can go pretty much on any uh media Outlet anytime that I want to they're happy to to have uh to have me on uh I think it's going to get less so with some with some Outlets pretty fast uh but I I think my rule has always been uh if it's not real obvious to the viewer why you're there you shouldn't go if you're going just because you can instead of it being really obvious that you're there with a purpose and a passion um to speak about things that matter to people who care you shouldn't be there at all and you know I probably do you know one out of 10 or 20 media requests that I get because I just um I I I think it's important to play Big not long play Big not often and I think if you choose carefully uh where you speak and what you say uh you can have much more of an impact than uh just being elevator noise and why would you say that you're you're you're compelled to continue to do it what do you think you're up to what do you hope you're up to I hope what I'm up to is you know I I really looked around and was very very concerned uh where this society's headed right now and I also looked around to see um who was willing to step up and speak about it and I am certainly not the only one uh but I felt like uh being uh trained in in Clinical Psychology and uh some of the things that I I have experience in that I had a unique perspective to talk about the collective Consciousness um because as you know there's an individual Consciousness and then there's a collective consciousness of the family of the community of the region the state the the country and I I I think that I I was seeing a void where people weren't really talking about that they weren't really talking about uh people exercising um their their right to have a voice within that Collective Consciousness and I was concerned that what we were seeing taught in the universities was going to put a generation in charge of this country next when my grandchildren are going to be out there living their lives that I was just uncomfortable with I just thought you know we're we're we're coddling these students we're not preparing them for the next level of Life somebody's got to step up and raise hell about this um and I felt passionate about it and so that's why I decided to keep going I see I see I see well I can I hope I hope I can relate to that so all right sir well um I'm wondering if there's anything we we we covered your your book relatively comprehensively we covered a lot of ground today I'm wondering is there anything else I'm going to continue to talk to Dr Phil as me many of you know on The Daily wire side I'm going to delve into autobiographical matters a bit and get to know them on the personal side and so if you're inclined to join us for that that would be well and good um on the Free Speech side it doesn't hurt to throw some support the daily wire way because they are doing what they can to be a Bastion of of alternative opinion in a landscape of woke nonsense and so that's worth some consideration um is there anything else that you would like to bring to people's attention on this side before we bid each other farewell well I would just like to say um it's really been refreshing to talk to somebody that knows what the hell they're talking about when I'm talking about a lot of these Concepts and and principles that um are sometimes nuanced and U you obviously did your homework on this and I I I I really appreciate that and I know how busy you are but to um have a clinician on the other end that picks up the nuances of what we're doing has been very refreshing Jordan so I can't thank you enough it's a pleasure to talk to you and I appreciate the fact that you took the time to talk to me today and and to everyone that's watching and listening and to all of you who are watching and listening as well um your attention is never taken for granted and it's much appreciated and to the Daily wire plus folks for making this possible here in Florida today I appreciate the effort that went into that to the film crew here as well for handling this so professionally that's also much appreciated and so and and so farewell to all you who are watching listening and and Dr Phil very good to talk to you today look forward to talking again soon thank you [Music]

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,351,064

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: nv-ap0Ax8Hs

Length: 112min 57sec (6777 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2024