Jocko Podcast - 98: W/ Dr. Jordan Peterson. Facing your Inner Darkness. Breaking Your Wretched Loop. The Ultimate Hero is Dangerous but Disciplined.

Episode Date: November 1, 2017

0:00:00 - Opening 0:21:27 - Who becomes evil?  And Why? 0:31:59 - Taking ultimate responsibility.   0:41:43 - Dangerous but disciplined. 0:59:40 - Discipline and kids psychology. 1:05:08 - How to be successful.  Breaking the loop. 2:04:42 - Self Authoring. 2:34:36 - Determining personality traits. 2:53:35 - The rise of Jordan Peterson. 3:00:29 - Using praise and rewards carefully.  Participation trophies? 3:13:25 - Support JockoStore stuff, Super Krill Oil and Joint Warfare, Origin Brand Apparel, with Jocko White Tea and Psychological Warfare (on iTunes). Extreme Ownership (book), The Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual.  3:41:39 - Closing Gratitude.   Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 98 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. They asked us to take off our headscarves and loosen any buttons to reveal our chests. That courtyard became the marketplace where ISIS men came and chose girls they liked, though they first sent all the older women to another place and the women with babies and other children to another place. We do not know the whereabouts of these women, and that includes my mother and my sisters. I had my period that night, but no matter how much I told him, I have my period, he did not believe me.

He ordered me to strip naked in his room. Then he stuck his finger in my vagina and saw that I was indeed bleeding. Only then did he believe, but that did not mean he left me alone. Instead, he put the air conditioner on a really high volume, said that I am to sit still in my nudity the whole night, and he molested me throughout the night. By the time morning arrived, I was frozen both physically and psychologically. Nothing mattered after that point. I didn't know I had not seen the worst of it yet.

He would put on horrible sexual movies and would do all kinds of things to me. They all had long hair and long beards. But the worst of all is their smell. I've never smelled such awful smell in my life. They do not bathe. They feel more like beasts than human. Only Yazidi women are taken as slaves. Shia women, they burn alive.

We saw one Shia woman burned alive in front of us. Christian women, they leave on the condition that their family must pay a fee for ISIS for being Christian in ISIS territories. And Sunni women are left alone as long as they follow ISIS orders. If they don't, they are whipped and tortured. Some of them are the wives of our captors. Some of the wives were as helpless as we were. And some were very mean women who encouraged their men to rape us.

As long as a girl has some breast, she is considered a woman. And that entitles them to rape her. Some girls are as young as 10 and 11 years old. I have no past and no future at the moment. I am stuck in my anger and pain at what ISIS did to my family, my community, and myself. I have a new behavior that I can't stop, including washing my mouth over and over again. There are nights I wake up more than one time to wash my mouth as I remember what they did to me and how they forced themselves on me. I am a dead person now. I have no life.

I only hope that my mother comes back from capture so my life can resume. So those are excerpts from an article that was in the New York Times by Zainab Salby. And the quotes are from Leila, which is a pseudonym, who was a Yazidi woman, captured by ISIS and obviously kept as a slave. And she eventually escaped and gave that interview in a camp in Earl Beale, which is in northern Iraq, which at the time was an ivory. Iraqi government-controlled city. And I would say this.

If you think that evil does not exist in the world, you are wrong. It does. And it's not just individuals scattered around. These are groups of supposed human beings that are systematically implementing

heinous and evil acts on totally innocent people. And I have obviously talked about evil before on this podcast 20 years ago during the genocide in Rwanda, 50 years ago in Vietnam during the Mili Massacre, 75 years ago in Nazi Germany, 80 years ago in Nan King, under the Imperial Japanese Army. And those things are in the past.

But it is important to remember that evil is still happening now. And I know that it is hard for us to see that, especially here in America, in this unbelievably well-protected bubble that we live in, a bubble that is provided and protected by young and brave men and women who volunteer to go out and hold the line. But the evil is out there. It always is.

And tonight, we have a guest on the podcast that I think, has a very clear understanding of evil, of where it comes from, and how it manifests itself in the world. And he also has an incredible understanding of the good and what we as people can do to live our lives better for ourselves, for our families, for our communities, and for the world. his name is Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. And I'm not exactly sure when I heard Dr. Peterson for the first time. But as I dug into the content online, what really struck me was that what he was saying, and he was an academic, an unbelievably smart, unbelievably well-read person.

And yet when he said things, they aligned almost. perfectly with things that I believed and things that I had learned in my life. And so here we were these two radically different people from different backgrounds. One highly educated college professor, the other, a military veteran and a certified knuckle drager. And yet, our thoughts were very aligned. and the way that I would hear him tie history and thought around human psychological evolution and to the social structure and to societal structure and the way he laid out the maps

of meaning behind the way we think it was very useful and it's helped me realize that the way I feel in my gut, my instincts about people and about the world, they're there for a reason. It isn't random. There is some reason behind the way that I think and the way that we think. So, Jordan, thank you for coming on the show. Very glad to be here. That's quite the beginning. Yeah, I think, like I said, it's very easy for people to lose track of the fact that while you're sitting in an air-conditioned space somewhere, thinking about your next Netflix movie that you're going to watch, there are people that are in the most horrible and heinous situations that are being put on them by other human beings.

And it doesn't really stop. Yeah, well, it's a hard thing for people to contemplate. I mean, there's two elements to life that are hard to contemplate. I mean, one is that the suffering that's attendant on life fundamentally, and then the other is the malevolence of people. And we're not, in the modern world, we don't really think about those as fundamental realities in some sense, because we tend to think about material situations as fundamental realities,

but the metaphysical realities, the ethical realities are more real. And it's necessary to know that in order orientations, yourself properly in life. Like, you know, I never really took the idea of good, seriously, transcendent good, let's say, or ultimate good, until I convinced myself of the existence of, well, if it wasn't ultimate evil, it was sufficiently ultimate for me, you know, because I immersed myself in a study of the Nazi Holocaust and of what happened in Nanking and what happened with Unit 731, which is the most horrifying, that's the most horrifying material I've ever read, which is really saying something because there's plenty of horrifying material to read

and what happened in the Soviet Union and what happened in Maoist China, which, you know, so few people know about now. And I guess what I found most striking, especially with regards to what happened in the Soviet Union was, well, and in Germany, for that matter, was that there were a number of people who were writing about it, like Victor Frankel, a psychiatrist who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, and also Alexander Solzhenitsyn who wrote the Gulag Archipelago,

which should be required reading, I think, for every American citizen, that there was some integral relationship between the moral failings of individuals and the catastrophic moral failings of the state and that that was directly causally related. So Solzhenitsyn made a great case with regards to the analysis of the Marxist catastrophes in the Soviet Union that they were tied integrally not only to,

to that dogma, but also to the willingness of the typical citizen to swallow endless lies and act them out. And he included himself in that set of deceitful people, let's say. And it really struck me that, because those writings are so profound, Victor Frankl's another good example, you can't really read that without it really punching you. You know, it really struck me that it really struck me that it was possible. that there was some direct integral relationship between the individual moral choices that people made in their day-to-day lives

and the broad-scale social movements that happened around them. And I think I've come to believe that that's the case. And, well, certainly the story that you read, the person who was written about the rapist was making all sorts of individual choices, right? And, you know, he might have been convincing him, that he was on some kind of holy mission.

But I guess that would be in part so that he could stand looking at himself in the mirror in the morning without running away, screaming if he saw what was really there. One of the things in Frankel, that kind of in Mansearch for Meaning, that definitely two points that really hit me hard when I was reading it was one is I didn't understand

the extent to which the Capos, which were the Jewish prisoners that got taken on board to help. and would get special treatment. Number one, I didn't realize the extent to which they were in existence. I knew that I knew what they were, but I didn't realize that they were as aggressive as they were. And the other thing that hit me is the paragraph or the lines where he's saying that the best of us didn't make it out.

And that if you were going to live, you had to do things that you wouldn't want to maybe do. and maybe if you were a better person, maybe you wouldn't do them. And to me, that was harsh. I mean, this was his admitting that, that if you wanted to survive as a person in that situation, you might have to take someone's piece of bread. You might have to move a number on a list to get someone else sent down to the execution area

a day earlier than you. and that happens to postpone your execution long enough that you can make another move. And that's a scary thing. You know, you saw the same thing with Sojanitzin's description of the gulags because they were run in large part by the inmates. But I think that that's a really good metaphor for totalitarian states in general, you know, because we like to think that a totalitarian state is made up of innocent, oppressed individuals who are under the thumb of an evil tyrant and that all of the catastrophes are cascading from the top down, but I don't think that that's true.

I think that it's more like a holographic structure where the tyranny exists at every single level, so it exists psychologically, and it exists within the family, and it exists within the mid-level organizations. And so, well, you know, in Eastern Germany, for example, one out of every three people was a government informer. So what that meant is if you had a family of six people, that two of them you couldn't trust.

And you can't just say that that's a consequence of the top-down structure. A tyranny is something that exists everywhere simultaneously once it gets a grip. And it's easy for people to say things like, well, I was just following orders. And, you know, I'm not trying to put myself in a position where I'm claiming that if I was in that position, I wouldn't have followed orders in the same way. I mean, God only knows till you get there, right? That's for sure. But what that did to me was focus my attention more and more on the necessity of individual responsibility.

I thought if it was individuals in the final analysis who were responsible for the great evils of the 20th century, which I think is a reasonable way of conceptualizing it, then it might be individuals who could be responsible for whatever good there might be in mankind that could help us avoid those situations in the future. And I thought of that as an alternative in some sense to nihilistic disbelief and ideological possession, you know, because if your group identity is too tight, then you start acting like they, like they, well, like a cog and a mob, and that's a very bad thing. But then if your group identity disappears completely, well, then you're left alone and bereft. And so those are bad alternatives, right? You're sort of damned if you do and damned if you don't.

And it was very difficult to understand that there might be a third path between those two. I couldn't see the existence of anything because people need belief systems in order to exist, right, to maintain psychological stability and to maintain sociological stability as well. But then if the beliefs get too rigid, then they turn into a raging totalitarian mob. So maybe you let that go because you don't want to play that game, but then you dissolve because you have no identity. that's not acceptable either. When I first laid that out that clearly,

it was really hard on me because I couldn't see a third path to that. But then I started to realize, and this was a consequence of reading the sorts of things that we already talked about, but also of starting to understand the underlying structure of mythology

and what the heroic path meant essentially, and that meant adoption of supreme moral responsibility as an individual. Now, there's this idea in the New Testament, which is a really interesting idea. It's one of these bottomless ideas. And I mean that literally. You could study it forever and never get to the bottom of it. And the idea is that Christ is the person who takes the sins of mankind on himself.

And there's something redemptive about that. And that's actually a really dark idea, because what it means, as far as I can tell, what it means, at least what it means psychologically is that when you read these terrible things, You have to understand that you're reading about you. If you don't understand that you're reading about you, then you don't actually understand the stories, you know, because you put yourself in the position where you're automatically the good person who would never do anything like that. And then these other people are, well, they're devils in some sense, right? And it's very easy for people to make that division. But it's a horrific realization when you think that that devil that you see outside is the same thing that's inside and that you don't know until you're put in a situation like that,

you might do. And then it's even worse because if you look at the historical evidence, you know, it was ordinary people in some sense that produced the catastrophes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and Maoist China. I mean, they might not have originated it, but they certainly had the option to say no at different parts, different steps along the way, and they didn't, you know, and these things do happen one horrible thing at a time. There's this great book, called ordinary men, which describes the descent of a German police force from ordinary bourgeois middle class men, essentially, just ordinary policemen, who actually were raised before the Hitler youth. They weren't indoctrinated, you know, as young people, and they were brought

into Poland to sort of mop up after the Germans had walked through, and it describes how they descended into the sort of people who would take naked women out, naked, pregnant women and out into the middle of fields and shoot them in the back of the head. And what's horrifying about the book is that the author, Browning, details the stages by which this occurred. And it's, well, for example, the commander of this unit told the men that they were going to have to do terrible things, but that they could go home if they wanted to. And then you think, well, there's an out.

But then if you really think about it, you think, Well, they're a tight, tightly knit quasi-military organization. And one of the natural thoughts under that circumstance would be, well, I'm not going to leave my comrades to do all the dirty work. That would just be a matter of cowardice. And so you can see that, you know, that there's an ethical requirement that would keep you there to begin with. And then they were... Well, you're doing what you just said, which is taking the burden of this sinful activity on yourself. If you let everyone else do it, then you're not acting heroically.

Well, right. And so it was easy for the men to get entrapped into that. And then, you know, the requirements for their horrific action kept ramping up. And like each time they accepted the requirement of doing one horrific thing, the probability that they would accept the next requirement increased. And what is also really interesting about that book, Ordinary Men, is that it's not like these men didn't suffer. Like, they were suffering terribly. They were physically ill.

They were vomiting. They were tearing themselves apart. psychologically, you know, but they didn't quit. So that's a great book because if you want to know how you walk down the, how you, how you can be enticed to walk down a terrible path, that's the book to read. And it's very frightening because if you read it properly, then, you know, you have to read it again, as I said, as if you're one of the people to whom this is happening, not the victim, but the oppressor, you know. And I mean, you can also read it as the victim. That's fair enough. But. but it's ordinary people who participate in these things and that's a very very terrifying thought we actually covered that book on this podcast and both of yeah yeah both victor frankl and and ordinary men uh yeah um it's interesting because i as i as i you know i've watched all your stuff read and one of the things that i was thinking about is you know you talk about where the the the hero comes from where this idea comes from and how we ended up looking at

at these types of people as they're good. And it happens over ages and ages and generations and generations of saying, oh, that's a good quality and that's a good quality. And there's these 10 people that are all considered good people. And they all have this couple qualities in common. So those are good qualities. And eventually that becomes elevated to the point where we say that's a hero. And what I was thinking of.

So that's what happens. And now we all have this elevated thing to look at and say that's something we can aspire to. That's where we want to go. That's where we want to be. We want to help and we want to support. do we want to make sacrifices for the tribe? How do we end up, or who ends up saying, I see something evil, and I'm going to follow in that direction? Well, I think that the story of Cain and Abel is a really very tightly constructed representation of that process.

Because, I mean, it's a very strange story because, well, for a variety of reasons, first of all, it's very ancient. Second of all, it's the first story about human beings, mythologically speaking, within the Judeo-Christian canon, let's say, because Adam and Eve aren't real people, right? Because they're formed by God. Canaan Abel are the first people, and they're a pair of hostile brothers. And so the first thing that says is that sibling tension within families is a universal truth, and that can get murderous. And if you don't know that and you can't see that, then you're not watching your children carefully enough. So because what siblings can torment each other to a great degree, and it's something that you should strive diligently to observe and to quell.

But then there's this, the next part of it that's so interesting is the idea of sacrifices is introduced, and that it took me a long time to understand what sacrifice meant, because on the surface of it, especially the way it's acted out, like burnt offerings and that sort of thing, it just seems like, Well, it seems so archaic and distant from us that it's not really comprehensible, but partly from reading Jean-Piege, and Nietzsche, for that matter, I started to understand that people often acted out conceptions before they understood what they meant. You know, and we act out a lot of things we don't understand because we're much more complex than we can represent. So we're always acting out things we don't understand. But so there's this idea in Cain and Able that you have to make sacrifices in order to stay on the good side of goal.

And so I thought about that practically, say, not so much metaphysically, but practically, and realized that that was equivalent to the discovery of time, of the future. Because we do act, and this is a peculiar discovery of human beings, and maybe a consequence of our expanded intelligence is that we're actually aware of the future. And we actually treat the future as if it's something that you can bargain with. Now, partly it's because the future is other people, and they remember your reputation, they remember your past action, and if you do someone a favor, then that favor is in some sense stored up in the future. So you could think about the future as a place of judgment about your moral actions. And it's not that far from that to imagining a God who's keeping track of that or who even is that. But in any case, the idea of sacrifice emerges in the story of Cain and Abel.

And Cain and Abel both make sacrifices to God in order to stay on his good side, let's say. And what a sacrifice means is that you give. up something of value in the present so that you can be, so that you can improve the future. And, you know, that's no different from what we call discipline. It's exactly the same thing. It's just that concretely acted out version of that. And so, you know, the idea basically was that, well, God was in the transcendent heavens. And the first question would be, well, why is that?

And it's like, well, if you go out in a really dark night and look up at the sky, you have a sense of what's beyond you, what's transcendent, what's infinite. And so to associate that with the highest of values is a reasonable association, right, from an emotional point of view. So it's not particularly primitive. It's a smart metaphor or it's a smart intuition. And it's above you. And, you know, we tend to think of when you're moving towards an ideal, that you're moving up, that you're moving above, you're moving to the mountaintop, right? You're going up, not down.

And so it all sits within that same framework. And it's partly because when you go up, like on a mountain, you can see for long distances, right? So all those things are tangled together. So anyways, so the idea is that you have to give up something of value now so that you make the future better. And sometimes it's even something you love now. And that's a good example, too, because often the things that stop us from moving forward are our attachments to things that we should no longer be attached to, right? And in fact, you can almost make that definitional.

If you're not moving forward in your life, there's a high probability that you have some idea or some mode of action or some habit that you're so in love with that you won't let go of it. So, all right, so Kane and Abel make sacrifices. And there's kind of a hint in the story that it's just a hint that Kane sacrifices are sort of second rate. But in any case, it's ambivalent.

hey but but able he just does wonderfully well and everything works out for him and everyone knows people like that you know and so god accepts his sacrifices but for some reason he rejects canes and maybe it's the arbitrariness of god or maybe it's because cane's heart isn't in the right place when he's making his sacrifices which is more likely and so cane goes and has a chat with god and he says basically what he says is something like how in the world world can you possibly justify this universe that you created? You look at me and I'm breaking myself in half trying to adapt and to make things right and it's not working and then there's this able character and things come easy to him and everything is flourishing for him and so like what the hell? And if you

don't understand that question then you're not thinking because it's very very frequently the case when a serious catastrophe besets you in life that you essentially ask you. exactly that question. What's the meaning of life? What's the purpose of the world? How come they're suffering? And it's easy to become resentful and vengeful as a consequence of that. And so you've got to think about what state of mind having your sacrifices rejected puts you in, especially when you see someone who's successful, because that's where the jealousy and resentment starts to, starts to, what, fester is probably the right word. And so God says to Kane exactly what he doesn't want to hear, which is, well, yeah, okay, but you have made lots of

mistakes in your life, so he basically says, sin is at your door like a predatory and sexually aroused animal, and you've invited it into your house to have its way with you and produced something creative as a consequence. So he's used a sexual metaphor, you know, and so that you've willingly gone down the negative path, and you've allowed that to enter into you and to operate in a creative manner, and you've spun off all these terrible thoughts and this justification for not acting properly, and that's why things aren't going well for you, and so don't lay that at my feet, which is the most brutal possible message he could have got. And so then he leaves the presence of God, let's say, and it says in the story that his countenance fell, which meant he

was basically enraged, and so what does he do? He goes out and kills Abel, and then that's a very fascinating idea because Abel is his ideal, so he kills his ideal. And when you kill your ideal, you're lost. And then he does that to take revenge on Abel, but also to take revenge on God, which I think is extremely interesting and a deep, deep idea. Like these kids who shoot up high schools, for example, you cannot understand what they're doing unless you understand this story of Canaan Abel. You cannot understand what possesses them until you can understand that someone, even someone who doesn't believe, it doesn't matter. It's the psychological state of mind that matters.

Is they're out for revenge on being itself? And that's why they produce as much mayhem as possible in the shortest period of time. That's why they sacrifice innocent people, because it's much more vengeful and demonstrative to kill innocent people than to kill guilty people, right? Because it's a worse sin, so to speak. And then they kill themselves. and they kill themselves as a final demonstration of their belief in nihilism and the horror of existence.

Because you might say, well, why don't they just kill themselves first and save everyone the trouble? You know, and there's narcissism in that too because they know their names are going to be splashed across the page. That's their notoriety instead of their accomplishment. And, of course, the media is unbelievably complicit in that. But, well, so when you're talking about motivation for evil, then you have to understand. what it is that's driving it, and it is a deep resentment about the structure of being for being what's saturated with suffering, but also for rejecting your sacrifices, and that produces the bitterness of failure.

And I'll stop with this. One of the things that's really interesting about the Old Testament, and the Jews in the Old Testament, is that they don't take the path of Cain. Every time they're walloped by God, which is like fairly frequently, they say, we must have done something wrong and we have to set ourselves right. And that's an unbelievably heroic attitude because that's the alternative to cursing fate. It's like you take the responsibility for failure onto yourself and you think, well, if I was just, maybe if I just had my act together a little bit more, if I took advantage of every opportunity that was put in front of me,

if I wasn't resentful and bitter, then I could have done something that would have tilted the situation in a different direction. And like, that's almost inevitably true. Well, it's interesting. And again, this is kind of where when I would hear you say things like that. So, as you know, I wrote a book called Extreme Ownership, the opening chapter of the book is a horrible situation with a fratricide, happens on the battlefield.

So friendly forces, killing friendly forces, some of those forces being mine. And, you know, it's all these people I could blame and all these little incidents that happened that I could have said, well, you know, we had this radio cryptographic change that happened in the middle of operation and it had people who weren't able to talk to each other. And we had these Iraqis that we didn't speak English. We had these units that we hadn't worked with before.

And they did things that we didn't expect. And there's plenty of blame to go around. And essentially I said, hey, you know whose fault this is? This is my fault. I'm the commander. And so when I hear you say things like that, it strikes me that you uncovered this through your study of history. and philosophy and religion. And I learned it, you know, as like I said,

a certified knuckle-drager out on the battlefield that realized, you know, if you're going to exist as a leader and as a human, then you need to take responsibility for what happens around you. And that's again... Yeah, you have to take, well, the religious notion in some sense is that you have to take ultimate responsibility

and that, in some sense, the things that happen around you, I mean, this is, Dostoevsky, I think, said something like, every man is responsible for everything that happens to him and everything that happens to everyone else. And that's, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, it's a crazy statement, right?

It's a crazy statement. And he was a pretty extreme person in many, many ways. But there's a level at which that's metaphysically true, you know, because what happens is that it's, it's failure to act often. That's the most catastrophic, you know, I mean, I've, it's to not do the right thing when the situation presents itself.

And it's very specific. You know, you're constantly in situations where you could do the right thing if you were willing to take a risk that's actually of relatively moderate size and you know that you could take the risk and you know that you should take the risk and you don't. And that happens to people all the time. And then what happens is the thing that they didn't oppose, grows a little bit, and they shrink a little bit. And that starts a loop, hey. And so, and you say, well, how do you take responsibility for the world? And the answer is, well, you also have to do it

with a certain degree of humility, because what do you know? You know, and this is part of the reason that I'm so opposed to the activist culture on college campuses. You don't teach 18-year-olds to go and demonstrate about capitalism, you know, because they don't know anything, and they have problems in their own life that need to be solved that are local. And the local problems aren't trivial, you know, they're not disciplined. They're not looking at the world in a straight way. They're not taking responsibility for themselves or for their actions, their sexual actions, among others. They're not taking responsibility for their family. They're not looking at how they could contribute to the community. They don't understand the fact that they don't know anything.

And so they should be taught to start locally and to put things together that they could put together, you know, to make their bed and to clean up their room and to attend their classes with regularity if they're going to university, because that's part of the implicit contract, and to straighten up the things around them that are actually within their power to straighten up. And then what happens is that if you do that, let's say religiously, which I suppose would be the same as in a disciplined manner, that your realm of influence starts to grow, but it grows in a positive way, just like you can go, you can end up in hell one step at a time. And that's extraordinarily well documented. You can end up at the opposite place of that one step at a time,

but it's also that same gradual process. You don't get to leap from being a 17-year-old knothead who doesn't know anything and who isn't disciplined to the critic of Judeo-Christian society. You just don't know enough to do that, especially when you can look at your own life and think about many things that you're doing that you know are wrong that you could fix that you aren't fixing. And that's the crucial thing. This is this this mode of thinking isn't asking people to stretch themselves beyond what they're capable of. It's just asking them to stretch themselves to the point that they are capable of and seeing what happens. And that works. It works. I've had many people write me over the last year and this is a great thing, really. It's a great thing who said

that they started to tell the truth, or at least not to lie, because who can tell the truth, right? But at least you can not lie. And that they started to put things in order around them, that they could put in order, and that, you know, the positive things just started to happen like mad, and they're not nihilistic, and they've got a purpose in their life. And so, you know, thank God for that, and it does work. I was trying to think of how to stop the loop of my sacrifices have been rejected. And the way that you stop that loop is instead of saying my sacrifices were rejected. So my hard work, my effort, everything that I'm doing to try and move forward, it's not working.

And if you want to go towards hell, you keep saying, well, it's not working, but it's because of everyone else. They're rejecting me. They're not accepting what I've done. Whereas if you say to yourself, oh, it didn't work, okay, it's my fault. What can I do better? and that's how you start moving in the other direction, which is... Yeah, well, at least you have control. And, you know, you don't even necessarily have to think it's your fault,

although that's a reasonable way of looking at it. You could minimally just accept the fact that it's your responsibility. You're stuck with it, and you could actually change it. And once you know, too, that if you're failing repeatedly, then there's probably something wrong. It's possible that there's something wrong with the way that you're conceptualizing the world. Because you have a choice, right? If you keep making sacrifices and they don't work, there's a binary choice.

And one is, well, there's something wrong with the structure of reality. And the other is there's something wrong with your approach. And so then you might say, well, let's take the first idea. There's something wrong with the structure of reality. It's like, you're really going to say that, are you? You're really going to come out and say, I know enough to judge the nature of being. And then the alternative is also. quite frightening because then you know you it's you that's making the mistakes and you might be wrong at a really deep level and that might mean that a lot of you has to burn off and be transformed maybe even things about yourself that you think are admirable and that you like because your position you know your yourself conceptualization is so warped and wrong and that's really daunting but you know when people set themselves up as the judge of being I mean I've written about this a fair bit in my new book which is called 12 Rules for Life when people set themselves up as the judge of being I mean I've written about this a fair bit in my new book which is called 12 Rules for Life when people set

themselves up as the judge of being, then they take on what can only be described as a kind of satanic arrogance, because they've actually taken to themselves the moral right to criticize the structure of existence itself. It's like, you better be careful when you do something like that, because you're setting yourself up as the judge of being. And the Columbine kids did that. Like, if you read what they wrote, that's exactly what happened. That's exactly what they say, that, you know, I've taken on to myself the task of the judge of being and found it wanting. And so I'm going to cause as much mayhem as I possibly can before I, you know, before I depart. And that's a very common story among people who do that sort of thing.

And it's so interesting because every time something like that happens, people go, well, we don't understand. It's like, no, you won't understand because they write about what they're doing. They tell you why they're doing it. But it's so, it cuts too close to the bone for people. And so they think, well, we don't understand how that can happen. You know, like there was a while back, I think it was in Connecticut where there was a bunch of elementary school kids shot, right? Because this is kind of a one-upmanship game.

And it's bad enough to shoot high school kids, but it's even worse to shoot kindergarten and elementary kids because they're even clearly more innocent. It's like, well, that's part of that vengeful spirit, you know, better to punish the innocent than the guilty if you're trying to make a statement about your hatred for the structure of reality. And these things, you have to understand these things, really you have to understand them at a religious level of analysis. Because there's no, well, that's what happens when you encounter evil, is that you're into the domain that can only be described by religious ideation.

And I don't say that lightly. You know, I've had many veterans come to talk to me now. And there are people who had post-traumatic stress disorder. And they've said that listening to my lectures has helped them out a lot because it's provided them with a philosophy of good and evil. And if you have post-traumatic stress disorder, you need a sophisticated philosophy of good and evil because otherwise you don't have any place to put your experiences. And that fragments and shatters you. It's no trivial matter to be touched by malevolence or to have it manifest itself within you unexpectedly. You know, it's physiologically destructive.

It shatters people. And you have to move from a naive interpretation of the world to a very, deep interpretation of the world if you're ever going to dig yourself out of that hole. You know, that's interesting. And one of the things that I was going to tell you or ask you about, so when I was a kid, I wanted to be a commando. Like, I don't really remember wanting to do anything else. When I realized that there was that role that you could play in life, that's what I wanted

to do. And a lot of my friends in the SEAL teams were the same way. That's what they wanted to do. And as soon as they figured out, like, oh, that exists, oh, I can do that. And I just have to sign this piece of paper and go do this stuff. And then that's what I'll be. Where does that come from? Well, I mean, that's a very good question.

I mean, I would say it's temperamental. You know, people differ tremendously in their temperaments. And to think that there's a warrior temperament is a perfectly reasonable thing to think. I mean, there's been whole cultures, many, many cultures who were devoted to fostering that warrior mentality, you know, where if you weren't like that, you were the outlier. I would say that's probably true of most human cultures across most of time. You know, we've been fortunate enough to live in relatively peaceful times, at least the vast majority of us. So the necessity for that, like right at the edges of actual warfare, is much less than it might be under other historical

circumstances, but it's a deep part of many people's nature. And so the question is, what do you do with that, right? And I mean, one alternative potential, potentially is criminal behavior. And, you know, the fact that so many people like watching movies about bad guys, you know, is an indication of how attractive that is to people. And I think the reason for that is that while Nietzsche observed at one point that most of what people regard as morality is just cowardice and what he meant by that was that people don't do bad things not because they're good but because they're afraid to do the bad things and then when they see people do the bad things they're actually really deeply attracted by that because it speaks to part of them that could go

beyond the rules and that's actually a necessary part it's a really necessary part like you don't make men safe by making them weak. In fact, they're much more dangerous when they're weak because they'll stab you in the back when they get the chance or take advantage of you when they get the chance. You make men safe, let's say, by making them strong and then by making sure that they're disciplined. And so, you know, you've got people like you have got this, let's say, warrior mentality that's a deep part of their temperament. And then you have some choices about what you might do with that. You might try to discipline it and bring it under voluntary control and integrated into your character in which then it can make you someone who's stalwart and indomitable and who will move

forward in the face of tremendous risk. And well, that's the optimal, that's the optimal pathway if you have that kind of temperament. And I think, like, it's the men that have the most, what would you call it? It's not aggressive exactly. but we'll leave it at that, aggressive and fearless temperaments that can be the best men. But it's like having a very powerful dog. You better discipline it because otherwise it's going to be a monster. Yeah. Well, I was a rebellious kid, right?

And I could have easily gone down the path of crime. And as a matter of fact, many of my friends that I left when they stayed at home, they did end up as criminals. and having big trouble with the law, or going down even paths of drugs and everything else that you can get into. But when we were kids or younger, everyone kind of had the same thing, but like you said, I'm so lucky

because I just signed that piece of paper and I saw that I could do something and I could take all that aggression and all that energy. I could do something that was good and positive. And we joke about that in the sea, teams that many guys, you actually, to be a good seal, you sort of have this criminal mindset that you've somehow harnessed and you keep under control most of the time. And occasionally it does get out of hand and we got guys that get in trouble and that happens. And if we only took guys that

would never get in trouble, we wouldn't have anyone in the ranks really. Yeah. Well, you also see too in the classic hero stories, I mean, you see this with Harry Potter, for example. which I'm making reference to because it was such a phenomena. I mean, when something makes welfare mother richer than the Queen of England, you shouldn't take note, right? And when kids are reading 500-page books and standing in line waiting for the next one, and when you produce a whole movie empire around something, you should take note of that. Well, Harry Potter's little team aren't the delinquents, right, who have no discipline.

But they're also not the good kids. They're the kids who will break rules when necessary. And that's the issue. Break rules when necessary. Now, the question is when is that necessary? Well, that's sort of the ultimate ethical choice. But, you know, why did that work for you, do you think? You know, like, why was it?

Well, two questions. One would be, why did you decide to step into a discipline structure? I mean, that's obviously very difficult. And why do you think you did that and some of the other kids that you knew that were like you didn't? It was really one of the most rebellious things that I could do was to join the military. So I come from a small New England town.

People get done with high school. They go to college. They get a job as whatever people get jobs as. They follow that very normal path. And I didn't even know anyone that joined the military. And so that was the most rebellious thing I could do. Oh, college, no. Education, no.

I'm going to go be a commando. That's what I'm going to do. And it was the most rebellious thing I could do. I think that's one of the reasons why I did it. It was also a complete breakaway from, you know, family. Oh, okay, I will have no reliance on you. You know, I'm going. You don't have to worry about me anymore.

I'm done. I will not rely on anyone else. I will be self-reliant, which I wanted to do. And so I think those are the main things that got me there. And then what's great about it for me was when I got there, you have a completely blank slate. And you have very clear directions of what you need to do to ascend the dominance hierarchy. You do this. You do this.

You follow these rules. You literally fold your underwear in this way when you're going through boot camp and you get a better grade on your military performance. So they give you very clear rules that you're supposed to. follow and very clear tasks that you had to do. And it was great for me because it was a blank slate because when I was in high school, I was a screw up. Not bad, but not good. And so I hadn't really set myself up properly. And now all of a sudden, all I had to do that. That was all gone. It didn't matter. The past did not matter at all. I had a completely blank slate. If you do this stuff properly, you'll, you'll do well and you'll ascend that hierarchy. That's a very interesting

thing because then it's not merely a matter of following a set of arbitrary rules. it's following a set of rules that have a clear path to success. That's a very different thing. And that's also something that's honest because the rules of the game are well established and then if you play it properly, you get to win. And that's a big deal as well. You know, and you mentioned the seal types,

and I've met a number of people like that, you know, they're capable of breaking rules, let's say, or maybe even inclined to break them. But I also think that this is part of the rule. reason that I'm an admirer of Carl Jung because Jung makes it very clear that see he was very interested in the barriers to enlightenment because if there's a if there's such a thing as being enlightened let's say then why isn't everyone enlightened if it's just a matter of taking the glorious root and and following your bliss let's say it's like well that sounds pretty easy why isn't everyone enlightened and

but Jung's thinking isn't like that at all you know he he believed that in order to transform your personality that, first of all, you had to be disciplined, that's for sure. But you also had to integrate that part of you that was terrible and capable of breaking rules and make it part of you. And so then, and I really like that idea. Well, here's an example. So about 20 years ago, I would say there was a newspaper headline in one of Canada's major newspapers. And it was the Minister of Foreign Affairs at that time, Lloyd Axworthy, and he was talking about what had happened with Milosevic in the former Soviet Union in Yugoslavia and the atrocities that were being committed. And he said that he was caught unawares by that

because he didn't have the imagination for that kind of evil. And I thought, well, you know, you think that what you're doing is signaling your virtue by making a statement like that. But from my perspective, all you're doing is stating your cowardice and your historical ignorance. because if you're going to be minister of foreign affairs, you bloody well better have imagination for that kind of evil. Because if you don't, then anyone who does wins, they beat you. And so, you know, again, in the Harry Potter stories, you see, he's touched by evil, right? He actually has a soul fragment that's embedded within him that's as black as anything can possibly be.

That's why he could talk to snakes. But without that, he wouldn't be able to have any victory. And that's exactly right psychologically, unless you, you can think the way that an evil person thinks, then you're defenseless against them, because they'll go places you can't imagine, and then they win. And so the best men I've met,

it was interesting even when I was in junior high and high school, because most of my friends dropped out, you know, by the time they were grade 10 thereabouts. And a lot of them were guys who developed physically. They're pretty powerful, and they're just damn sick and put up their hand to go to the bathroom. It's like, you know, they're not doing that anymore.

One of my friends got kicked out when he sort of challenged the gym teacher, you know, physically. And the gym teacher, he could do an Iron Cross. He was a tough guy. And so it was no trivial matter for my friend to stand up to him, but he got expelled anyways. But, you know, I noticed that it wasn't, it was often the kids whose character I admired that either quit or got expelled. And they were the tougher guys who were just sick and tired of following rules that didn't take into account their character. And then they'd go off and work in the oil rigs or whatever. And you could do that in Alberta at that time. That was really hard work, you know.

So it wasn't like they were necessarily taking the easy path, but like a harmless man is not a good man A good man is a very very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control and you know you also see that Like one of the central Female stories let's say if the hero archetype is the central male story there are variants of hero archetypes that are relevant to women and one of them is beauty and the beast and you know beauty is interested in the guy who isn't the beast. She's interested in the guy who's the beast, and that's exactly right, but she's interested in the guy who's the beast that can be civilized and disciplined, right, and who can use that in the service, well, let's say, of a family.

And that's exactly, well, that's exactly how it should be. So I gave a speech, one of my very good friends got married a few years ago, and I gave a speech. and at this speech he was a friend of mine seal and at this speech i was talking about what it was to be a man and what when i felt like i was a man and i said there was three things that i felt let me transition from being you know mentally insecure about who i was as a person to being okay i'm actually good with who i am number one was learning how to fight. And, you know, I got into Brazilian jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts and I learned how to

fight. And now all of a sudden when I looked at other people, I didn't, I wasn't posturing. I wasn't trying to pretend that I was tough. I knew that most people that I would encounter I could defeat in a physical altercation. That was number one. Number two was going into combat. Because even though you might be tough in a street fight or a fist fight with someone, when you're facing death, well, that's a whole other level. And for me, going into combat, well, what was I going to act like? Was I going to be scared? Was I going to be a coward? Was I going to be scared of death? And when I went into combat, I wasn't. I was fine. I was okay with the fact that I could die and I was okay with that. And I made good decisions and did what I was supposed to do. And the last

one was I got married and had kids because all of a sudden all these things these being aggressive and working to fight and be able to destroy in an efficient way well then I took that and combined it with okay now I'm going to take care of these my wife and our children and that's what I'm going to do and my point in giving this speech was he was a guy that had learned how to fight he was a guy that had been in combat and now there was one more step to take which was okay now you're going to get married and you're going to take care of these people so it's interesting that once again, that dichotomy that you talk about, it fits perfectly into the way I figured things out as a guy that went to high school and joined the military.

It's kind of crazy, but it reinforces what you always say, which is that there's deeper meaning. There's a reason why I'm thinking that. And the reason is because I've, because of the things that you talk about and the way these things are overlaid throughout history for human beings to have gotten to this point. Yeah, well, you acted it out, you know, which is what you're. supposed to do and it's also it's better to act it out and to understand it you know that's that's best it's better it's better to understand it and not acted out than to not understand it at all but the best is to act it out and understand it

because then you can you know then then the way that you represent the world and yourself is in accordance with the way that you act and that's that's optimized yeah it's it's something that I was kind of acting out again no no real guy like my guidelines were like I was raised in the seal team That was sort of my guidelines. And here's a good example. When I first got in the SEAL teams, there's no war going on. So what did a good SEAL do?

You know what you did? You went out and drank and got in bar fights. That's what a good SEAL did. So you know what I did? Went out and drank and got in bar fights. That's what, okay, that's what I'm supposed to do. It took me a while to figure out, oh, there's actually something more than that. Like, we're actually supposed to be preparing for war.

And so now, like you said, I definitely acted things out and sort of was on a decent path. but as I got older and more mature, and to this day, as I can look around and actually overlay the understanding on the way I've carried out, my life is very, it's very helpful to me, and it also helps me explain it to other people that see the path at Amman go,

they like that path. They would like to join me on that path. And I get guys that, you know, when I was in, I, you know, I kind of, I look like a serial killer for all practical purposes. That's the way I come across, right? Not creepy enough.

There's guys that would, you know, guys that would work for me or guys that would be around me and they'd see me and they'd kind of latch on to the fact that I was tough and aggressive. And some of those guys, they wouldn't catch the other part, which was that I was politically savvy and I was working and I was maneuvering and I was, you know, figuring things out and talking to my boss in such a way that we could get where we needed to be. and I was doing that whole other side. And so I'd get these guys that would end up not doing as well as they should do because they were just, hey, Jocco is just ultra aggressive and he gets after it. And so that's what I'm going to do and I'll be in the same place. The guys that would do well are the guys that said, oh, yeah, Jocko's awesome and he's aggressive and he gets after it.

He's also working and he's also maneuvering. He's also massaging the egos of the people around him. So make sure that they get positioned in a right spot where they can go to war in the right way. And so as I've gotten older, been able to tell people that more clearly, like, hey, it's not just about that side of the ultra-aggressive. You've got to be aggressive. You've got to be willing to fight. You've got to be willing to kill. And you've got to be willing to die. At the same time, you've got to be able to tamper and temper all those things in such a way that they can be controlled and disciplined.

Well, I also think that that's part of what makes a world peaceful in the final analysis. Because if you're around people who are dangerous but disciplined, then everyone watches their step. And that's exactly what should happen. Everybody should watch their step. And if there's no reason for that, then, well, there's no sanction for poor behavior, for example. Like, I mean, if you're going to discipline a child,

the child has to be convinced that you're a force that's worthy of paying attention to. You know, I see kids, there's a chapter in my book called, don't ever, don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. And I'm pretty happy about this chapter, although I suspect it'll be rather controversial. And, you know, it's predicated first on the observation that many people hurt their children physically and psychologically, you know, because everyone gets sentimental about the relationship between parents and children,

but that's especially in relationship to themselves because they think, well, you know, of course, I'm going to be a good, parent. It's like it's not so bloody obvious that you're going to be a good parent, you know. And so, and then what I see happening with people who don't know how to discipline their children is that the children run roughshod over them in their, let's call them, hierarchical disputes because children push for position in hierarchy and they do that behaviorally to sort of feel out the contours of the social structure. So, you know, your kid will act perfectly fine at home, let's say, at the dinner table, but then you take them to a stranger's dinner

table and all of a sudden they act out. And you think, what's up with you, your little monster? And what's up is that they're trying to figure out what the power structure is in the new. They don't know this, of course, but they're acting this out. They're trying to figure out if the same rules apply in this new situation as apply in the old situation. And they can't ask that and they don't even know that they are rules exactly. They're regularities that they've learned. And so they'll test and test. And then you have to show them that, yeah, it's the same here. It's the same in this situation. But lots of parents are very uneasy with disciplining their children,

partly because they believe that if you give a child infinite freedom, that's best for them, and that constraints are inappropriate, which is really just, well, I don't know what to say about that, except it's so untrue that it's very difficult to think of anything that's more untrue than that. But also, the thing is, is if you let your children take advantage of you, if you have an ounce of spine and an ounce of aggression, which you do, especially if you don't admit it, then you will take revenge on your children.

You know, so if they have a temper tantrum in a grocery store and embarrass you, which a child whose can he can do quite effectively, you know, because you wouldn't let them have that pack of crayons or a chocolate bar. And then, you know, you tell yourself it's okay and that you still, you know, that that really didn't make you that angry and it's okay, but you're fuming inside. And then you go home and half an hour later maybe the child is doing some interest little bit of work, maybe artwork or something, or does something good and comes up for a reward. It's like the probability that you're going to reward that child properly under those circumstances,

zero. You're going to take the opportunity to take your revenge. And if you don't know that, then you're not much of a parent. And so part of the trick with kids is that if your child is doing something that makes you dislike them, that you have to figure out how to stop them from doing that and teach them how to do it properly. You have to talk to your wife to make sure that that you're not being too much of a monster, and the same with her. But that discipline is partly what enables you to continue to like your child well you love them.

And even more than that, you know, parents talk about fostering self-esteem and fostering creativity and all of that in their kids. And I think that's misbegotten. It's shallow for a variety of reasons. First, it's not that easy to foster creativity because it's rare, and self-esteem is a very badly defined concept. mostly it's been used for harm, not good.

What your job is as a parent is to help your child learn from between two years old and say four years old, how to act in the world so that when people encounter them, people smile and are happy they're around. Because then, you know, I've seen kids who behave badly, and everywhere they go, people wear false smiles, and everywhere they go, people are relieved when they leave. And that means you think about that world from the child's perspective. everyone's lying and everyone hates them. That's their world.

And then if you have your child, you know, capable of adhering to minimal social requirements, like maybe being able to sit at the table in a civilized manner for an hour and being grateful for being fed, let's say, and knowing how to share and knowing how to pay attention to adults and not having that, you know, that kind of terrible, cynicism and arrogance that can develop even in a four-year-old child who's always had its way, then they'll interact with adults in a manner that bring out the best in the adults. And everywhere they go, everyone smiles at them and pats them on the head, maybe even tells them useful and interesting things.

And so the whole world opens up for them. And that's all a consequence of you having enough courage to admit to yourself that your child can do things that you don't like and that you will take it out on them if you don't straighten it out. And people don't like that idea because they think, well, I'd never do anything. You know, I love my child.

I'd never do anything to hurt them. It's like, yeah, God, right. You know, you're so asleep, if you think that, that there's almost no hope for you. You have to think, I'm way bigger than this child, and I'm way meaner, and I'm way trickier,

and I'm way more unpredictable. And so I better be very careful in my relationships with this child, so that the worst of me doesn't come out. And then that gives you enough intelligence to make a disciplinary framework that's minimal and enforce it properly and carefully. And then you can have an unbelievably good relationship

with your kids. So. And this idea of discipline, obviously, I talk about discipline a lot. And one of the things you were talking about earlier with regards to veterans and people that have listened to your lectures. And it's the same thing with me,

people that listen to this podcast or read the books. And one of the things that I've noticed and I've talked about and I've gotten a lot of positive feedback on is, you know, when you're in the military, you have this discipline. And beyond the discipline that's imposed on you, you also have a lot that you have to just hold the line yourself. I mean, when you're in the military, sure, you go through boot camp where there's a drill instructor that chilling and all that.

But once you're in the military, you're doing what you have to do. It's self-discipline. you learn that and you become self-disciplined. And what happens is guys get out and that's gone and that hurts them. And the other thing that hurts them is they don't know what their mission is anymore. And my big thing with people that I've been telling vets now is find what your next mission is. Go find whatever your next mission.

And I don't care what it is, but it has to be something. And I was listening to you talk on something the other day. and you were talking about how not doing anything, when people are not going anywhere, when they're failing, when they don't have the drive, it's because they're not accepting responsibility for anything. And so my way of saying that is like,

you need a new mission. You need to be responsible for something and you need to go and move towards some new mission. And do you encounter people that, or you see people, that's very problematic in the civilians. side as well where people they just don't know what they're doing. They don't take responsibility for anything.

That's part of this nihilism, you know, is that because first of all, you learn that truth is relative and that there's no real moral order. And, you know, that alleviates you of responsibility. And that's why that's such an attractive message to people. But the problem is that it kills you, it kills your soul, so to speak, because, well, when we can talk about this technically. So, you know, there are systems, neurological systems that underlie your, experience of negative emotion and there are neurological systems that underlie your experience of positive

emotion and they're separate systems they obviously interact but they're separate systems so but the positive emotion system well there's two of them but one of them sort of kicks in when you get something that you want so you know you're hungry and you eat and that feels good and so that's kind of the simple one um but there's a more sophisticated one that i think is even more active in people um and it's the one that tells you that you're moving forward towards something worthwhile. And that's actually the one that gives people that sense of meaningful engagement in their life on a moment-to-moment basis. So, and, and it's also, it's also something that doesn't have to go away. Like, if you're hungry and you eat, well, that's good, but it's over, and then you're on to the next thing, right? It's

not exactly sustaining. It's just necessary. That's called consumatory reward, by the way. This other reward system is incentive reward. And the incentive reward system works on dopamine, this neurochemical dopamine, which is also the neurochemical tracts that opiates and cocaine and amphetamines, the drugs that people really like to abuse alcohol often for some people, activate. And so you might say if you don't have enough meaning in your life, then you're more prone to addiction. And that's definitely the case. Even with rats, if you take a rat and you put him in a cage by himself and he has nothing to do, and then you give him access to cocaine, he'll get addicted to the point where he won't do anything but take cocaine. But if you throw the rat back in with a bunch of other rats and he gets to do rat things,

then it's very hard to get him addicted to cocaine. And so the purposeless rat is prone to addiction. Well, it's the same with human beings. Now, here's a corollary to that, which is really cool. So the magnitude of the reward you experience as you're moving towards a goal is proportionate to the importance of the goal. So that means the more important, the goal you pick, the more possibility there is for the kind of reward, let's say. It's really a state of being that is life affirming, and it is directly life affirming in that, you know, like if you're in a football game and it's an important football game and maybe you break a finger.

And, you know, normally that's a problem. It hurts and you're going to stop doing whatever you're doing. But if you're right in the middle of the game, then you'll be so amped up on this reward system. that it's analgesic. It stops the pain. It also suppresses anxiety. So if you have a purpose, then it's analgesic. It takes some of the pain out of life. It's very positive in that it motivates and energizes you and focuses you and makes you able to remember and pay attention. And it quells fear. And so those things are all direct. And so then you might think, well, what's the best possible goal? Well, and that's the purpose, I would say, of religious training and philosophical training. It's like, just what the hell are you doing in the world?

You know, and I would say, well, that's actually fairly easy to also lay out. And this is why nihilism is a much weaker philosophical position than it might appear to be. It's like, well, there are lots of terrible things happening in the world. If you're not, I don't care if you're a believer in atheist or a cynic of the highest sort, You listen to a story like the one that you read at the beginning of this podcast. And no one says, well, in 100,000 years, who the hell cares? So why does it matter? No one says that.

They listen to that. Not if they're human. They listen to that story. And they think, that's not good. It's like, that's right. That's not good. It's not good. You should do something about that.

Because it's self-evidently not good. So you might say, well, at least you can start your self-organization. by improving those things around you that are self-evidently not good. And that's easy, man. Anybody can do this. You can sit down for 10 minutes, say, well, I'm going to be honest with myself. Like, that's a horrible thing to do. I'm going to be honest with myself.

Okay, I'm probably doing a dozen stupid things that I could quit doing that are making my life less, more wretched, and also the people around me. And so you think, okay, what are those things? And, you know, if you really want to know, you have to want to know, You have to want to know. And you're going to get a bunch of information that you don't want to hear. But you'll know it's true. And you already knew it in some sense.

And then you can ask yourself, okay, that sucks and it's miserable. And it's not very self-affirming. Is there one of those things I would be willing to do something about, that I would actually do something about, you know, that I could do something about, that I would do something about? which is also another horrible question because as soon as you get an answer to that then you have a responsibility right

it's like oh god I have to go do that and it's something you don't want to do you don't want to do it that's why you've been avoiding it and so then it's right in front of you and it's like it's some little trivial horrible thing that you're not going to get a pat on the back for and no one's going to give you an award for it and and most people would just say

Jesus you should have done that a long time ago you're moron and but then you go do it that's kind of humility I would say And then you keep doing that. And it's like there's this injunction in the New Testament against praying in public. You know, and it's like virtue signaling. It's like you don't pray in public because then you go out and you show everybody just what a great believer you are and how good you are. It's like, well, that's what you're doing.

You're not trying to get your act together. That's something you do in private at home. You think, okay, what kind of moron am I? And what stupid things am I doing? And then what could I possibly do to get rid of one of those a little bit now? Well, anybody can do that. And that's associated with these great evils, you know, in this way that we've already described. It's like you're constraining, you're improving your character and you're constraining the kinds of actions and perceptions that you have that are going to make you sick of life and work against it.

Because failure does that. That's the cane story. It's like, keep screwing up, man. See what happens. If you think that isn't going to make you bitter, and if that isn't going to make you vengeful, and if that isn't going to make you work to hurt people around you, or at least not to help them, which is the same thing, then you're just not paying attention. Everyone knows that's true.

So, well, that's responsibility, right? And then so you take on this great task of putting yourself together, it gives you life meaning. And that also helps you be buttressed against the fact that there's lots of suffering in life and there's lots of malevolence. It's like, yeah, true, man. Absolutely. It's worse than you think even. But you can do more about it than you think. And there's nothing in it except good, but you also have to take responsibility.

So that's the thing. You've got to decide if that's what you're going to do. But you don't get to whine about it if you don't because you haven't tested it. So people don't even have to look for some grand goal in the sky, some elevated goal of what they're going to do, whether it's a financial goal, whether it's a non-profit goal, and they could look around their bedroom and figure out what they're going to do right now to improve things.

One of the things I learned from reading Solzhenitsyn is he talked about his moral transformation in the camps, and he said the first thing that transformed him to some degree was looking at people in the camps who did refuse to do immoral things no matter what. He said he ran into people like that, and that just blew him away, Because you already laid that out.

It's like these are, he said they were continually choosing between their life and their conscience. And they chose their conscience. Like, and he tells some amazing stories in the Gulae, like archipelago about, you know, dozens of people he meant like that, met like that. And they're just, there are stories that of heroism, moral heroism, under absolutely vicious conditions there. You just can't believe them, you know, so, so that's pretty amazing. But he said that once he kind of figured out,

that there was a difference between attending to your conscience and doing whatever was necessary to prolong your miserable existence, that he started to think about that deeply, and that he went over his life with a fine-tooth comb and tried to figure out everything he did that he knew was wrong, and then to try to figure out what he could do in the present to rectify that. You know, you wouldn't necessarily be able to atone. That's the right way of thinking about it. You know, you do something wrong, and well, maybe you can't. even fix it with the person you did the wrong too, but maybe there's something else you could do

that would be good enough so that, you know, you can think, okay, well, at least those balance out and maybe I'm a little bit on the side of the positive. So he did that, you know, and that he said that straightened him out a lot, and then he wrote this book, this amazing book that, you know, cut the communist intellectuals off at their knees and changed the world, really. And that's a hell of a thing for someone to do who's a, you know, miserable Zek in a, in a concentration camp. That's a hell of a story, man, and it's not the only one like it. So you don't know how much power you have where you stand, even if you look weak and, and if what's around you is terrible, well, then you've got lots of things to do, that's for sure, and they're announcing themselves

right there. So, and, well, and it's tying it in with evil and suffering that is best for me, because it's so real. You know, it's like you can be skeptical about the existence of the good. But if you open your eyes and you do any amount of studying and even any amount of self-examination, you can't be skeptical about the existence of evil.

I don't believe that you can. There are things that read about Unit 731 and then see how skeptical you are about evil. I wouldn't recommend that, by the way, because that is so horrible that you can't really read it without being traumatized. It is unbelievably horrible. you read that and then you say well morality is relative it's like see if you can utter those words

after reading that and then if morality isn't relative and there is evil then there is good it's at least whatever isn't evil right you can whatever doesn't cause that is good it's sort of defining it by its opposite but that's okay doesn't matter it's good enough and so how do how do guys going back to the the PTSD conversation a little bit how do guys that sort of experienced this evil part of not only of the world but of themselves because they had to do some things that they didn't want to do or they didn't like doing and things that made them feel like there's a dark part of me that I don't really like too much what's the what's the you know from what I've said is you got to embrace that that the fact

that there's darkness in the world and that there's darkness in you you got to embrace that and get a hold of it, not try and disguise it, not try and make it seem like it's not there. That's the same thing you're saying, right? Yeah, well, you know, when you're in really, they say there's no atheists in foxholes, you know, and that's, you know, it's a bit of a cliche. But there's a deep truth in that, which is in there's some circumstances that you find yourself in for which only religious language works. And if you happen to observe yourself doing something that's highness enough to damage

you psychologically, then you're in the realm of good and evil, archetypal good and evil. And unless you can start to conceptualize the world in that manner, you're never going to make sense out of it. And so, partly it depersonalizes it. You know, it's you that did this. But it's like the capacity for evil isn't just you. It's part of humanity. Maybe it's part of the structure of the cosmos. And you happen to stumble over it naively. And so, it hurt you. You know, there's this old Egyptian story about a god named Horus, and he's the god of attention, so he's represented by the Egyptian eye, so he pays attention. He's also a falcon, and falcon has great vision and flies above everything, right? And he's also the force that

revitalizes the dead father in Egyptian mythology. But he has a fight with his evil uncle, set, who's a precursor to the idea of Satan, and you can tell partly because the words are quite similar. And he has a terrible battle with Set who's taken over the kingdom and is a terrible tyrant and is killing everyone and everything's going to hell. And he has a battle with him to regain control of his kingdom. And that's fine. And he's a god. And so is Seth. And they have a fight and it's a terrible fight. And during the fight, Seth tears out one of his eyes. When you think, well, that's a god, right? And nonetheless, he ends up with his vision damaged, his consciousness damaged. Now, he gains a different kind of sight.

He gains insight, right? Because now he knows the nature of evil, but he pays a big price for it. And so you think, well, if that's the case for a God, how much more is it the case for a man to be damaged? It's like absolutely right. It's no joke to encounter malevolence. And I've seen that in my clinical clients, too. I had a client who was terrified into nightly convulsions for four years by the look on her boyfriend's face when he attacked her. It took me a long time to.

unpack that. It was like a three-month process. But it was the, it was, see, she was very naive, very, very, very naive because her parents had raised her in a world where the evil queen was not allowed to visit, like the parents in Sleeping Beauty. So she was way too sheltered. And she thought that human beings were only good, you know, and then she saw the look on his face that indicated that he was out to consciously harm her. And he, he couldn't. They had a fight, a physical and she was strong enough to prevail. He wasn't that big. But that wasn't the point.

It shattered her world because she didn't understand until that point that someone could actually consciously want to hurt you. You know, that that wasn't just, they weren't just in a bad mood, and it wasn't just because of the way they were raised and, you know, all those excuses that people come up, that he was not only going to hurt her,

but he was going to enjoy it. And if you don't understand the part of you that's capable of that, then, well, you're... You're dangerously, dangerously naive and dangerous as well because you don't know what you're capable of. A lot of these things that you bring up are about leadership. And, you know, I talk about leadership all the time. And one of the things that, you know, I heard you say, and you've talked about with chimpanzees and other hierarchies that are out there, including lobsters, which I know you like quite a bit.

And, you know, even lobsters have a dominance hierarchy, which is definitely incredible. Since how big is their brain? Oh, it's not like, it's mostly distributed through their body. I mean, it's not that big. And yeah, it is absolutely unbelievable to know that the hierarchical arrangement, like it's a, the reason it's a symbolic reality, so that would be the great father, let's say. The reason that's a symbolic reality is because you can't see. see a hierarchy. Like if you look at the world, you don't see a hierarchy, but chimps know exactly

where each chimp is in the hierarchy. So, for example, a low-ranking mature chimp won't attack a high-ranking juvenile, even though he could tear him apart, because he knows that that juvenile is actually an illusion. The juvenile is the juvenile, plus all the other chimps that will come to his rescue. Right. So he can can't perceive the hierarchy with his eyes, but he can perceive the hierarchy with his emotions. Okay, so that hierarchy is essentially eternal. It's at least 350 million years old, and we perceive that all the time. We look at hierarchical posturing, we look at, and we live in hierarchies of competence, mostly. So that's a universal truth, and the fact that you have to struggle with

the fact of the hierarchy is also universal truth. You actually see this being played out to some degree in the leftist feminist arena. Because really what's happening is they look at the hierarchy, let's say the male hierarchy. They don't attribute it to it competence. They attribute to it power. And they make the presupposition that you get to the top by being the meanest, most exploitive creature possible. And so these are often damaged women who've never had a good relationship with a man, and who can't distinguish between competence and power. There's a big difference because a hierarchy that's only based on power is a tyranny, but a hierarchy based on competence is something that gets things done.

Like, that's exactly what you want in a hierarchy is that the competent people climb the hierarchy so you can tell who's competent at the top. And you made reference to the chimpanzee work. I mean, Franz de Wall has showed quite clearly that unstable chimp power hierarchy, are based on tyranny. So it is that the ugliest, meanest brute of a chimp gets to the top. But like as soon as he has a bad day, then two, three-quarter as strong chimps tear them into pieces. And the chumps that manage to maintain power at the top, or let's say authority, because that's a better word, because we've got to get our words right. That's a chimp that has friends and that engages in reciprocal

grooming and that pays reasonable attention to the females. And so it's so interesting to see that because it shows that even at that level of biological organization, there's already a morality of leadership. Yeah, and where that strikes me is so interesting, and I try to explain this to people all the time because, well, in the SEAL teams, again, you might think the same thing. Well, the biggest, toughest seal that can destroy everyone else is going to be the leader that everyone looks to, and it's just not true. And in fact, a lot of times those guys that might be the biggest and the strongest and the

fastest, they're actually arrogant as well because they think they can beat everyone and no one wants to work for those people. And so it happened when I first started my consulting business and I would have, you know, a CEO say, I can't wait till you come in and just whip my people into shape. And I'd say, well, you need to find somebody else that's going to whip people into shape because I don't do that. And they couldn't quite put together that me would, what was listen into whipping people in a shape. And what I wanted to actually do is teach people to lead and to lead people myself. And when you're leading, you're not having to whip people.

In fact, if anything, yeah, that's an indication that you're not leading. Exactly. As a leader, where I, the place where I usually found myself was I'm actually having to pull the reins back on people because they're going far and away above what I actually would even want and expect them to do. They want to go even more and do more to accomplish the mission. And that's where you want to get. And I find it interesting that, you know, you talk about that all the time, that it's,

that it's not the person with the biggest club. It's not the person that's the meanest and the most aggressive. Sure, they might rise for a minute. They might get some control. And that happens in any organization. Oh, if you've got a CEO that really, he's just a tyrant and everyone's scared of him, he can make some things happen for a little while. And then all of a sudden someone says, oh, he wants us to do it that way.

I'm going to do a little sabotage. Right. Just a little sabotage. Your project that you want us to get done by October 31st, oh, it got delayed, boss. And you can go nuts and you can yell and scream, but you should have listened to me when I said, we needed more time.

And now guess where we are you are? We didn't deliver the product we're supposed to deliver. So you can yell and scream all you want. It's not going to get that product delivered. Yeah, well, and if you tyrannize people badly enough, they'll actually hurt themselves to hurt you. So, you know, they're willing to take a hit to reclaim justice, let's say. So, yeah, that's really worth knowing.

And so one of the things that Jean Piaget pointed out, because he's a very interesting psychologist, hey, and he's never taught properly. Because, you know, most of these great thinkers were very strange people, and the strangeness gets edited out of their stories. And it's really too bad, because they're way more interesting when you know how strange they were. And so Piaget was obsessed with the disjunction between religion and science. And his goal, as a thinker, was to reconcile the two. And so to some degree, he was looking for a biological basis of morality. That might be one way of thinking about it, or at least to reconcile the idea of a biological substrate with an emergent morality.

And one of the things he said is, okay, imagine two systems. All right, so both systems are moving towards a goal, any old arbitrary goal. And in one system, the people within it are acting under compulsion. And in the other system, the people within it are acting voluntarily, said the people who are acting voluntarily will defeat the people acting under compulsion because in order to use compulsion you have to spend a fair bit of time and energy on force. And so it makes you inefficient. Whereas if everybody is together on the project, then you don't have to spend any time on compulsion

because people are compelling themselves. And so that's what he called an equilibrated state. So an equilibrated state was, well, we sit down and we have a negotiation. It's a real negotiation, so it has to be honest. And we say, okay, well, what the hell are we doing? And everyone hashes that out, and we decide what we're doing. And then we decide how that would be good for all of us, but each of us singularly as well. So if you got your family put together properly, then the whole family moves together,

but everybody inside moves ahead as well. And so then everybody's pushing in the same, you know how it is in a negotiation. You actually want your interests to align with the interests of the other person because then you don't have to worry about the integrity of the deal. It's like everybody has reasons to keep it thriving. And the idea that capitalism somehow is predicated on the tyranny of the people at the pinnacle, that happens when it gets corrupt. But it doesn't happen at all when it's working properly

because deals that aren't based on mutual self-interest and group interests and group interests simultaneously have to be enforced, usually with lawyers, and then you're done, right? You're done at that point. That's actually incredible. So I would, when I work with companies, everyone else working with a company,

it was a couple years ago, maybe even three or four years ago. And, you know, they were talking about how they needed to hold their salespeople accountable. And that's what they needed to do, and they needed more accountability, and the sales leadership underneath them needed to hold all their front-line sales leaders accountable for everything

and follow these rules and make these numbers of calls and do these follow-up things and send the follow-up emails, and they need to get this accountability thing going. And this was the, when I heard this guy saying this, was the first time I said, because I heard this a lot, this is word accountability and leadership.

You hear, oh, well, we just need better accountability, better accountability. And it's a trick because you think about it. And you say to yourself, well, if I'm in charge of you guys and I'm going to hold you accountable to make sure you do everything you're supposed to do, well, then we will successfully do what it is you will do because I held you accountable. I made you do it. The problem is, in any way,

organization, there's too many people to hold everyone accountable to everything that they're supposed to be doing. So it just doesn't work. And so you could take one group, and this is what I said. I said, if you've got one group where you have to hold them accountable for each and everything that you do and you try and do that, versus a group where people know what they're supposed to do and they want to go and do it, I go, which team is going to win? And he said, well, the group that wants to do themselves. I go, that's what you need to do is get them to want to do with themselves. That's leadership. Well, exactly. Well, exactly. Well, that's exactly right. I mean, look, if you get people to track everything they do, it takes them longer to track it than to do it. Plus, they hate it.

They hate it because they're not being trusted and it's the most terrible, dull administrative work. And it just kills people who are actually productive because they're driven crazy by that. It's like, leave me the hell alone so I can do my work. You know, and so, yeah, so there's something that here's an interesting little fact that I think is really cool. I found this out. This is from the psychological literature. So I've been interested in how to increase people's motivation for a long time, you know. And there's a nice literature on that. And part of it was created by Latham and Locke, Gary Latham and Edwin Locke.

And they're looking at goal setting. That's how they described it as a means to improve business productivity. And so what they imagine that you have two teams and you get them to set goals, say, and one team sets goals for their corporate productivity, and another team sets goals for their life. And then you match them head-to-head over some period of time and see which one comes ahead. And what happens is that the people who set goals for their life

beat the people who set goals for the company. And then there's a variety of other literatures that support that kind of hypothesis, but it's very, very worthwhile thinking that through because what you want, if your company is structured properly, you want people in it who have a life, right? So they're aiming at things that they think are valuable

because they're just not going to be motivated, period, unless they're aiming at things they think are valuable. And then you want their loyalty to the company to be nested inside that. So they have to see that working there, no matter what it is that they're doing. And often jobs are repetitive and dull and difficult and challenging in all of that, or you wouldn't be paid to do them, right? They're not all fun and games. But if you can see that the less intrinsically interesting things that you're required to do

are related in some directly intelligible way to goals that you regard as valuable, then that tags those activities with this dopaminergic kick that we were talking about earlier. So you need this hierarchy of values, right? Just like, here's what I'm doing with my life. Here's why my job is important to that. Or maybe it isn't, and then you have to quit and go find a new job. But that's fine. because you might discover that too.

And so we started trying to formalize this at the same time that I also realized something that I've never recovered from realizing, I think. So I teach students usually for this class it was third and fourth year students. And so this is at the University of Toronto. They're pretty smart kids. It's a hard university to get into

and they're pretty disciplined and they're actually quite conservative, all things considered. and I was teaching them about stories and about the fact that our life is a story with a goal and a purpose and a beginning point. And I was encouraging them to develop their own stories. So I had them write an autobiography and they really got into that. That was quite amazing. To identify, you know, to break their life into epochs and then to describe the important episodes in each epoch,

both positive and negative and what they might do to reduce the possibility of the negative. in the future and to capitalize on the positive, which is the purpose of memory, by the way. And then also to write a plan for the future. And so we formalized that. So the plan is, okay, first of all, you have to get yourself in the right mindset. And the mindset is you're trying to take care of yourself like you would care for someone that you cared for. That's a hard mindset to get into because people like their pets better than they like themselves often. And then you have to have a vision and so the vision would be well okay three to five years down the road if your friendship networks were configured properly what would that look like if you were pursuing the career

that would be appropriate for you and sustaining for you what would that look like how are you going to educate yourself how are you going to take care of yourself mentally and physically what do you want for an intimate relationship and how are you going to handle temptations like alcohol and drug abuse because they take people down pretty frequently. So all you have to do is think about, okay, what could that be like if you had what you needed? Not some wild fantasy, but realistic and what you needed. So that's the first part. And then, okay, now write for 20 minutes about what your life could be like three to five years down the road if all of this came together. And then now do the opposite. So imagine all your weaknesses and all the ways that you can go down the wrong

path and then imagine that gets the upper hand. Then imagine where you are in three to five years. So then you get a polarity, it's like not this and this and yes, this. So you can run away from the things you don't want and you can run towards the things you do want. That gets your anxiety behind you instead of in front of you, right? Because maybe you're going to go do something difficult and you're afraid of it. And then you think, well, if I don't do this, I'm going to end up there. It's like, oh, okay, that's so terrible that this little terrible is nothing. So, and then in the next part of the exercise, you turn that into an implementable plan, you know, and you write about why your life would be better and why your family's life would be better

and why your community's life would be better. So it's like fully articulated. And we've tested about 10,000 university students with that now in three different locales. And we've increased the probability that they'll stay in university by about 30% and raised their grade point average about the same. And it's worked best for men who are most, who are doing the least well. So in Holland, those were non-Western ethnic minority men, and they improved their performance enough to actually slightly exceed the Dutch national women

who were at the top, otherwise, over two years. Yeah, it was unbelievable. It just blew us away. A psychological intervention to cure what's hypothetically a sociological problem. And so that's a good example of. How, and what blew me away when I was first considering this is I had all these students 21 years old, and I realized that no one had ever sat them down, not even once in their entire career in education. It said, okay, who do you want to be?

Like, what sort of person is it that you want to be? Not job. It's like character. What do you want your life to be like? What should it be like? And what shouldn't it be like? And, like, write about that seriously, like your life depends on it because it does. And then I thought, well, that's so weird.

Why in the world isn't our education system set up to help people with that? Because it's like, that's kind of obvious, you know? It's like, what are you doing and why? And then I did some reading partly from John Gatto, who's done some interesting work looking at the history of the education system. And it was a derivation of the Prussian education system back in the late 1800s. And it was designed to produce obedient, obedient, well, it was partly soldiers, but it was partly workers.

I was going to say it definitely was soldiers because that was the transition. When they had the transition take place at that time as well, where they moved away from centralized command after they got beat by Napoleon. And they were constantly trying to fight towards that direction where the soldiers would not just be obedient because they realized that that is not what they actually wanted. They finally started to do at the end of World War I. And if they would have done it earlier, it might have turned the tide of the war. war, but that was what, you know, that's what World War II, the Blitzkrague and, and total

decentralized command and elements just going out and making things happen and finding gaps in the defenses and attacking them as opposed to, you're just going to wait until you told what to do. Right. And that was the German way and decentralized command. Right. Yeah, well, competence beats obedience, right? So you unite people under a goal and then you let them act autonomously. You've got to get them, you've got to not sell them the goal.

not right. You know, what you have to do is you have to go in and talk to them and discover what the goal is of the enterprise and what it is that fires people up. And that really does work. You know, and the idea that capitalism is essentially crooked and it's the people who are pulling the wool over other people's eyes who win. It's like, well, you know, now and then there's a criminal action and the person gets away with it, so to speak, although people get away with a lot less than they think. But most of the time within a functional company, you better have your people on board,

or they will do exactly what you said they'll do. They'll spend 80% of their time sabotaging the company. Yeah, and I, again, something I learned working with a corporate world, and it was working with a corporate world where I reflected on what I did and was talking to a business leader at some point. And I said, well, you know, your people got to understand why they're doing what they're doing. And so then he absorbs that and says, okay, that makes sense. And so then he gets up in front of his team and he says, you know,

well, the reason why we're doing this is we want to improve our profitability as a company. And, you know, he sat down and we talked afterwards and he said, did I do a good job? Because now they understand. And I said, oh, no, actually, you missed it. And then I started explaining to them better because I learned that what you have to explain, there has to be a thread of why that goes all the way through the corporate reason. But that Y has to come back down to the individual contributor. So they realize that when we do better as a company,

when we're more profitable as a company, we can put more money in marketing and we can produce stuff cheaper because we'll do it under more mass scale. Then we can lower prices and then we can actually hire more people. And that's going to make you move up in this command here and you're going to make more money. We're going to sell more stuff and you're going to get a bigger bonus. So you doing this, the reason why you're doing it is because then you can achieve those life goals

because you want to buy that house and that car. and send your kid to school. So there's a big difference. You need to make sure that the people understand why they're doing it, not for the corporate reason, not for the mission reason, but for why it's going to help them. The exact same thing you just said. Yeah, well, it's also really helpful too if you, you know,

your corporation has, I hate to use the word vision because that's, you know, turned into a buzzword. But, you know, it's often that you're working in a company where worthwhile things are happening, exciting and worthwhile things, you know, and you're trying to, well, make something better at a lower, price, let's say. And so there's the heroism, let's say, of producing a product that's going to have a positive impact on the world. And you need to know how your small actions are tied with that greater goal. And then there's this financial self-interest as well. And the thing is, if you don't,

if you can't tell your workers that story, then either your company is fundamentally corrupt because that isn't the true story. It's like you're actually working so that I can rape and pillage the company over the next four years and take all the value out of it and run, because, you know, CEOs do that from time to time, yes. Or you don't understand how the company works and you can't tell the story, which means you're basically incompetent. So, but, well, people are not wired up so that they will work without knowing why, unless you beat them. And then if you beat them, you don't, don't be thinking that that's victory. No, no, it's a temporary victory. It's also something really good to know about marriage. It's like you can never win an argument with your wife. Like you could if you only

lived with her for one day. Right. Right. It's like I won. See you later. Yeah. It's like no, no, she's there the next day. And then she's beat. And she remembers that. She does. She does remember that. Yeah. Maybe even more than you remember it. You know, and it also might be that she was right and you just out argued her. So, you know, and that's something that's really worth knowing too because sometimes, you know, you'll have an argument with, well, let's say with your wife. And she's got something to say and it's not very well articulated. Same could be true for you. And so you can just brush it aside. But you don't want to brush it aside because maybe there's something there. And if you don't address it, then it's not like it's going to go away, man. It's going to grow. So maybe you have to help her

formulate her argument, which is really annoying, you know, because you want to win. And you're having this dispute. It's like, I want to win. It's like, well, you're not winning that game. You're winning the game. Well, I think about it as the game of games. You want to win the set of games. You that stretch across time. The long war. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. The long war.

That little battle is not going to matter. And in fact, I don't, you should not try and be right. If you're right, everybody knows it's fine. But the worst thing you do is rub it in and see I'm right and you're wrong. Yeah. Yeah, you do that a hundred times. And then like, well, you're the winner and she's the loser. And then that's great because now you're married to a loser.

I mean, you know, that's, if you do that 100,000 times, then your marriage is over. And then they'll be hell to pay. You can be sure of that. I got asked the other day, what is the biggest problem in America? And I thought about it. I hadn't been asked that question. Lately I've been getting some good questions. A lot of times like you, I get the same questions over and over and over again.

But I got to ask, what's the biggest problem in America? And I thought about it for a second, and this may or may not be right. But I thought it was at least thought provoking. I said that the biggest problem that we have in America is that we don't have any big problems. And if you look at us in World War II during the Depression, during times where we've got major, major problems, the country kind of unifies and it gets behind itself and joins together. And, you know, I talked about, you know, that we live in a bubble here. I kind of opened up with that as well. And that's good.

Like, I want there to be a bubble, just like I want my family to live in a bubble. And I almost want, I almost want my daughter to really, really think it's a real problem that there's not a strong Wi-Fi signal in her bedroom. And so sometimes it takes longer to die. I've kind of succeeded as a dad if that's her problem. If she sees that as a problem that, you know, it takes a little extra. There's a longer buffering time on some of her Netflix, right? I've done a good job if that's a problem because, you know, God can only imagine what kind of problems people really have.

But sometimes I feel like in America and really in the West as a whole, the problem is, is that we don't have any major problems. So now it's the Wi-Fi in our bedroom that we're getting crazy about and wanting to lash out about. And I guess my point here is that do we as individuals, do we need struggle there to keep us focused on the right things and as a country or as a culture? Do we need to have some level of struggle before we start looking at things that don't matter and turning them into things that we perceive? as actually mattering? Yeah, well, you know, a couple of things about that. Kierkegaard wrote about that back in the late 1850s thereabouts. And he said there will come a time when the best thing that you could do for people

would be to make things more difficult, right? And that's a thing, because everyone's working so hard on making things easier, there will come a time when there's a felt sense for difficulty. And I think we're at that point now. And I think that that's why this message of responsibility and truth is echoing so nicely among, particularly among young men. Because every time I talk about that in my public talks, the room goes silent. And that's really interesting.

And, you know, people are dead focused on it. And so, like, enough rights and freedom. It's like time for truth and responsibility. And there's something noble about that. And we haven't been able to talk about nobility for God only knows how long, you know. So I do think that's the case. And I think it's a... And William James said that,

what we need is a moral equivalent to war. So something that's as serious, but that is hopefully not as destructive. And so I really like that idea as well. And so, but I think that we are at that point, if people would open their eyes a little bit, because we have this unbelievable culture, this technological culture that does provide the degree of protection that you described. That's an ongoing miracle, right? It's absolutely unbelievable that any of this works at all. And it could easily not work, and if it didn't work, there would be hell to pay.

And to keep it working and to keep it moving forward, especially with what's going to come over the next 10 years, with artificial intelligence and the sorts of things that we're learning and inventing, we better have our acts together. And so I think that you can get that warlike sense if you start to understand that you can take on your life like that, That's also why I think it's so necessary to see the world as a battleground in some sense between good and evil. But you don't put the evil outside. Like some of it's outside, obviously, but that's not your initial concern. Your initial concern is to get your act together, right? To take on the burden of being, to bear the suffering.

Like you said, you found that when you went out into combat, that, you know, you might have been wary of death, which is perfectly reasonable, but that you weren't afraid of it to the point where it would paralyze you. Well, that's a useful thing to know, you know, because it means that you're different than you thought you were. You know, because people are afraid of suffering and death, especially if they've been completely and constantly sheltered from it. But you can discover, and lots of people do, that if they actually confront it, that they can tolerate it far better than they thought. I mean, think about all the people who work in, like, palliative care wards, you know, or in funeral parlors, for that matter. Like, they're confronting death on an ongoing basis, and yet every day they go to work. So people are tough.

And so I think there is a responsibility that everybody can take up. And I think the responsibility is something like, well, we need to decide if we're going to collectively and individually tilt the world towards heaven or tilt it towards hell. We saw what hell was like in the 20th century. That could be back at our doorstep in no time flat. We should have learned that. And it's necessary for people to understand the relationship between their individual actions and the direction of culture, as a whole. You know, look at that guy in Charlottesville. You know, that was one guy, and he probably increased polarization in the United States by like 5% or something, you know.

It doesn't take very many individual actions of that pathological sort to tip things in a very terrible direction. So, I mean, one of the things I've been telling the people who've been watching my videos in the live conversations is that you have to take yourself seriously. have to know that you're a monster and that you're capable of terrible things and that it's and that you have a responsibility to understand that to incorporate it to constrain it and to discipline it and then to work for the alleviation of suffering and the constraint of malevolence and if you understand that then it can turn your life into a noble enterprise and then you have some self-respect which beats the hell out of self-esteem in my estimation

So, and I don't think that that's a difficult message for people to understand. I think they know that at a fundamental level. And I think at the moment they're starving to death for it. The subordinate principle. So the thing, when you talk about this elevated state, this elevated thing, I think I've figured out that what you're talking about is essentially truth. Is that to you sort of the what we need to do is deal in truth on a daily basis in our own lives and in the lives with people around us? Well, I think it's two things like in sort of classical Christian morality and I bring it up because it's sort of at this substructure of Western ethics. There's two things.

There's truth and love. And, you know, both of those words are even hard to say because they've been mouth to death. But they have, in some sense, they have a deep technical meaning. And if you know that, then it kind of reignites their power. And love is the decision that being is worthwhile and that you should struggle to support and improve it. And that's not a trivial thing because being is rife with suffering. You know, everyone dies. Everyone gets sick.

Like, it's brutal. It's brutal. And it's easy to turn against it. And so the idea that you're going to voluntarily accept responsibility for that, assume that it's good or act as if it's good, and try to improve it is no trivial matter. And that means you have to scour out the resentment and the arrogance and the deceit primarily. And it's sort of based on this idea, I would say, is like, well, life is very hard, obviously.

But we're not doing everything we could to make it better. and we're often doing things to make it worse. So even if it is suffering, which is true, we have no idea how much we could ameliorate that if we all put our efforts into it. And so that's a genuine question. It's like, yeah, there's reasons to shake your fist and curse God. I mean, everyone ends up in a situation like that.

Someone they love gets a terrible illness and disintegrates before their eyes, you know. Maybe they're a really good person and they've done nothing you would think of to deserve that. and, you know, that terrible fate is visited upon them. It's very difficult not to get cynical and angry under such circumstances. But then, well, that takes you down a very bad road if you do that. But it doesn't change the fundamental question.

It's like, if your life isn't everything you think it should be, you have to ask yourself if you're doing everything you can. Because you actually don't get to make a judgment about the structure of being until you do everything you can. And I would say that's love, essentially. That's the decision. And then truth is the best strategy with regards to that attainment. And how could it be otherwise? Like, if you're going to contend with reality, you bloody well better know what it is.

You know, and truth isn't your grandmother's, you know, your two tight-laced grandmother's moral finger-wagging. It's like the truth of existence is brutal and bitter. And so to be able to face that and to admit to the things that you are and to communicate them with other people, especially in an intimate relationship, it's like that's no cowardly morality. That's not the morality of cowardice, quite the contrary. You know, Nietzsche said you could assess the spirit of a man by determining how much truth he could tolerate. It's like, that's the right way of thinking about truth. Well, you opened this whole podcast with some truth. It's like, who wants to hear that?

You know, and people think, oh, that's so terrible, and they don't think, well, could I be one of those ISIS guys? It's like I can tell you, if you're bitter enough, especially if you hate women, you know, because they've rejected you because you're such so goddamn useless that no woman in their right mind would look at you twice. You know, that'll generate plenty of bitterness in your soul. And if you don't think that you could act like that under those conditions, then you're, you're not. You're not even watching your own fantasies. So, truth in the service of the betterment of being. It's something like that. And that's enough to give your life meaning.

I don't care where you start. Like I had this kid come and visit me a while back. And he had never left his home state. And he was, I think he was 19, and he was overprotected and oversheltered. And he was a smart kid. And so, of course, he also thought that the world really hadn't appreciated his gifts, which is a very common feeling for smart kids who aren't getting anywhere, right? They get

really angry about that. And then he decided that he was going to move out of his house, and he took a job as a dishwasher. And he said he tried to do a good job as a dishwasher. It's like, good, that's some humility. It's just a dishwashing job. But you know, you can be a good dishwasher. And then the restaurant runs better. And then it's kind of fun, as long as the people you're working with are half decent. You can make good social relationships. and then you can learn to be social, which was happening to him. And then maybe they let you be a short order cook. You know, and you got a bit of a clue,

and then you have a bit of money, and you have a little independence, and it's a lot better than being at home and being bitter and resentful and immature. You know, it's just a dishwashing job. Well, that's the wrong way of thinking about it. It's like it's the first door that's opened to you. You know, and then he came up to Toronto. He'd never been out of his home state,

so it was a big deal for him to come to another city, When he first came to talk to me, he was outside of one of my lectures. He couldn't even speak. He was so nervous because he had pretty high levels of social anxiety. So he was tongue-tied. And I invited him to come over to my house to talk to him because I knew there was something up with him. And he told me this story, you know, and I thought, well, you know, that's the beginnings of a heroic journey. He was able to humble himself enough so that, you know, if you're low, if you're in a low place, it's a low door that's going to open.

And you might think I'm too high to crawl through that low door. Young said, Carl Jung said, modern people don't see God because they don't look low enough. I really like that idea. But that's it. If you're in a low place, the opportunity that presents itself to you is going to be low. And it's going to be very tempting to you

because you're arrogant, resentful to say, well, that's not good enough for me. It's like, well, do you have an alternative? If you don't have an alternative, then an in-shop is, up and it's the right trajectory, you know, and so that's humility, that's humility. It's like you're low. You take what, you take what's given to you and you see if you can make it work. And the thing is that works way faster than people think, even because I worked as a dishwasher when

I was a kid, you know, for a year or so. And it was really hard to begin with because I didn't know what I was doing in the German chef, who was kind of a tough guy, just let me flounder around for two weeks to see if I would quit. So I was there until like three in the morning. And I was 13, I think, I couldn't wash all these damn dishes. I thought it was impossible. I told my dad at one point, I said, I don't know if I can do this. It's like I'm working as hard as I can and they keep piling up, you know, but I didn't stop. And then the German cook, you know, who had been treating me pretty harshly. At one day, he said, okay, I'll show you how to do this. And then he showed me how to organize the dishes and everything. It was like, that was no problem. I could do it in like 10% of the time. So then I cleaned up the rest of the kitchen. I had a good time mucking about with the chefs and We played around a lot back there, and I ended up working as a short-order cook, and I learned to cook and all of that. And that was a good part of my adolescence. But the thing is, so the thing is, is that those trivial jobs, it's the conception of their triviality that makes them trivial. They're not trivial, not if you do them right.

And if you're around people of any sense, you know, sensible people are always looking around for other people who can do things right. And if they see you trying to do things right, the probability that they'll open a door for you is virtually 100%. Because it's kind of rare, you know, so they're going to be skeptical to begin with to see you've got to prove your metal, let's say. But as soon as you do, they'll think, okay, well, we'll give this kid a little bit more opportunity and see what happens. And, you know, to not think that's how the world works is to be extraordinarily cynical because that is how it works in a functioning society. Yeah, I mean, I work with businesses all the time. and there is anybody that is just above normal competency in anything, even if that's going to try,

even if that's going to put effort in, they love those people. And those people are going to do well. And you're absolutely right. The doors are absolutely going to open for them if they do what they're trying to do to the best of their ability and doing a competent job at it. Well, the other thing that's interesting is what happens to people who aren't trying

because what happens to them is like they're in a place where there's a thousand doors in front of them that are invisible. They don't know the doors are there. And they could either be opened or closed. And so if they're one of these people who is going above and beyond the call of duty, unless the organization is entirely corrupt, right? And that happens sometimes. Then there are people who are watching and they'll start to open these invisible doors.

And then all of a sudden the person has opportunities in front of them. And they don't even know why some of the time, right? Because someone said, you know, gave a positive word to someone else and said, oh, you could take a look at this kid. And so these doors open. And then the people who are in there grudgingly and bitterly, it's like people watch that. And they're the people who are the gatekeepers,

and they just close the doors. And then the person looks up, and there's nothing in front of them. There's no open doors at all. And then they curse God, you know, from making such a miserable cosmos. It's like, no, you just don't understand what happened. It's like the fruits of your bitter,

bitterness, how do you. Your bitterness manifested fruit. You don't even know it. You've delimited your options in a terrible way and you've closed, you know, you're walking down, you're walking between cliff walls and they're getting closer and closer and closer together and then you'll be stuck. And you'll think, how the hell did this happen? And it happened because you didn't, you didn't avail yourself of the opportunities that presented themselves to you. So, you know, that's horrible, but that's how it is. I get asked quite often, you know, this guy got promoted and I should have gotten promoted, what should I do now? Or this person isn't carrying their load and they think I should do their work.

What should I do now? And, you know, the answer is, yeah, someone wants you to do their work? Do their work? Do their work. I'll do that all day long. Yeah, don't kidding. Yeah, you want to do your job? That's fine.

I'll do it. Yeah. And actually, I just answered a question where somebody said, the guy's a friend of mine and he's not carrying his load. What should I do? And I said, well, how about you help him? What's going on at home? Is he going through a divorce?

Has he got issues? Is a kid sick? How about you help him and say, hey, let me take that off your plate right now. Because two months or six months, you might be the person that needs help. You might be the person with a sick child. But regardless of that, maybe he's just as lazy. And maybe he shouldn't be your friend. And maybe he eventually he won't.

be your friend, but nonetheless, the solution is the same. If you don't want to do your work, that's fine. I'll do it for you. That's such a funny thing. That's exactly right. Because, you know, what you want to do in your job is make yourself indispensable, right? And the way you make yourself indispensable is by being indispensable. And the way you do that is by doing a bunch of things that if they're not done, catastrophe occurs. And that's exactly right. So if there's someone around you and they're abdicating your, their responsibility and you can pick it up, It's like, what an opportunity. You know, it's, you think, well, I'm not going to get credit for it.

It's like, well, first of all, there's lots of different forms of credit, but you learn. And then when the company shrinks and they're looking at who to keep, you know, they think, oh, it turns out you're doing all sorts of things. We can't do without you. That's not what we expected. We can't do without you. Here's some more things you could do. You know, and then you're also in a position to bargain. You can say, well, look, you know, in order for me to keep doing this level of,

of responsibility, you know, I need to be paid more because I have other options or because it's just or because that will make me more efficient, but then you've got some power too because they need you. And so indispensability, and that's power. Indispensibility is power, not tyranny. So now, obviously we started off talking about some very negative stuff with ISIS and you've touched on this a little bit already, but I want to make sure we hit this hard enough, and that is for people to live a better life, to live a life that they're proud of,

to live a life that when they die, they don't regret the life that they lived. And for me, I mean, I tell people, discipline equals freedom, that the hard work, the doing the right thing. You know, I tell people, to write down what you're supposed to do the next day before you go to bed and then you wake up

and you do the things that you're supposed to do. The things that you said you were supposed to do, the things that you actually know are going to make you healthier and faster and smarter and stronger and make you more money and move you forward and help your family. You just write those things down and then you go do them.

And that's essentially, you've drawn that out on a large scale with, and you've described this somewhat But with the experiment that you did with people writing down what they're supposed to do, not just tomorrow, but with their life, that's the future authoring program. And that's really been immensely beneficial for people. It certainly seems to have been. It's at self-authoring.com.

And we put up a discount code for your listeners. It's willing. And so they can get 20% off it. And the system allows you to write an autobiography and to analyze your personality flaws and virtues and to write a future plan. And you can do all of those or one of them. But yeah, it's extremely useful

because one of the things you can be virtually certain of in life is that you don't get something you don't aim at. And one of the things that's interesting about that is often people will keep their goals fuzzy. Because one of the problems with specifying your goals is you specify your failures. If the goal is really fuzzy, you're not sure when you fail, and then you can fool yourself.

You know, really, but you can kind of keep it foggy. But you make your goals sharp and clear. Then, well, first of all, then you know what to aim at. And what's interesting is, you know, your brain is set up so that it reorganizes the world around your aims. And that's not, I've also written about this in 12 Rules for Life quite extensively, and that's not a metaphor. Like, we don't see much of the world,

because there's a lot of the world, and there isn't much of us. And so we see what we aim at. We aim with our eyes. And here's an example. So, like, great apes don't really have much of a white in their eyes. But human beings do. And the reason for that is that we've evolved to detect where everyone else is looking.

And so if I can't tell where you're looking, I don't know what you're up to. And then, well, over time, that means I can't read you as well, and we're more likely to get in a dispute. And one or the other of us is more likely to get killed. but it also means that your probability of finding a successful mate decreases. So we've evolved to have this very, very visually evident eye. And so when we're looking at each other, we're always looking at our eyes, because then we can tell where someone is pointed,

and then we can tell what they're up to. And so we're hunting creatures, like we're aiming at a moving target and trying to track it all the time. And so you have to specify your aim, and the future authoring program helps people specify their aim. And it's more than one aim. It's like you have a highest aim, which you might say is to be a good person. And then I would say, well, there's a more elaborated aim than that.

It's like you want to be able to constrain malevolence and work to decrease suffering. It's something like that. That's the highest aim. And then you have to decompose that into the things you do each day so that there's a definite connection between all. the micro actions and the macro aim. And then that gives dignity to what you're doing. You know, so, you know, if you're at home with your kids, well, what are you trying to do? Well, you're trying to raise them to be the kind of moral agents that will work to constrain the evil in the world and

to reduce suffering. It's like, and so that's what you're doing when you're changing a diaper, if you're doing it carefully and with some respect and some love. Like, it's a major league deal to be doing that. And God only knows who your kid's going to be. You know, he could be the kid that shoots up Columbine or could be Stalin, that wouldn't be so good, or he could be someone or she could be someone who is a positive benefit to the world, you know, and so every child is a whole new realm of possibilities, and so there's dignity in that if you understand that. So the future authoring program anyways helps people lay out a plan and I always suggest to people that they do it badly because you're not going to do it perfectly, and if you get perfectionistic, it's

going to stop you. You know, when you first start to plan, you're probably only going to be about 20% right. But zero, the difference between zero and 20% is immense. And we found with our research that even people who only spend an hour on it benefits substantially in their ability to stick to what their next plan is. Now, and you, now you mentioned something earlier too, just a bit of, oh yes, about about scheduling. Yeah, so one of the things I tell people, so, So you say, write down what you're going to do the next day before you go to bed. That's good, because then you've got a direction set when you wake up in the morning. But I've told people to learn to use a schedule. And people often hate schedules because they act as their own tyrants, right? They say, well, you have to do this unpleasant thing. And then here's another

unpleasant thing you have to do. And then you have to do this unpleasant thing. And you do that for about three days. And you think, hell with this, I'm not doing that, you know, and you fall off the wagon. That isn't what you're supposed to do with the schedule. You're supposed to use it to design the days that you would like to have if you were taking care of yourself. And so some of that is, you know, you wake up in the morning and you think, here's five things I have to do that if I don't do, my life will be worse. It's like paying bills, for example, or taking out the garbage. It's like you have to do those because otherwise things degenerate.

So you've got to put some of those in the schedule because otherwise tomorrow is worse than today, and that's a bad trajectory. But you also want to build in things, you know, you've got to act in some sense like you're dealing with a relatively recalcitrant nine-year-old. It's like, so, well, here's some things you have to do, but here's some things that if you do, you could reward yourself with. And if you get the balance there between obligation and reward right, then you'll find that you're motivated to do the things. And that's what you want to do. You want to do that so it's sustainable across days and weeks and months. And so you got to treat yourself like a good boss would treat a valued employee and not like a tyrant would treat a slave.

Because the slave will rebel. And people say, well, I don't follow through on my plans. It's like, well, A, they're probably not very well formulated. And maybe you're doing them because of an external moral obligation or something. They're not really your plans, right? And B, you're acting like a tyrant and a slave. and that's a bad relationship to have with yourself. So you want to treat yourself with some, well, the same way, that's the golden rule, right?

Treat yourself as you would treat other people as you would have them, sorry, treat other people as you would like to be treated. It works both ways. You also treat yourself like you treat other people properly. So that's a necessary thing, and often people don't do that. But the scheduling is really important. Yeah, actually, I When I tell people, because when I first started talking about this, people would start scheduling their day

and they would just go, you know, minute by minute, everything would be scheduled. You can't maintain that for multiple reasons. Number one is no one wants to have a day like that where everything that you do throughout the day, minute to minute sucks. It's things that you don't want to do. So guess what?

After three days, you say, I'm not doing this anymore. It sucks. It's not fun. And so, and the same thing. With the task list, people would push those off if they're not on the schedule. So I'd say put it on the schedule. But then the thing I ended up telling people is you need to,

you need to number one schedule empty space in there where because things are going to take longer and then you're going to be off schedule and then you'll be frustrated. So you schedule that things are going to be just empty. You're not going to do anything. For this hour before lunch, you don't schedule anything. You're not going to do anything. You're not going to do anything there. And the other thing is you schedule things that you actually want to do in there.

And then you go and execute the things that you want to do. You want to work out every day you know you should. Well, maybe if it's something you enjoy, then you schedule it in there. If you enjoy going picking your kids up from school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, because that's when they do their running club, then you schedule that in there so you can go and do that thing that you want to do. So you don't just schedule the things that suck. You schedule the good things, too.

And discipline equals freedom. I say this all the time. If you want to have more free time, which is what people want, then you need to have more discipline time management. You will end up with more free time. I promise you. I promise you, you will. The other thing I was thinking about, and I just kind of occurred to me,

now is people always tell people, you know, come up with a goal and then write it down and then you're going to get there. And I was, you know, as you were talking about future authoring, what you had said earlier when you were describing the program in its infancy, what became future authoring, is I was saying, well, how do you get people to actually do this? Well, what you've embedded in the program is the fear of what happens if you don't do these things and where you're going to end up. And people forget that. People forget where they end up if they don't do what they're supposed to do in life. And I've explained this to, to my kids that when you look around and you see people that are doing things which are self-evidently

not desirable things to be doing in life, whether you're a bum or whether you're doing a, you know, I was a dishwasher as well and I have an interesting story about that and I'll tell that at some point about a Scottish girl named Roslyn. She was older than me. I was 13 and after, you know, several weeks of washing dishes and she was like maybe 17 or 18 and and anyways, to make a long story short. Eventually, I said, hey, do you want to, like, go to a movie or something with me? Because I'd like to go to a movie with you. And she looked at me and she said, Joko, you have a serious mental problem.

So, Roslyn, I know you're out there somewhere. You broke my heart, sister. But I wash dishes. And that's a good thing for a 13-year-old to do. But when you're 18, okay, now it's a little bit, you want to have moved up to be the short-order cook. And by the time you're 25, you want to be, in charge of the whole kitchen. And by the time you're 30, you wanna maybe run the nighttime shift.

And that's a good progression and that's good. But you don't wanna be 35 and 40 years old out at the dishwashing stage. You don't wanna be there. And I explain to my kids, because you can see people that are at that stage in their life. And sure, there's a chance that maybe they had some hardship that came along that hit them and it put them in this position.

And now they have to build back up again and they're waiting for those windows of our, or doors of opportunity to open up and that's okay. But a lot of times it's because they didn't work. They didn't make good decisions. They didn't do the best job that they could. And so they end up in these positions that they shouldn't be in. And I tell my kids that those are real people that are in those positions.

Like we're going to leave this restaurant and we're going to go home and we're going to do what we do. That guy's going to be there for five more hours because it's nine o'clock. He's got to clean everything when they get done. He's going to be there for five more hours. Then he's got to mop the four. And you know what he's doing tomorrow? The same thing. You always doing the night after that?

The same thing. It's a real person. And I hope it's a 14-year-old. I hope it's a 16-year-old. I hope it's even an 18-year-old. But I hope it's not a 48-year-old. But there are 48-year-olds that end up in that position. And what you do in this program is you explain that you can end up there.

And actually, being a 48-year-old dishwasher is actually pretty positive to where some people can. Oh, definitely. Which is addicted to drugs, addicted to alcohol. or whatever. Well, and everybody kind of has a sense of where they would end up if they let things auger down. You know, and everybody has their specific weaknesses that their faults would exploit. You know, and some people would end up homeless,

and some people would end up with a physical illness or a psychiatric illness, and some people would end up addicted, and some people would end up cruel. But everybody kind of knows where they would head, because they've seen it. They've seen it rise up. And it's really useful to be terrified of that as if it's a possibility. You know, that's a heaven and hell thing, essentially. It's like, okay, well... It's not even as if it's a possibility.

It's a possibility. Oh, yeah, definitely. It's an absolute possibility. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and all you have to do to get there is do nothing. Like, you'll just drift there all by yourself. So not only is it a possibility, it's actually a rather high possibility. And so you have to make that realistic enough,

which means that you have to take an inventory of your weaknesses, let's say. You have to make that realistically enough so you're actually terrified of it. Because then that's a great motivation. In my clinical practice, people are often faced with tough decisions. Like, well, you know, I'm not happy at my job and I'm afraid to leave it. Fair enough, you know, that's a big deal. Okay. How afraid are you of not leaving it?

Let's lay that out. Because, you know, one of the peculiarities of human thought is that, you do get used to the devil you know. And then you downplay them. But it's very often that staying in the same place will do you in. It's much worse than the risk that you'll take. You know, and I mean I'm practical with this. I say, look, if you're going to stop your job, let's have a clue about this, right?

Get your CV together, right? Start seeing what other options you have because you don't want to just step off a cliff. That's not helpful. organize yourself so that you've got enough strength to go through the process of finding a new job. You're going to have to get used to be an interview. You've got to think that through. Maybe we can practice that. So you've got to set yourself up for it.

But you really want to think through the cost of inaction. And that's something people generally don't do. And this is also one of the useful features of having a tragic view of life, let's say. Because most of the time, often, you're screwed either way. but you get to pick which one. And that's a big deal. It's like there's risks on both paths and they're major risks. And that's actually freeing because, you know, well, there's trouble both ways.

So that frees you up because if you think, well, this is the safe path and this is the dangerous path, well, then you're not going to take the dangerous path. But if you think, well, I've got danger A or danger B and this is where I would rather bet my future, well, that's way better. And I've had like many, many clients that I've helped with their clients. careers and we do exactly that. It's like, you know, okay, what's our goal? Our goal is to triple your salary in four years. They think, well, that's not possible. It's like, well, we'll try for doubling, but you don't know. It's possible. You got to let's get it together and you've got to get over being afraid of

looking for a job. You got to get over being afraid of being interviewed. You have to put yourself together so that you've got options and then you've got to start to push. You don't know. You might be to do it. Well, it's quite surprising how frequently that works. You know, and that assumes the people are trying, right? They're competent. You know, it's not, this isn't waving a magic wand or anything like that, and it takes a lot of work, you know, like if you're going to switch jobs, you might have to, I figure 50 to one failure to success. It's something like that. And it's useful to know the baselines as well, right? Because looking for a job can be very disheartening unless you know the baseline. It's like, well, yeah, 50 resumes for one interview.

Don't take it personally. It's just how it is. So it's not that you're a screw up. It's that there are way more resumes than there are jobs. And that can also, and then, you know, don't look for a job for eight hours a day because you'll only be able to do that for three days and then you'll die. You look for a job an hour a day, if you already have one, for an hour a day or half an hour a day for three months, two resumes a day, three resumes a day, three resumes a day.

a day, you'll find a job. It'll take a while. One of my clients took like three years, you know, to get her first break. But then right after that, she got another one. And then right after that she got another one. But she stuck it out. And, you know, it was brutal because she had interviews and they didn't go, you know, they didn't get a job. Was she working in the job that she didn't like at the time? Yeah. But I also say to people like, you know, generally, stay in your job. Yeah. Because you're way more likely to get a new job when you have a job. Yeah. So I always tell people, yeah, because I get the same exact thing. hey, I'm in this job, it's miserable, I don't like it, want to leave tomorrow.

But I don't have the courage. And I've said, actually, it's going to take you more courage to stay in your current job, formulate an exit strategy, save up money, start putting together a better resume, get some technical skills that you might not have right now, do all that while you're suffering in this job that you don't like. So that when you make the transition, which will come, it'll be the right way. and you won't end up, like you said, jumping off of a cliff. Well, it also makes you hopeful even in the terrible job. Because, you know, then you've got some hope. And, like, hope is a big deal. You can put up with a lot of misery if you've got hope.

But if you think, I'm miserable today, and I'm going to be miserable tomorrow. And next year, I'm going to be older and just as miserable. It's like, that's not good. But if you think, well, I've got a plan, you know, that's a whole different story. Yeah. And it's a good idea of. for those veterans that are out there, don't just get out. Formulate a plan, figure out where you're going to go, and have that in place.

And then you get out, you step into your next mission. Yeah, well, I'd really like to see the military use this future authoring program for people who are decommissioning. Because you need, you know, your idea that you need the next mission is that that's exactly right. You know, life is like a series of missions forward, you know, and nested in something greater than that, I think. But you do, you need to have a plan. And you know, you've got to hold the plan loosely, you know, so because you're going to make mistakes formulating it. But the way it works, basically, is you aim at something in the future.

And so then you start moving forward. And as you move forward, you accrue more experience and more information. Sometimes that's through failure. It doesn't matter. But you're not staying in the same place. So you're actually growing, even if you're doing badly, if you learn from those mistakes. And so then you move towards the goal and your perspective shifts.

And then you might have to modify the goal a bit because now you're a little smarter. You think, well, that other goal wasn't helpful. It's like, yes, it was because it moved you an inch farther ahead. And so, you know, you kind of approach the final goal in a zigzag manner, and the zigs and the zags get less extreme as you get closer to the final goal. But you have to do a lot of zigzagging to begin with. So you've got to give yourself that space for error. That's why there's an archipal idea

that the fool is the precursor to the Savior, which is a really... And you see that with comedians, you know, comedians are fools, and they tell the truth, right? So in the court jester is the only person who gets to tell the truth. And a fool will take a risk as well, and you need to take risks in order to progress. So that's the idea.

But it also means that you have to allow yourself to make the mistakes that are necessary while you progress and not beat yourself to death about it. And so that's also really helpful, it means that when you're formulating your plans, you can say, well, this is the best I can do now subject to revision. It's like, great, that's good enough. Really, it's good enough. It just has to move you to the next place.

That's interesting because, obviously, I've done a ton of military planning. And I would see guys that would get so wrapped around trying to make the perfect plan. And it would take them so long to plan that by the time they're ready to execute the plan, the whole target had shifted and things had moved. And the battlefield had changed. They're not ready to do this anymore. So you need to come up with a, like you said, you need to come up with a good idea of what you're going to do and how you're going to do it. And then you start to move. And as you move, you start to see things from a different angle and you gain more intelligence and you get another report and all of a sudden the target shifts a little bit.

But you're adapting and you're closer to the target anyways. Exactly. Yeah. Well, and it is. It's also the idea that you're gaining information because you might say, well, I don't know what to do with my life. So maybe I should just stay here and figure it out. It's like, no, no. If you stay there, then all you know is what you know, well, you're there.

And you don't know enough because you can't make a plan. So make a bad plan. Even if it's actually a plan that works out so that it's opposite of what you want, if you move towards that plan, you're going to know more clearly that it's opposite of what you want. And as soon as you know that it's opposite, you know, oh, I should be going in the other direction. So, like, that's not a retreat. That's an advance. And the thing is people, we're active creatures and we're always navigating through territory, right?

We can't be sitting in one place and waiting. Well, you can't because you get old. So even if you're sitting in one place, the place is changing on you. And that's just, while you said that, when you said, you know, people make a detailed plan and then the environmental shift on them. On future authoring, do you go back in and adjust your goals? Yeah. So it's something that you continually update? Yeah, and I would say don't update it too often, right?

Because then you end up in the situation you were just describing. But the idea would probably, it's something like make your damn plan, implement it for four months or six months, and then go back and see what needs to be updated. You know, and you'll find that you've done a lot of what you said you would. And so then it'll need to be reformulated. So, and that's also very self-affirming, I suppose, is the right? it helps you understand that there's more to you than you think, which is actually the case. You know, there is more to people than they think.

That's one thing that's interesting about human beings, and so you can put yourself, you can stand up to things you're afraid of, you know, in measured doses, and you find that you grow to be larger than the thing that you're afraid of. And, you know, that's like one of the basic rules of clinical therapy. It's like if people are afraid of something, you break it down into pieces,

and you have them, encounter the things they're afraid of, and they don't get less afraid. They get braver and more competent, which is way better, because there's plenty of things to be afraid of. So, once again, here's just a total alignment. I wrote this kid's book.

It's called Way of the Warrior Kid. Yeah, I read it. Oh, okay. So I didn't know about this, but I knew what I did with my kids. And in the book, you know, the kid's scared of water, and he doesn't know how to swim.

So he starts off wading in the water, and then eventually he dunks his head in the water, and then eventually he covers up to his neck in the water and then eventually he swims a little bit and then he finally jumps off the bridge. But when I heard you describing that process in some interview that you were on or one of your podcasts, I said, I put that in my book and I didn't even know it. Yeah, it's progressive exposure. And so what you want to do, what you want to do is you can do this for yourself. You think, okay, here's something I'm afraid of doing. Okay. And so I won't do it because I'm actually afraid

of it. It's okay, fine, decompose it. Like let's say you're afraid to go on a subway. You have agoraphobia. It's like, okay, go online and look at a bunch of pictures of a subway. Can you do that? Go to the subway station and look at the subway station and then go home. Or go into the subway station and open the doors and go in and then go home. But don't play tricks on yourself, right? If you say that you're going to go and just look, then just go and look and then go home, you know, because otherwise you won't trust yourself the next time you do it.

So you have to keep the bargain intact. And what you want to do is you want to push yourself a little farther than you want to go, but so that you would go. That's all you have to do. And that's kind of a rule for learning in life. So this happens. The reason it works is because this is actually how human beings learn. And so if you watch a kid, maybe let's say a kid that's a little inhibited because some kids will just take off.

We'll use the kids that's a little inhibited. So they're around their mom and they're in the place. and there's strange kids there. Maybe they're like four years old, something like that. And so they're thinking about maybe that they'll go out and play. And so they hang around mum for a while and they check out the situation. Then they'll go out a little bit and check it out a bit more and then they come back. And maybe they need a little pat or something like that, you know, because they're coming back to home territory.

Then the next time they go out a little farther, then they'll come back. And the next time they'll go out a little farther and then they'll come back. Because they want to know they can come back and they're checking to see how far out they can go. out they can go. And if you're patient and encouraging, even with kids that are quite nervous, you know, you encourage them to keep going out and exploring, then they'll habituate and, well, what they do is learn their competent and away they go. And so it's not surprising that graduated exposure works because that is actually how human beings learn to confront the world. But it's a great technique. Yeah, and the story in the book, it wasn't, my daughter was, had stage fright,

but she wanted to be in the school musical. And so it was started with her. in her room singing by herself, but I was outside the door with the door shut. Yeah. And then it was, okay, you sing, but the door was open. And this happened over, you know, a couple of weeks. Yeah. Now the door is open. Now I'm going to stand in the doorway.

Now mom and I are going to stand in the doorway. Now we're actually going to come and sit down and watch you sing. And then it was the family's going to watch you sing. And then the neighbors are going to come watch you sing. And eventually she has no, no issues whatsoever right now, very confident kid. But that was. Yeah, that's perfect. I translated it into the water for the story for whatever reason.

But yeah. Yeah. Well, that also means that, see, what I like about that story, too, is that you established an individual relationship with your daughter, you know, because kids have different temperaments. So like some kids, if you take them to the playground, it's like they're like pop, you put them down on the ground, they're like puppies over water. Their feet will be going before they hit the ground and they're just gone, right? They're out there playing with the kids. Those are extroverted kids who don't have very high levels of negative emotion. And your problem is going to be that they'll run off too far, you know. So, but then other kids are more. they're more inhibited and often they're a little more introverted they're a little higher negative emotion So then what you want to do is calibrate and you have to watch it's like okay how much can this kid tolerate It's like we'll push it and you can you can figure that out it's like it it has to you have to push them enough so that if they accomplish it They feel that that's an accomplishment it can't be too easy But it can't be too hard you want to put them right on that edge that's the edge between order and chaos right

Fundamentally you want to put them on that edge and let them experience what it's like like to be there. Then they also learned that they can be there. Because you know, you taught her two things. You taught her that she could sing in front of a group, but you also taught her that she could learn to do something she was afraid of doing. And that's a way better lesson, right? That's a killer lesson. So, so that's good. That means, and you can do that with kids too with graduated reward. Like, you can watch them. And if they do something, well, I'll tell you how I did this with my daughter. So My daughter had arthritis and it was really bad. And she had to learn to give herself and, well, she had to take injections every day.

And so, and I think that started when she was like seven. And so we could give her the injections, but she was pretty skittish about that. And no wonder, because they hurt and everything. So I thought, all right, to hell with this. We'll get her to do her own injections. And so I sat her down and I said, she was pretty motivated by money. She's always been kind of a capitalist kid, eh? So we found her outside once when she was four

selling all her child books on the street, which was quite funny. I think she was maybe five, but whatever. I said, look, kiddo, I'm going to give you this needle. And if you can give you, if you can inject this yourself in 45 minutes, I'll give you 50 bucks. And so I let her sit, and she, like, struggled with that. She struggled with that, eh?

and by about 30 minutes she did it and I thought that good work man good work so then the next time I said okay this time it's 30 bucks but you got 10 minutes to do it and so she did it and you know soon we got it down so that because I wanted to get it down so there was no hesitation right because actually the anticipatory anxiety is worse than the needle so you want to push it so it's like okay now and we got to the point where it was

if you can do it in five seconds I'll give you 10 bucks And so she got to the point, took about a week, where she could do it in five seconds. And I kept paying her because, well, for obvious reasons, you know, I mean, it was kind of unfortunate. She was very sick, and she had these needles. And we had to do some things that would sort of perk her up, you know, to some degree. But that was a hard thing for a kid to learn, you know. It's not an easy thing to give yourself a needle. But you can use that graduated exposure and careful reward.

You can get kids to do very brave things. And then they also learn how tough they are. It's like, I can. And she was proud of that, man. you know, that she could go and do it by herself. Because that was a big deal. It also gave her some control over your illness. So competence, that's what you want to instill in your kids,

unless you're jealous of them. Now, you also talked about, you started talking about some various personality traits and how those come through. And you just released, what, a month ago? A new program, Understand Yourself? Understandmyself.com. Understandmyself.com.

Yeah, and I also put up a discount code for your people for that too. So it's Willink again and it's 20%. That would make it about 795, so it's pretty cheap. What you do is it, you answer 100 questions. The questions are pretty standard, like they've been derived from the standard scientific literature, partly from a test that I designed, that my students designed about in 2007, Colin DeYoung, who's now a professor at the University of Minnesota. And we statistically analyzed this question set so we could break out five major personality traits. And those are the standard traits that psychologists believe are reliable and valid. And they've been working on that since about 1960.

And so that's extroversion. And it breaks into two aspects. So extroverted people are assertive and enthusiastic. It's the positive emotion dimension. They're talkative, eh? They like to be in social groups. They like to plan parties. They like to talk.

And they're smiley and so forth. And then there's a negative emotion dimension, neuroticism, and people who are high in neuroticism are, that can be broken into withdrawal and volatility. And people who withdraw have a lot of anticipatory anxiety, so they might shy away from doing something. And volatile people are kind of touchy. You know, they're easily set off.

So agreeableness. Agreeable people are compassionate. and polite and disagreeable people are tough and blunt and so women are higher in agreeableness than men and they're higher in negative emotion as well Conscientiousness which is the best long-term predictor of life success after intelligence Conscientious people are dutiful and So they're industrious and orderly and orderliness is a good predictor of conservative political philosophy by the way or political affiliation along with low The last dimension is openness and And open people are interested in ideas, so that's intellect and creative.

And we call that open. It's openness to experience is the main trade, and the creativity trade is openness proper. So this report gives you a comparative description. So you compared to other people on all five of those dimensions plus all of those 10 aspects. And that can help you understand who you are. And that's very useful because one of the things you want to do in life, is figure out what your temperament is so that you can find a niche in the economy or in the social world that you're suited to. So like if you're an introvert, well, computer programming is not a bad idea or accounting or something like that.

But if you're extroverted, you've got to be out with people. You know, and if you're high in negative emotion, you're going to want a job that's not too stressful and that's fairly secure. And if you're open, then you're an entrepreneurial or creative type. And if you're agreeable, you should be working with people. And if you're disagreeable, you should be working with things. And so anyways, the reports detail all of that. And so then once people see where they fall out, they can kind of put themselves into a better position, like you said, a job that suits them. And that's going to be beneficial.

Yeah, well, that's it. Well, that's it. You know, you do have a temperament. And there is a place for each temperament in the economy and the world because otherwise they wouldn't exist. And so the issue is what is your temperament. So if you're high in openness, you need to engage. in something creative because you won't be healthy if you don't because it's like a major if you're like a tree with different trunks it's like that's one of the trunks it might be the

major one you can't let that thing die because it'll take a big part of it with you and if you're disagreeable say you're a competitive type and so you're going to need some of that in your life and if you're conscientiousness if you're conscientious that's a really good predictor of military uh um performance by the way then you need a routine and you need to be you need to be locked on to some task, you know, because otherwise you'll, you'll consume yourself with guilt. So, so it's very important to understand who you are in that way. And it's also important. That's, that's interesting because that's, I can tell you that that's sort of the middle of the bell curve. And even like towards the higher end of the bell curve of military performers

are, you know, people that are, can concentrate on the task, they're going to be relatively obedient. But When you get to either end, either high end, either the low end of bad performance, but also the high end are the people that know when to break the rules that are slightly rebellious, that will rebel, that will tell. You know, one of the big ones is, you know, I don't want to be surrounded by people that are telling me that I'm right all the time. I don't want my subordinates. I don't want to have people that are working for me that are going to, when I say, go charge that machine gun now, so they say, okay, and they go do it. You might think that that's what I want. and that might be the overall perception of people in the military. I want a robot that's going to fall my orders.

I actually don't. If I tell you to go charge that machine gun nest and it's not and it's going to get you and your men killed, I actually want you to say, hey, Jocco, that doesn't sound like a good plan to me. Let's do something else. Let's come around to the flank. So it's interesting that, yeah, you'll be good in that middle part and you might even get towards the higher end, but the guys that are really valuable in the military are the guys that also have that openness and that creativity. and at the same time are able to discipline it and harness it

so that they can conform when they need to. Right. Well, and they need to be discreet. Which I actually had to do as I got older. When I first got in, you know, I was the guy pushing the envelope. I long hair. And so everything that I could do would maxed out to stay within the bounds of what we're supposed to be doing.

And then as I got older, I realized, like that stuff's not important. What's important is that you're able to do your job good and you have creativity, not with how you have your stupid haircut, but in how you come up with a mission plan. And that's where I expressed my creativity, not through pushing the envelope of uniform standards, which is what a lot of immature, young military guys do. Right, right.

Well, and the thing about the people who will stand up and tell you what they think is that they tend to be disagreeable types as well. And, you know, you hear a lot about emotional intelligence in the business world these days, but emotional intelligence is really indistinguishable from trait agreeableness. And so agreeable people are polite and compassionate. And that's great, especially if you're taking care of people.

But you want some disagreeable people around because they'll tell you what they think. And they're blunt. Well, isn't emotional intelligence, though, can't you be agreeable but not be able to read? I always think of it as me being able to read people. Like I understand, oh, that person's got this going on. That's their agenda is in the background. So even though I might be agreeable, but I'm also understanding where you're coming from? Well, I think that that's what emotional intelligence is, if it's anything valid,

but the tests, the test that tend to correlate very highly with agreeableness. And so actually, agreeable managers don't make better managers. Disagreable managers make better managers. Well, they have to be conscientious as well. Because a disagreeable person who's conscientious is actually relatively easy to work for because they'll tell you what they think, but they'll do what they say. you know, and they can make tough decisions, and you often have to make decisions that are somewhat harsh in order to move things ahead in the long term, right? Because if you're soft, it means you'll sacrifice the long term for the short term.

And if you're tough, but have your head screwed on straight, it means you'll make tough decisions in the present that might ruffle feathers and hurt people's feelings, but they make the medium to long term better. And so... No, that's absolutely true. I see that all the time, especially with younger companies. they go through that expansion phase

and all of a sudden they go through the retraction phase and they got to fire people. Yeah. And they wait because the leader is too agreeable and too soft. And so they wait and all of a sudden they're upside down financially and it's a real problem. Whereas if they would have been aggressive and said, you know what,

here's the decision we got to make. I know it's going to hurt right now, but long term it's going to be good for us. We've got to get rid of this division or this department or these people. And if they don't have the ability to do that, it really hurts them in the long time. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the sacrifice of the future for the present.

and that's generally a bad idea. The other thing with the Understand Myself system is that you can also use it to, like if you do the program and get your results and someone else does, someone you're close to say you can compare them. And that's really useful because you think you understand people,

but you don't understand them as well as you think. So, for example, my daughter was fairly, well, she was quite ill, so it was complicated, but she was touchy. let's say, when she was a teenager. And I thought it was because she was rebellious, but she did the personality test, and my son, by contrast, was very easy to get along with.

But then we had them do the personality test, and it turned out she was very high in agreeableness and compassion, but also pretty high in negative emotion. Whereas he was the opposite. He was very disagreeable, but very low in negative emotion. So he wasn't easy to get along with. He just never got upset. But if you ever tried to get him to do something he didn't want to do,

That was like impossible. And he was like that from the time he was two years old. Whereas my daughter, it wasn't rebelliousness. It was that she was easily made anxious and upset. And so I learned at least to somewhat. So if she sort of flared up, instead of interpreting that as rebelliousness or conflict, I just saw it as nervousness. And that helped a lot.

You know, it didn't make me able to deal with it 100%. But it helped a lot. It was quite shocking to me because, you know, I thought I knew my kids. And I did. I think, but that was very useful. And then it was really funny because then as she started to date, she had every boyfriend she ever went out with take the personality test first. So I thought that was really comical.

That actually worked out quite well. Well, the thing is, you know, you want to be. Are the boys not smart enough to like manipulate the answers? Well, they don't necessarily know what she wants. Oh, yeah. So, you know. I would at least assume like, okay, I'm going to try to sound agreeable and I'm going to try. I remember I had to take psychological.

to, and this was in the 90s, they gave us one. You'd think they had some big battery of psychological examinations and interviews to get in the SEAL teams? No, it took like one test during boot camp. And it was funny because I was really hungry when I was in boot camp because the food sucks. And I just thought, man, I want to pass this test. And I knew I had some things in my brain that weren't going to be smiled upon by whatever analyst was going to read these things.

So, and it was complete the sense. These are the things I remember. is complete the sentence. So it said, for instance, I hate when my mom, and you fill in the blank. And obviously, it's real easy to go sideways on that thing, right? I mean, if you're a psychopath. But for me, every answer that I gave was, you know, for me it was, I hate when my mom doesn't cook enough noodles with the spaghetti.

Every single answer I gave was just about food. They must have thought I was a food psychopath. They were getting nothing out of me, nothing. I think the test that my daughter used was when I had designed that people couldn't fake. So it wasn't quite as accurate with regards to the individual personality traits, but it was more difficult to fake good on, which is better for hiring people, for example. What kind of question can you not fake in? Well, are you hardworking or are you easy to get along with? Right. Are you creative or disciplined?

Oh. Right, right. Or are you, are you, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Are you neurotic and anxious or are you inhibited and awkward with people? Can you go in between? Is it a one to ten? It's either or. Yeah, with that particular pairing it is. And then you've paired all these questions so that eventually you get something good. That's right. Or maybe here's 10 negative statements. Which five apply to you most?

People hate those particularly, but they're quite accurate. So we use those for personnel selection for a while. So for me it would be are you agreeable or disciplined? Hungry is. Yeah. Now, before we close that, you also have the book, Maps of Meaning. And for those people that were expecting me to do the book, Maps of Meaning, on this podcast and review it in depth, there is literally no reason because you have already done that online on YouTube and on your podcast. You go through in great detail, better detail than I would have been able to in one podcast because you have. have a series of podcasts about Maps of Meeting.

It's fascinating. It's awesome. Everything that you kind of touched on today is in there in great depth. And, you know, there's many worshippers of Marduk out there now, thanks to you. And I'm sure that will expand. And if you want to get into that, the book is called Maps of Meaning, the architecture of belief. It's very interesting.

I also like that you have the, you talk about some of your clients as, which by the way, I didn't talk about you at all in the opening. I realized that about halfway through this podcast, that I didn't actually explain who you were. So is there anything you need to say about yourself that I should have said? I mean, what? Well, there's just the bare basics.

Yeah, what are the bare basics? Well, I'm a clinical psychologist. I've practiced for about two and a half decades. I've done a lot of business consulting, as well as clinical work. I'm a professor at the University of Toronto in psychology, and my domains of expertise are personality assessment and neuroscience and the study of belief systems

like religious belief systems. And I, that's basically the, and I have a family. I'm married and have been for just about 30 years, and I've got two kids and a new grandchild. And so that's, and I've become somewhat notorious on YouTube over the last year, really.

It's been that. And so that's been quite the bizarre trip, you might say. So everyone can go and explore of that. Yeah, you're pretty... I guess the other thing I should say, because my publicist will be on my case if I don't, is that I have another book coming out, which is much more straightforward than Maps of Meeting, which is quite a technical book. And that book is going to be called 12 rules for life. Yeah, an antidote to chaos. Yeah, and it's available for pre-order on Amazon already. So January 23rd, that's when it comes out. Yeah, and I'm hoping that... Now, that one,

maybe you come back on here and we could talk a little bit about that. that book. That would be good. That would be good. That book will be right up. I mean, you've touched on it a little bit. You've mentioned a couple of the 12 rules today.

I think you mentioned two of the 12 rules today. And that would be awesome. Do you have you come back on? And again, I think people after they hear this, if they didn't already know who you are, they'll go and research who you are and they're going to want to get that book.

Yeah, that'd be great to have you back on there. And then obviously, you've got your own podcast. Yep. The Jordan B. Peterson podcast. Yes. you've got your YouTube channel. Yep.

Jordan Peterson videos. And Jordan Peterson Peterson clips. Yes. You just put out. Yes. Echo wasn't that, you know, crafty to come out with a thing,

like a separate thing. Two channels. Yeah. So he's got two channels. He's the one that's supposed to make the clips. Yeah, well, one of the things that's been so strange,

I mean, learning to use YouTube, um, people have been clipping my work like mad, which is not something I expected. Like I would say right now, There's probably 40 new clips a day being put on by people, which is really good. I mean, I've got no problem with that at all.

But I thought I might as well see what would happen if we also did it. And so I put my son's fiancé on that and my daughter as well, so they've been doing that clipping. But yeah, it's cool. The YouTube videos are so interesting as well as the podcasts because people can do their own thing with them to some degree. you know, and that can be bad depending on how they do the editing. But so far, people have been responding very positively to what I've been doing, which is quite a shock to me. But I think it, I think it, and you've made reference to this as well,

in the fact that you found a ready audience, is like people are ready for a message that's not all freedom and rights. You know, it's like, Jesus, enough of that. Like, really seriously, we've been watching. walking down that road for 60 years. It's time to look at the alternative ethics and responsibility. That's a big one. And especially when it is the case that, you know, you think freedom gives your life more meaning. That's true if you're under a tyranny. But if you're not, then it's responsibility that gives your life meaning. And your life has to have meaning. It has negative meaning whether you want it or not. You choose whether or not it has positive meaning. And you choose that by adopting responsibility. And so, you have to have meaning. And so, you know, you have negative meaning. And so. So, and like, there's a ready market for that because we've, we've ignored that reality for too long. So it starts to stop. And eventually people say are now at the point where they realize that being free, free, free, free isn't getting them anywhere.

Yeah, well, I always think it's like, you know, okay, you want to be free. All right, I'll take you out, drop you in the middle of the ocean. It's like, you can swim in any direction you want. It's like, that's not helpful. You know, you got to be swimming, be different if I dropped you near an island and said, well, swim to that. It's like, yeah, I can do that. That's got meaning. I won't drown.

I won't die. But there's no difference between too much freedom and chaos, right? And you drown in chaos. You need the right balance of freedom and order and discipline. Well, as you said, also, which is a paradoxical thing, the more discipline you have, the more self-discipline, the more freedom. Even putting in those hour breaks that you described. you know sometimes when I've been too busy which has been fairly frequent I'll take an hour break you know and I can actually have a break because I've done the things that I was supposed to do and so even though it's an hour long I can actually relax during that hour not being plagued by my conscience there aren't things undone you know and so that's that's that's a really good thing to be able to attain when you feel that you've got things you've got the right things you've got the right things you've got the right thing. reasonably under control and you're moving uphill.

That's better than anything else, really. Yeah. Speaking of getting things under control, Echo, maybe could you tell people quickly how they could support this podcast? I'll try to make it. I kind of feel like we should keep talking about what we've been talking about. I hear you. Actually, I have a question.

Two questions. Okay. You know, so with the recent kind of rise. This is what everyone waits for in the podcast. Echo's questions. a little bit more. You know, with the rise of your exposure, we'll call it, do people kind of flock to your class now?

Well, no, not so much to my class, but they're definitely flocking to public talks. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, and my class has generally been quite popular, you know, so that's, so, and. Makes sense. Yeah, and I'm on sabbatical this year, so we'll see what happens when I, when I return. Was that luck or did you pre-coordinate? that? Well, it was actually the

good grace of the university because, well, I had to get my act back together after all these things happened, you know, and I've also had some health problems over the last year that had been rather severe, which I think I have under control maybe. But I told them that,

look, I'm going to be much better if I take this year and do what's necessary for this book that's coming out and re-conceptualize what I'm going to be teaching. Because the other thing is I have to do that. I've got all lectures recorded now. They're on YouTube. It's like it isn't obvious to me why I should do them again. I've done like there's three years of some of them online. So I have to re I have to rethink what I'm doing as a university lecture because with YouTube, you know you can do something new like this

biblical series that I've been doing. You can do something new and you can have it out in front of 150,000 people in one day. It's like well you got to think about that. That's a whole different universe and I like doing lectures on things. that I'm still learning about. It's hard to do that at the university because you have to have the evaluation structure. People have to know what to expect. And, you know, it has to be pre-planned.

And that's not so good if you want to do something that's novel. So I've got a lot of thinking about that, and I don't know what's going to happen this next year in any case. Do you find that, like, let's say you did a talk about something specific and people saw it online? I think a lot of times people were more compelled to see that same. one in person like a concert you know like oh yeah I listen to I don't know Z Z Top I listen to ZZ Top and you know I have the CD or whatever but they're in town for a

concert or they're you know in the next day for a concert I want to go see the concert well I think I think that that works out okay for me because there are these underlying themes that that permeate everything that I'm saying and I would say those are the archetypal theme so I have this sort of structured way of presenting information It's based on, well, the work I did for Maps of Meaning. And so even if the lectures knew, there's echoes of the other ones always. I mean, one of the things about archetypal stories and images is that they're very expansive, you know, and so they're multifaceted.

And so you end up touching on the same themes over and over, but from different perspectives. And one of the things people tell me all the time, which is really interesting. And this has really been the case for 30 years, is they come up to me after the lecture and they say, you know, you were telling me things that I already knew, but I didn't know I knew them. Yeah, yeah. And that's definitely an archetypal experience because, you know, your experience does have a certain structure.

And that doesn't mean you can say what it is. But if you hear it being said, then you know that that's what it is. And so it's fun in front of a crowd because I can watch that happen to people, because I'm always speaking to individuals within the crowd. and I'll say something and someone will go like this. Your eyes are open a little bit or they'll jerk back a little bit and I think yes, so that just clicked a couple of things together for you, which is really, well, it's fun.

I get the same thing. So with extreme ownership, the book, and it's about leadership principles. And we say in the book, these are not new. These have been around for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years of how militaries run organizations and therefore the military leadership principles are actually the same as all leadership principles. principles because you're trying to get a bunch of crazy human beings to do something that's going to behind a mission and execute it in the most efficient way. But people say, oh, you know, I kind of

always, I always thought that I should do that. I always, I've always done that. But yeah, you captured it. And it's a self-awareness, I think, when people, maybe they do have good natural leadership judgment. And they've always taken responsibility for things. But they never really thought about it. They just kind of did it. Well, then once they know, hey, I need to take ownership of things, well then they really can do it. And they also see it in their subordinate leadership and they go, that guy's not taking ownership of things. They're not doing a good job.

And it's the same thing with keeping things simple or decentralized command or prioritize and execute. These are things that successful leaders do. Prioritize and execute. If you get a leader that's going to try and accomplish 37 different things at the same time, they're not going to be successful. So leaders, they know to prioritize and execute, good leaders. But when we say it to them, you know, they might still, they might not do 37 things,

but they might try and do eight things at the same time, and they know that they should be doing one or two. And when they hear us say it and describe, they go, yeah, that's exactly right. One of the things that characterizes a leader is that he or she knows where they're going, right? I mean, that's the fundamental. You have to be able to communicate it, too, but that's, I worked for a UN committee at one point on economic sustainability, economic and environmental sustainability.

and one of the problems with the first draft of the report, and I would say the final draft to some degree, is that, you know, it was all done by committees. So there are 100 priorities. It's like, no, there aren't 100 priorities. That's a contradiction in terms. It's like you start with one of these things, and maybe you start with a small piece of it and see if it works. But it's, to have 100 priorities is to make no one dissatisfied. But you're not going to, you're not going to move, because you can't move in a hundred directions at the same time. So it's a real abdication of, and people do that in a sneaky way too, because they're abdicating their responsibility, right? Say, well, we're going to move in a hundred directions and everyone had input. It's like, well, that's not the issue. The issue is

how you condense that down to an actual action plan. And that actually makes you accountable. That's the thing. And that's why people don't do it. It's like, well, if you're going a hundred directions, then it's hard to see whether you're, you're doing it well. But if you're going to one direction, that doesn't work. It's like, well, that's pretty obvious. So people are afraid to do that. But if you don't do it, it's failure. I get the same thing where I get people now. They ask me a question and I give them the answer. They say, I knew you were going to say that. Yeah, yeah. I know. I know. Yeah, I'm one of those people, by the way. Yeah, he does that from time to time. Yeah. Also, how you're talking about kind of breaking the loop in your behavior,

you're like, oh, I want to make a change to that one thing, you know, to break the loo. And then you start with something small and then it ends up affecting more things. And you mentioned sometimes it's hard because you don't get pads on the back for those little things, you know? Yeah, well, they're often so small that it's humiliating that you even have to do them. Yeah, yeah. But in a lot of time, like to yourself, it's like kind of big, like, oh, I'm going to drink eight glasses of water a day now, you know?

And then it's almost like you're seeking that pat on the back, like you want to tell your friend, like, hey, I drink. eight glass of water now. And they're just like, yeah, so. Yeah, right. And you're like, why do I even, party you is kind of like, why do I even do it then if no one's going to care? Well, you know, there's a lesson to be drawn from that too in terms of relationships

that's really useful psychologically is, and this is a big mistake that people won't make. It's like, if you want to have a good long-term relationship with someone, then you watch them constantly. And when they do something that you like, you let them know. even if it's a small thing because they're way more likely to do it again. And so sometimes a person will have kind of an inkling about what they might do that's good

or that would be good for their relationship with you or that might even just be pleasing to you, but they won't say anything. They're like afraid because maybe they won't get attention for it. But then they do it and you notice, it's like, man, that's super powerful. Like you have to be really attentive though because the good things that people do don't stand out,

the mistakes they make stand out. And then you say, well, you may have a mistake. It's like, yeah. But to watch and to reward someone for doing something small right that's a step in the right direction, that is a killer strategy. I found that to be true with my daughter. She's four and a half now. Oh, yeah.

Well, some kids really, like some kids are tough and they don't respond to punishment at all. Yeah. You just can't, you can't, you can't intimidate them. My daughter, if I just pointed at her, she would stop. But my son, it was like, that was just round one. He'd just laugh. He'd just laugh and run away. But he responded to reward like, Matt, if I watched him and he did something that was good,

and I told him that, it was like he was just like, yes. Dang, that's good. Yeah, reward is harder to use, but it's more effective if you can manage it. Yeah. And then that's not like kind of how you say where you're like, be careful with the reward when you give like too much reward for these small things, you know, and then they come to expect the kind of thing. That's the problem with the self-esteem movement, you know. Every kid gets a trophy day.

No, it's like inflating the currency. If everything is good, then nothing is good. Because there has to be a distinction. So, yeah, you want to watch and you want to see when the person's made an effort, and you want to see when they've gone beyond the call of duty. And then you want to say, hey, I noticed that. That was really good. And it is.

Scarcity really matters in those situations, because otherwise it just turns into noise. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, patronizing noise even, which is even worse. It's like, oh, you're doing well. Oh, you're doing well. It's like, leave me alone. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's such a lie.

Yeah, I have a fun time with that, actually. Like, if I have to judge, all through my kids' lives, if I had to judge them and their friends, and I have three daughters and one son, usually it was the daughters. I was being some kind of a judge. I'm going to judge the dance. I'm going to judge the little play that they put together.

I'm going to judge the acrobatic routine that they're, doing in the backyard. And I always be judging these things. And I would have so much fun because I would say they'd do their little performance. Their one minute performance. And they'd come out, say, well, how was it? And I'd say, okay, first of all, presentation overall, I'm giving you a 4.2. I didn't see one smile until you actually got on stage.

That's wrong. And I would just go through and give them these really strong critique points. And they loved it. Yeah. They loved it. They didn't get mad. They would be happy to, and they'd go try it again and try that race that 4.3 to a 4.5. They'd be smiles like you could see you from a mile away.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just got done. I was at a pool party with a bunch of little kids running around, and I ended up judging the diving competition. And all the parents were watching, and they were aghast at what I was doing. Yeah, that was in my house, by the way. Oh, I did it there, too. No, I do it on the redmond basis, but I did it at your house too, right? Yeah, you've seen it in action.

Yeah. I give the kids little nicknames. And then I say, you know, you were completely unbalanced when you left the board. It was almost embarrassing for me to watch you. Go try it again. I'm giving you a 2.2. Yeah. Go try it again and see if you can bump that up a little bit.

Yeah. And the kids get all motivated. They go up there. And that's why I get them a 2.5 and they're static. You treated them like someone who could improve. Oh, true. Right. So that's a big deal.

That's better than that's better than a pat on the back. It's like because everyone's flawed and everyone needs to improve. Also, when my kids were little, I taught them how to speak in public. It took about an hour. That was it. So I had them, they had to read something, you know. And so they'd read it. And I was across the room and say, well, that's not loud enough.

It's like I can't hear you. It's like belt it out. And then they get a little louder and said, no, no, no. That is what I mean. Read it way louder than you think you should. And so they did that. And I said, well, that's about right, because there's nothing more appalling than listening to some speaker that you can't hear. It's like there's just no excuse for that.

And then like, make it clearer. Put some passion into it, you know. And it was unbelievable how quickly they would pick that up, you know. And that also made me sad because it took so little time to get them to do that. And then they had it, you know. And so, and that, like a critic is your best friend. if the critic isn't destructive, because what a critic does is say, look, you did 10 things. And like these five things, you need some work on those.

They're not good. And here's some things you could do that would make them better. And here's two things that you got all right, and here's three things that you did pretty well at. And so then, well, what's the message? The message is, hey, you can handle some actual criticism. So you're not some little, you know, useless, wimpy thing that's going to die just because someone isn't telling you that you're already wonderful. Plus you're not already one,

not nearly as wonderful as you could get. So let's keep that in mind. And then, you know, you lay out a pathway for improvement. And then you treat the kid with some respect. And you also show that being an adult means that you know more than being a kid. Because, you know, the kid does something.

You say, oh, that was really good. It's like, what are you saying? Well, as an adult, I don't know any better than you do. And that's pretty dismal message because the kid is going to be an adult for a very long time. And one of the things we do really badly in our culture is model why being an adult is better than being a child. Because it is better. You have freedom and you have responsibility and you have autonomy.

And so we're always so concerned about making our kids feel good about themselves. It's like they should feel good about becoming responsible adults because they're going to be adults for like 80 years and they're going to be kids for like 20 years. So the adults, the goal. So yeah that was interesting when you started doing that because the kids are like seven years old and under by the way. Yeah. And he's like letting him have it. But it's funny. You have this kind of tone about you though when you talk to kids that it's like it's almost like live that much over theatrical. You know just that much. So you can tell he's like playing a character. Right, right, right. And the kids love it. It's so funny. My daughter like loves him. And the kids are just scrambling around wanting to do it again and like let me do this. Let me do it. Your daughter is all used to it. She's like, she's like, like, okay, okay. She goes, it's so funny, so funny. Kids, though, you know, big jocco ordering these little kids. Kids love attention.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's their currency, and they want attention because adults actually know more than they do. And so if you pay careful attention, like I get along really well with little kids, and it's because I pay attention to them. And if they do something good, then we had this kid over at our house once.

This is a sad story. I told it in my new book. So this kid, was about four, really cute kid, really nice-looking kid. And his nanny had been hurting a car accident, and so he was kind of being shuffled around the neighborhood for daycare for like a week or so, hey. And I'd heard some rumors about this kid,

and so I was kind of curious. And so anyways, he came over to our house. My wife was also taken care of some other kids at this time. And I came home, and he was standing. Other kids were playing in the living room, and he was standing in the port. sort of in the corner, you know, kind of just wandering around back and forth. And I looked at him and I thought, that's not so good.

So I kind of poked him a bit, you know, and I was poking him and trying to get him to play. And he had this like really mask of a face on unhappy. And I poke him and he kind of jerk away and all that. And I couldn't get him to smile. I couldn't get him to play. And I thought, that's not good. That's not good because he's four. Like I, he should have, you know, acted unhappy for two or three pokes and then kind of laughed.

And then we would kind of get into it, you know. So that wasn't so good. So then we had lunch. And the rule at our house was eat your damn lunch and say thank you to the person who made it because otherwise they'll cook you horrible things and you'll die. So it's like it's hard to cook lunch for you. Have some gratitude, you little monsters. And so you ate what was there.

And so his mother, when she dropped him off, said, he probably won't eat anything all day, but that's all right. And we thought, well, actually, no, that's not all right because he needs to eat. And it's not all right that he doesn't eat. Wrong. And so we'd learned how to feed recalcitrant children by that point. And so all the kids were at the table and they were eating. And my wife had made some chicken stew and he wasn't eating.

And so she was trying to feed him. And so we were watching him very carefully. And so she'd bring up the spoon to his mouth, and he'd, like, move his head back and forth, you know, to refuse it. And it was just like about a nine-month-old would do that, eh, when you're trying to, that's their first trick. And so that's a nine-month-old trick. And we thought, okay, well, something happened when he was nine months old, and he never really got beyond that.

And so, you know, my wife was fairly persistent with the spoon, and he'd get annoyed and, you know, squawk a bit, and she'd put some food in. and then he'd swallow it. And then as soon as he took a little bit of food, and she'd pat him and tell him that he was being a good kid. And she meant it. It was not a game. Like she was really intent on getting this kid to have lunch.

And so that's fine. And he's moving his head back and forth. But what was cool, as she kept patting him on the head and telling him he was a good kid, he was opening his mouth more often, even though he was still moving his head back and forth. And so it took about 10 minutes or so, and she'd fed him the whole bowl of,

chicken stew and she said, she showed him and he said, look, you're a good boy, you ate all of it. And that horrible mask that he was wearing, you know, that mask of unhappiness, it just fell off him. And he had this great smile. It was just, it just made the hair on the back my neck stand up because you could see that was the first damn thing that he'd had been allowed to succeed at, you know? And so he was thrilled. And then for the rest of the day, he followed my wife around like a puppy dog, like he was one step behind her. And then, we went downstairs into the basement and we were watching TV and he climbed up in her lap and he grabbed onto her just like there's this famous experiment that harlowe did with monkeys and the monkeys

could either have the wire mother that fed them milk or the cuddly mother that they could cling to they were both artificial and the monkeys preferred the cuddly mother you know and that's what it was like he was just wrapped around her you know and then his mother came home and she came downstairs and she took one look at this kid wrapped around my wife and she said oh super mom and grabbed him and then, you know, walked out and I thought, you, that was horrible. That was a horrible thing to see because he was one day with that kid, you'd fix him up. You know, it was one positive experience was enough to bring him out of his shell. And, you know, it's okay that he doesn't eat.

It's okay that he stands in the corner and doesn't play with the other kids. You know, it's okay that he's miserable and unhappy. It's like, hey, guess what? That's not okay. It's not even a little bit okay. So that's a good example of the use of reward, you know. It just, it was something to see, I'll tell you. Well, speaking of breaking the loops, we'll talk about origin.

So origin, American-made stuff. Jocko has his own line of supplements, so in the event of your joints, because that's really the main one, your joints. Yeah. Jocko's super krill, krill oil, better than, fish oil, by the way. What do you make of this? When someone ke, so krill oil, back in the day my wife's dad, my father-in-law,

used to always say take krill oils for your joints, it's good. And he's one of these like health, for lack of a better term, health nuts, right? I don't know if that's good or bad, but. And he'd be like, yeah, krill oil, it's even better than fish oil. I'm like, cool, never listen, never listen. But then when Jocko, for some reason, takes, doesn't even say to take it, just like, takes it, then I start taking it. And I reap the benefits, of course, because krill oil is dope.

But what do you make of that? What did the krill oil do for you? It helped. So you know how you get joint, just from working out and doing stuff? You know, your joints get sore, especially when you get older, whatever, in my experience. So I started taking krill oil, and here's the example I said it before. I'll try to make it quick. So my daughter, she was four.

She was maybe three at the time, three something. And in the morning, how she'd wake me up is she'd wake me up. And then when I get up, she'd jump on my back. like she wouldn't let me walk downstairs without her on my back. So when she'd do that, you know, you just woke up. You're not warm. You may or may not have, you know, worked out, did some training, whatever. So you kind of got to exercise, like perfect form to stand up with this little girl who's moving on your on your back. Otherwise, you get injured. So after, it was about six days of taking krill oil. I didn't have to like, it was like I was already warm. That was the

feeling. That's what it did for me. That's cool. But why do I listen to? the Jocko and take krill oil and not my father-in-law, even though he's telling me the same stuff. Well, you know, often having an example instead of being told is more effective. You know, and there's a confidence, I think, that goes along with someone doing something and not telling you about it. Yeah, huh? Yeah. You've been psychologically unwound.

All right, there you do. All right. Well, nonetheless, so on top of that, Jacqu has his own krill oil, so you know that's the good one. Super krill, not just regular. super by the way. Also, joint warfare, which is a bunch of other ingredient. Is that glucosamine?

Concordinated, yep. Yeah. So boom, you got the perfect formula for joint, sustainable joint maintenance and health. Perfection. That's from origin, origin lab. So origin main.com on the top menu labs. Boom.

That's where you get it. Is there like a, I think there's like a, anyway, there's a link on the store anyway. There needs to be link on our store. There is. There has been, boom, right there, whatever you need. Also, geese and rash cards. If you're into jiu-sci-se, you're into jiu-jitsu, Jordan Peterson?

I'm not. Brazilian jiu-jitsu. No, I'm afraid not. There's not much call for that as a professor. Not so far. Seemingly, seemingly. Some of your videos where you might have wanted to have had, at least it in your back pocket. Yeah, yeah.

Well, we've got one coming up on November 11th to talk on free speech, and I'm afraid there's going to be plenty of trouble at it. I hope not. And I hope that everybody behaves. Yeah. Do you need security? Yeah. I got Cruz.

Yeah. Dang. Right that happened. Boom. There you go. Nonetheless, if you are into Jiu-Ti, they got some good geese, American-made, by the way.

But what, you know, if you're into the American-made stuff from beginning to, yeah, if you're not Canadian. This doesn't help you. Actually, I was born in Canada, by the way. Where? Victoria, British Columbia.

Yeah. But I moved back to Hawaii when I was like two months old. It was kind of my mom lived in Hawaii. She was from Canada. Go back. home to have the kids at a twin brothers. So have us two months later, boom back to my. So is that kind of deal?

So you don't have many memories of Victoria there? No, I'm afraid not. Only the pictures. But I've been back a few times. I've been to Victoria and Toronto, actually. And where is over the East Coast? Where is over the East Coast for some film? Anyway.

I digress. Maybe. No, it was, where did they speak French a lot? Way, way over there. On the, on the East Coast. Well, Montreal. Yeah, yeah. I don't know why I can. Yeah, Montreal. That was Good. That was really nice. Yeah, Montreal's a great city. Yeah. Rory McDonald. Anyway, back to the geese and rash guards.

We got... I ate so much at some restaurants. A guy was up there for UFC. My fighter cut weight and then it's time to go reload. In Montreal? Yeah, in Montreal. And we ended up at this little Italian restaurant and it was insane. The guy was making the noodles.

He made everything, everything he made himself. And then we get done. I'm, you know, just completely gluttonously filled with food. And he comes out, would you like some dessert? And I was like, no, I'm going to eat anymore. And he says, it's the best tiramisu in the world. And I have a weakness off the program for Taramisu. Yeah.

And he brought it out. He made it. And it took him 20 minutes to make it. And he brought it out. And it was the best thing that I ever put in my mouth. It was so good. Yeah. Tiramisu is pretty delicious.

and Montreal has excellent restaurants. I wish I remembered the name of the place I'd go back there. Yeah, but I don't. Actually, I did find that. We went to a diner. It was just a diner. And it seemed like it was the same thing. Like, they put carrying everything, all the fries or whatever.

Like, it was legit. Yeah, kind of like Atlanta, by the way. Yeah, man, it's good. Nonetheless, rash guards, we do have some new ones coming out from origin. And we have our own new ones coming out. But Pete over there at Origin, he makes... Warrior Kid, Rashgards are coming out, right? Yeah.

Yeah, that's going to be on the store, though, which I'll talk about it in a little bit. Okay. Good store, by the way. Also, fitness gears, or fitness gear, if you want to break the loop, I think that's the theme. That's what I'm going to leave you. One of the many things, by the way, I'm going to leave here with, break the loop. So, you know how people, they want to get more back into their fitness or improve their current fitness. They want to try kettlebells.

It can be intimidating. I'm speaking from experience, but break the loop. Just get one kettlebell. I think you should get the chimp kettlebell. They're design. You know a kettlebell, right? We did talk about chimps today. Yeah, that's what I mean.

I'm integrating all the themes. So you get these kettlebells on it. It's the company called Onet. Onet.com slash jaco, by the way. You can get these kettlebells. They're not just a cannonball with a handle. They're like a cannonball shaped like a chimp or a werewolf. They're pretty dumb.

Anyway, Onit.com slash jaco. Check those out. and break the loop, man. Get it. Get one. Get two. I think I have like eight now. Legit.

Also. Self-proclaimed legit. Yeah. You're not allowed to do that, I'm not saying. I'm not saying I'm legit for doing it, even though I am, but that's not what I'm saying.

Okay. I'm saying this certainly sounds like you proclaimed yourself as legit, which is a violation. It did. It did. It did. So I'll make that disclaimer. That's not what I'm,

and that's not the point. The point is my set of kettlebells is legit. Chimp, double chimp. We'rewolf double werewolf Gorilla double grid These are escalation in weights and one

Bigfoot 90 pounds What's your heaviest one? 80s I know man Two pounds heavier every rep too by the way There's the legit part Yeah Two more pounds Yeah every rep though

Every set every rep two more pounds Boom over time that is legit Also when you get Maps of Meaning by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson all listed on the website jocopodcast.com I listed on that website books

click through there that's a good way to support and the new book to Amazon and 12 rules for life yeah oh yeah you can pre-order that one yes yes yes yes yeah it's doing pretty well in pre-order I think it's sold about 4,000 copies in pre-orders nice boom yeah hey yeah yeah we'll double that number when this podcast comes out that'd be good that'd be good

the goal there so yeah man if you want to people that listen what's cool is people that listen to this podcast, we read books all the time. Yeah. They read the books. They buy the books. That's, it's awesome. Oh, well, I should say, too, then I have a book list on my website on Jordan B.

Peterson.com. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's a book of recommended readings. And so if you want to, well, I mean, the books that had a huge impact on me, well, ordinary men is one of them for, and the rape of Nanking as well, yeah, which is a, we did a podcast on rape and Nick King. There's probably a lot of, man. You would be very interested in the follow-on.

book to that, which is called A Woman Who Careed Too Much, which is written by Iris Chang's mom. Right, right. Yeah, I know Iris committed suicide day. Yeah, well, no wonder after investigating that and being harassed for it, it's not surprising. Yeah. And it seemed like her mom thought it was a lot to do with the drugs she'd been prescribed and going on and off drugs. And apparently, you shouldn't just stop taking one drug and start on some other drug. Apparently she was, she was being directed to do that. And it was negatively impactful, at least according to what her mom thought. So what a travesty that was. Yeah, I'm sure your book list and our book list

probably has a lot of overlap. Sounds like that. Basically all the books you were talking about, we already covered. Like we already covered that. I'm not saying that, but, you know, like we're familiar with it because it's on the same list. Yeah. A lot of overlap.

But yeah. Well, I've looked at your list and it's actually not a lot of overlap. Oh, yeah. There's a, I mean, you obviously have a ton of books on there that, that, that, a lot of people would be interested in reading that I haven't covered yet. Yeah. So perhaps we will do some of them, actually. Yeah.

So yeah, but yeah, these are going to be on that list. Again, go to joccopodcast.com on the top little tab. It says books from the episodes. And I got it listed by episode. Sometimes multiple books per episode, by the way. So yeah, go through that. That's a good way to support. Click through there and get those books from Amazon.

And if you can do other Amazon shopping, hey, carry on. Do that too. Good way to support. Also, subscribe to the podcast. If you haven't already, seems obvious, I know. But if you haven't, boom, subscribe to good way to support. Also on YouTube, like we talked about, we only have one channel. Jordan B. Peterson has two. That's good. Maybe a good idea, though, because they go to certain channels for certain things. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Well, it's not obvious, too, what the optimal length of a YouTube video is. You know, different links serve different functions. Yeah, and different experts will give you different answers with that. very interesting. Hey, do you ever listen? You know how you mentioned that people get your, like little clips of your talks, and they'll make their own videos?

They'll put some music on there. Yeah, yeah. They do that with a lot. Obviously, they do that. Do you ever, like, go on there and just kind of watch them and be like, hey, I never really, really felt it like that, you know, with the added music and stuff? Yeah, it's really interesting to watch what people do with it.

Yeah, yeah. It's really fun. Yeah, it's funny. That good, we made, he had this little thing about the expression, So it's like, all right, let me make a video, made one of those, made them watch it, but he liked it. Somebody made a video where they put me through one of those gadgets that auto tunes your voice. I was talking about cats and rats, and so it's like this sort of rap video.

It's ridiculous, you know, it's ridiculous, but it's, it's kind of dope, though. I don't know what to think about. Got 500,000 views and millions of views or whatever. It's cool. So you know what, me and my brother. Retweeted something that I was telling I go about this you retweeted you retweeted It's some it's some computer sorting something sorting numbers yeah, and it you can just watch this thing sort yeah and you you posted two or three of them and I watched all three of them and it's just kind of funny that How did we get to a place where we're watching a computer sort things and it's well first of all why is that on YouTube in the first place and I'm sitting there watching it and I'm a person that that

constantly tells people don't waste your time on YouTube videos and there I was watching you know three 45 second YouTube videos of numbers being sorted. It's therapeutic right like that kind of. Yeah we like to see things being sorted yeah or like you've seen those big domino patterns you know that they've met and they just have a video of it and you're just watching the domino pattern you know it's kind of the same thing well we've actually actually I feel bad now we failed to talk about sort yourself out today we even use the word sort until right now. That's a real mistake on my part.

Yeah. You know, for those of you that, well, you'll find this as you get into Jordan's work. You'll see that he talks about sorting yourself out and how that's what you need to do is sort yourself out. Yes. And that's become a, that's become a meme, I guess. And you can buy it on T-shirts and all sorts of things. That and clean your room, which is, I really think that's so funny.

It's so absurd. So much of what's happening. happened in the last year has been surreal and absurd, but that's certainly one of them. You want to talk about absurd? The other day I was, um, had my daughter cleaning her room and I was playing a Jordan Peterson clip of you telling people to clean their rooms. And I'm following her on her room and she's getting so mad at me. Um, but I thought it was fun.

And then, and then she told me yesterday that she had had a conversation with her friends about torturous things and mean, things that their parents had done. And that is what she used for me. I was following you around the room. So you're using me as an instrument of torture? An instrument of torture. You are there now.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I can understand that. I can understand that. But those YouTube clips, like how you say, they made the rap video, right? Yeah. So a lot of time, like me and my brother would always talk. He'd always say that what people do when they add the music to your voice,

it almost gives it like this, you know, like when this might be a crude comparison. But you know how like dogs, you got to give them their medicine, but you got to put in the food, you know? So it's kind of that, you know, like, okay, you know, this University of Toronto professor, I get it. Maybe other people might not get it because it's just this quote unquote boring lecture, but let me put some cool music behind it. Yeah, well, and I think people are doing that because they do find something, you know, they find a statement or two that hits them. And so then they like to play with it. And as far as I'm concerned, like more power to them. It's really interesting to see how that multiplies out, you know.

It's been fascinating to watch that. I made it into an artist, a rap artist, made a song. The song is called Too Free. And it's a guy rapping, and I forget his name right now. I apologize. But he's rapping, and then the song, like, his rapping fades out. And in comes me talking about discipline equals freedom in the middle of his rap song. Actually, it's like the last minute of his rap song.

Dang. And I was going back and forth with him on Twitter. And he's like, yeah, man, I really dug what you said. I heard it on J.R.E. Yeah, yeah. So you're like a rapper. Wait. Yeah, that's very cool.

Yeah, Jordan Peterson's a rapper too, though. No, you guys both are straight up. Rap artist. Rapper. Poet. Author. Badass. All that stuff, man.

Dang. That's legit right there. Nonetheless, YouTube, that's a good way to support, subscribe. You know, Jocko podcast. The legitimate Jocko podcast, though, because there could be fake accounts. I remember there were. Oh, but yeah, it's a joggle podcast, YouTube channel. That's what you're talking about, right?

You'll see. Actually, it's not very hard to distinguish at this point. Nonetheless, good way to subscribe. Also, Jocco has a store. It's called Jocco store. It's a cool name, right? It is. It's also like direct.

Right, right. To the point. The whole deal, yeah, man. Just like the name of the podcast. That's why I have the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. There's like, go. See, real creative. You scored high on openness.

Exactly. I really had to scratch my eyes. head over that one. You're in the same boat. Yeah. But it is a legit store, nonetheless. Still a basic store, but what we got on there, got some shirts, some rash guards for jiu-jitsu and surfing, actually for pretty much any physical activity, cycling, whatever.

Also, some women's stuff on there and hats. Hoodies are out for the winter. Yeah, so he's from Canada. He needs legit. Well, me too. He's from Hawaii. Yeah, he's not. He's from Hawaii.

And last hoodies that he made were. thinner than your shirt that you're wearing right now. They were inappropriate as hoodies. So he beefed it up again this year. Slight exaggeration, but true nonetheless. So yeah, they're thicker hoodies for sure. And they're in some patches on there. Again, some women's stuff where, you know, the lady troopers get after it.

So yeah, should be all good on there. Some new stuff coming out. I'm going to let you guys wait on what those things are. Anyway, jocco store.com. That's a good. That's a good. Like it's this big thing, you know. There's four people that are waiting to know.

I don't know the next thing. I'm just saying that's who I'm talking to. Boom. Anyway, it's called jocco store.com. Easy to remember. Also, okay. So psychological warfare. I'll tell you what that is.

Makes sense too. So when you're on the path, that's what we're calling right? The path? Yeah. Discipline, right? You know, like, okay, I'm going to take you got to keep doing that stuff. You know, you can't just be like, I'm going to quit drinking and then just quit drinking for one day. day you got to do it for good but some days you find that it's like hard like let's say i'm gonna wake up

4 30 in the morning every morning now for the rest of my life one day it's gonna be like i can't do i'm hit snooze but now psychological warfare it's an album with tracks you can get on iTunes whatever and each track is for each little weakness that might come up see what i'm saying so let's say you're about to wake up you want to hit the snooze instead of the snooze psychological warfare get up and get after it. That's the name of the truck. It'll have Jocko telling you pragmatically why you shouldn't do that. Why you should stay strong. Stay on it. Stay on the path. Your campaign against weakness. And also, you know, it goes for a bunch of stuff.

Like you want to skip the workout that day or you're procrastinating. You know, I'm going to leave it for tomorrow, whatever. Create a block, all that stuff. Anyway, it's called psychological warfare. Check it out. See if the, see if any one or more of the tracks addresses your potential weakness on your path. That's what it's for. And that by the way, that that album was the number one spoken word album for something like nine months. And it was only recently, and this is on iTunes, it was only recently overtaken by another album that's called the Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. Audio version, audio version, which is now on iTunes. And Amazon music and Google Play and other.

Did you read it? Yes. You did? Yes. Yeah, because I've been thinking about reading my new book. Oh, you absolutely should. I read this. Yeah.

I read this with my buddy Laif. And this book, the kid's book, Way the Warrior Kid, my son read. Oh, yeah. He read the kid and I read Uncle Jake. So I have fun with that kind of thing. Also, when you're in Amazon, you can get Jocka White Tea, which you may want to try it. Do you ever deadlift weights? Yep.

Okay. this will give you a minimum deadlift of 8,000 pounds if you drink jocco white tea oh yeah that's that's a lot yeah it's guaranteed it's like a thousand pounds more than I've ever been able to deadlift well there you're stuck at that 7,000 pound plateau it's a tough one you need to get to 8,000 jacca white tea it will get you there 100% also on amazon obviously we got the books jordan's books maps of meaning and 12 rules for life pre-order it the thing that this is what's going to happen and I had to warn people that it was going to happen, and it's going to happen to your book, too. Your publisher doesn't understand what's happening.

They don't understand YouTube. They don't understand your podcast. They don't understand this podcast. They don't understand this podcast. They don't understand that. And so they're printing books and they think, oh, yeah, we think it's going to do okay. The book is going to sell out. So if people don't pre-order the book, they won't get, there's two things.

First of all, they won't get it when it comes out. And second of all, they won't get the first edition copy, which is kind of like, if you're a book guy, you want that thing. You want it to be first edition. Okay, that's good to know. So if you want his book, which you do, pre-order it, do it now. Way the Warrior Kid. If you want to put your kid, if you want to sort your kid out and put them on the proper path, the proper path, get them book Way the Warrior Kid. You said you read it?

Yep. Okay. Yeah. It's funny. I use that term too in my book, The Proper Path. My editor asked me quite repetitively, I'd say what exactly what I meant by that. but it's sort of implicit in the book. But proper is the right word for that for some reason.

It's even though it's kind of an old word in some ways, old-fashioned word, that's okay. There's a lot of old-fashioned words that we could use again. I agree. And I wrote this book because all the books that were out there for kids were telling them that there was okay to be weak and that it was okay to do bad in school. And maybe they weren't smart enough to know their times tables. And all these, maybe it's okay if you're scared of the water, maybe you should just stay away from the water.

It's like no, no, no and no. Right. It's not okay. Yeah, it's not okay to be like that. Yeah. It's, but it is okay to be strong and it is okay to study hard and work hard. It is okay to face your fears. It's okay to stand up to the bully.

It's okay to do those things. It's proper to do those things. Yes, that's right. That's right. Well, that's the problem with that damn self-esteem movement. It's like, you know, what you're supposed to be telling kids is that who you are is more important. Who you could be is more important than who you are. Because you're living.

It's like, what are you living for? You're, you know, if you're already everything you should be, it's like, well, you know, you're done. So what good is it growing up? That's not helpful. It's like you say, look, man, you're full of potential. There's worlds out there to conquer. There's things to do. There's people to help.

There's things to put right. Get the hell together. Get it together. And don't let your fears stop you. As opposed to, everything is great and you're this wonderful child. Why would you want to then burden yourself with the? bunch of responsibility. Why would you do that? Doesn't make any sense. I'm already good to go. Yeah, right. No, unburdened me. Well, and the kids know that's not true because they're not,

like, well, people in general know this because they're not satisfied with their life. They have a feeling that there's got to be more. Well, there is more, but the more isn't by radical self-acceptance of all your pathetic flaws. Stream ownership, another book you can get. It's about personal responsibility and how that will make you win as a leader. So get that book if you don't have it yet. And if you don't have, if you have it, and you want your team to be better, get the book for your team. So that they start taking ownership of the problems and then the problems start getting solved.

Discipline equals freedom. Field Manual. It's out. Thanks to everyone that bought it and made it into a bestseller, a New York Times bestseller, a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Those things are cool. Guess what? Appreciate it. Appreciate all you out there buying the book, spreading the word.

Everyone that sent pictures of 12 books stacked up that you're buying for everyone on your team or everyone you know or you're buying them for Christmas and your dad and your uncle, thank you for doing that. Because not only to help the book do well and continue to help the book do well, it's also going to help those people out, in my opinion. I agree. Not that everyone's going to get it. Some people are going to go, this book is stupid.

Impossible. And what we talked about earlier, some people read the book and they go, oh, I already knew that. Well, of course you did, but why didn't you do it? Why didn't you do it? Because someone obviously thinks you need to do it. So, okay, you get it. That's fine. You know what you're supposed to do.

Guess what we all know what we're supposed to do. We all know what's going to improve our station in life and what's going to make it worse. Why aren't you doing the things that you're supposed to do? Question. I don't know. Now you got a manual. I actually do know. You want to know why?

Because you lack the discipline. You lack the discipline to do the things you know you're supposed to do. Don't. Oh, you might also lack the fear. It's like it actually matters if you don't do it. It matters if you leave things undone. You leave the world in an uncompleted state. And it hurts.

It hurts you. It hurts your family. It hurts your society. And it hurts the world. So if you're laying there being useless and not getting at it, then you're contributing to the, catastrophe and it's that simple. So it actually matters if you do it. And I think sometimes people don't do it because they don't understand that. You know, they're down on themselves. They don't

think they matter. It's like you matter a lot more than you think you do. And actually, that's rather frightening, you know, because you think, well, wouldn't it be nice if everybody mattered? It's like you got to think that through. If what you do matters, you better look out. So get at it because you're going to pay for it if you don't. So, um, Thank you. Yes. I obviously agree that. And a lot of people have been asking for the audio version.

And like I said, it's on the MP3 platforms. It's on Google Play, iTunes, Amazon music. Spotify? Yes. Spotify. I think you can ask you Alexa to play it. Right? If you have that digital thing in your...

Yeah. If it's on Amazon music, I think it automatically does it. I don't know for sure. But, you know. If you need some leadership support training at your team or your business Eschalon Front, that is the leadership consulting company. It's me, Laif Babin, J.P. Donnell, Dave Burke. Info at Escalonfront.com.

We'll come and get after it with you and your leadership team. If you want to keep this conversation going, you can hit all of us up on the interwebs on Twitter, Instagram, and on the Facebook. Echo is at Echo Charles. I am at Jocka Willink. And Jordan is Jordan B. Peterson on Twitter. Jordan B. Peterson on YouTube and Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on Facebook. And like I said, you also have the podcast as well. Echo, do you have any closing thoughts? That's it. Thank you so much. Hey, thanks for the

invitation. It's been great. Yeah, looks like we're doing the same thing from different directions. And not so different even. So that's pretty cool. So yeah, it's good. Anything else from you? No, don't think so. Appreciate it. We'll get you back on here before 12 rules comes out, and we'll talk about that book in a little bit more detail. I'll get you an advance copy. Awesome.

And thank you for coming on, obviously, but more important, thanks for being out there. Thanks for spreading a positive message, again, very aligned with what I say. You're coming at people from a totally different angle than I come from. but that message I think is going to make people better, which in turn, as you just said, is going to make the world a better place.

And I know, I know that you are working hard to make this happen. And I truly appreciate the fact that you are doing that. So thank you. It doesn't seem like there's anything better to do. Good thing. Well, you know, really. That's kind of, it seems like a basic truth, doesn't it?

It's like there are things that aren't so good. We could probably fix most of it. them. So like, what, you got something better to do than that? Doesn't seem like it. Let's at least have a good shot at it. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And to the people that make this podcast possible, and that is the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines on the front lines who protect our right to free speech. Those folks that are living out the archetype of the hero, they're out there for. fighting the dragon and killing the snakes and protecting us from evil.

Thanks to all you serve as men and women for protecting us and to police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, and other first responders. Thank you for keeping us safe on the home front. And to everyone else that is listening, remember this. There is evil in the world. There are snakes and there are dragons and there are depraved human beings and pathos pathologies that can rip you apart but there is also your world that you control and you have the ability to stand up against evil and against those snakes in your own way and make your

world a better place so stand up and get after it so until next time this is Dr. Jordan Peterson and Echo and Jocko. Out.