"THIS IS Why Most People Are LAZY & UNMOTIVATED IN LIFE!" | Jordan Peterson & Lewis Howes

if i saw something was difficult i wanted to master it i was driven to do that just to see how far i could go in these multiple directions and that left me vulnerable to one thing when there's no elephants under the rug and everyone's playing if you ever have that you should consider yourself i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness yeah please welcome powers is there anything you any skills you wish you would have developed in your 20s that you didn't develop sooner maybe you yeah maybe you have them now i've really thought about that i've really thought about that recently what those few skills be that you wish you would have developed and you wish everyone would develop well when i when my health fell apart and i was in the hospital for or multiple hospitals for long periods of time you know i stopped doing everything i was doing and everything i was doing was difficult my clinical practice was difficult the professorial job was difficult the company i was running was difficult uh writing was difficult uh the um podcasting and interviewing was difficult yeah the lecturing was difficult it was all difficult and i'm not complaining about the difficulty i actually loved that that was that was fine i'm not complaining about it at all but because it was difficult i have to be in really good shape to do it and so then i wasn't in really good shape and so because i wasn't really good shape and everything i had done was difficult i didn't know what to do and i couldn't get back on top of things because it was like trying to jump into a car going 200 miles an hour you know it's like well what i did what i started doing back in december really is when i started working again although i had been writing to some degree over the last two years um i started doing podcasts like this and they're not easy yeah you have to be again i'm not complaining i love doing them they're really interesting but you have to be engaging and you have to be sharp and you have to not say anything stupid and you can't be too emotional and you can't be angry and um or that has to be very controlled and you have to pay attention and focus and you have to line people up and it's technically difficult you have to advertise it you have to get the social media right you have to monitor the social media you have to stay up on current events and you have to see who you're going to talk to and it's complicated and i have people helping me and they're helpful and great but but there was no well i'm gonna go five there's no beginner have a youtube channel that a million people watch right so and it's something you can really screw up publicly and catastrophically yeah it was very daunting yeah very what i should have done when i was in my 20s and 30s is that i should have cultivated some activities that were less demanding look i went to a baseball game when i lived in boston it was the only baseball game i think i ever went to no i've probably gone to two or three but it was the first time i'd gone to a baseball game a professional baseball game i thought jesus baseball who would go watch that so bloody slow it's like nothing happens it is slow it's so slow it's nothing happens and i have like 50 other things i should be doing and and i went there and then i realized i was looking at all these people and i thought they're not even paying any attention to the baseball game they're like talking to their friends and they're drinking beer and they're eating popcorn and then i thought yeah that's the point fool that's the point they're going there for that like you get to talk to your friends now and then someone hits a baseball and you can look at that that's kind of interesting and you can eat popcorn and it's like they're relaxing they're they're not you know climbing mount everest they're just relaxing and you know one of the things i've learned this is a good thing to talk about it's really dangerous to be casually contemptuous what does that mean well i i've seen many professors who are contemptuous of business people right well they don't have businesses and they're angry that the business people can make all sorts of money and so and and that's a whole skill set they don't have and so maybe they'd have to feel inadequate about that if they thought about it and then i've talked to lots of business people who you know regard professors as in the ivory tower and you know easy job it's like hey will you try lecturing and see how easy it is about a complex subject and publishing it's not easy it's really hard just like your job casual contempt stops people from investigating things that might be good for them you know and and well when i realized that about the baseball game i thought there's there's no content no contemptuousness here like clue in clue in clue in there's something here that that these people aren't just stupid and going out to a baseball game because they're stupid you know it's very easy for us to call people who are doing something that we're not doing stupid it's like don't be so sure about that you know and it would have been better for me if i would have had a wider variety of skills that weren't so high intensity i play ping pong with my son that works out good probably could have had another sport or two i could have had some leisure activities that i got good at music might have been good that weren't so demanding see what i i tried to do if i saw something was difficult i wanted to master it i was driven to do that just to see how far i could go in these multiple directions and that left me vulnerable to one thing it left me vulnerable to being in a situation where i wasn't healthy enough to manage it so you think if you would have had these other leisure hobbies things that you did for fun and play you wouldn't be in potentially the situation well it would have been easier to get going again that's for sure it would have i think like i'm you know i'm trying to sort it out i'm but someone asked me the other day you know do you regret the pathway that you've taken and that's a question that's worth considering um and the basic answer is well i don't know i guess in some sense because if you if if you become extremely ill especially if it isn't clear why you don't know what you might have done to contribute to it because you don't know what it is and people say well you know you went on this 160 city tour in a year maybe that was too much it's like it didn't seem like too much i really enjoyed it actually right you had fun it was great dave told me all about how amazing it was and every night a new city and it was great but it was it was also very intense and i did expose myself to a lot of misery you know meeting people so many people so many thousands of people i opened myself up to a tremendous amount of misery and and longing and pain and um that was very emotionally impactful um but i can't say with certainty that what the consequence of that was right i mean i'd worked as a clinical psychologist for decades and i had to deal with people who were in trouble all the time and that was actually an extraordinarily positive enterprise because although i was dealing with very serious issues and people were in trouble they were on a good path and getting better and we were collaborating in that so it was lovely enterprise i loved it i loved it in deep conversations meaningful conversations devoted to making things better it was great so it's tough to know i guess then yeah i i don't know yeah it's what i have observed however is you know so i've been opening up my day to work more and more so now i work from 3 30 to 6 fairly intensely every day and i started one day a week and then it was two and then it was three and then i could see was i better when i was working or was i better when i wasn't working and the answer was clear i was better when i was working and it wasn't just clear to me it was clear to the people who were watching me right and so it looks to me that that also indicates that it probably wasn't the work that hurt interesting i think it's possible that just too many things happened at once yeah that's possible it certainly distracted me right and so maybe i wasn't paying attention to the exactly the right thing so but but i don't know i i can't i don't know yet and maybe never will so that's that's one skill you wish you would have developed in your kind of your 20s what's maybe two other skills you wish you would have developed so that's pretty much that's that's as far as i've got with that line of thinking yeah um what do you think of the skills that people should start to develop in their 20s in general to make them better human beings more potentially open to success financially relationship health-wise what are two or three things that everyone should focus on their 20s well it certainly doesn't hurt to be in physical good physical condition so we can walk through it stop drinking too much how do you know if you're drinking too much um you regret what you do when you're drinking it's it's interfering with other important goals it's it's causing you financial distress it's getting you in trouble with your friends or your family it's getting you in trouble with the police okay so stop abusing substances if you can right if you see that they're um hurting you um an alcohol is particularly pernicious in that regard so physical health are you in decent shape are you strong and coordinated and if you're not well you'd be better if you were right you'd feel better you'd be more effective you'd live longer you'd be less sick and you really see that mount top like if someone's been in shape once in their life they age way better and it's also a really good way of maintaining your cognitive ability like you know you you hear about those exercises that you can do online to make you smarter and keep your cognitive ability intact those don't work there's no evidence that they work people keep saying that they make you smarter they maintain your cognitive function psychologists have studied that for 50 years hoping that one of those things will work trying all sorts of creative tax they don't work exercise works cardiovascular and weightlifting you start to decline in your fluid intelligence at about the age of 25 and it's a linear trend downhill and it can accelerate as you get older it's just like this quite ugly if you exercise you stave that off so that's really useful um maintain your relationships and and foster them they're un so when i look at successful people they're really good at something they're reliable right you can count on their word they're generous and they have a wide wide connection network which becomes more and more valuable as you get older yeah so it's one advantage that older people really have over younger people they have a connection network and a connection network is huge well you could be connected to a thousand well-connected people okay that means you are connected to the entire world right it's unbelievably valuable and that's one of the things that's so absolutely remarkable about the situation that i'm in right now as far as one of the great benefits is i can contact pretty much anybody and they'll talk to me it's like really right that's so cool i'm i'm i'm interested in infrastructure for reasons i won't get into but i'm interested in infrastructure development i think it's a good method of wealth transfer it's a good solution to the problem of inequality and and employment um i reached out to a leading expert leading expert on infrastructure last week see if he'd talk to me i thought i don't know anything about infrastructure except that it's worn to a frazzle and we should do something about it you know he agreed to talk and having a connection network is of an inestimable value that's huge reliability generosity you can work on both of those philosophical sophistication it's very useful um because it orients you properly you have a sophisticated sense of of the world you find for example that um doing things for other people is actually more rewarding than virtually anything else you can do you know when you hear you should be of service to other people well if you actually watch yourself you pay attention to yourself and you do something that helps someone else and it genuinely helps them i defy you to find another experience that is that satisfying it's actually quite stunning how satisfying that is and so that's a very useful thing to realize and why why is helping another person the most satisfying thing for probably most people when they're if they're you know out of their ego of like i want to buy more things to make me happy in this moment why is that such a satisfying thing for human beings uh there's no better strategy for there's no better life strategy i mean imagine i could give you a quick sort of technical example so imagine i take two people and i say okay um i'm gonna give you a hundred dollars and you have to give some of it to the person right beside you and they can either agree or disagree with the split but if they disagree you don't get anything okay so a classical economist would say that the person should take the hundred offer the person next to them a dollar and the person should accept it because why not they get a dollar instead of nothing and that's the solution but what happens is that if you don't offer that other person something close to 50 50 they're likely to tell you to go to hell yes very and they think nothing you get nothing too you think well why would people do that because they just reject 50 and who cares and the answer is well we don't just play one game with other people we play a repeating game and so so imagine we did this so imagine it's a crowd and they're all watching you and i offer you a hundred dollars and you have to share it with the person next to you and you say would you like to take seventy dollars and the person says well i'm not sure that's fair to you but if it's okay yes but then everyone else sees that and now they all have an opportunity to pick who they're going to play with next well you're not going to get pissed picked last are you remember what you told me you didn't want to get picked last right okay so what you did was you turned yourself into an athlete a machine okay okay great so but imagine we expand that game yes and we say you want to be the person that everyone wants to play with yep well then all you have in your whole life is invitations to play well how how and how are you going to be that person be productive straightforward generous make everyone else better around you and they're going to want to play with you absolutely so there you go and then you get to play yeah exactly well how is that not the best possible deal it's clearly see so so the re if if the ethical argument is put properly it is by far the most compelling argument it's like if you want to have everything you could possibly want and more then be a good person the better a person you are the more likely that is to happen that doesn't mean you that you're completely protected against getting cut off at the knees but there's no better strategy that's it and you can even think about it selfishly and i talk about this to some degree and beyond order let's say you let's say that i you want to be selfish you think that's the best possible strategy why should i care about others okay let's say you should only act in your own best interest well then it's like what's your best interest well what does interest mean and what does you mean what's in your best interest your best interest three mysteries what's your what's best what's interest okay well there's you but you aren't just you right now you're you and you tomorrow and you next week and you next month and you in five years and you in 10 years and you when you're a pensioner you're a community of selves stretched across time and so if you were enlightened and selfish you would act in a manner that would benefit that entire community across time and i don't think that's any different than acting on the best possible part for other people i i think they're the same problem so i think as soon as human beings discovered the future we we know we were no longer singular individuals were instantly each a community and then the community ethic prevails and the community ethic is i want to win in a way that makes you win that's the best possible victory wins and what's the point well you think it's a zero-sum game it's either you or me or maybe i want the comparative status but i would say even if you want the comparative status let's say you just you're motivated by that what what would confer upon you even hypothetically more status than to be the most popular person while being chosen for games i mean you think about that just think for a second about right because it struck me that biographical peace alfred adler who is the psychologist that i talked to you about earlier he said one of his claims was that many people have a like a stark memory that sets the course for their life that's true moments yeah and you have exactly that and you so adlerian psychology would be of great interest to you i suspect but but partly you see what happened was you had a true revelation thought i if i'm being picked last something is wrong and that's absolutely right it's it's unbelievably right and you played it out first in the athletic domain but you have to start somewhere right so that's a good place to start jockle was telling me when we talked this week he's this tough character man you know and he could have and i'm not telling tales out of school here he could have been a criminal no problem and he knows that perfectly well and i'm not saying i'm not saying that as a slur on his character partly because i believe the nietzschean dictum that a lot of morality is just cowardice whatever he might be he's not a coward right and so and just because you obey the laws doesn't mean you're moral it just might mean you're afraid in any case so the question is well what socialized this brute well he was taught in the navy seals take care of your team that's your fundamental purpose and he noted and we had a long discussion about this the successful guys man they've you know they've got your back wow right they you know that above all yeah and if and if if if you aspire to a leadership position among those brutes let's say and you aren't someone they know to have your back they're not following you're not gonna make it yeah ah you're not going to make it and so that's this is why the discussions of power that are so prevalent in in modern culture bother me so much it's like you think male hierarchies are predicated on power you really think that they are when they've gone rotten but when they're not rotten that's not what they're predicated on at all the capacity to exercise power that's really important you need that it has to be part of you for you to be admirable it's like you could be a badass son of a [ __ ] yes i see that and and that way i'm somewhat intimidated by you and that's actually a testament to your moral virtue that you have enough force and power to be intimidating but then if you can encapsulate that and take that potential for power and harness it to this broader good well that's unstoppable and a real functional hierarchy that's what it is yeah i know how important your wife is to you and it's actually the first thing you write about is the importance of the 50 years you've been in love with your wife i'm curious what is the thing you love most about your wife uh that's my first question i think it's very difficult to say exactly why you're attracted to someone it's there's lots of factors and many of them aren't known to you really she's very she's provocative she's witty and uh sharp and so there's always an element of game playing like it's not dishonest game playing but there's a teasy flirtatious provocativeness that characterizes her quite deeply she's no pushover by any stretch of the imagination and i find that constantly interesting and intriguing um it's particular it's it's can be somewhat hard on me when i'm not feeling well but when i'm up and functioning properly then that works out extremely well and so yeah what would you say would be the the keys to your success of 50 years of loving each other and being in a what seems to be a healthy functional relationship when in society today that doesn't seem like many of those well we we really do our best not to lie to each other about anything and we also have fights when they're necessary we don't let things we don't hide things in the fog that's the title of chapter three of my new book don't hide things in the fog and we work through our issues our if we're if we have a dispute we do our level best to get to the bottom of it to find out what in the world's causing it who's needs to change and why and how and when and then how we can progress forward into the future without having that issue dog us or drag behind us or interfere with us at all and that means a fair bit of confrontation i would say but less so over the years as we've settled more and more things but everything's out in the open everything that we can get is out of out in the open you can't have a relationship without trust and you trust your partner courageously if you're not naive knowing that you can be hurt and that you can be deceived and that you can also do both of those things so you offer your partner your trust as an invitation to them to be honest and forthcoming and and well and then issues come up and you delve into them and straighten them out and we also attend to the relationship um in i'm not going to refer back to this new book continually but it's relevant in this context it's chapter 10 plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship and we do that as well and it is effortful i mean we we try to have throughout our relationship we tried to have romantic dates one to three times a week and they require preparation and cooperation and the will to do it and the will to put yourself on the line and the desire to make that a priority even when other things are more pressing we both want it to work that's another thing we're committed to it and not interested in finding another relationship and so far we've been fortunate and that's worked we have fun together we love our kids we have had joint projects of all sorts together renovating houses traveling raising our children now our grandchildren but all of that is the most important thing as far as i'm concerned is to not to lie to your partner you mentioned you don't have a relationship if you don't have trust or if there's not trust in the relationship how does someone um if someone is not trusting the other partner how do you cultivate trust if you're 100 honest with that person if you are transparent about every action you make in your life if you're you know they have access to whatever they want to see and you're you're constantly creating trust but for whatever reason they still might be jealous or insecure or not believing you how does someone get someone to trust them or is it not about them at that stage and it's about the other person and their insecurities well it depends very much on the particulars of the situation um you know so i don't know if there's a generic answer to that i think that you can establish the ground rules explicitly you know and have a discussion about it are we going to lie to each other or not are we going to tell each other the truth to the degree that we can to make that an actual goal and to talk through the consequences of doing that and not doing it and then i would also say whenever a hiccup occurs in the relationship maybe you don't call it out at each hiccup you know because you have to have a certain amount of silent tolerance in any relationship to let small infractions go but if they repeat my rule is three times and it's the rule that we i share with my wife if something happens three times that is causing emotional upset anger jealousy disappointment resentment frustration any of those things anything that you don't want to experience and that you especially don't want to experience repeatedly then you can call it out and and if you if you have three examples your case is much better made than if you just have one and i would also say that when you call it out you know you could say look we were at a party the other night and you were it looked to me i felt as if you were paying too much intense intent attention to um dave there was flirting going on there that's what it looked like to me there was some flirting going on there and you know i that made me uncomfortable well you don't say well you were flirting stop doing it you say well this is how it looked this is what it looked like to me and here was my response and then you want to think and maybe i'm a damn fool and blind and jealous and stupid and i'm misinterpreting or maybe it was a harmless flirtation of the sort that people will engage in because it adds a little bit of spice to a social interaction you want to find out like it it's really convenient if it's the other person's fault except then you're laden with living with that person so it really doesn't help you anyways but it's convenient because then they have to change but you've got to think about this over the long run you're going to be interacting with this person on a minute by minute basis for decades um if you're the idiot and that's causing trouble then you should find out so you want to say well look this is what i saw what's your explanation of what's going on and then they'll offer you their viewpoint and hopefully they'll do the same thing they'll think well this is my intent and maybe they have to go think about it but this is my intent and this is what i saw and i think you're being oversensitive in that situation and you peel back the explanations layer by layer until you both agree on what happened and more importantly on what you're going to do about it in the future and that's really hard and especially if there is something going on that's not straight because that will require quite a bit of digging it'll probably result in anger and tears and a fight and that's very unpleasant it's it's easier in the short term to avoid that but hopefully the consequence of that is you don't have to have that fight again right you have to come to a negotiated agreement about about that situation and you have to pay attention to your own uncomfortable negative emotions in order to manage that and not and not pretend that everything's all right or that you're nicer than you are or that you're less jealous than you are or or or less blind or see one of the things i learned from carl jung the psychoanalyst about marriage was that there is a reason marriage was a vow like the vow is that you stick together okay so now imagine that's a vow okay you do not get to leave period okay so what does that mean well on the upside it means that you don't have to be alone it means that your family will have continuity over decades it means that the narrative of your life won't be fragmented and broken by divorce or sequential divorce it means that your children can grow up and maybe have their children within a continuing family it means that your children will be able to maintain relationships with the grandparents on both sides and the cousins like it's a big deal to maintain that there's huge advantages in it it means that you'll have someone there when you're not well and so will your partner um and it'll means that you have someone to share all of the positive things of life with so there's huge advantages to it okay so why does it have to be a vow well i don't think you can tell the truth to someone who can run away because if you tell the truth to someone and they can run away then they'll run away right right because you're a mess man and not not just because of your own inadequacies but because human beings are so complicated and and have such dark corners and and and have had you know unresolved problems in their life sometimes that stem back generations and are twisted and bent in all sorts of ways and you you can't re it's very very difficult to reveal that except to someone who can't run away now that that you know i'm not saying that people should never separate i i am saying though that it's better not to if you can manage it but then the other thing too is if you can't run away then you're motivated in a different way it's like i'm stuck with this woman and she's stuck with me and unless we want to have this same goddamn fight over and over and over for the next who knows how long why don't we straighten it out and then we can put it behind us see the the vowel gives you a kind of desperation that is another motivation to actually solve the problems and if you've got a way out you you can always stay hidden you can guard yourself you can protect yourself and even protect that part of yourself that thinks that it can leave if things get too bad now the problem with that in my estimation is is that you're going to drag your stupidity into the next relationship right always do right well generally speaking right and so now you can get very you can you can in under unfortunate circumstances you can get tangled up with someone who's not playing a straight game with you and won't and and it's just impossible but i'm not talking about the limit cases you know i'm talking about the average case the average amount of unhappiness and trouble it's still plenty and then the sorry just one more thing i'd add to that you also have to in some sense shake the illusion that the other person is somehow not you you're so tied up with them that there's no difference between you and them in some sense is that what's good for her is going to be good for you and vice versa one of the things we try to do to the two of us is we try to say yes to each other now there's rules that go along with that which is well i'm going to say yes to you but that sort of means that you shouldn't ask me unreasonable you shouldn't make unreasonable demands i'll say yes as much as i possibly can and then you'll do that in re return and then we get yes out of the deal instead of no that's also a huge plus so that's that's is there anything else about you you want you want to you want you have to want the best for the other person and you and for the relationship and in within that confine you want to tell each other the truth yeah the truth is is huge and i heard you mentioned jealousy and insecurity at some point that that message is there room for jealousy and insecurity in a relationship is there a healthy amount of jealousy that people should have in relationship or does jealousy and insecurity only cause more suffering and pain in a relationship well i think there's a reasonable amount of proprietary interest let's say i mean in a classic monogamous relationship a marriage their sexual fidelity is a crucial element of that um and maybe you'll make an arrangement that differs from that but it's not easy to chart uncharted territory like that i mean if you want to have an adventure like that with a partner a monogamous adventure that also includes sexual exploration well maybe you can pull it off but i doubt it it's really complicated let's say you're not having sexual exploration with other people and you're telling each other the truth and you're being honest is there room to be jealous or insecure uh in that relationship or it does does jealousy typically cause more harm than it does you know spice and good i guess i think jealousy probably causes more trouble than good but that doesn't mean that there's something wrong with the proprietary interest should you care if your partner pays undue attention to someone of the opposite sex they find attractive well probably you should care you might even say something about it they might even be happy about that right because it indicates that you noticed and that it matters to you now i think it shades into jealousy when it's harmless interactions it's interactions that would be regarded as harmless by a third party observer let's say i know that's a very difficult line to draw that are being magnified as a consequence of insecurity on the part of the observer or there's envy where your partner is attracting attention status success any of those things and you're jealous of that that's not helpful you should be pleased the optimal situation is for you to be pleased when your partner is successful um i i don't think competitive couples i don't think competition between people who are in a monogamous relationship is useful particularly it's not zero-sum competition yeah um i mean you can compete in a game-like sense right fine like unplayful competition but not yeah but not existential competition you're on the same team that's the point right you know and if one of you is feeling left behind for one reason or another it's it's time to throw that out on the table and say look i'm i'm playing second fiddle here far too often what can we do about that well it looks like you need it and like i've got an adventure it looks like you need one too well how can we rearrange the situation so i have my adventure and then it's up to that person too to figure out what obstacles they might be putting up in their own pathway right that's stopping them and then they have you know they're angry at you for getting in the way but it's actually a consequence of them using you as a convenient excuse for not doing something difficult those things all have to be sorted through it's very hard these conversations are extremely difficult it's no wonder people avoid them i also think people are not taught to negotiate oh man at all and that's a that's a real shame first of all you figure out what you want this is what i want then you tell the person then you strategize with them so that you can get what you want and they can get what they want and you both know what that is and the way you go together and that that usually comes out it's usually obscured and hidden and comes out awkwardly in difficulty and and with difficulty if it comes out at all and people fool themselves into thinking that it's okay what they're doing i'm sacrificing myself for the children and that's okay i'm sacrificing myself for my husband's career and that's okay um i'm working at a job i can't stand because i need to support my wife and children and that's okay i mean sometimes that is okay but it has to be out clear in the open talked about negotiated disgust you know i think there's you can be a slave or a tyrant or you can negotiate those are your options and we default to slavery and tyranny because that doesn't require any cognitive effort and then we pretend that everything's all right and then it blows up in our faces and we end up divorced right so we got to learn how to negotiate yeah yeah well and then you have to notice that there are things that you want right and you have to tell yourself what those are and then you have to let the other person know and then they can deprive you of them because they actually know who you are and so that's a big risk but if you if well if you if you do lay it out and negotiate then you have two people working in the same direction and they each bring their different viewpoints to bear on the problem and sometimes that'll save you you know that additional cognitive complexity you have because there's two of you instead of one it can make you much more effective what happens when we feel like our partner is depriving us of what we want if it's not you know uh infidelity or something of the likes of being with other people but something else that we want in our life uh a goal well actually that happens all the time right because people generally speaking men would like to have sex more frequently than women so that's a that's a sticking point in many relationships um but forget that for the moment we might just as well say that the probability that one partner and the other partner are going to have exactly the same level of sexual interest say with regards to frequency is quite low so there's going to be friction there so what do you do well you you you negotiate about it it's like well i'd like to have sex 15 times a week well i'd like to have sex once a week right okay well you know the logical the logical uh meeting point there would be in the middle but then that has to be planned out and you also have to say exactly what you mean well exactly what do you mean by sex do you because there's all sorts of variations of sex include inclu from ranging from just intimate closeness to full-fledged sexual activity of various sorts and the various sorts matter too and these are painful discussions often it's very funny in some sense that people will do and desire things that they won't talk about right they're they're they'll they'll engage in the act but they won't engage in the negotiation and they won't admit what they want why is it so hard for us to admit what we want we're ashamed of it that's easy with sex sex and shame regulates sex you know people say well you shouldn't be ashamed of sex it's like well really really no that's a stupid theory we arrest people who expose themselves in public why well because we don't want people masturbating in public we assume they should be ashamed enough not to do that shame regulates sexual behavior so we're embarrassed about our desires and you know naively you'd think well you can just shed that well first of all no you can't and second of all it isn't obvious at all that you should what you might be able to do is to determine how to play out your sexual life in the confines of your relationship in a manner that neither of you do find shameful but that's that's just think how hard that is like you know you think well that's what i want it's like but then you think about how unlikely that is and how difficult it would be to attain it you know you could say that if that ever happens to you in your life once you're lucky you know that it's perfect now i i think that's pessimistic because i i believe that solutions to that problem can be negotiated but it's not it's what everyone wants but it's an extraordinarily difficult thing to bring about you know so let's say you want the ideal romantic evening well okay what are you going to do about it are you going to put yourself in reasonable physical shape are you so you're attractive are you going to um you know make a playlist and put some time into it are you going to buy some candles are you going to buy something nice to wear are you going to wear it are you going to dare to wear it that might be true for you and and for your and for your partner are they going to dare to wear it are you going to be smart enough if they do wear it to respond in a way that makes them feel confident and increases the probability that they'll do it again are you going to do whatever is necessary to make yourself physically attractive in that moment are you going to have the kids put away have you got the day-to-day aggravations with each other that are dragging you down and making you resentful under control so that you actually do want to give your partner some pleasure like these things are very hard yeah but they're not impossible and they're worth it but it's not surprising that people don't do it and then then the next well then there's the shame part too is well okay just exactly what is permissible or desirable and when and when should you when are your um kinks counterproductive exactly you know we can't we certainly can't have that discussion as a culture you know on the one hand we think we're so split on this on the one hand we think any sexual misbehavior should be subject to the harshest of punishments and everything goes and is acceptable it's like well good luck having both of those ideas right it is so interesting to me to watch this you know there's just outrage constant outrage about sexual misbehavior and and fair enough like you either surprised what do you mean when you mean sexual misbehavior means someone cheating or someone having an affair or what sexual misbehavior yes or unwanted sexual attention or sexual harassment and i'm not saying these things don't happen or that they're not uh nefarious and and uh and and awful obviously they are it's no wonder that happens but at the same time we also are obsessed with the notion that any sexual interest of any sort whatsoever with the possible exception of sexual interest in children is absolutely laudable well sorry you can't have both of those things right right so and because we want both of them insist upon both of them then we can't even have a discussion we can't have a discussion about pornography it doesn't look to me like pornography is really a very good idea i don't think it's helping anyone now you know why there might be codicils to that freedom of expression um some potential educational utility um the pleasure that's a consequence of sexual utilization of pornographic material but i would still say seeing all that that it's not a net social good it doesn't do the people who produce it or who consume it any good and i don't believe that anyone feels like a better human being after utilizing pornography for sexual gratification now you might say well that's because they've been shamed about sex since they're born and you know and that's a consequence of our crooked culture and you know in a utopian world we wouldn't have that um shame and yeah no it's way more complicated than that and i read something in one of the youtube comments in my video the other day i was talking to abigail schreier about the apparent fact that today's teenagers are having much less sex um one person commented that there's the shame that men feel when sex is a spectator sport rather than a participatory act and then you think well you know the mere fact that you're watching two other people one of whom isn't you having sex instead of having sex really implies something either about your it's it implies something about your desirability it's pretty hard to shake that isn't it or your courage why is it that you're sitting there alone at night with your laptop on your lap what the hell is wrong with you well nothing it's just we should dispense with sexual shame it's like no probably not that's probably not the answer well so that was all you know why do people have a hard time negotiating about sex or talking about well it's no bloody wonder it's sex is such dynamite what's the i agree this could be a four-hour conversation on that i'm curious yeah well that would be a good conversation we need to have about a 50-hour conversation about that you should do a series on your youtube channel about that uh i'm curious about the biggest challenge you've had overcome personally in your marriage that you're really proud of that you overcame in the last i i don't know if you've been married for 50 years but i know you wrote that you've loved your your wife for 50 years but what's the hardest thing that you had overcome as a man or a human being in this relationship that you're extremely proud of that you did in fact overcome it or you've improved upon it in a major way i don't know if i'm proud about it i'm proud of it um like the the success that these things seem so unlikely and so dependent on good luck in some sense that you know mostly i'm gen if things go well for me i'm generally grateful that i escaped from the acts you know rather than being proud of it we did a good job of working through our our attitude towards how we're going to treat our children so we're on the same page all the time pretty much all the time and so the kids couldn't we didn't let the kids appeal to one of us or the other we really participated in their upbringing and we talked all that through and that that's that's good we have good relationships with our kids both of us and and that was really necessary too because my daughter got unbelievably sick for massive amounts of time and and my son we had to ignore him a lot because he just wasn't dying so it was like kid sorry like we got a problem here and you and and he was great man he uh he just rode through that like a like a master but um if we hadn't sorted out our child-rearing philosophy let's say we would have it would have sunk us for sure well because it was so close to the edge that you know few marriages survived the death of a child and no wonder you know but the serious illness of a child is also an unbelievable stressor and you know we sailed through that as well as could be hoped you kind of know that because you look back and you think well do we regret right did and of course there's the odd regret you know one thing when you have a sick child you have this terrible conundrum all the time of well how hard do you push them when do you allow the illness to be a reason that they aren't doing something when do you allow them to use the illness as a reason that they're not doing something well it's really it's really really hard to get that right and sometimes we pushed harder than we should have and misunderstood too and but at least we did that together and my my wife you know she i've seen many many women protect their children from the father they don't trust him and so every time he interacts with the child they'll do something disapproving a look they'll they'll put him down now it's not like men don't do that to their wives there's all sorts of tricks that men have for their wives men are very good at turning their wives into uh drudges for example for a variety of reasons which we can go into but if you don't trust men you won't let them have a hand in the children the discipline of the children you know when you think of discipline you think of punishment threat and dad saying no that isn't discipline discipline is discipline if you discipline someone properly they become disciplined right they that means they're competent they're organized they have structure they have yeah they can control themselves so i'll give you an example my son is quite a disagreeable person by nature he's very masculine he's very high in emotional stability so he doesn't have much negative emotion and he's very and he's relatively low in agreeableness he's um he's and that's that's typical masculine pattern that the two big personality differences between men and women are agreeableness women are higher and neuroticism tendency to feel negative emotion women are higher so so what that meant was that when he was a kid he was a stubborn little pup it was hard to get him to do what he didn't want to do and you know that's the mark of a character that is hard to stop so there's real advantages to it but it kids who are disagreeable are a handful because they think i'm not doing that and you can't make me right he was really quite good at that and is it one of your rules from the first book like don't let your kids do anything that would make you just like them yeah yes and the re we should talk about that because that's such a good rule i think but any i used to the rule for him was you know he'd push the limits in a variety of ways and he was really good at that and quite persistent at it and i'd talk to my wife and say look julian's getting a little too pushy here um we have to crack down on them and stop them and and this is what i see and she'd say this is what i see and we'd think well this is what we're going for a week he isn't going to get away with anything like the line man he's like kid he'd be three or three and a half at this time sit on the steps sit on the steps and if he wouldn't because he was stubborn well i'd bring him over and put him on the steps like it was you're gonna if i say you're going to sit on the steps you are absolutely going to sit on the steps so it was so interesting to watch him because he'd be angry you know because he got interfered with he didn't get to do what he wanted to do and um he'd be and he would go and sit on the steps but he'd be like mad as hell on the way there arms pumping up and down and just you go sit on the steps like you know like this just overcome with anger and the rule was as soon as you get yourself under control and you can act like a civilized human being and you want to have a good day then you come and tell me and all that's it you're done but it had to be real and look my my uh my criteria for accepting his statement was whether or not i liked him when he said it you know if he was still being this uh if he was still misbehaving and and bending the rules he he wouldn't be genuine when he talked to me right but if he came and said okay dad like i've had enough i'm i'm i've got myself under control i'd rather have a good day and as soon as he said that i liked him it was like hey man you're back in the park yeah well i didn't want him to sit on the steps anymore i liked having him around so sure sure so but our you know we we were on board with that and so the discipline so the thing is see what was the discipline aspect which is what i was talking about is he learned how to integrate it into his personality and i could see him doing that sitting on the steps he was it was just this aggression circuit which is unbelievably powerful was just dominating him and he'd just force it get it under control get it under control calm down bring yourself back into the social world and it was a victory for his developing ego you see because he wasn't defeated by his own impulses and that's discipline you see then you're not defeated by your own impulses and so discipline has the wrong connotation i was encouraging him you can master this man and and it worked and it was so useful to us later because when michaela got so sick um he was together we could rely on him so it was necessary and it hasn't stopped being necessary and he's a very reliable person who does what he wants it's a great combination yeah that's beautiful when do you feel the most loved jordan when what's when what's happening around you or when you're creating something or when you're with people when do you feel personally the most loved it's when i'm with my family when i'm with my kids with when i'm with my family friends too and that's even been more the case over the last couple of years because my family and friends have been so unbelievably loyal and helpful to me and my family as we've had our troubles terrible terrible troubles over the last couple of years they've been so unbelievably reliable and helpful amazing certainly people have gone out of my way for me in a way that i i don't believe i would have done for them really well look i saw my father-in-law when when and i taught write about this in in beyond order oh no i read about it in 12 rules more i think but it doesn't matter he's a like he's a really extroverted guy disagreeable guy too masculine guy extroverted assertive everybody in the little town i grew up in knew who he was he was a performer you know the life of the party um and a good businessman but a real character and uh he he did his own thing but then his wife got uh prefrontal dementia when she was quite young 55. and man he took care of her for 15 years wow it was unbelievable and it was so interesting too because if we offered to help him he would accept it right away and anything that we could do that would like i suggested one time for example that he buy a digital readout sign so that if he went out he could type in where he was going on the sign and it would just repeat over and over oh that's cool and some recordings in the bathroom to help his wife remember what to do and he would just implement those accept and implement them right away but he this guy who was who lived his own life who who was a a very extroverted social person not someone who you would have regarded as soft and caring and i don't mean that in a negative way it's just that that wasn't him it wasn't mother teresa you know um he just he cared for her in a way that was absolutely astonishing and i saw that also in my friends and my family in the care that they've offered to tammy and i over the last two years mind-boggling uh mind-boggling but i would say the like the place i like to be the most is in a family situation when everyone's when there's no elephants under the rug and everyone's playing if you ever have that you should consider yourself fortunate beyond belief because it's unlikely and you can lose it at any moment yeah i've been i was in the hospital more or less for a year and then another year with tammy and i thought i'd lost all of that never get it back it was very dreadful and so now when it happens i mean i've always been grateful for it when it happens strive for that you know the animal experimentalists have demonstrated that the ones who study play this is yak pancep in particular but there's a variety of them who study play brilliant brilliant scientists play as a circuit it's a mammalian circuit it's a specialized circuit and it's very important developmentally for for that circuit to be given free reign to play it's how children play out roles in the world that they're eventually going to adopt they play mother they play father they play they play all these different roles and that's how they learn to to be those things the role of the father is to put up security so that play can occur so the security is there that's the wall say fortify the walls man the walls guard the walls but within the walls then that's where play can can take place and play is very easily disrupted hunger thirst any emotional state any motivational state can supersede it even though it's very very important so you have to have the walled garden in place before play can occur remove the fears to make it safe so that experimentation can take place within that's paradise right that's right it's a walled garden that's what paradise means is a walled garden where structure and nature the walls in the garden are harmoniously um interacting and where eternal play can occur that's paradise and so you get a glimpse of that when everyone's together often at the table not fighting and and and and also not not fighting right right right yeah fighting but not like it's when everyone's at each other's throats but no one's saying anything well we're not going to talk about we're not going to bring that up we're not going to discuss that because that's not paradise either no that's pretense and and you see that that negotiation is the eradication of the need for that pretense it's like you got a problem with me let's sort it out right because we're going to carry it with us you want to do that so people wonder why i engage in conflict i hate conflict it's and i find it very stressful but conflict delayed is conflict multiplied oh that's so true it's worse to have lingering conflict for months years decades than the pain of direct conflict that can hopefully resolve and move on yes absolutely well and as the conflict is delayed it's the reasons multiply and the persons who are involved because they're avoiding demean themselves and get weaker and less confident and so it's a vicious circle it's better to notice you've there's this there's a line in the new testament christ talks about prayer and so you imagine that as communion with god so you could imagine that as an attempt to to confer with the ideal or maybe to even occupy that space for a while well he says christ says if you have a problem with your brother you fix that first go pray later yeah yeah well that's it that that's that's that's wise and and that's a good thing you know if you're if you're angry with your the people who are close to you if you're resentful i read a lot about that in chapter 11. resentment is so useful it's so useful it's so horrible so toxic it's so destructive but it's so informative right if you're resentful you're either being oppressed and not standing up for yourself or you're whiny and should grow up and both of those things are really useful to realize and all you have to do is notice that you're resentful and want to do something about it okay i'm resentful okay am i immature you know are people picking on me or i am immature or if people are picking on me do i have something to say or something to do i should do it it's a it's a gateway to improvement resentment or you can let it you can foster it and let it devour you and take you places that no one with a clear mind would ever want to go hell that's resentment man that's the pathway to hell and if you don't believe in hell you don't have any imagination that's my sense of things and what we you mentioned uh paradise being a safe space where we can play and have fun and feel protected but a lot of times at least in the last year i'm seeing more and more in the world that the anxiety stress depression challenges of the mind or the heart and the body have seemed to come to the the surface for a lot of people even more and it it sounds to me and it looks to me like when i'm connecting with people that a lot of things from the past past memories past pains hurts traumas are being brought to the forefront for a lot of people with the chaos of the now how do we start to heal the memories of the past the traumas of the past so that they don't keep hurting us in the presence well the first thing i would say is you know sometimes there's a crisis and well-meaning mental health professionals rush in to discuss the trauma while it's still happening that's a really bad idea people are generally traumatized because something actually horrible happened and dwelling on it in the moment just makes it worse it's not like anybody has a solution here's how you should understand this you know someone's just shot up your kid's school here's how you should understand this that'll make it all better it's like no it won't if you have old baggage that often comes up if you're having an argument with someone doesn't it you know how it you know how it is this is partly why people don't like to have a dispute within a relationship because it's a thread and you pull on that thread and just god oh that we had another rule do not agree with something you don't agree with ooh like if we're gonna if we decide you and me that we're doing this we don't go back and say well i didn't really mean it we don't get to play revisionist with our history so if you if you don't agree don't agree fight object or hold your peace because you see what happens with couples is there's a little fight and then one says together yeah but you did this and then that person says yeah i know i did that but then that was because you did this and each this gets bigger until what's on the table is why the hell should we stay together at all right and so every fight becomes why the hell should we stay together at all so that's another thing you want to do is you want to have the fight about this thing not about it about the past not everything it's like okay you were flirting i think you were flirting more than you should have been okay so i go away and i think well okay maybe i was okay um well then we have to have a discussion about why and maybe we can solve that but mostly what we have to do is figure out how to not have that happen again okay so we're gonna go see the same couple again what is it that you want me to do so i'm the flirtatious one let's say what do you want me to do well you have to figure that out it's like no i'm stupid like you we're equally stupid i need to know what would satisfy you and you need to figure out what would satisfy you so i know and that like that's also extremely useful is let your can establish your conditions of satisfaction make them explicit let the other person know yeah you can't read someone's mind we're very bad at that we're bad at reading our own minds for that matter yeah so if we if i have a fight with with tammy let's say sometimes i remember to say okay what what do you want me to do right now what can i do what what should i say and mean you know and you think well you shouldn't let the other person put words in your mouth well fair enough you know i'm not act i'm not asking for something false i'm saying i'd like to not have this happen can you see a way out is there something i could do to increase the probability that that's the route we could take and you know sometimes that works but the other person has to let you know what they would find satisfying you mentioned you mentioned sexual shame um and it triggered something in me about just the shames of the past that people tend to hold on to i think i might have mentioned this to you the last time we talked i'm not sure if you know but i was i was sexually abused when i was five by a man that i didn't know and for 25 years i held on to the secret the shame uh and if anyone ever knew about this then i would never be loved i you know right because you feel contaminated permanently yeah i would you know i wouldn't have any guy friends no girls would find me attractive my parents would disown me you know i went down the rabbit hole these stories of you know i'm the only one this has ever happened to i never saw any examples of this happening to right and about eight years ago i started to really heal that and start sharing that shame and in many different therapeutic experiences that allowed me to start the healing process uh i'm curious from your perspective with all the work that you've done what is the best approach for someone to really heal their shame if whether it's around sexual abuse or trauma or just anything whether it be small or big or any type of shame that they might have how does someone release shame in a healthy manner so that it doesn't make them a prisoner of these emotions of the past that hold them back well you hinted at a few things when you just described what what happened to you was you said well first of all you know i thought i was the only person this had ever happened to it's like no it's a universal human experience to one degree or another now you know i'm not saying everyone was sexually abused and i'm certainly not saying that some people aren't sexually abused to a degree that's so extreme it's unimaginable where there are others you know get off relatively lightly but it's still it's it's well within the realm of normative human experience that sexual that sex goes wrong in some way at least you regret something that's happened something you've done or something that was done to you so putting it in to when when you're the only person that something has happened to that's really not good right because it alienates you even from yourself you have no idea what to do with that and so that's sometimes why people find it such a relief to have their illness diagnosed it's like oh there is this is known there's a category other people have had this experience maybe there's a pathway through it so just knowing that you're not the only person like that can be very helpful um updating it's like how you were how old five okay well one thing to realize when you're 25 and you were abused when you're five is that you're not five anymore right right that the person to whom that happened is no longer there you're there but so you know you might feel afraid of relationships you might feel afraid of all sorts of things but a lot of that was you're sort of feeling that like that residual five-year-old i tell a story about one client i had she was abused by her older brother and she told me this story and i drew a picture in my head while she was you know i kind of pictured her of at five and this teenage hulking teenager you know taking advantage of her but as she told the story i realized that her older brother was only a year two years older than her while he was seven was like okay well they were she wasn't the victim of a tyrannical male in some sense she they were two badly supervised children now that doesn't mean that what he did was right but she was still the five-year-old in the memory but she was 27 when or so when she came to see me and so the first thing i did was just point that out it's like think about the seven-year-olds you know right from for a five-year-old a seven-year-old is an adult but for an adult a seven and a five-year-old are clearly both children well that just changed things somewhat it made her feel less vulnerable in the moment what your brain wants from you in relationship to a traumatic memory is indication that you're no longer vulnerable to the same problem that's what memory is for right you remember something bad and you process it so that you change your interpretation or your behavior or the situation or whatever you can change so that it isn't going to happen in the future and that'll if you do that thoroughly you'll generally let yourself rest um it's do you have the memory to protect yourself from it happening again well that's the purpose of memory in general you you you make sense of your past behavior so that bet the good things that happen to you can be duplicated and the bad things can be avoided it's not to make an objective record of the world it's to make a functional map of the world that you can apply to the future and so so yeah how do we let that go how do we disassociate something that happened a year ago 10 20 years ago that is no longer happening but it seems to be triggering us oh it's very it's it's very difficult well i would say you know one of the things you need to develop if you've had an experience like the one you had perhaps because i don't know the details you probably need a theory of malevolence you need an explanation it's like how could a person do that well you have to have it what if the explanation isn't good they were just bad person they just well then you need a philosophy of bad you need a philosophy of evil you have to understand it so that you're no longer a victim of it you have because otherwise you can't put the event in a context right you know and sometimes that means the development of real a real philosophical sophistication and that can help because then you know then you can start to separate out malevolence from benevolence because maybe you're afraid of any intimate relationship now because it's been contaminated with that and everything's fuzzy and foggy and so you need to understand the person who did that at least to some degree so that you can separate that person out from all the other people around you who that you encounter in situations that might be reminiscent of it you know so you you felt vulnerable for out for perhaps you felt ashamed all those things have to be gone through what do you think you know when you're ashamed when does what elicits that what are the eliciting cues what do you think when that happens all of that has to be taken apart i said in this beyond order book that you know if you have a memory older than about 18 months that still bothers you right it's still got emotional resonance older than 18 months ago or yeah no older than 18 months ago or more otherwise it's not really in the past right it's still happening that that whether you should delve into something how you should delve into something traumatic that's currently happening is a whole different issue but if it's an old memory and it still bothers you it means that you haven't decomposed that experience sufficiently to detach it from the emote emotion so imagine when something terrible happens to you you don't understand it so then you might say well if you don't understand something that's happening to you how can it be terrible because it doesn't terrible mean that you understand it and the the answer is well you understand things in stages and the first way you understand a terrible thing is by freezing in terror or running that's the understanding it's not conceptual it's embodied and emotional and so event terror that's the first category okay now the next question is how do you get it out how do you get out of the terror well you realize that nothing truly dangerous is happening well what if something truly dangerous did happen then you elaborate your view of the world to the point where you're no longer vulnerable to that terrible thing and that's extremely difficult so the memory of something terrible stays terrible until you effortfully process it and decompose it into well often into a much more sophisticated map of the world and it's really hard to do that what's the thing in your life that was the hardest to do to to deconstruct after the event so that it didn't consume you emotionally from the initial terror because you study this you practice this you teach this stuff but when you know as a practitioner teaching it is there was there a time where you're like man this is really hard for me to understand oh absolutely it's chronic i mean that state is chronic for me at the moment i would say partly because i've become so insanely famous and i have difficulty with that for sure it's very difficult to understand i'm i'm and so and i wouldn't say i've managed it i'm managing it i suppose but and then health trouble that has hit my family and me it has been so devastating that i'm i'm i haven't managed that either like you know that's the thing i i suggest to people no that isn't even that it's that what have i found that you do about terrible things generally you don't run from them especially if they're not avoidable in the future generally you stand confront decompose understand adapt but just because you generally do that and it's the best bet doesn't mean it's definitely going to work it's just the best shot you have at it you know it'd be lovely if something always worked but if something always worked people would never get sick and die right and we do all the time so we do our best but that doesn't mean that that always works but it's still the best that can be done it's still better than all of the alternatives so how do you how do you cultivate your own personal inner peace amongst the different uh changes that have come up whether you know the fame the health challenges uh personally maybe challenges with family your friends how do you personally keep a level of inner peace amongst the chaos i walk a lot i exercise a lot a lot like i'm walking about seven miles a day now and working out as well and so and that's necessary um i take solace if you didn't walk and work out where do you think you would be really definitely yes yes definitely is that physically because you wouldn't be physically taking care of your body or because mentally and emotionally your peace would be chaotic and it would drive you to die that wow yeah so that you see you're saying sorry i was interrupting you so well peace that comes to you if you're fortunate and sometimes it doesn't come um i try to do things that i think are worthwhile that that seem worthwhile and that gives me solace i suppose yeah um so i'm writing i'm talking to people who i find interesting about things that i think are crucially important i'm trying to learn and to communicate as a consequence of talking to these people um i'm trying to do what i can for my family and my friends and to do what i can beyond that as well in a variety of different ways um those are all useful endeavors and they keep me going what have you found to be the best practices of managing uh mass attention whether you want to call it fame mass attention mass audience people being fanatical about your message your work you as an individual luckily that that hasn't happened too much the fanatical side of things you know i've had the odd the odd brush with people who were a little more persistent than was probably good and you know i could see lurking signs of mental health issues behind that and but fortunately very little of that has happened and um that's certainly all for the good because you're not you're not living in l.a that's probably why well could be could be but for whatever reason i've been pretty fortunate about that um i talk over what i'm doing with the people around me all the time and try to keep it on the proper pathway to the degree that i'm able to do that and and to see if what i'm doing is justifiable and ethical and we're all terrified of this you know to a degree that is very difficult to communicate you know we live in a time where if you make a mistake you can be shredded and i would say to some degree the more visible you are the more thorough the shredding oh right yeah and so the cost of an error an ethical error is unbelievably high the cost of the appearance of an ethical error is extremely high much less the cost of an actual ethical error and so we're very careful to try to act ethically in every manner possible appearance and reality and everything's being watched yeah well i i mean i can i i have no idea how any of this looks from the outside but my reputation has been on the line publicly many many times and partly sometimes outright accusations sometimes as a consequence of things i hypothetically said sometimes as a consequence of newspaper articles that you know have taken a particular twist and god only knows how many times a consequence of my own inadequacies and errors but every time that rises up as an issue there's a two-week period where no one in my family knows if this is the time that it's just going to go to hell really where it's all oh absolutely sure well look at how many people it happens to it and look how people respond man you know it doesn't take a very big twitter mob to chase anyone back into their hole how do we chase a company for that matter back into its on its heels i mean it isn't that doesn't does that is that how it looks to you i mean what what do you think about this yeah i'm just curious you know as people individuals whether it be me you or anyone wants to build something wants to have a goal and aim as you talk about and go after this thing that they care about and share their opinion share their voice have good intentions maybe someone doesn't like those intentions but have good intentions is how do we as human beings think about reputation and does reputation even matter anymore if anyone can try to tear your reputation down should we be focused on having a good reputation yes okay and how do we you should you should you should be more focused on deserving a good reputation what does that mean don't don't do things you know to be wrong and even if you don't lie yep don't lie don't be careless you i mean especially if you're see i'm fortunate i i suppose i put all my lectures online so virtually everything i've ever said to a student is i mean obviously not but a non-biased sample of everything that i've ever said to students is available well it hasn't come back to bite me right and that's hundreds of hours why well because i've been fortunate enough not to have said anything um fatal and you know maybe that's because i'm careful with my words i don't want to attribute too much virtue to myself in in in relationship to that i know that good fortune plays an immense role in how things turn out for people and that you can get unlucky but you know one rule i didn't write down is um act so that you can speak of what you do so there's two domains of lying right so one lie is a statement the other lie is an action you know it's wrong [Music] you do it anyway it looks to me like that's becoming riskier and riskier right people aren't doing that anymore because they're getting caught yes and the consequences are dire well but then you think about this you tell me what you think about this one of the things that carl jung taught me again was that you know as we become more technologically powerful the quality of our individual morality becomes an increasingly pressing social concern because each of us are far more powerful than we once were for good and for evil and so with this technological prowess comes an associated ethical demand and and i don't see a flaw in that argument i i don't see how that can be anything other than true if technology multiplies your power then it multiplies the cataclysmic consequences of your own immorality right and if you did one thing 10 years ago and someone finds it it could haunt you it seems like is what's happening there's no doubt about that not only could it it will it will you know all likelihood you know and that's a problem too because of course people do make mistakes you know and and i'm i'm perfectly pleased that my teenage years aren't stored on youtube for example it must have been terrifying a long time ago well it must be terrifying to be a teenager now knowing that your drunken foolishness at a party could become the next viral youtube video i mean yeah i was lucky enough never to i've never been drunk uh in my life and that was a conscious decision because my my brother actually went to prison for drugs when i was a kid and i was in a prison visiting room many weekends for many years uh and witnessing the consequences of doing certain things so for me i was like i don't want to touch any of this stuff i don't even care if it's like i'm going to sell it but i'm not going to take anything and um i but it doesn't mean that i didn't do bad things like you know i cheated i lied i stole you know i did all these things that i'm not proud of when i was 10 to 13 until i got caught and i was like oh my co my actions actually affect a lot of people and um i remember the shame well it's normative behavior i mean if you look at adolescents imagine there are adolescents who break rules all the time including criminal including legal rules okay but they tend to become criminal it's too much but then at the opposite end of the distribution are adolescents who don't break any rules and they tend to develop um in internalizing disorders depression anxiety disorders that sort of thing so there are two constraints so there is a a certain amount of exploration of rule breaking that's a normative part of healthy development and but but now you know you could take a chunk of that a video of it a record of it and it's permanent can you imagine not being able to forget your past painful so painful and not even you forgetting it but the world knowing your past seeing it or witnessing it yes and and sort of un on what unexpectedly and at any moment yeah right what's your what's your greatest fear with the fame and the acknowledgement that you have at the level of you have it what's the the greatest fear you have moving forward or oh that all that all do something to um you know that i'll betray the people that that that i've been speaking to with you know that all be insufficient to the challenge in some manner yeah ethically particularly but more than that even just physiologically let's say so that's that's definitely it did you ever have a a goal to impact this many people was that part of your life's mission that i want to reach more people than outside of the classroom and you know sell five million copies of my books and be so well known that you are was that ever a mission or was it always just i want to learn and teach and if 10 people watch great if 10 million people watch great i probably knew i knew when i was working on my maps of meaning book that i was look i i tried to i tried to write about the most serious problem i could find in the most serious way i could manage manage and i thought well if this is a serious problem and i'm addressing it seriously it's probably a serious endeavor and will have the consequences of that that whatever those might be and when i started to lecture about what i had been thinking about and learning about [Music] the impact was obvious and and and unique in some sense i mean there are my lectures the most typical response i got from students in my classes was especially in the class on my first book maps of meaning was this course changed how i looked at everything and i would say life the world the universe god yeah or they'd say well i've learned all these things i don't know how to talk about them with anyone else which was the same sort of thing and and a lot of the public commentary on my work is it's similar to that but you know in some sense that wasn't a surprise because what i learned changed the way i looked at things completely too absolute completely one-handed like completely in revolutionary way and so and i i i had a sense of that from i don't know how old very young you had a sense four five you got a song you had a sense that your uh life would impact millions of people yes yeah it was a kind of like an inner dialogue or an inner calling or something that was it's like a dream yeah sort of or the remem memory of a dream that's crazy look i talked to jocko willing the other day i'm i'm looking forward to releasing that it was such a good conversation i had such a good conversation with him he made such this immensely tough person tough guy very he knew he knew he wanted to be a soldier from the time he was like three wow and he said what and don't be thinking that it was for any high noble reasons i like i mean he's quite funny and but at this point he just he states it's like this is my character this is who i am it's it's it's me and you know with my kids i could see who they were they were the same person right from the time they were born they developed and unfolded and all of that but it was the unfolding of something that was there it was the bringing of something there to light it's it's shocking and surprising to me constantly and exactly what i expected at the same time and that seems completely paradoxical it's sort of like one part of me knew and accepts it and the other part is too old and too much the way that i was to adapt to it yeah i saw a clip from an interview of your daughter and your wife together i think was on your daughter's podcast and your wife was mentioning something about how you were smitten over her for i don't know a period of time maybe this was years but she was never showing the interest in return oh just just glimpses of it just enough to keep me interested right but she wasn't going to date you uh you know or be committed i guess or whatever she said until i can tell you what she's like it's it's easy i one day i went over there i was about 13 to her house i was delivering papers and it was her paper route i'd taken it over and and so um she was there with one of her friends and my wife tammy she was very popular among all the boys even when she was in grade three and four like there was like 10 of us it wasn't a very big town and we're all in love with her yeah except for one guy who was not just out of spite and this is true like i can remember this very clearly anyways um i went over there when i was she was a friend of mine when i was a kid but there was always this romantic interest part of it even when we were very young um and we didn't see much of each other when we were around 13 you know girls mature faster than boys and i was also one year behind in any case i went over to her place one day delivering these newspapers and she was talking to her friend uh hazel blonde girl who was very attractive girl as well and they were talking about getting married and they were you know being kind of cynical and smart ass about it and tammy said to her friend i don't want to change my name when i get married i'm going to have to marry some wimp and she turned around and looked at me and smiled and she said jordan would you like to get married wow and i thought and she was playing like it was a poke and it was you know genuinely poke but she knew i liked her and and so you know it was one of those barbs that's funny because it's close to the bone right right well that's where real humor exists right it's right on that cutting edge and so that was her she was provocative like that um and i told her that story when we decided to get married and i said well you're tammy peterson not tammy and so that you know i got the last laugh in that story but it took like 20 years for sure yeah she had mentioned something like you know he wasn't suitable or ready for me until until you were and i don't know she you know it's typical like as soon as she found out that i was attractive to other women because i was vaguely competent then she swooped in for the kill exactly so i'm curious what is the what are the keys to building confidence when you feel insecure afraid or or scared of being embarrassed whether it be dating someone or a career or anything what's the keys to building confidence so that you're attracting what you want look you i read some of your biographical history before we talk today and you tell a story about being picked last and then you compensated for that yes now there alfred adler by the way this psychoanalyst the associate of freud built his whole theory around compensation of that sort inferiority complex plus compensation but it's adaptive right like you got picked last it embarrassed the hell out of you yep so what did you do you decided that is not going to be me never again right never again okay now you did say you know that you adopted a maybe two what inflexible model of what it meant to be masculine as a consequence but when i read that i thought yeah but still you fair enough it wasn't the the new you that you adopted wasn't optimal in all possible manners but it was definitely improvement over the previous year exactly i wasn't picked last again that's for sure right well exactly okay so so so the first thing i would say is that if you feel insecure and less and ashamed and all of that that you have to take stock and look i have an exercise online at selfauthoring.com it's there's three exercises there one helps you write about the past one about the present and one about the future the present authoring program helps you assess your faults and your virtues okay well if you have some faults and you feel insecure and inferior because of that well you should now it shouldn't be so much that you're crippled by it and unable to take action you shouldn't be beating yourself into the ground because you're not everything you could be because no one is and if you beat yourself into the ground then you can't get up and improve but you you you have to differentiate it's like okay to what degree am i being hard on myself counterproductively critical hearing the voice of my too harsh and angry father in my head right um adopting inappropriate stereotypical representations of masculine competence how much of my self-criticism is ill-advised fair enough and you want to deal with yourself with a certain amount of care but then along with that there's the well fix your weaknesses you know if you're ashamed of being ignorant you're showing up at a party because you know you claim to knowledge that you don't have and someone exposes you well you can be angry at them and you probably will but they've actually done you a favor they've pointed out an inadequacy is a pathway that you can travel down right a recognized inadequacy is as soon as such a gift in some sense if if it's accurate i'm in it because you think well what should i do what should i do with my life that's a real complicated question oh here's an inadequacy excellent you have a pla you have a goal now rectify it now you still have to think strategically and figure out how to rectify it and do it step by step and but carl rogers the psychotherapist um pointed out that the per person for therapy to be successful the person has to want to change so they have to have recognized that they have a problem if if someone is mandated by the court to attend therapy it's very difficult for the therapist to convince them that they have a problem once you're convinced you have a problem it's like away you go you know i know it's still technically difficult it requires discipline and all of that there's no magic solution but if you're plagued by feelings of inferiority you should rectify the most obvious inferiorities right focus on those first over optimizing strengths would you say no not necessarily not not necessarily i'm and you don't have to redress every like i can't i'm a terrible jazz musician it's not a thing where you hold shame around or like well it's not an impediment yeah yeah i would say that you have to rectify an inadequacy when it's clearly an impediment to your goal or you have to shift goals but if you're shifting goals because of an inadequacy related impediment then you have to ask yourself are you is your desire to shift the goal reliable or are you just taking the easy way out right you can protect yourself by picking a different goal that's more difficult that that's a good mental hygiene practice because sometimes you should switch goals rather than rectifying inadequacies but you can fool yourself then and and that's that's not good and if someone is goalless lazy unmotivated not sure what they want to do what would be a few key steps to get started to turn their life around or to find the motivation for something greater than where they're at well i i think a fair bit of that's probably to be found in you can find it in shame you can find it in guilt you can find it in conscience you can find it in anger you can find it in interest and and and engagement and beauty there's lots of pathways if you're angry about something in the world well you know that's an indication that that's in some sense your problem right it's speaking to you in a moral sense this shouldn't be that way well maybe you're the person who should do something about it in some manner maybe it'll take your whole life to figure out how to do that but it's bothering you for a reason so that the negative emotions can be a pathway to transformation i'm not trying to romanticize them they can crush you completely and leave you with nothing yeah right for sure and they can go badly astray but shame that's a good one what am i ashamed of well can you fix any of that because you might ask yourself let's say you're so ashamed and so crushed that you're nihilistic and you can't see any hope for life you're just done you might think well what if i was less ashamed like i'm not going to jump off the bridge today i'm going to wait a year i'm going to not i'm going to work on these things that i'm ashamed of and and just see like does my life improve enough so that i'm not so bitter about it now or i'm not so hopeless about it now and my experience has generally been that that works it works and then some of some of its practical knowledge too it's like you can get a really long way with very small changes incremental changes yeah micro habit changes so aim low don't have big big goals or big transformations well you can but but the problem with the big goal is that it's daunting enough so that it might paralyze you and there's a high probability of failure and so imagine that you're your own child okay now imagine you love this child and you would like him we'll say him because it's you and i talking to succeed now you have an ideal for this child you'd like him to grow up to be the best he can be better than you the best man he can be that's what you want for your son if the good part of you is talking yeah you definitely want him to be better than you are but you want him to be the best he could be if your vision is unclouded okay but then you offer him a goal it's like we'll do this well can he do it well if he can do it without a second's thought there's no challenge in it there's no developmental impetus it's not in the zone of proximal development you want a goal that you can do but that requires some improvement on your part because you want to attain the goal that's satisfying but then you want to make yourself into the thing that can attain goals and so you want to push yourself yeah you want to push yourself a bit farther yeah yes and and and there there's an ample psychological literature that suggests that that's where maximal motivation is to be found interesting so you're you're pursuing a goal but you're also pursuing the goal of transforming yourself at the same time you're doing both of those at the same time do you need to know that you're transforming yourself in order to attain the goal or do most people just think i got to take these steps to make it happen but they don't realize they're becoming better human beings they it depends on what you mean by realized they they they have the sense of satisfaction and confidence that would indicate that although they might not be able to make what that means explicit but i would say it would be better to make it explicit it adds one other dimension of possible motivation how do you think people lose confidence we've talked about gaining it but how does someone how could someone like yourself who's accomplished so much who's got millions of followers who you know is financially successful has a great marriage how could someone lose confidence once they've built it illness that'll do it that's one way death of someone loss i mean there's lots of ways of having the rug pulled out from underneath you um moral error as the stakes get higher as we already discussed the consequences get larger ingratitude that's a big one you can succumb to the temptation to believe your own egotism that's a big mistake um there's lots of ways that things can go sideways that's for sure so it sounds like you know we we start off with a lack of confidence when we're pointed at you're inadequate in this thing and we go down a journey of you know building ourselves and overcoming the challenges and diving into the fear to to have these small wins to build confidence and then the more successful we become the more we succumb to losing that confidence again uh when a lot no no i wouldn't i wouldn't say necessarily that you become more susceptible to that um but you asked how can that happen how can that also occur i think i think i still believe that you know genuine accomplishment but it's ethical it's always ethical accomplishment i believe that to be the case genuine ethical accomplishment is the best source of security but it's not un unerring when you mean ethical accomplishment you mean doing something good right whether people know about it or not just good and write for yourself is that what i'm hearing you say do or does someone else need to acknowledge that this was good and right um i i think if if you if you've done it for yourself that's good but if you do it and other people are in on it and and along for the ride that's also good and sometimes that's better to bring people along um if it's just a matter of them acknowledging it well there's value in that too i mean you know you people say well you shouldn't care what people think of you it's like well of course you should psychopaths don't care what people think of them now you shouldn't care so much what people think about you that you're willing to lie to maintain whatever it is that you think they value that like there are places beyond which that becomes counter productive clearly but of course well i mean i read the comments in youtube particularly and i pay attention to them and if you know 30 people say something like here's something i do and i probably did it to you um when i'm interviewing i interrupt more than a certain percentage of my audience would like i get that's my comments it's like just let them speak you interrupt too much so i just try to shut up more now do you know the joke what's the joke knock knock who's there the interrupting cow sorry that's a stupid joke but it's a stupid joke anyhow so you know i read those and that's what people think and and then i i think okay i should probably try to interrupt less but i get excited and and then with zoom there's a lag that makes it harder but i do pay attention and you should pay attention i think when you know i hear a lot of people say don't let the opinions of other people hold you back from taking action on your goals because i think a lot of people will listen to other people's opinions and they feel scared to do something based on someone saying i told you so or you couldn't do this or you're not good enough how do we overcome that those opinions that keep us playing small that hold us from putting our creation into the world or going out well generally someone else's comment is unlikely to bring you to a halt unless you value that comment it so imagine you're going to pursue a goal but you're full of doubts and so 40 percent of you is doubts and 60 of you is pursuing the goal and then five or six people object and they object using the doubts well you're you're it's that's going to be really hard on you so how do we overcome well partly what that means is you you probably haven't thought it through completely like what are you doing and why and if you have a bunch of doubts and they haven't been addressed then you're vulnerable at that point and it may be that your goal is not everything it could be and it may be that your strategy isn't fully fleshed out and so you have to have a conversation with your doubts and take them seriously and see if you can construct a goal that's that you're on board with and then then a doubt pops up because someone criticizes you it triggers a doubt and you look at the doubt and you think okay here's the doubt and this is why what i'm doing you know maybe won't work but then you think but i but this i've thought this through and i thought this through and i thought this through and that all works and so no that that isn't going to stop me you know so i look and i think well i'm i'm i'm writing something why well i want to figure out this problem i want to think about this problem why well it's an engaging problem but it's a problem that many people seem to have so that discussing it and figuring it out seems to be useful why well because the more of us who take problems seriously and try to address them and communicate about them the fewer problems we might have and the less suffering they'll be and suffering doesn't seem to be a good thing unnecessary suffering maybe we could work towards it and maybe that's what i should be doing and that seems to be what's ethical and and that's it like and you might say you might say well what if you doubt that doing what's ethical is right well it's not that easy to construct an argument that supports the idea that having more unnecessary suffering in the world is good so i would say you know you want to put yourself on firm moral foundations and people talk about morality all the time this is what you should do or you're a bad person it's arbitrary you know it's it's got this ring of patriarchal tyranny but that that's based on a misapprehension of what morality is it's like do you want to be tortured by your conscience like how i mean how pleasant do you find it to be tortured by your conscience it's horrible how horrible like is there anything worse excruciating yeah i don't know if there's any worse i mean it's up there you gotta live with it yeah for as long as you have it yeah well i think that's a universal experience a near universal experience so you you live ethically when you're not violating your conscience right well there isn't anything better than that that might not be good enough it might not even be good like let's say you manage it things can still come along and take you out sideways but but the purpose of living ethically is so that so that you have some peace yeah what are and it's real yeah the ethical torment and and the the peace that emerges as a consequence sorry i want to interrupt you no no problem what is the uh the biggest doubt you face at this stage of your life and how are you working to overcome it the biggest doubt i have is whether or not i'm going to be healthy enough to to continue by far that's it's it's and it's an it's a continual it plagues me continually continually every second i'm so ill how are you uh navigating that um well i i with great care and and effort i mean i mean i i wake up at eight even though i'm not my sleep is not restorative at all um it's disrupted and i i don't know why so i sleep but it's not restorative i've had my sleep monitored so i don't go into deep sleep um i get up at eight period i sauna for 45 minutes i walk seven miles i work out i write i do my work i stick to a very specific schedule and i hope that that's that i can manage that and that i'll improve across time yeah so but um we'll see but it's touch and go all the time i've got about uh 14 minutes to be respectful of your time uh until you've let me know that that's the our time we've got so i want to ask i want to ask a different question and get to the final few questions to be respectful of time and before i ask this question around money uh and the psychology of money i want people to make sure they get this book be on order uh 12 more rules for life and make sure you pick up uh your your other book as well which is amazing which is uh 12 rules for life and antidote to chaos but make sure you get a copy of this book or a few copies and get them for your friends because it'll be extremely life changing when you start going through this uh i haven't heard a lot of people talk to you about money maybe i've just missed it and maybe you've talked about it a bunch but i haven't seen it that's a good that's a good that's good question yeah definitely i i don't want to make assumptions but uh if i was making assumptions uh college professors aren't typically multi-millionaires yeah am i fair to say that's semi-accurate but if you're a professor you're not making millions you're not this financially abundant uh human you have maybe a good salary but you're not bringing in financial abundance at the next level uh and i'm not going to try to assume where you're at financially before you became more famous in the youtube and the media sensation and the books but i'm assuming that you've accumulated a lot more money than what you had let's say five years ago how have you learned to manage the mindset around the the wealth that has come to you the level of wealth that has come to you how have you managed it how do you deal with it now as it keeps coming in i'm assuming more comes in with every book and success and what were your thoughts about money before this level of money came to you i'd never made any bones about being an evil capitalist i'll but you an example so i built this i told you about this software that that online program that helps people write out their past and their present and the girls goals for the future we tested the future part of that to see if it worked and it worked quite well it was effective and i sell it why don't i give it away well because that's not the right price at pricing decisions money is very very complicated and pricing is very complicated pricing is value it's like well is the right price for something zero well probably not first of all because it doesn't take zero to make it or sustain it like there's an infrastructure customer service infrastructure there are people working on constantly who could be making new things if you can't sell it what makes you think it's worth anything if you can't sell it what makes you think you've got your communication right you can use price as an indication of whether what you're doing works if no one will pay for it maybe it's no good or maybe you're not talking about it properly so i wanted to make things that would work that would work in the marketplace it was a challenge there's the challenge aspect of it too so i never had contempt for money um and money for me was always well it was a challenge that's one thing and for many people who are motivated by money money actually serves as a challenge it's like can i can i make more of this it's it's a competition in some sense like a game um because you might think well they want all the things it's like yeah sort of no you kind of if you're sensible you sort of max out on things pretty rapidly can i buy so much and use it well and it did yes and i'm not hedonistic in a manner that money would aid in in some sense of course um partly because i'm not 16 you know i'm 60 so what am i going to do with it and i've also learned be careful what you buy because it's not clear who owns who when you buy something like i knew this very rich couple and they had like six houses well the poor woman the female member of the couple all she did was worry about the houses like one house is bad enough because it's always falling apart six big houses fall apart all the time oh man so you know when you think well poor hershey had six houses it's like yeah yeah i know the problems of the rich right don't we wish ever don't we all wish we had those yeah fair enough but but there's still a point to be made there yeah um i put together a financial team i also had to abandon my supervision of my my financial affairs because i couldn't manage them but fortunately i had put together a team and people stepped in to manage it and and that's gone as well as could possibly be expected under the circumstances yeah and so um and that that is a source of security and i have accountants who do taxes and i hate doing my taxes i everyone does but maybe i hate it even more it seems to bother me a lot in any case that's one thing that that having this money has been useful for me is that i don't have to do my taxes now i have experts who can do that but i've farmed it out to people and hopefully not too carelessly um so so for someone that wants to uh attract more wealth gain more wealth make more money what do you think needs to happen psychologically for them in order to create that beyond the actions the doing the solving the challenges oh well a big part of it is well discipline like hard work what is it you work 15 more hours you make 40 more money i think that's the data warren farrell accumulated it's part of the reason men make more money than women because they work slightly longer hours but it actually produces a disproportionate return um people who make money aim at it generally speaking you know i'm not talking about people who inherit wealth but it's pretty easy to squander money you know even if you inherit it but i'm if you're not earning it if you you don't have you want to make more yeah yeah well conscientiousness which is dutifulness industriousness orderliness amount of time effort put in that makes a difference it makes a difference i would say if you're trying to uh produce a product and and and introduce it into the marketplace there are things you should definitely know um the product should work it should be reliable your customer you have to put your customer service in place if you despise sales and marketing you're making a massive mistake that's casual contempt it's really hard to sell something hardly anybody is a good salesperson it's an extremely demanding job and you can you know oh he's a salesman it's like yeah you try it yeah no i wouldn't sell out well that's because no one ever offered you the opportunity to sell out if you have 10 opportunities to sell out and you reject all of them it's like great claim moral victory until someone until you're in that position you're just not of interest that's why you're not selling out you have to understand the marketplace you have to communicate with your customers it's complicated and difficult so so don't despise the necessary components right all of these things are important the product the engineers the people who work on it the creative inspiration that's the entrepreneurial end make the product that's extremely necessary all the communication strategies those are crucially important because if you have a product and nobody knows about it then who the hell is going to buy it no matter how good it is so you you despise the things that are necessary to your success at the expense of your success so you gotta you gotta frame the reframe the way you think about those things you know you have to look at it's like sales it's like okay well you're not gonna sell anything then yeah so that's that's the end of that problem so or maybe you know you have moral qualms about engaging in the capitalist enterprise well you know good luck carrying that along with you yeah you know and if you maybe the qualms are well mer are merited it's like okay put aside a percentage of what you make to do something you know um what would you call it uh clearly not self-centered and generous with you can you can do that i mean the products that i'm selling some of them are what would you say they they have less ethical impact than others i do do some merchandising why um the merchandising of of me was taking place anyways you might as well do it yourself well i had my i got my son involved in it i thought well you know there's a market people want this we might we might as well put up a genuine place i mean lots of the merchandise that's being produced related to me i leave it alone i let people do that i don't bother them i don't chase them down if if they can make a living you know putting my quotes in acrylic blocks or making posters it's like that's fine as far as i'm concerned but we have some things posters and so on that and people want them so if they want them i don't see that it does any harm you know you might think it's kind of cheap you know what you know you know what i mean it's like it's it's like the disney vacation of philosophy but i am interested in you i'm interested in communicating with the public this is sales and marketing you know most academic work languishes well i don't have contempt for my my readers listeners and viewers i like them i hope they do well if they want a poster of the 12 rules and they find that useful hey okay if they find a lobster tie funny good it's fine with me and there's a bit of you know there's a bit of humor to it and sure and i can use that and so can my message a little bit of levity would be wonderful yeah where where can people get uh see some of your your stuff what's the best site to go oh if you just go to youtube channel there's a little bar underneath it that's jbp merchandise i mean it's absurd right there's also that element of absurdity which i i kind of and a surreal element to it that i find kind of interesting and and and ridiculous and perplexing and and hallucinogenic it's very very strange it's all fun you know it's all fun i want everyone to go buy a lobster tie and posters and the book i want everyone to get beyond order get a few copies for your friends as well i've got two final questions but before i ask the questions jordan i want to acknowledge you uh for a moment because i i know you went through a lot of you're still going through a lot of pain and challenge and adversity since the first time i interviewed you a few years ago to now and i also know that you went through a lot of pain and adversity with your your kids with your daughter specifically and other challenges that have happened in your life and i acknowledge you for continually showing up in a time of uncertainty in a time of maybe a loss of hope at different moments in a time of physical pain in a time of lack of sleep continually and non-restorative sleep the fact that you continue to show up and serve is truly to be acknowledged and i'm i'm so uh grateful that you take the time to come on my show and share this knowledge because i know the impact it'll have in the service of the message and all the work that you're doing for your own content and everyone else's that you're being on i'm really grateful that you've decided to continue to show up well whatever i might be doing for other people they're certainly doing that for me so i'm grateful to have the privilege the immense and staggering privilege of being attended to it's amazing you know um it's so so i don't whatever i might be uh what would you say sacrificing for it i'm gaining equivalently i've had so much support from people it's just absolutely staggering and so we appreciate you and you're making an impact on our lives and we hope you're balancing and taking care of your health as well that's the most important um i asked you two questions in the last interview that i'd love to ask you again i'm not sure if you're gonna remember them but i wanna see if you have the same or different response uh the one question is hypothetical it's called my three truths question i would like you to imagine that many many years away you get to choose the last day on earth for yourself but you eventually gotta go and you accomplish everything you want to create into the world you see your work come to life the impact the family everything happens and it's magical right but for whatever reason you got to take all your work with you so you got to take beyond order all your content your videos podcast it's all got to go with you to the next place but you get to leave behind three truths the three lessons the biggest lessons you've learned in your life that you'd want to share with the world and this is all we would have of your content left behind what would you see what would you say would be your three truths i would say have the faith strive to manifest the faith necessary to make things better rather than worse pray that you have enough terror to be frightened out of your own deceit and [Music] strive to be grateful regardless of regardless that would be that's good enough yeah i think one of one of your rules is be grateful in the suffering right in spite of it yeah that's the last rule and the one that i've wrestled with most i would say over the last especially the last two years yeah that's probably gonna be the hardest to find yeah well you know people have their reasons i outlined them in chapter 11 why are you bitter well here are the reasons well those are real reasons no wonder you know you listen to someone tell you about their life it's so typical so frequent catastrophic occurrences you know and yet people stumble forward positively and it's a miracle and a lot of that is it's see that chapter be grateful in spite of your suffering it's really a chapter about in in some sense about faith and courage and it it's it's an act of faith and courage to be grateful because there's reasons not to be and so it's like it's a decision and it's not like you make the decision and then you've got it you've done it right and then you have it it's it's a constant ongoing decision and the temptation to not to to be ungrateful to be bitter it's always there and compelling rationally compelling it's easy emotionally compelling yeah but it makes everything worse oh it's so true it's so true it's like eating candy you know it tastes good for a moment and then you feel sick for hours so you said you had three questions this is my final question right now okay so my final question is what's your definition of greatness the capacity and the capacity to utter and abide by beautiful truths jordan peterson thank you so much make sure you guys get the book beyond order subscribe to jordan's podcast youtube everywhere else online and jordan it's been a pleasure my friend thank you very much for being here thank you very much for the invitation and thank you to everyone who's watching and listening much appreciated if you're looking for more greatness in your life make sure to check out this video right here and also check out our free pdf the three secrets to unlock the power of your mind to help you change your life download it right here the lesson that i learned from her is go do it now like stop talking just just go do it if you don't have an excuse then you shouldn't be wasting time

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 4,949,692

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, jordan peterson, jordan peterson interview, jordan peterson speech, jordan peterson motivation, never be lazy again, why you waste your time, 12 rules for life

Id: ylTHKT4HSBc

Length: 142min 5sec (8525 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021