Modern Wisdom - #436 - Dr Jordan B. Peterson - Your Life Is Built For More

Episode Date: February 17, 2022

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist and an author. Letting go of the good for the great is a terrifying prospect and most people fear risking what they have for what they want. I flew out to Texas to sit down with Jordan and discuss his principles for how to get past the things which keep us stuck in life. Expect to learn how to deal with feelings of loneliness from thinking in a different way, which skin-colour emoji Jordan uses, what he meant by "enforced monogamy", how to deal with imposter syndrome, how to become more dangerous in life, Jordan's thoughts after meeting Elon Musk, whether there's a value in having an enemy in life and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get your news from a much better source at https://www.ground.news/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Beyond Order - https://amzn.to/3d4eKdX Follow Jordan on Twitter - https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson  Check out Jordan's Website - https://www.jordanbpeterson.com  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Jordan Peterson. He's Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist, and an author. Letting go of the good for the great is a terrifying prospect, and most people fear risking what they have for what they want. I've allowed to Texas to sit down with Jordan and discuss his principles for how to get past the things which keep us stuck in life.

Expect to learn how to deal with feelings of loneliness from thinking in a different way, which skin colour emoji Jordan uses, what he meant by Enforced Monogamy, how to deal with imposter syndrome, how to become more dangerous in life, Jordan's thoughts after meeting Elon Musk, whether there's a value in having an enemy and much more. I really enjoyed this episode. Flying out to Texas to do this in person with Jordan for two hours talking about all of my favourite topics that he discusses, like personal responsibility and sovereignty and taking control of your life. This is him at his best as far as I'm concerned and I really hope that you find this as enjoyable as I did.

Also, the Modern Wisdom reading list is available right now for free. Head to chriswillx.com slash books. It is a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that you should definitely read before you die. chriswillx.com slash books to go and get your copy. And now, please welcome Jordan Peterson, look up in the show. Hi Chris, good to see you. How's the tour going?

It's going great. It's the crowds are well dressed, extremely positive, there for good reasons. A political in the most, in the best sense of the word, welcoming, the theaters are packed, the lectures are going well to extremely well, the time I spend afterwards meeting people is like being in a wedding celebration I would say that's the closest thing I could. What do you mean? Well you know you go to a wedding and you meet all sorts of people you don't know generally and everyone's happy to be there and they're all looking good because they dressed up for the occasion and it's a positive event and and that's the

closest analogy that I that I can think of that would describe what's happening. And so, and people that are there are there because they're trying to put their lives together and they are putting them together and it's working and so everything about it is as positive as it can be, fundamentally. So yeah, it's going great. I saw you took a trip to the Tesla factory. What were your thoughts after meeting Elon Musk? Did he get to speak to him much? I wouldn't say much.

We spoke probably for 20 minutes in total, not purely privately because there's other people around, but you know, that just barely gets you to know the surface of someone like Musk because he's an amazing person and God only knows what's What's up with him all things considered we saw his new truck He was taking people out for a ride. I didn't I didn't go out for a ride The trucks an amazing piece of engineering the factory is massive the trucks an amazing piece of engineering, the factory is massive. You know, what do you say about someone who built a functional electric car, then shot it into space on a rocket. He's a singular person,

but I thought it went very well. It was a very interesting evening. So I was pleased to be there, and you know, we sort of walked around each other a bit, and it was just fine. You guys interacted a bit on Twitter. We seem to, yeah. Yeah. What do you think that is while you're converging? I don't know.

I don't know exactly. We're both well known, and I suppose to some degree, that increases the probability of that kind of convergence. But maybe he's aiming up me too. He seems to be. He's aiming up literally. He's aiming up very literally. Yeah. Definitely. Didn't he put a wasn't there a space man, a model of a space man in the driver's seat of the car that he put out into space? Oh, that that's certainly possible. He's got a theatrical twist. There's no doubt about that. And a great sense of humor because that's really funny to shoot your own car

Out into space on a rocket. That's needlessly pretty good joke. What is it? What is it that's a why is it that someone like Elon has got himself to the stage where he can say things that almost every other See you know, he's the richest man. I don't think he's got himself to that stage I think he's always done that and so now he still knows how to do it. I know, he's the richest man in the world. I don't think he's got himself to that stage. I think he's always done that. And so now he still knows how to do it. I mean, you know, people think, I'll say what I have to say when I get to the point where I'm protected and secure.

It's like, first of all, being protected and secure does not give you the courage to say what you have to say. That's completely, that theory couldn't be more backwards. You think you going to get braver and braver as you get more and more protected. You think that's how the world works. I mean, I've watched university professors think that at some point they're going to say what they think as they develop their career. But by the time they're protected and secure, they spent so much time not saying what they think that they aren't even who they were and they don't know what they think. So, no, he says what he says because he's always done that. And people who are like him are like that. And so Steve Jobs, I presume, was exactly the same way.

I mean, I know people who knew him. He always said what he thought. And he was pretty damn cut and dried about it, which is why the Apple products are such miracles of technological mastery. He had an unbelievably cany design eye and was very... He cut whole projects without a second thought in some sense when they were working. He did that when he came back to Apple the second time, refined the entire product line, got rid of a ton of different things. And so it was focusing on this.

Yeah. Right, right. So that was proof. I mean, maybe it was fluke the first time which it wasn't, but coming back and doing it again, the second time showed pretty clearly it wasn't fluently. Same with Elon Wright. He's refined down what he does to a couple of very, very tight parameters. He seems to have, although the enterprise he's put together is unbelievably high functioning,

I mean, to produce an automobile sub-industry that's actually competitive and to bring down the cost of space exploration by a factor of 10 and to invent reusable rockets and to have developed this boring technology. It's it's a miraculous. It's probably an alien. Yeah, probably. There's only two probably a reptilian, isn't it? American car companies, I think, that haven't gone bust, forward in Tesla. And Tesla came very close a number of times. Yeah, it's an amazing accomplishment. So go Elon as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, he's a remarkable person. What color skin emoji do you use? If I used one, it would be black. Why? Why not? Why? Why not? It's so preposterous, all of that. You know, everything that's happened to Rogan, all this idiocy around race, this insistence that we can be reduced to our race, our ethnicity, our sexual identity. It's so appalling and it's so destructive. In one of the reasons that I had a lot of

reasons for making my political stance in relationship to Canada's compelled speech laws, I had a lot of reasons for making my views about that. Known, one of them was the fact that my government had introduced a bill that required me to say things a certain way, which was an unparalleled move in the history of Western democracies and something the Americans had made strictly unconstitutional, I believe in 1942, so that was part of it. Part of it was I knew that this top-down mandated belief that confusion around gender identity was a positive occurrence to provide that freedom. Let's say I knew that for every person that saved that would do a thousand people primarily girls to a kind of psychological contagion as confusion about sex and gender identity ramped up

I knew the literature on psychological contagion. It was it's quite what is that psychological contagion You can think about them as psychological epidemics. So the last one of any real size was the satanic daycare scares in the 1980s. You're probably not old enough to remember that. But the largest, longest census in the US criminal justice history were handed out often to women who were accused of late onset female sexual predation of children in daycare centers. The FBI invented a whole new category of perpetrator. Category that didn't exist because there are no late onset female sexual child sexual

predators. They don't exist. But there were women who obtained prison sentences of several hundred years for hypothetically being involved in these satanic, daycare abuse rituals. And there was a just swept across the whole country like the Salem Witch Trials, except at a much larger scale. There's a book called Satan Silence that was written by a lawyer and a social worker that documents it. It's just unbelievable. There were stories about underground tunnels where children were being taken down and

being, well, every possible thing you could think of was happening to them all in the name of satanic ritual. It was a contagion. all in the name of satanic ritual. It was a contagion. And those things happen. It happened with cutting behaviors, happened with eating disorders. This is almost all among girls because their teenage girls are most prone to this.

They called it hysteria back in Freud's time, but there's a book by a man named Henry Ellen Berger called Discovery of the Unconscious that traces back psychogenic epidemics area back in Freud's time, but there's a book by a man named Henry Ellen Berger called Discovery of the Unconscious that traces back psychogenic epidemics to about 300 years. And I knew that, you know, people in adolescence, especially people of a certain personality configuration, have some trouble settling into a stable identity. And for a variety of reasons, it can be high negative emotion, which is associated with low self-esteem. Those are more or less the same thing.

And then in all likelihood, high-trade openness, which is the creativity dimension, and the high-trade openness people, there are the ones that are more likely to have green hair and red hair and lots of piercings and lots of tattoos and dress in a somewhat in a non-standard manner, let's say, that's all associated with creative behavior. And they have trouble catalyzing a single identity.

And then if you throw in categorical confusion, which is exactly what you're doing when you declare that there's an endless number of gender identities, then people who are prone to identity dissociation and to psychogenic contagion, you're going to demolish them. There is an obsession. Abigail Shryer has documented that quite nicely in her book, Irreversible Damage, and it's way more girls than boys. And it's thousands and thousands and thousands of them. So you think, well, perhaps a few people who are transgender benefited from this new reality, but for everyone who's benefited and, you know, I'd like to see the data just showing how much they actually benefited, that I'll take a long time to accrue. There's a thousand people who've been just demolished by this.

So, and then, what else? On the, well, that, that's basically that, on the political front. I could see all that coming. I talked to the Canadian Senate about it when they put in the legislation. They didn't listen. They just thought racism, bigotry, sexism, it's like, yeah, have it your way.

But you know, so what all these girls that have Rapidon said gender dysphoria and a disfiguring themselves and taking hormones and You know wreaking havoc with themselves and their families and the broader culture These people that were so woe and so permissive, you think they're going to have that on their conscience? They're on to something. Some other noble venture. So, give me thoughts on the modern dating market. Well, I'm too old to really have any thoughts on it in some sense. Not from a personal perspective.

Well, I don't understand at a level of detail, you know, I do know some things that are happening perhaps at universities where there are far more girls than boys or women and men. What happens in those institutions, this is what it looks like anyways, possibly. So, females are hypergamous, which means they'll mate across and up hierarchies, socioeconomic hierarchy, but competence hierarchy is really at the bottom of it. So, when you set up a situation where there's far more women, then there are men in a given domain, say, where mate selection can take place,

most of the men still don't do very well, because most of them are still rejected by women. But a small minority of men do extraordinarily well, if you think, well, means unlimited sexual access. And so what's happening in the universities is that a small minority of men have sexual cart blush in some sense. And most men are in the same position that most young men are always in,

which is there in this state where they're not particularly desirable to women. And then the women, of course, are terribly frustrated because the minority of men that they would really like to have long-term relationships with, it's a seller's market for those men. They're not settling down. That's the sex ratio hypothesis.

Yeah. And the reverse happens, right, that you see whoever the more scarce sex is gets to determine the rules of the game. So the men, if they are in high demand because the short supply, you get more short term mating. Yeah. You get an increase in relationship dissatisfaction from women. And when the reverse happens, you get more dates before sex.

You get more long term mating. You also get more sexual violence in that situation as well, when there is a surplus of men and a scarcity of women. But I think there's something. You got to get far more unstable societies. You know, I was pilloried a few years back from my comments about enforced monogamy because they were taken out of context and twisted in exactly the way that things like that get twisted now. But what did you mean by that?

I mean that one of the one human universal is the construction of societies to both mandate and reward monogamy. And there's all sorts of reasons for that. It's because it's the best long-term solution, fundamentally. But one of the reasons for that is that when women are scarce, men get violent. Now, you know, that was red to say, well, I thought that this society should be distributing women to undeserving men, which is, of course, absolutely utterly preposterous and there's no relationship whatsoever to anything I ever said or thought or anything anyone sane would ever think or say or has

ever thought or said. Because I don't know anyone politically ever who was insane enough to think that the state should distribute women to men. Like, that's just never happened. So, it would be accused of that belief. And then for that to, you know, be put forward as a credible representation of what I thought was just one of the preposterous things that has happened to me. It's an unfortunate name enforced monogamy

because it's a term from anthropology, right? But what you mean is culturally celebrated monogamy because it's a term from anthropology, right? But what you mean is culturally celebrated monogamy, culturally and norms that are supporting people and raising that up to the institution. Well, supporting and punishing both, but mostly supporting. I mean, the punishing is that there's a moral disapproval applied to say cheating, right, to adultery, to especially running around behind your partners back if you're married, particularly that, but even if you're even if you're in a long-term stable relationship. That's not the only type of enforcement. It's not the only type of sanction or threat or punishment or disappropriation or disgust or contempt or shame or frustration or disappointment, all of those things. And all of that, because monogamy is a good long term solution,

but in some sense, a troublesome short term solution, if you have other options, then all of those elements of social support, let's say, need to be put into place. And that is it as far as I've been able to determine by looking at the anthropological literature, norms surrounding monogamy are a human universal. There are exceptions, but there are very,

there are very specific situational reasons for those exceptions. So, do you see the ONS data that came out a couple of weeks ago that said for the first time ever since records began 50.1% of women are childless by 30. So there are more women without children at 30 than there are women with children. The first time out.

So, this is, somebody clipped a part of one of my podcasts. I believe it was where I was talking about what what our society does to 19-year-old women or 18-year-old women, 19-year-old women. We just lie to them all the time. You know, the first lie has, there's nothing more important than your career, more or less by definition. So know, the first lie has, there's nothing more important than your career, more or less by definition. So that's the first lie, the second lie is, there will be nothing more important to you in your life than your career. So that's the second lie, and then the third lie is, there should be nothing more important in your life than your career. So that's the third lie. And then, implicit in that is the idea that children are burdened.

And that the idea that women should have children is part of the oppressive patriarchy and should be resisted. And who are men to tell me what I can do with my body, and, hey, fair enough, and et cetera, et cetera. Now, I've worked in female dominated occupations my entire life. I worked, for example, I worked as a daycare worker way back when that was like 1980, something like that.

And there were no men doing that, but I really liked kids and so that was fun. And I worked for social services in Alberta in the childcare department. And then I've been working as a psychologist, either training or as a psychologist since then. And that's been a female dominated enterprise, increasingly, as the years went by.

But even when I first entered it, so I'm in the post femalefemale in the workplace generation firmly. I never experienced the world except as that. And so I've watched women progress through their professional careers at every level of attainment from the lowest to the highest and observed what happened. And relatively, I would say bias-free because I didn't know. And what I've seen is that as women progress towards their late 30s, now late 20s, there's a psychological transformation. And what happens is that they place less emphasis on their career

and way more emphasis particularly on having a child. And that really reaches a crisis point around 29 or 30 for the vast majority of women and their attitude flips. And I've seen it and I suppose the most signal, single, most convincing evidence of that. I worked with high-end lawyers in Toronto for about 10 years. I was part of an organization. We went to law firms, high-end law firms, and said, send us your most productive people and we'll help them iron out whatever wrinkles there might still be in their life and the advantage to them is that things will go better for them and the advantage to you is they'll be even more productive. And there's a good management dictum which is pay the most attention to your most productive people because they're bringing in the bulk of your revenue disproportionately. And so I worked with men and women who were at the peak of their careers in a very difficult enterprise. And so these were women who were generally very attractive, well put together physically,

pretty stable psychologically, extremely conscientious, very, very smart, and high achieving from like junior high all the way through high school university, law school onto top firms Rocketing up through the ranks full partnership by the time they were 29 or 30 and all the law firms all the women bailed out all of them 39 or 30 and all the law firms, all the women bailed out, all of them. The law firms couldn't keep them. And I was really, and I talked to the women a lot about this because I was very interested in it, because I knew the law firms were bending themselves over backwards and tying themselves into knots, trying to retain these women because why wouldn't they?

You know, just being greedy capitalists is enough. You know, we don't want to lose their high performing women because they're performing at the highest level. And they couldn't keep them. The women wanted to have 95 jobs. They wanted to bind the job so they could have a life. And that was especially true once they got interested in having a child or had one. And what they really came to was a very interesting realization. So because they were highly conscientious women, they sort of did their duty and worked hard

and diligently and didn't pop their head up to ask questions. They were in junior high, they got the best grades, they were in high school, they got the best grades, and so on all the way through right till they reached partnership. But that's sort of an apagy, right? You hit partnership in a senior law firm, it's like you're at the top of your profession. Well, then what? Well, so then they looked around and they thought, hmm, here I am with all these like hyper competitive men, perfectly willing to work 80 hours a week non-stop to stay at the top. What the hell are they doing? Because that's the real question.

What is it that characterizes this small percentage of hyper competitive men? It's not. You can assume that that's how everyone should be, but first of all, that isn't how everyone is. Or you can flip that and say, well, there's only a small minority of human beings that are willing to do this to work flat out eight hours a week. I mean, they're getting, they're certainly

being paid for it. Let's make no mistake about that. But what about the rest of life? Well, that's what the women asked. Why am I doing this? And that's a great question. Well, for men, there's a different answer than for women. It's a really different answer. And it isn't like the men are exactly thinking this through. It's more like this is an integral part of male motivation. The more successful you are as a man, the more women like you. Well, the problem that you have now is that as women are getting better educated with more employment, more status, more prestige, they compete themselves out of their ability to find an attractive mate, as women raise up through the dominant hierarchy. And this is competence hierarchy. Who's going to tell women the equal access to opportunity that you have

recently just acquired? Actually, what that's doing is it's making it more difficult for you to find a mate that you're fundamentally attracted to. Yeah, well, it does a lot of things. I mean, it does provide women with a lot more opportunity on the economic front. It does decrease their dependency on their mate in relationship to economic security and educating women, countries that are willing to educate women, that's the best predictor of their future economic success. So if you look at developing countries and you want to find out what about developing countries, most likely to predict the fact that they will continue to thrive economically,

it's the attitude towards the education of women and a couple more things. Women's educational status predicts their children's educational status, but men's educational status doesn't, so that's also an important multi-generational effect. I released a video, I was going to conclude that other story, I released a video or someone released a clip of me talking about some of the things we just talked about, and it went out on YouTube shorts and it's got like five million views in a month or something like that. And the comment section is unbelievably vitriolic. It's every single comment is vitriolic. And

it's all from women. It's like, who is this old white bastard telling us what we should do with our bodies? You know, and I wasn't being judgmental. I was just saying exactly what I said to you, which is, well, I've watched women over the entire course of my life with I would say an affectionate eye, you know, I love my sister, I love my wife, I have a daughter, I love my mother, I'm pretty happy about women, all things considered. I don't have an axe to grind in relationship to how they should conduct their lives. I don't even know how they should conduct their lives. I've watched what happens. And I've also watched what happens to women who hit 29 or 30 and then can't conceive.

And that is not a fate I would wish on anyone. It's awful. And 30% of couples fall into that. 30% of couples have difficulty conceiving. It's a lot. And the probability that you'll have difficulty conceiving increases with age. And so, you know, salivate.

But it's very interesting to me to see how vitriolic those comments have been and how uniform that is, because usually on my YouTube channel in particular, 95% of the comments are positive, and this is completely the opposite of that. And then so you brought this up at the beginning, you said 50% of women now at 30. 50.1, a childless by 30. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, that's, that's not good. That's a sign of something profoundly wrong with the entire culture at an extremely deep level. I don't think that women need to take it as us trying to tell women what they should

or shouldn't do, but I think that it would be very fair to say that you need to be an incredibly unique woman to make it to 50 without a family and look back and think, yeah, I did this right. That's not to say that those women aren't out there. They absolutely are. I know some of them, but I think overall that it's... It's the same with everyone, for everyone. I mean, this is another example of how our culture has just lost its moorings. It's like, well, what's life? Well, you have a job or a career and hopefully

you're productive and you contribute something to the community and you provide yourself and your family within the necessities of life That's a quarter of your life or a third of it something like that You have an intimate relationship and you have a family that's life And if you don't have one of those that's one third of your life you don't have now some people maybe they're doing so well on the other two fronts That they can cope with not having that or maybe they're doing so well on the other two fronts that they can cope with not having that. Or maybe they're doing so well on one front, they can cope with not having two of them. Compensites. Yeah, maybe. It's pretty hard because if you want to have a great career, it's hard to do that if you're alone and without a family, right? I mean, the people that I've seen who've been best situated in their life, all things considered even in relationship to their career, have a pretty solid monogamous relationship that

stabilizes them. And then they have a family that also stabilizes them and broadens out their life. And exceptional people do exceptional things and good for them, but they're, by definition, given that they're exceptional, they're a tiny minority. This is always the argument between conservatives and liberals, right? Because the liberal types, they're more tilted sometimes towards what would you call it, compassion,

or appreciation for the exceptional, and fair enough, the exceptional is necessary, but on average, what everyone does on average is the thing to do. And so you just look, you see, well, what do people do? Well, if they have a job or a career, they have an intimate relationship, and they have a family. And if you don't have any one of those things, well, then your tread and water harder.

It doesn't mean you can't do it. And it doesn't even mean possibly that you shouldn't try, but as a default presumption, it's just utterly foolish. What else are you going to do with your life? Well, maybe your wildly creative, fair enough, you know, that's extraordinarily rare as well. Subject to the power law problem in any case, which is even if you're hyper creative, the probability that you're going to be successful at that economically is extremely,

extremely tiny, to the point where it's almost non-existent. It's so difficult. Now it does happen and you can have spectacular success if you become successful. But, wasn't it, did you say last night of the 100,000 most recently printed books, only a thousand have sold more than a million? Yeah, it's something like that. It's something like that. How will I lose all the way down? Everywhere, everywhere.

Power law, that's a tiny minority of people do all the work, a tiny minority of people, get all the benefit. A tiny minority of athletes score all the goals. A tiny minority of men get all the benefit. A tiny minority of athletes score all the goals. A tiny minority of men get all the women, et cetera. A tiny minority of stars have all the mass. A tiny minority of rivers have all the water. A tiny minority of cities have all the people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, everywhere, always.

You know, and we're so clueless in our culture that we blame that on capitalism. It's like, how does that account for the massive stars, people? Or the volume of rivers or the population density of cities? Rolling the clock forward, you and Elon tweeted recently about population collapse. What do you think's going to happen there? Oh, well, I've thought for at least 10 years that the biggest problem in 50 years will be that there's just not enough people.

I remember hearing you say a few years ago that you thought we'd peak at about 9 billion. Yeah, we probably won't hit 9. Yeah, and I knew the stats because think about how crazy it is to think that we might be living on earth right now at a time with the most number of humans that are ever going to exist at one time ever. Yeah, that's highly probable. And you know, in the population, the population collapse in developed countries is precipitous, right? It's like it fall off like cliff because it's the same as everyone knows this from the

pandemic. They are not number. If fewer people are reproducing, next generation, you have fewer people to reproduce as fewer people are reproducing. And it, yeah, yeah, well I worked on it UN committee It's got to be ten years ago now To help draft the UN Secretary's General's report on sustainable economic development and so I looked at all sorts of things like that I was very curious for example about Because people have been beating the overpopulation drum since, well, it really kicked in in the 1960s, you know, because there were dire predictions. By the year 2000, the Club of Rome came out and said, well, there'll be riots and mass

starvation and mass movement of migrants and all the things you hear about climate change because there's too many people on the planet and that just didn't happen at all. That was just that it wasn't just wrong. It was anti-true. It was absolutely wrong. What happened instead was that everyone got way richer. And the bottom section of the population in terms of economic distribution got lifted out of poverty. Inequality still exists, but that's that power law phenomenon we already talked about, not that that's trivial. It's just unbelievably difficult to determine what to do with. There are solutions, but certainly getting rid of capitalism isn't the solution. And so I looked at population trends, and first of all found, not that this is an act of genius or anything that, as soon as you educate women, the size of family shrinks precipitously, like below replacement. And that's partly because women have other options. That's a huge part of it.

But the thing is, play out. Oh, yes. I mean, all the countries in the West are way below replacement. Korea's way below replacement, South Korea. Japan way below replacement. Yeah, yeah. I think the number one on the planet might be Chad. of Waibolo replacement, South Korea, Japan, Waibolo replacement. Yeah, yeah. I think the number one on the planet might be Chad.

Chad, the country. In terms of growth, eight children on average. Yeah, I think Nigeria will have more people in it than China by the end of the century. So yeah, yeah, and Musk, you know, he's a far looking man. And so he's looking around the apocalyptic corner, let's say, like, well, we're running out of people. And what that means, of course, is that you run out of young people, right? You don't run out of old people

first, because everyone who is here now is going to be 30 years older and 30 years and it'll be young people we don't have enough of. And of of course young people are the ones who do the innovation and are going to do most of the heavy lifting etc. And so there's going to be a terrible shortage of young people. Well you see this with some of the things that I posted that O and S data, the 50.1% of women, childless by 30 and both men and women are replying to that tweet saying well good, there's too many people on the planet in any case.

I know. Thinking how this NPC midwitry is so dangerous because it makes people believe that they actually have something grounded backing up their claims. Yeah. Well, and this idea that the planet has too many people on it. There's no sentiment more implicitly genocidal than that statement. So what do you mean too many people? Exactly. And what do you mean the planet? And what do you propose to do about that exactly? Mass abortion is that your answer? Or should we do something a little more dramatic? Maybe we'll just shame people out of having children.

And I've seen people do that. Literally, I saw a professor when I was at a TED, I think it wasn't, it doesn't matter. It was a number of professors talking to a couple hundred students. And one of the professors who was an environmentalist, activist type, and he got up on stage and shook his finger to the whole young crowd saying that him and his wife had only decided to have one child which was in my opinion one child too many for him and told all the young people there if they had a

shred of ethical decency that they would live severely limit their reproductive potential and I stood up and said that I thought thought that that was one of the most appalling things I'd ever heard anyone in academia say to young people which is really saying something because they say plenty of appalling things. And it was a very uncomfortable moment and he huffed off the stage. But when a frenzy talking about how you couldn't talk

about such things without being pillory don't ethical grounds. And yeah, that's for sure. You come out as a, what, emissary of the academic establishment, you tell young people that humanity is so corrupt that they should seriously consider not propagating because that violates the deepest of ethical norms.

And you think that's a good thing and that that's your right. And it was just beyond comprehension. It's beyond comprehension. But it's associated with with a deeply rooted, existential self-hatred. And I mean, hatred at the level of humanity is like a virus on the planet that we're a cancerous growth.

I'll accept Stein called this human racism. Right. Right. Right. And it's that. Yeah. Well, we're a cancer on the planet, you know, unchecked growth, just like a cancer. It's like, that's how I say a cancer.

It's okay. We know where your heart is located. Because what's the implications for a doctor like that? What do you do with a cancer? Cut it out. Yeah, that's for sure. Poison it or whatever, whatever. There's nothing you don't do to a cancer. So you're going do to a cancer. So you're going to use a metaphor like that. There's too many people on the planet, you're going to use a metaphor like that. And then you're going to also decide that you're virtuous while you're

using it, because you're on the side of the planet, whatever the hell that means. So yeah, it's unbelievable. And a huge part of it's rooted in this existential shame and horror at the condition of being human and the fact that life is right for suffering and a lot of it's unjustified. You know, it's a mefistophelian position. So, mefistopheles was laid out, portrayed in Gertus Faust. That's the story of a man who sold his soul to the devil for knowledge. It's a story of intellectual pride and Gertz stands in relationship to German literature

in the same manner that Shakespeare stands in relationship to English literature. Gertz is Memphis Dothelys. Says straight out twice in the play once in the first, there's two books and once in the first book and once in the second, Gert that has a restated twice. Existence is such a foul thing because of all its suffering, essentially, that it would be better if it was merely annihilated. And that's the mefistophilian stance.

This whole show should just come to a halt. Look at how corrupt people are, evil reigns everywhere, it's nothing but willpower. We're destroying the planet with our unchecked ambition, all of it rooted in greed and Machiavellianism and jockeying for position. And we're so contemptible that we should just roll up and die and we should shame women

into not having children. And we should shame men so they never manifest any planet destroying ambition. And it's unbelievably appalling. It goes all the way down to the bottom, the bottom of things. That's what's tearing our culture apart, this dispute about the nature of existence at the most fundamental level. So, and the universities have come out on the wrong side. Talking about the individual, one of the things that I see holding people back is comfort.

So it's easy to get life to a stage where it's not that bad, but it's not that good either. At least when you have a full-on breakdown, there's only one way to go. You're only going to go up from there, but I think it's possible to wallow for years in a just about possible life, right? Sedated by comfort. And I see this temptation in myself as well, to give up the good for the great. What would you say to people who are trying to escape this curse of mediocrity? Well, if you're satisfied with it in some fundamental sense, I mean, there's something

to be said, I suppose, for walling off a private space for yourself if you can maintain it, and detaching yourself to some degree from the troubles of the world and maintaining your own little private garden, the problem with that is the snakes tend to seep in from the outside, right? It's pretty difficult to wall yourself off in any real sense from the concerns of the world. So it isn't clear to me that that's a viable solution. It also means that you might justify to yourself lack of civic engagement.

You know, I shouldn't go to church. I shouldn't take part in the political process because it's also corrupt. I should hide myself from all the annoying noise that's generated constantly on the media front. I have some sympathy for that viewpoint, but I don't believe it's really possible because you can't have a wall garden independently of the health of the broader society. It's just not possible. Maybe you can have it for a very short period of time, but so, but if you're comfortable with what you have and it's genuine comfort, then,

I think, hey, but generally, it's not. I think for the most part, it's people that have become sedated. You know, they've forgotten their dreams, but they've forgotten that they've forgotten them. Pink Floyd's comfortably numb is about this, right? They've become comfortably numb. I think most people, I have this friend and this story really hit me. So during the pandemic, running a podcast, I was able to have the thing that I feel I'm good at, my

artistic pursuit and outlet. That was available for me to continue. It was actually increased because I didn't have other stuff to do. And I have a friend that's a barber, and he got a job at a supermarket. Barbers shut down for a long period of time, and he got to job at a supermarket, stacking shelves overnight, and I asked him, I was like, man, how are you finding the new job? Do you know this is a big change?

He's like, did you know that it is? I actually don't mind the work, I'm not mind the people that I work with. But man, I miss being good at something. Right, right, right. Well, dude, that hit me. Yeah. So hard.

Right. I missed being good at something. Yeah, yeah. Well, people need the opportunity to be good at something. So then you might ask yourself, for what's the best antidote to the discomfort of life? And you might say, well, it's comfort. And I suppose that's what you

act out when you swaddle a baby. But a better antidote is something like adventure to excellence. And that's far better antidote to suffering than the mere absence of suffering. So not to say that the mere absence of suffering, that's not nothing, you know. Stepping out of that sedation from comforts, difficult, especially if you've become routineized to it. Yeah, well, that's the difficulty of maturity. You know, the Freudians said very wisely that the good mother necessarily fails. What's the mean? It means she stops providing the comfort that insulates people against the need for adventure. I heard you say recently that a mother's ability to let her child go out into the world,

knowing that they're still vulnerable and that it's now down to them and the world, still after them, that's one of the bravest things that they can do. It's the female crucifixion. them and the world still after them, that's one of the bravest things that they can do. It's the female crucifixion. That's exemplified best in, well, the best portrayal of that I've seen is Michael Angelo's Pieda. It's a statue of Mary and she has Christ's body as an adult on her lap and he's broken and destroyed and you know she's displaying that and that's that's the bravery of a mother to allow that to happen but not only that to to facilitate it. So what about the ego kid? Where you go? Where you go? Well why it's dangerous out there it's like yeah no kidding. Well, why it's dangerous out there. It's like, yeah, no kidding.

It's more dangerous here if you stay with me. By a lot. So you might lose your body out there in the world, but if you stay here, you lose your soul. How do you see that? As an individual, let's say that there isn't the mother there that's pushing you along Well, you know one of the things Jung Carl Jung Was very interested in the eatable complex and that's basically that over protective maternal and he He criticized Freud for presuming that it was really something the mother did.

He says, it's more relational than that. First of all, it would be something the father would allow to happen, assuming there was a father around. So let's not forget about the paternal contribution to allowing that to occur. Because in some sense, it's the father's role to serve as the antithesis of that maternal overprotection. So a woman is extremely bonded with her infant, say, between 0 and 9 months, and the infant is utterly helpless. And so complete compassion and the provision of comfort is the only job that matters.

And that's really the case. And then the woman has to switch gears to some degree. The mother has to switch gears as the child starts to become more mobile, fundamentally, and more independent. She has to let go of the infant, which is a real grieving process. And she has to start to facilitate this movement towards independence. But that's a hard shift. And so partly the role of the father in that is to be an advocate for the child's independence and to comfort the mother to let her know that that degree of security provision

is no longer necessary, but also to act as an advocate for the child's outgoing desire. And so so it's the eatable situation is not only the mother, it's also say the weak father, but then it's also the child. So you can imagine, because you don't believe that these negotiated agreements were, were relational. So, you know, you're six, you're in grade one. Maybe you're feeling a little ill, maybe you're not, maybe you're playing with being a little ill, and maybe you're playing with exaggerating how ill you are and your mom comes downstairs and says, you've got a test today at school, maybe you haven't quite prepared for it,

maybe you should have, and she says, but you seem to have a tummy ache, maybe you're too sick to go to school. And the kid thinks, maybe I could just stay home and mom could tuck me in and I wouldn't have to take that test. I wouldn't have to confront the world. And he says, yeah, my stomach really hurts. And away we go.

And the child has made a choice. And you think, well, that's, and that's a catastrophic choice. And you think, well, children shouldn't be held accountable for choices they make at that age. It's like, not child soon going to be an adult that's going to make very similar decisions. The choice has consequences. And to be held accountable for that is to recognize purely that the choice has consequences and that it is a choice. Now, you could say, well, 95% of the blame is to be put on the mother and maybe that's an overestimate. I think it probably is, but the child could say, mom, you don't have to worry about me.

I'm going to get up and go do this. And that's choice. And that's the right choice. So these are always chicken and egg problems obviously, but that fleshes out the complexity of the situation. If you're being enticed down a pathological road, you can accept or reject the invitation. Now some people are better at enticing and some people enforce it more harshly. And you know, there's all sorts of individual variability in situations like this. But just because you're offered debate doesn't necessarily mean that you have to take it. So, and I'm not a determinist, I do believe that people have free

will, whatever that means. That's a murky subject and it gets complicated the more you look at it, but whatever, it's still a good shorthand way of describing the fact that we seem to be cursed with responsibility for our own destiny at least to some degree. How do you advise people that are dealing with imposter syndrome? at least to some degree. How do you advise people that are dealing with imposter syndrome? Oh, everyone deals with that.

Every time you make a status shift, as you move upwards, of course you have imposter syndrome because when you first make a transition into a new role, you are an imposter because you're a beginner, you don't know what you're doing. And that doesn't mean you're a liar or a fake. And it doesn't mean you should presume more knowledge than you have.

It's what it needs to say. Every great man is an actor of his own ideal. And that feeds into the imposter syndrome in some sense. If you want to move to the next stage, at some point you have to act like you're already there when you're just barely started. And that's not a lie. It's the willingness.

It can be, and it can degenerate into a lie, especially if you presume more than you know. But if you move, let's say you move from being an undergraduate to a graduate student, well, all the other graduate students and the professors know that you're just a beginning graduate student, they're not going to expect as much from you as they would from a more seasoned graduate student.

So you have some leeway that's genuine, but you are the low-run occupier of that role. And of course you're going to feel like you're an imposter if you have any sense because you're just barely there. You just made the transition. That's okay. You know, that's not a problem. First of all, you have to understand that everyone with any sense who isn't narcissistic feels that. And it's actually an indication of your mental health and your competence, as long as that doesn't become crippling. It shouldn't knock you out. I'm such a phony. Well, don't be a phony. That's the first thing. If you're dealing with competent people

and you admit your ignorance, the competent people never judge you harshly for that as long as you've been paying attention. So in my classes, for example, people were often afraid to ask questions. And so sometimes I would point to people and ask them if they had a question, especially the quieter types. And they'd be afraid to ask the question because other revealing their ignorance, and they would assume they're the only person in the room that's that ignorant, but they're not, because if they were paying attention and they had a question, the probability that half the class had that question was really high. It's different if you're not paying attention. And so you can be ignorant, you can be an ignorant newbie,

and you can even ask the questions that are necessary to ask in that position and sort of reveal your inadequacy. And as long as you're dealing with competent people, and you've been paying attention, they're just going to answer your questions. And then you only have to be ignorant once. That's the thing about asking a stupid question. You only have to ask it once, then you're no longer stupid. To well-balanced people, that intellectual humbleness is endearing. Right. Really endearing. Yes.

So, one of the things that I want, just because they're always asking questions too, they always have imposter syndrome too. If they have any sense, like, what are you, what are you more, what you know, or what you don't know? Well, if you're competent, you know what you know or what you don't know? Well, if you're competent, you know you're more what you don't know. And so you're always asking questions. You see someone else asking questions, you think, oh, you're asking questions. You probably are competent. And there's the trajectory. That's the trajectory of a person that will become competent or more competent in the future too. So that what I would hope within Postus

Syndrome, and this is something that I noticed, first off in myself, but then in other people as well, I've bro-signed my way into something called Imposter Adaptation. So, idonic adaptation is the phenomenon where your happiness level tends to reset after a change in circumstances.

So you buy a new car or get a new house or get the job promotion and it feels good for a while but then it resets. In post-acindrom being that you never feel fully worthy of any achievements that you get in your life and you don't feel like you are worthy of being there. Imposter adaptation is a real nefarious version of this where no matter how many times you disprove your lack of self-belief, it continues to persist in the real world. And this, there is a kernel of truth in this, because of what you said, if you're trailblazing, if you haven't done this thing before, but you also have to think,

well, how many times have I done something analogous to this? How many times have I done something that's kind of like this, but not quite this? Yeah, well, people who are high in trait neuroticism are more likely to feel that way. Because so neuroticism is the negative emotion personality trait and it's index of sensitivity to threat and punishment essentially. So imagine that it's very difficult to calibrate how many units of physiological preparedness you should manifest per unit of threat. Right? Because how big is the threat? The answer is, you don't know. You wake up in the morning and you have an egg in your side. Is that nothing? Or is that the cancer that's going to kill you in six months? And it's pretty low probability that it's the latter, but the probability is not zero.

So why shouldn't you be panicked out of your mind? And the answer is, some people are, and sometimes they're right. So the calibration of threat, especially when it's associated with novelty, is an impossibly difficult computational problem. We have like ten different mechanisms to try to solve that. And one of the mechanisms is whether it's tremendous variability and response. And if you're higher in trait neuroticism, you're gonna have the problem you're described all the time.

You're gonna be doubtful about your competence and the validity of your position. And the only treatment we really know for that is to expose yourself to things that you're afraid of voluntarily and to become braver as a consequence of doing that. but some people have to live with that more than other people. The thing that I realized was that after a while, if you continue to disprove your imposter syndrome in the real world, you have a challenge, your adamant that you probably won't or

might not or don't deserve to get past it, and then you do, after a while, you have to admit to yourself that your imposter syndrome has nothing to do with your capacity and everything to do with your addiction about feeling like an imposter. Yeah. And that does change as people aged, generally speaking, they become more agreeable, more conscientious and lower in negative emotion. And some of that is that adaptation. You see that you've survived through various challenges. And then you can review that evidence to yourself, but also the people around you bolster you, because they have confidence in you. And so their anxiety doesn't

trigger your anxiety. And they'll remind you to, you know, you got this, you've done things in the world. Such a wealth of data, you know? You've done it so many times. Yeah, and yeah, I think, and that does help. I mean, it does help. People get more confident as they get older and they accrue experience because of that. But it's subject to that underlying trait variability

and sensitivity to negative emotion. I mean, there's been good psychometric analysis of self-esteem scales and neuroticism scales. And they're pretty much the same thing reversed. And so, are you confident in yourself, self-esteem? Do you lack confidence, trait neuroticism? And so, it is harder for some people because it takes more evidence for them to dampen down their response to threat.

And it's partly because we're all adapted to some degree to the failure of induction, right? Just because something happened multiple times in the past does not mean necessarily that it will happen the next time. And that's a big, that's the farmer and chicken problem, right? Farmers always feeding the chicken. Chicken thinks the farmer's his best friend, but one day the chicken is dinner. And that's induction. There was a stable pattern in the past.

You come to rely on it, but at any time that axiom can be disproved. And so the fact that we have variability in trait neuroticism is a consequence of the probability of the failure of induction. It's a very difficult problem to solve how to regulate negative emotion. But I would say that the best way we know is to keep facing challenges voluntarily, pay attention, at a rate that works for you, develop your competence, that actually stabilizes the environment around you so it actually is less predictable and less threatening,

plus you accrue that evidence and you get the social support for doing so. That's your best pathway forward. You said that a harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control. How should people become more dangerous? Oh, becoming more articulate is definitely, I would say, that's the primary array of weapons.

So, physical prowess is something, and it's not nothing. That physical confidence that comes along with that as well. But the same thing replicated at the level of the ability to communicate and to think that's way broader field of battle and opportunity. So this is one thing that isn't taught well, especially to boys. It's more important to teach it to boys, I would say, because they're more skeptical of such the educational enterprise in general, generally speaking. Part because they're less obedient, partly because they're less agreeable.

That's particularly true for disagreeable boys. And agreeable boys get higher grades independent of their IQ and their academic achievement because they're easier to deal with. So what do you tell disagreeable boys? There's nothing that makes you more formidable than verbal competence, than being able to articulate, be able to think to marshal your arguments, right? to think to marshal your arguments, right? It's a battlefield metaphor to get everything in order, to get all your information straight, no, to marshal your forces.

And so, I mean, that's part of the reason that rap artists are so popular, especially among disaffected young men, black and white alike, because they're unbelievably articulate. They have this incredible verbal prowess. It's unbelievably attractive. You know, when it's associated with genuine artistic and redemptive activity, often focusing on something that's approximately the voice of the underclass,

let's say, but a powerful voice, right? And it's interesting to see how many young white guys identify with that. Was it Aldousuxly that wrote Doors of Perception? Yeah. Yeah, so this is kind of an equivalent of that, right? That you have an experience which many people struggle to articulate.

You take the best of us, the one that has the most precise, most articulate, erudite language, you drop them in and you say, okay, show us what you've learned. This is the equivalent, but for just a different community, a different sort of life, that maybe you don't have the ability to describe what it feels like to live on a counsellor's state in Manchester or in, you know, one of the neighborhoods of Brooklyn or whatever it might be. And then this person can. And it feels like it's your voice. Yeah, well, you still, if you're a young man, you still feel alienated from your place as rightful error of the proper kingdom. I mean, that's an existential truism for everyone,

particularly for every young man. Because he is an outsider in many ways. He's young and juvenile and not very highly valued and and then is in some sense hurt by the inadequacies of the current king, the current culture and and it is easily turned against it because of that and that's the machinations of the evil uncle, that's the king Arthur's story, that's the story of Horus and Osiris, it's an ancient, ancient story, it's the story of Soron and it's there all the time. And you see in that in rap music in hip-hop, all of that alienation being given an articulated voice in an artistic sense. And that's a good example of the power of verbal facility. And that's the root to, let's say, marketing education to young man. It's like,

you want to take your rightful place in the kingdom. It's like, get your tongue straight, man. Get it under control. In the highest possible sense. We went to a comedy club, Tammy and I, in the highest possible sense. We went to a comedy club, Tammy and I, and in New York, a comedy seller, it's a great comedy club, and the last comic was an English guy, and he was not particularly physically prepossessing, and he made a lot of jokes about that,

and it was quite funny. And then he divided the audience into five sections, and he asked each section to toss up a topic just to yellow to topic And they were like random topics like the Kennedy assassination and Electric lighting before 1890 those were two of the topics and the other three were just as diverse and then he put on some beats and he did about an eight-minute rap with every verse rhymed and he tied the whole thing together at the end and ended at the end of the music. All spontaneously was unbelievable. And that's logos, man, that's the redemptive power of the logos right there, the magic word, the sacred word. It's just

manifesting itself on stage. It's very impressive. Something about that that does feel dangerous as well. Not in a, I need to be concerned and this should be contaminated and walled off, but in a way that you think that person has so much competence, that it's flowing out of them and you almost feel competent by being around them. But you certainly feel competent by appreciating it. Yeah. Because it speaks to the part of you that feel confident by appreciating it. Yeah. Because it speaks to the part of you that is capable of appreciating such things. You think, wow, that's really something. That's an amazing display.

That's an amazing thing to see. Amazing, right? A very interesting word, amazing. You're trapped and trapped by the charisma of that. And that charisma, that's not nothing. That's a signal of something redemptive will curry that that accounts for virtually all of the attraction of hip-hop and rap is the articulate

articulated voice of the struggling but worthy underclass I suppose that's a good way of putting it but those who are alienated from the rightful place, and so that verbal prowess is one of the ways they struggle up towards the light. And that's a good example of having that danger under control, because it's a dark genre in many ways, right? It's a real undercurrent and error of violence that surrounds that and it's culture like the punk movement in the in in the UK back in the late 70s same same sort of thing, but that That capacity to express that in a poetic manner and a compelling manner sit or Johnny Rotten was great at that. He was so intense

In a compelling manner, Johnny Rotten was great at that. He was so intense. He worked with PIL afterwards. Public image limited, is that his public image? I think so. He has a song called Rise, which I used to show my clients all the time when I was starting a assertiveness training with them. I'd put on Johnny Rotten's Rise and the line in there is anger, is an energy, and he's got these the line in there is anger is an energy and he's got

these unbelievably intense eyes. Anger is an energy. You bet. And John Lidenman, he could channel out like almost no one I've ever seen. He'd get that anger built up inside him. And then it was completely under control. And he expressed it in his music and he's absolutely captivating, unbelievably charismatic. And I really liked his music, that raw anger in the music,

but it was, it was in the bloody music, wasn't it? Wasn't some random riot, you know? He transmuted that into something, you know, you can argue about the poetic merits of punk rock, although I don't think you should. I mean, I did it my way. He said vicious version of it. I did it my way. My God, that's a work of genius that. It's so brilliantly satirical. What someone's doing is they're refining it, they're distilling it down, and then they're directing it.

So I went to a powerlifting competition a couple of years ago. There was this one guy there lifting, holds a bunch of records in the squat. And he's a normal working class guy from a normal working class town on the outskirts of Newcastle. I'm watching that man warm up, is something else. He's got a sacred playlist, never listens to the songs, apart from when he's about to step on to the lifting platform. He's got these headphones on and he's just walking up

and down. In the same way that you'd see a bull, ready, ready to go out, ready to go and chase something, and he steps out on stage and the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. You're watching this guy channel Rae Fury. That's the God of War. That's Mars. Yeah, he's in touch with that. Unbelievable. Man, words, man. You go to to war with words and you think that's what young men should be taught There we go, but a fury I want to talk about your recovery Can you explain how it felt in the first few days when you realize that it might be over when the clouds were

Lifting you know what happened very incrementally an over a period of months lifting. You know what happened very incrementally in over a period of months? Well, things were slightly less catastrophic in the morning. It was taking me three and a half hours to stand up. And then it was only taking like three hours. So that looked like maybe something had improved. It was very slow. Like the question about when did you get old? Yeah, exactly. One day at a time.

Exactly. So, you know, and I still have a lot of pain, I mostly feel like I have a bad flu all the time, but that's way better than it was. So. What's changed on the other side of that? Do you view the way that you should be in the world different? Do you feel like you have a new purpose after being ill for so long?

Hopefully, I'm more grateful for the mere absence of catastrophe. You know, and I guess I'm possibly more pleased to be out, say, doing this lecture tour. I mean, I was really pleased about it in 2018. I was already pretty damn happy about happy, isn't the right word? Overwhelmed, grateful, in a state of constant disbelief, thrilled about the fact that people were responding so positively amazed about the fact that this had a religious dimension overjoyed to see people come and tell me that they had got their lives together and that they were very happy about that. I had all that already. Maybe

I feel that more. Now, I wouldn't say that I've learned so much that all the pain was worth it. But that's, I suppose in some sense, putting a happy ending on something in a way that's just too trite. It's like, it was, most of that time, I would have far rather been dead for all sorts of reasons. So now I'm perfectly happy that I'm not, but I haven't forgotten what that was like. So it's a lot of people that are very glad that you're not? Yeah, well, that's great. Really, that's great. And I'm thrilled that I'm about being able to be

not terrifying to my family, let's say. And I'm really happy to be back out in public and to be doing what we're doing, you know, along with my daughter and my wife, and with the support of my family. It's great. I love this tour. It's so nice to meet all these people. It's so positive. It's ridiculously positive.

And in a world where so much is negative and ridiculously negative, that's a lovely thing to see. And to see these, I'm going to see 150,000 people in the United States, you know, between when the two are started, which was about two weeks ago, and the end of, I think it's the end of April, before we go to Canada and then to the UK and then to Europe and then to Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia and Russia, all of that's on the table. And to see 150,000 people who are committed enough to trying to make their lives better,

to come to the lectures and to listen to them, even though they're essentially philosophical treatises, or at least the best I can manage in an hour, and to watch people be committed to this and to hear their stories, it's... you can't imagine anything could be more positive than that. And so that's wonderful. If there's something to come back to, you have to have that, it's not much better that you could have arrived back into a world to find. No, no. I mean, the downside of it is that there's such a need for it, because part of what I think I have to offer perhaps is encouragement, because I don't think the planet would be better off with fewer people on it. And I don't think that the ambitious motivations of young men are nothing,

but the manifestation of the corrupt will to power, etc., etc. And the fact that so many people are pining away nihilistically in some sense in no small part because of such accusations, because they're being taken out by their own conscience. I think that's absolutely appalling and seeing how positive people are in relationship to what I'm doing has that as it's shadow, which is, well, isn't it so awful that that's necessary? But it is necessary by all appearances, at least to the people that seem to be listening to me. So, say La Vie, and I do believe,

and I think my family is firmly behind me in this belief that this, the idea that the planet has too many people on it, sort of a group idea, you know. There's too many people, it's like the mass of people. And the mass is too big. But I don't think of people as a mass. I think of people as individuals. And so there's not a mass of people.

It's the wrong level of analysis as far as I'm concerned. The right level of analysis is each person. And I think that that's a core tenant of Western civilization, to the degree that the West is actually civilized, let's say, the more it civilized, the more the emphasis is on the individual. And the idea that the individual is sovereign is the core axiom of Western civilization, democracy itself. And I believe that that statement is as true as any statement we've managed to collectively formulate. And so if it's true, then the real battle is at the level of the individual, even within

the individual, even within the individual. And that's fine with me. And so, mostly, what I'm doing is attempting to make connections with individuals, even though I'm talking to thousands and thousands of people. I'm never talking to them as a group. Ever. I don't even look at them as a group. I never look at the crowd when I'm talking to my audiences. I always look at one person. I'm not always

the same person because that makes them uncomfortable. They're happy to be singled out for a second or two, but it gets weird if it's authorish. So I'm always looking at one person or another, but I'm always talking to one person. I learned that in part from Kirkgard, you know, his Kirkgard believed firmly that as soon as a truth was embodied by the mob, it was no longer a truth. The truth was in and of itself something that was always manifested at the level of the individual. People notice in their own lives that you have wisdom on your own, you go into a group and you compromise that wisdom for some reason, social norms, or the way you've dealt with past traumas,

or the things that you think are the people want to hear from you. You know, that's diffusion of responsibility, right? Because when you're buried in the mob, you can do and say things that the mob hides from you and the world. Whereas if you're just operating on your own, the consequences of your actions are manifested pretty quickly. No place to hide. We have to keep, you know, every group of people isn't a mob either.

I mean, there are groups of people that are decentralized, highly functioning, aggregates, hierarchies, composed of individuals, and that's working at every level of analysis. That's a properly functioning society. That's not a mob at that point. There's a dynamic that permeates the entire hierarchy that keeps the individuals, let's say, at the bottom of the hierarchy completely in touch with those smaller, that smaller number of people who are at the top. A a good, how well functioning democratic political state has that nature, is that there's constant communication, upward and downward, just like the way the brain is organized.

The brain's a hierarchy, but information doesn't just propagate from the bottom up or from the top down, even with your visual system. So for example, when information first enters your brain from your eyes, at the foveal level, each foveal, and that's the center part of your vision, that's high resolution. Every cell in your foveas represented by 10,000 cells at the first level of visual processing. And so there's a tremendous amount of input from your eyes to your brain, bottom up. But even at the very bottom of visual perception, there's more top-down connections from your brain. So the visual system is hierarchical, but each level of the hierarchy communicates all the way down the hierarchy, and a good political system is structured that way. And so you can have a group of people that's not a mob. It's a different way.

It's a different organization, and a democratic polity is not a mob, not if it's functioning properly. You know, it's something that was really brought home to me when I went to England because I went into the lobby of the House of Parliament. It's this great dome building that's more or less at the center of the parliamentary cross. And that's where citizens of Great Britain

can come and lobby to speak to their representative. So that's where the voice of the people meets the voice of the representatives. And that's how it should work is, in some sense, there are emotions and concerns that are stirring in an inarticulate manner at the bottom of the hierarchy where the problems first manifest themselves, because they always first manifest themselves

at the bottom of a hierarchy. Those problems aren't necessarily easy to articulate, and so people stumble forward with their concerns, and the job of their representatives is to take those stumbling concerns and aggregate them, and to give them voice, and to transmit them up the structures of power, to transform the laws into the new body of laws, which is what we act out to reconcile the bottom with the top, and that has to just happen continually, because it's a living, it's like a living organism. Well, it is, in a sense, it is a living organism, because it's a meta-organism, the consists of living organisms. So, you know, for all intents and purposes, it's something

that's alive. I really hit me in the lobby. That's where the word lobby comes from, by the way. So it happened there. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And people are cynical about lobbying, but people are cynical about lots of things, and it's not that helpful. Is it possible to have too much responsibility

to take too much responsibility for yourself? Like, one thing that I've been thinking is that have too much responsibility to take too much responsibility for yourself. One thing that I've been thinking is that the victim mindset where you believe that you have no control over the outcomes in your life, I wonder whether there's an opposite where you believe that you have an infinite amount of control over them and you lose faith in your innate ability to just carry you through. I've been thinking a lot about releasing the tiller, which is a Jed McKenna quote, and he's talking about the fact that the best way to ride a boat through a storm is to actually release the tiller and it allows the boat to maneuver best through the swells. And I think that a lot of

the time going back to the imposter syndrome thing that we were talking about, as you start to accumulate more and more competence, the higher level of overthinking, the higher level of neuroticism, the more of an attention to detail that got you from 0 to 50 isn't necessarily the thing that's going to get you from 50 to 100. You know, you had to get across a river and it was bad and difficult. You don't need to carry that boat across ground to then get you across the next one. And I wonder whether the opposite of a victim mentality where you take responsibility for the things that occur in life, I wonder whether you can overshoot that.

You can for sure, yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, Dostiewski said that every man was responsible for everything he did and for everything that everyone else does, which is kind of an insane statement, but also somewhat, it's true in a certain sense. You do have an indefinite responsibility, and you do have an indefinite capacity to bear that responsibility, but that doesn't mean it can't be crushing. And then I would say the antidote to that is that you're not in this alone as your responsibilities

mount and your opportunities increase. You have to delegate more and more. There's enough for every, there's a, it's important that you do everything you can, but there's enough for everyone to do. And so you might say, well, the herod path is one that leads to universal redemption. And that's true. And you might say, well, that's all on you. It's like, it is in a sense. But then the problem that you just described comes up. Children too much, but well, I can crush you. It can be unsustainable. You can torture yourself for not doing it well enough. And it is up to you, but it's not can crush you. It can be unsustainable. You can torture yourself for not doing it well enough.

And it is up to you, but it's not up to you alone. It's not up to you alone. So you delegate and you build, you help build people around you so that they're all working in the same direction. It's an effort, it's an effort multiplier in any case, and you make sure that they get credit. They get credit isn't exactly, credit's good enough. It's not exactly right. The rewards are in accordance with their efforts, and you can distribute that, you know, because there's also a narcissism that can come along with that, which is, well, it's all up to me. And even if you're working in a veryism that can come along with that, which is, well, it's all up to me.

And even if you're working in a very competent manner, it can seem that way, but there's plenty of work to go around, and there's plenty of credit where credit is due. And so what you do as you attain more responsibility and opportunity is you delegate more of that and you do that continually. I mean, one of the roles of a good manager

is to make him or herself irrelevant. Absolutely. Yeah. Right. So if you're not a good manager, if your company would collapse, if you disappeared, that should all be delegated out. And it's not because you're abdicating responsibility, because also what happens is that if you can root nice someone, something and parse it off to someone else, so here's a little kingdom for you, and it doesn't have to be little, and it's something that can grow. But here's a kingdom for you. Well then you can go off and do the next thing you need to do, which is extremely important.

You know, and you might think there's a kingdom, and then it's broken into little kingdoms. And so the farther you are down the hierarchy, the smaller the kingdom you get. But that's only true if you think the world is a zero-sum game, because you could also think of it as a place of indefinite, a place with an indefinite number of the largest kingdoms possible. And I think why do we think this is exhaustible in some sense? What we're doing? It doesn't look exhaustible. You know, that's the limits to growth mentality. It's like, economists don't believe in that, because they think, well, no, we can just get more efficient, which we certainly are.

We're way more efficient than we once were. And those grains in efficiency, when they're not being interfered with, are increasing at more than an arithmetic rate. Why do you think people have a tendency toward that zero-sum mentality? When I find myself thinking that it's one of the first things that I check myself on, that is cancer. Yeah, well, I mean, there are elements of life

that have a zero-sum element. I mean, if you're competing with another man, for example, to marry a particular woman, that's a zero-sum game. If you only think of the game as including you too and that woman. So you can set up circumstances that are zero sum. And then port them across into situations which aren't? Yeah, well then, but to take that metaphor of zero sum game where there has to be winners

and losers because there's a finite number of resources to assume that the rules of that game are the rules that govern all game, the set of all games. And that's just not true. There's games are infinitely multiple. I mean, you can invent a new game. People do that all the time. The man who invented Catan, which is a game I really like to play, it's a very popular board game. That didn't exist until he invented it. Now, thousands and thousands of people play it, and he made a fortune from it. It's like that game never existed. So, there doesn't seem to be any limit to the number of games we can invent.

And it's a complicated problem because we are on a single planet, and some resources are more zero-sum than others, but we haven't really run into any actual zero sum limits in terms of our, you know, the probability of us living an abundant life on the planet. We've stewarded some resources very stupidly. We've done a very bad job of managing oceanic production, for example, although fish farms have alleviated that on the production side to some degree, but it's a tragedy of the commons that we could address and should address as far as I'm concerned.

One of the good things the true to government has done, I think, to give the devil as do, let's say, is to put a lot of the coast of Canada into marine protected areas. And that's smart. We have to be smart about our resources, but that doesn't mean there's zero sum. And certainly doesn't mean the world is a zero sum game. And that's a melathusian idea, you know, that population will grow till it consumes all available resources and precipitously collapse. And then why do we think apocalypticly? It's well, because things do come to sudden ends.

People die, people get fatal illnesses like the world you so carefully constructed can be blown apart at any moment by a random occurrence, genetic mutation that causes the cancer that kills you. Like life has a like it life has a fundamentally apocalyptic aspect. And we do understand that because we're self-conscious and then it's very difficult not to apply that kind of apocalyptic aspect. And we do understand that because we're self-conscious. And then it's very difficult not to apply that kind of apocalyptic reasoning to things as such the world's going to burn up the climate's too hot. What about runaway positive feedback loops because that's what the climate types are afraid of. Hey, they happen. How do we bind our apocalyptic thinking?

That's a good question, man. That's a good question. We do that through truth. We do that with the truth. That's how we do it. Through dialogue, through investigation, through exploration, through discipline, all of that. The logos is the antidote to the apocalypse. Of course, that's central Christian dogma, isn't it, that the logos is the antidote to the apocalypse. I'm happy to fancy that. And so what does that mean? Love and truth is the antidote to the apocalypse. No, the planet has too many people on it. You said to me when we went out for dinner a couple of months ago, I asked you what I should be doing with my life, and you said what you're doing right now, I think, is pretty good.

And then you said truth in the service of love. What do you mean by that? You just brought it up again. Well, it's a hierarchy of virtue, I would say. You know, there's an old idea that God is the sum of all that's good. I don't think sum is exactly the right metaphor. It's more like imagine there are eternal verities, truth, beauty, justice, love, courage, fortitude, compassion, think of all those things as virtues. So virtue is what all virtues have in common, virtue is what all virtues have in common. That's the relationship of God to the good. God is the essence of the good. So when we put that aside for a moment,

the essence of the good. So, we put that aside for a moment, or you think, how would that manifest itself in your life? Well, that might be pursuit of the good. And that's the pursuit of the good that unites all proximal goods. And what is that exactly? Well, it's something like the belief that it would be for the best that all things flourish to the degree that that's possible. When I was a clinician, I thought of that as the good in me serving the best in my clients. And I think the desire for that to happen that's love. So that's the desire for, you say, well, you take a human bent broken, miserable, malevolent, hurt, corrupt, weak, pathetic, contemptible, frustrating, disappointing, all of those things that we can lay on ourselves because of our inadequacies.

It's easy to dismiss that. And part of that dismissal is what drives the notion that the planet has too many people on it and that we're a cancer on the face of the earth. It's like it's not easy to love that. But what do you want? You want the broken people to rise up out of their brokenness, rather than despise them for it. And then you orient yourself towards that, and try to pull that out of people and yourself. And you have to have that frame first. That's what you're aiming for. And maybe that would be the opposite of hell.

This is one thing I would say that Unite Sam Harris and I, despite our differences in belief in some sense at the level of detail. Sam is very acutely aware of the reality of malevolence and hell. Now, he wouldn't frame that metaphysically or religiously, but it doesn't really matter. He is doing his best to aim away from that as hard as he possibly can. I didn't realize the last time I talked him that Sam identified the religious tradition, the dogmatic religious tradition, with the totalitarianism that produces atrocity.

Now, I think that's a misidentification. The same way the Marxists blame inequality on capitalism. Inequality is really a problem, but it's not the fault of capitalism, and totalitarian atrocity is really a problem, but to identify that reflexively with religion, or even with religious dogma, that's a mistake.

Dogma maybe, but even that's tricky because what's the difference between dogma and knowledge? Today's knowledge is tomorrow's dogma, and drawing the line between those two is extremely difficult. You can't just abandon everything you think, even though it's arbitrary. You need it to guide you. And it can transform into totalitarian dogma and promote atrocity in the service, of its no longer valid maintenance, but that's a very complicated problem. So if that's the love? Love, yeah.

Truth. Truth in the service of love. Hmm. Well, truth to begin with is, well, okay, we could take that apart a bit. What you talked about letting the tiller of the boat go. Well, imagine that you treat, so we're having this conversation and let's say I want this conversation to go the best way it can possibly go. Okay, well, I don't know what that way is, but I have to want that to begin with.

So I come to the conversation, I think I'm going to try to have the most engaging conversation that I can have. I'm going to say what I believe to be the case during the conversation. There isn't something I want from you except that hopefully we can meet in that endeavor. I'm not trying to craft outcome. I don't know what we're going to talk about. We talked a little bit about possible broad themes, although I don't think we touched on any of the things we actually discussed. That doesn't mean we didn't need to do the preparation. And then you think, well, whatever we accomplish in the course of a genuine dialogue is for the best. And that's to let go of the of the tiller. And truth does that. It's like because you can't craft the outcome. And so what

you're doing by engaging in truthful dialogue is letting the wind blow where it's going to blow. And you do that if you've decided at some fundamental level, even if you don't know you've decided that, that the truth will set you free. And the truth is what is in the final analysis, redemptive. And we tend to think of truth. We tend to think that truth resides in a set of accurate facts. That's actually the weakness, I would say, of the materialistic atheist position. That axiomatic presumption about the nature of the truth, but the truth is a process.

It's, and it's often a dialogical process. So the truth is the thing that emerges in the course of the search for the truth. It's something like that. And true truth is to be found in the search for the truth. That's the process that continually revitalizes things. And so, and then if your orientation is towards the good, to the degree that your orientation is towards the good, to the degree that your orientation is towards the good, and your belief that the good can prevail, which is an article of faith, right? The good can prevail. It's like, what's your evidence for that?

There's evidence for whatever position you want to hold on that, so it's a decision. And you let go and the truth takes you away. And you think that it's going to go where it should go. You put, you commit yourself to that idea. And then that's your adventure. That's the thing that's one of the things that's so cool about that. It's like you need this adventure to butt for you against tragedy. There's nothing more adventurous than the truth. And in fact, it's the only true adventure, obviously. You just have to think that through for 20 minutes. How could it be a true adventure if it wasn't true?

And then why is an adventure if it's true? Because you're not crafting the outcome. And so what does that mean? It Because you're not crafting the outcome. And so what does that mean? It means you've decided that the truth is what will set you free. And that's independent in some sense of the evidence. One of the things my family has learned, this has taken a lot of learning is that

there's been at least, I would say, 50 times in the last five years, where we thought we'd be taken out by what was happening around us. Sometimes those were big things. There was probably ten of them, like they were public and famous. And then there was like forty things that weren't so big, but were still plenty big. And it was always the same thing. It was hot as hell for weeks, but flipped. Always, always. But that doesn't mean it was pleasant to live through the part

when it wasn't flipping. It was horrible. But so far, so far, we've been able to let go of the tiller and let the waves take us where they'll take us and not flip the boat. and let the waves take us where they'll take us and not flip the boat. Do you think that there's a usefulness in having a anemosis to motivate you, talking about some of the situations that you've been through? Not particularly those ones exactly, but I try to avoid making enemies of people or groups or ideas or whatever. Yes, don't make unnecessary enemies. But there is an extra level of fire that gets lit underneath you when you're going up against someone, and I miss it sometimes.

There's a price that you pay for peace. Yeah, well, then you just have to look at yourself harder and find the nemesis, because that's there all the time. I mean, there's always parts of yourself that you can overcome. And so that's William James, moral equivalent to war, essentially. If you need something to grapple with, and you probably do, you can find that.

You just look inside, you'll find something to grapple with. Inadequacy, weakness, susceptibility, deemptation, narcissism, pride, envy, revenge, resentment, frustration, lack of faith, all of that, that'll keep you occupied if you really grapple with it. And yeah, I mean, that's an ancient theological question. What's up with the devil? Why is the possibility of evil exist?

Why is there an eternal adversary? You see that reflected in Cain and Abel, right? At the beginning of the Genesis stories, essentially, the first two human beings are good set against an adversary. And that's what opens history, that story. You think, well, why would God construct such a... Why would God construct a reality where an adversary exists? And maybe it's because all things considered a world with an adversary is a better world, just like a garden with a snake, and it is a better garden. These things aren't easy to understand. No snake, no necessity to contend with snakes. So why be awake at all? No adversary, no challenge. Why be challenged? Because maybe you're better for the challenge, and maybe that's the challenge to see if you can be better for the challenge.

But that should be internal. Well, fundamentally, well, if it isn't, you'll find it externally because you'll demonize someone to turn them into Satan so that you can find an adversary. And then that's very unfortunate for you and for them. That's the problem. It's just not as big a battle. It's like you battle with someone external who's malevolent, let's say,

or you think they are. And usually you've got that mostly wrong, but not always. But if the battle is inside, which is where it's supposed to be, most fundamentally, then, well, then it's the ultimate, it is the ultimate challenge. And that's the infinite game. The external one. The battle between good and evil on a playing field of chaos and order. That's the eternal game. And you know, you can play that out in the external world. But part of what the religious enterprise is about and the Christians have really contributed to this is the notion that that sacred battle is fundamentally spiritual, which is to say in some sense,

fundamentally psychological. It's to be fought on the battleground of the soul internally. It's a subjective issue. How do you defeat evil? You defeat evil in your own heart. That is how you do it. And so if that's all being acted out for you in the world, well, you've misplaced Satan. That's a good way of thinking about it. This is another weakness, I think, of the atheistic position, because it's pretty hard. It's an easy, in some sense, to dispense with belief

in the highest good, but it's not so easy to dispense with belief in evil. So that's a big problem. So then where do you localize it? And you can find evidence of it everywhere, certainly in institutions. I mean, that's the whole systemic racism, corrupt patriarchy narrative is that Satan

is to be found at the core of our institutions. And to some degree, that's true, because everything we do is corrupt to some degree. And so then do you fight it sociologically? You're the good person and the institution is Satan? You're so good, are you? You're so sure of that, are you? You've got everything in order, are you?

And you might say, well, do you have to have everything in order before you fight evil on the sociological front? And the answer is, well, no, because you're you have to have everything in order before you fight evil on the sociological front. And the answer is, well, no, because you're never going to have everything in order, but you still shouldn't put the cart before the horse. It's really, it's a spiritual battle. And it's taken people thousands and thousands of years to figure this out. Now, first of all, it was the snake. What's what's evil? What's

malevolent? The predatory reptile. Fair enough, man. I mean, we've been fighting with predatory reptiles for 60 million years as mammals, 60 million years. So it's a good first pass approximation. It's the snake, the poisonous snake, the external enemy, the predator. Well, what about the predator and other people? Oh, yeah, that's even worse, man. It's like how predators are one thing, but predatory people, other tribes, man, they're brutal, they're brutal. Well, what about your predatory friend? Oh, that's pretty bad, too. The friend who stabs you in the back, the person who betrays you, Judas, God. Maybe that's the ultimate snake. It's like, well, how about when you betray yourself?

Oh yeah. So you wanna see there's this association that's very strange that occurred in the development of Christian thought between the snake and the Garden of Eden and Satan. There's no indication in the original story that the snake has anything to do with the Lord of all evil. It's a very weird conclusion that's been drawn. It's almost extra biblical because there's almost no mention of Satan in the Bible at all, much less any direct connection between the serpent and Satan. It's a very, very strange idea. But it's part of this psychologization of evil. Like, what's the ultimate predator? What's the ultimate

predator? What's the enemy you harbor in your own heart who hates you? That's the ultimate predator. When there's these images of Mary, with her head in the stars and baby in her arms and her foot on a snake. It's like, well, that's the eternal feminine heads in the stars because she's oriented towards the highest good and she's protecting her infant from predators. That could be an actual predator. Or that's just to be the case throughout not just human history, but mammalian history, could be other people who are predators, could be men who are predators, could be her,

who's a predator, a devouring mother. What's the ultimate locale of genuine evil? Well, the highest religious answer is, that's in you. That's the proper place to battle it out. And I think that's true. I think that's lit.

It's literally and metaphorically true. And I was convinced of that in part because of Sultian Itzen's writings, because Sultian Itzen identified the totalitarian state with the willingness of the subjects of that state, the subjects and the perpetrators at the same time to live by lies. No, no, no totalitarian state if people don't lie. Every time you lie in support of the totalitarian state, then you're the perpetrator.

That's the psychological issues. Like, you're going to lie to get along or not. Say, well, what does it matter? I'll go along with it. So OK. We'll see how it matters. Because it matters. And that's all psychodrama, as far as I'm concerned.

Fundamentally, when it's properly placed, you've got plenty of problems to take care of on your own front. That's where you should concentrate your efforts. One of the things that I've realized is that people that are self-reflective, that rely on cerebral horsepower, that pay attention, that think in a detailed way, the more nuanced that you're thinking is, the fewer people are going to be like you,

which makes you feel more alone. How do you think people can overcome this? Well, I would say that hasn't been my experience exactly, because as I started to make my thoughts more public, they seem to appeal to more and more people. And so I don't know if that's a threshold phenomena, because maybe it is, you know, as you start to become specialized as a scientist,

in some sense, your vision narrows and narrows, although it gets more high resolution at the level that you're operating, but you kind of pass through a needle, let's say, out the other side where the thing your studying starts to become everything again. And so maybe that's that developmental progression. Further more. Yeah, specialization and then generalization again. Yeah, I think that you might be right there, the deeper into the breach thing, the show that I

went to go and see you do in Manchester in 2017 or 18, someone asked a question about the depth of my consciousness causes me to suffer and you said you take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that girdles the world around you. And I think that this is something you see here as well, that when you start to think differently, when you start to consider the way that you're living your life in a more detailed, higher resolution, more unique, more nuanced way, you will probably receive pushback, especially speaking from personal experience in a normal working class town. People born, live, die in these places. It's insular. There isn't a huge culture of, especially in the UK, tall poppy syndrome is a huge problem. The biggest difference that I've noticed actually between American people and English people is that American children are told that they

can be anything that they want to be. They're told that they have blue sky vision, they can achieve whatever they want. And that gives them a lot of confidence when a Spritz stuffy, stiffer, blip, Brit sea Americans on TV. It sounds like everyone's had media training because everybody's just so enthused about whatever it is, even if it's a 18 car pileup. And then the equivalent in the UK is that deviating from the norm is very, very, very quickly mocked.

And that's a lot of that in Canada too. It's all a puppy syndrome, it's a big deal. Now... Did Japanese have that saying to accept it's the nail that sticks up above all the rest is the first one to be struck down by the hammer? Right. And there's some truth in that too. There's some truth in that. But some and all are very different words. When you roll the clock forward, what you end up with is American children

that then become adults who look around at the world and say, well, hang on, this wasn't what I was promised. I was told that I could be anything that I wanted to be. I was told that I could have anything that I wanted to have. Yeah, There's a difference between you can earn everything that is earnable and you deserve everything there is. So that message can become what you say. It can become misinterpreted in a narcissistic manner. I think that has happened to some degree, especially as people have had fewer and fewer children.

You know, Jonathan Height and Luke Enough talk about the cardling of the American mind. And they think about that in large part as a consequence of an ideological transformation. And some of that's true, but it's also useful to look at more fundamental phenomena. People have children, they're a lot older. They have way fewer children. They have way more resources when they have children on average. If you're one kid of eight, you're pretty much battling it out for attention, for a very finite amount of parental attention with a lot of intense competition. The probability that you're going to come out of that entitled in narcissistic is pretty damn low because your siblings will

definitely punish you for that. But if you're the only child, especially of older parents who are also more conservative because of their age, and also less willing to take chances with you because there's only one of you, and then you have a lot of resources at your disposal. Well, that's a whole different developmental milieu. And we have no idea what the consequences of that are. But the idea that children in that circumstance are more likely to be overprotected and dependent and structured is like, well, yeah, undoubtedly. And that would even be an overabundance of parental virtue in some sense, right? Well, we just did nothing but pay attention to our child. Okay, but too much. What did you expect? It's so strange because I'm an only child, right? And all of the, well, maybe my friends might say differently,

but a lot of the commonly held presumptions around only children. I just, and I have a couple of friends who are as well, and I don't know whether it's where we're from, that the northeast of the UK is very spit and soared us, it's salt of the earth people, it's, you know, grab your bootstraps and your boots and start pulling. And I just haven't seen that. What is it through your clinical practice?

Would that comment? This may not be a primarily working class phenomena, you know, the carnal mind phenomena, that could easily be a middle class and upper phenomena. Is there something, is there a common trend or from your reading have you found that only children tend to be one way or another? No.

No. So you just get huge variance in them as well? I don't know the answer to that at the level of individual psychological data. There might be a literature. I'm not aware of it. That for me, that was more a response to Heitzbuck on the Kotl mind. I thought, okay, fair enough, the Kotling of the Irankamut, what's driving this? It's not just ideas.

It's a huge demographic switch. It's a huge transformation in the way we raise children. We're 10 years older when we have our children now. That's a lot older. You know, when you're 18, you have a kid. You're still a kid. And there's some wildness that's perhaps not so good about that, but there's also perhaps a higher

proclivity to go off and live your own life. And then, you know, how much children, how much should your children be left on their own? The answer is as much as they can tolerate. And how much is that? Well, you find out with each child, but it's certainly possible to not deprive your child enough. So, I've realized that it's scary when you find a thing that you're going to fully commit yourself

to the pursuit of, especially if it's excellence that you're going after, because there's no more room for your inadequacies to hide anymore. You can't decide to change direction and do something else if things get tough. There's no more ejector seat, right? I've committed to this. This is my thing. And this is one of your rules. You know, commit to something as... Yeah, commit to at least one thing. As hard as you can, and see what happens, yeah, precisely. Aim yourself in one direction, and I had a rule with my clients,

because, you know, you might say, well, I've gone halfway down this path, and I found out it's wrong. So how do you distinguish that from just giving up? Well, that's a really hard question, right? It's a moral hazard, because it's inappropriate to continue in a direction you now realize to be wrong, but it's also inappropriate to give up

and use that rationalization as an excuse and how do you distinguish. Especially scenes we're not transparent to us on. Well, right, exactly. So that is genuinely a moral hazard. So One of the principles that I tried to abide by in my therapeutic discussions was, you can change course as long as the next thing you do is equally or more difficult. That's a check against just giving up. You want to discipline yourself so you can get yourself organized so that you can go in a particular direction so that when you find the right direction you can really go in that direction and that does require an apprenticeship of sorts.

And it might not matter in some sense exactly what the apprenticeship is as long as it is rigorous. And so that sort of a bridge between moral relativism and moral absolutism. There's lots of games you can play. It's not that obvious a priori, which is the best game. So that's kind of a morally relative stance. There's multiple playable games. But then the absolute is, yeah, but you have to play one of them. You have to learn to play one of them.

You have to become an expert at least one of them, and then that's not a relative proposition. And I believe that's true. That seems to me to be the case. So you want to commit to something. And then when you commit to something, you require yourself to bring all of your disparate components, moving in a single direction, united in a single direction.

So it's a unifying act. And then once having been unified, well, then you can bring that unity to bear on a variety of different tasks, but you have to bring it together first. And that makes sense developmentally. You see, children start out as a disparate bundle of motivations and emotions, sort of warring with one another, and then they can integrate that into single games that they can play with themselves, and then they integrate that with games they start to play with other people.

And all of that is integration. It's not subjugation, it's not repression. Not if it's a good game, it's integration. And you want to get integrated because then you have all the horses that are pulling your chair pulling in the same direction. And you're much more likely to get to where you want to go that. And also much more likely to specify a good place to go.

So that's another... that's something else. Conservatives have to teach young people, which is, well, get yourself disciplined. Well, why? Well, not so you're a slave, but so that you could be a master. To use a terminology that you're not supposed to use anymore. But, you know, this is in relationship to yourself, not others. So yeah, and to begin with, you have to accept an external master because you just don't have the wisdom to do that

for yourself or the ability or the opportunity often. Everybody knows this, you know, they feel bad when they decide they're going to put put get themselves in good shape and go to the gym and last like three temps. Yeah. And then no one's happy about the fact that they quit and they berate themselves for it. And we know that we need to go through a disciplinary process. We need to subjugate ourselves to a disciplinary process. That's part of the problem with the constant harping about the oppressive patriarchy. It's like, well, you need a disciplinary process. So, well, that's just oppression and slavery. It's like, no, it's not. No more than a game is. Not a good game.

A good game isn't oppression and slavery. We saw being on time, being punctual, was later the fate of some oppressive superstructure. Yeah, obviously. Yeah, it's utterly inbisillic. I mean, even at a scientific level, there's no, that's trait conscientiousness, by the way, to be punctual, part of orderliness and dutifulness, industriousness. There's no evidence whatsoever that that varies by ethnicity or race. Also, supremacy. Yeah, or supremacy.

And there is evidence that if you are like that, you are more likely to succeed. It's one, it is the most determining, it's the most potent personality predictor of success in algorithmic domains, managerial administrative domains. So hard work works. And in fact, the degree to which hard work works is actually the one metric of the health

of a society, like the higher the correlation between conscientiousness and outcome, the healthier the society. Well, obviously, why? Well, you want the bulk of the credit to go to the people who are the most productive. I mean, not because not even in some sense, because they deserve it, because what does deserve mean exactly? It is because they deserve it, but that's a black box that word. It's because if you want them to keep making stuff, you have to do that. And you want them to because, well, or what, you don't want food, you don't want shelter.

Why would you not reward the people who provide it? Differentially. It's just your own, even your own narrow self-interest would require that. So talking about committing to one thing and the inevitable pain of then not being an easy get out anymore, I've decided that this is my thing. I'm going after it. I'm going to give it. Yeah, it's useful to stick a temporal parameter or an accomplishment parameter on it.

That's one of the reasons it's useful to have it in three months, I'll try it for six months. Yeah, well, I'm going to get this degree no matter what. Well, it's a time limit. It's not your whole life, but you're committed to that. And then you do box yourself in. It's like, well, I'm in this box. I have to make the best of it. That's right. You're in this box and you have to make the best of it.

And you might say, well, I don't want to be in a box. Like, are you so sure you don't want to be in a box? A box is a fortress. The walls keep the dragons away. You want to be in a box. And then you have to be in a box. And don't want to be in a box. It's like, are you so sure you don't want to be in a box? A box is a fortress. The walls keep the dragons away.

You want to be in a box. Paradise is a walled garden. It's not a garden without walls. It's got walls, right? You have a house, it has walls. You have a room, it has walls. You don't want to be outside of a box. Pick your damn box and then figure out how to make it into a garden. Well, I want a box without walls. You don't want to be outside of a box. Pick your damn box and then figure out how to make

it into a garden. Well, I want a box without walls. It's, no, you don't. It's nothing but snakes. Yeah. You spoke about this last night in relation to relationships. And you said that when you commit to somebody, there is the inevitable pain that any future catastrophe is going to need to be worked out in a difficult way between you and the person that you've committed to as opposed to you being able to go, oh, well, cool. I'm out of here. The side chick's a warm on Tinder in any case, I'm off. Yeah, right, right, right.

Well, that was something I really learned from reading Carl Jung. He thought about marriages. He used alchemical symbolism as purification requires heat, heat and pressure. And so you have a container and it gets hot and that's when you want to leave, that's when the changes can take place. And sometimes they have to be radical to maintain the relationship. Very radical, but hopefully those radical changes are positive. But what makes you think you'd make them if there wasn't a fire lit under you. And one of the fires is I can't escape from you. Here we are locked in combat, right? Here we are in this adversarial relationship.

Beneficial adversarial. Exactly. Beneficial adversarial. Yeah. There's no out, except through. Yeah, exactly. Beneficial adversary. Yeah, there's no out except through. And there's no evidence that through will work. But and so that's part of the utility of the vow is to turn the temperature up. And you know, you could say, well, I'll escape. But the problem with that is escape to where you're not going to have another relationship. And to the degree that you brought the catastrophe to the previous relationship, which is at least a 50, 50 probability, right? What makes you think you're not going to bring it to the next relationship? You're the common denominator between all of the

experiences you have. I've had many bad relationships, like really? I've never met anyone I can trust. Okay. Everyone's motivated by power. What's the common denominator here? Exactly. So, you know, it's tricky because I've,

I mean, lots of people in my family have been divorced, which is the case in virtually every family. And I don't feel like I'm in a position to shake my finger at people and say, you know, you failed. And with more effort you could have succeeded. That's not up to me to decide. And many of those people have gone on

to have more successful relationships the second time around. But that doesn't belive the initial point. And besides even the people who went through a divorce wanted to get married again, they still see utility in the vow and the container. So, you know, you can't make these things into inviolable absolutes, zero divorce, zero drugs, zero climate change. No, that's that isn't how the world works. Partly because there's always a snake in the garden, right? There's no zero. Not without the application of increasingly totalitarian force has to be some leeway,

but you don't blow the whole systems apart just to provide some leeway. It's a very difficult thing to negotiate. You know, I've had clients who had partners that really couldn't be negotiated with. The whole idea of negotiation wasn't negotiable. And I didn't see they really had any choice to either maintain the millstone around their neck and drown or to leave. It's an awful choice, but that doesn't mean that marriage is a prison that no one should ever enter. It just means that things are complicated. Optimizing for absolutes always ends up in. Carl Newport says this about email.

Really interesting insight, he says that one of the problems that you have with anything is when you drive the cost down to literally zero, you end up with a ton of very weird externalities that you have with anything is when you drive the cost down to literally zero, you end up with a ton of very weird externalities that you didn't think of. Right. And he made some argument that every email should cost five pens. Right. Right. And if every email cost five pens, you would receive 90% fewer emails.

Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. The proper, it's very, we've wrestled with that very frequently, building these programs to help people, so with my colleagues, both of who are psychologists, one in clinical psychologists, one in research psychologists, we built personality tests to help people understand their personalities, which also produces a couples report so that you can understand the differences between you

and your partner at a temperamental level. And we produce this suite of writing programs that help people write an autobiography and an analysis of their virtues and faults and a plan for the future. And one question is, well, why not give it away? And the answer is, because zero is not the right cost. Now, what the right cost is, that's really tricky. Well, that's why you have markets is to determine what the right cost is. Zero is like we've sold way more of these than we would have ever given away partly because people presume that if it costs nothing, it's worth nothing. And partly because it isn't free. Like we actually worked. Partly because it isn't free. Like we actually worked.

Well, one of my partners were pretty much full time for 15 years on this at subpar wages, making a tenth of perhaps of what he could have made in the private domain. Like if he would have gone out and marketed his skills because he's a brilliant programmer. He has a PhD in psychology, extraordinarily educated, unbelievably accomplished. He could have made a fortune in the private endeavors. He worked at subpar wages for 15 years before we had any success on this front at all. So it wasn't free by any stretch of the imagination. It was unbelievably expensive for us to do this. And so then to say, pillory it, because somebody might say, well, if you were really interested

in the welfare of the human race, you wouldn't be making money off your redemptive endeavors. It's like, what do you know about it? Exactly. Have you ever tried to build something and market it? Do you have any idea what that entails? Like, first of all, have you built something that works, that's scalable, that would help? You've demonstrated that it worked.

You've done all that. And that's like, you're 5% of the way there, buddy, because you think, now you've got a good thing that people will line up to use it. 95% of the problem is marketing and communication. Have you ever tried to communicate about a product that you've built? No, and you're telling me that somehow I'm malevolent because I'm trying to make enough money off this to

justify its existence to make sure that I've designed it in a way that people actually want. You can tell that because they'll pay for it in a way that will sustain it and allow it to grow. Well, simultaneously trying to reward the people that developed it. That's all wrong, is it? And you know that. So no, I'm, I have a set of empty-headed axioms about inequality, and I'm judging you morally because of their what, injudicious application, because that's easier than thinking. That's where that argument goes.

It's just a rational price. It's an indicator of quality and it's a commitment device. It's where that argument goes. It's just irrational. Price is an indicator of quality and it's a commitment device. It's a rough indicator, but it's better than any other indicator we have. You know, generally, if you want to buy a suit, a more expensive suit is better, but not always. People hack this, right?

This is in the online space. They decide to ratchet up the price of something that should have been one-tenth or one-hundredth. I thought this about James Clears' Atomic Habits. It was the best-selling nonfiction book in the world last year, 2021. And it's great. And he sold this book for whatever, £8 on Kindle and £12 for a paperback. If he decided to release an online course of Atomic Habits 60 days to a new you or something.

It would have been 500 pounds or a thousand. Right. So there's this odd tension now that's happening between people who have the capacity to improve other people's lives, where I know a lot of authors who are coming into the writing space from the online course space that they're thinking, right, okay, well, I've made the money. Yeah. Now, because there is so much disproportionate fee that people are prepared to pay for an online course.

The reason that I think this is the case is because people are looking for outcomes with a lot of personal development books, and they feel that they are closer to the outcome by doing a course because it's going to be more applied as opposed to reading the book. Well, it's also the case that hardly anyone reads. Listening and watching is way more accessible to people. Way more, like 10 times more. And this is actually going to start

and is already affecting the author market, I would say. I mean, I talked to Sam Harris about this a while back whether he was writing something. And he told me, I hope I get this right, and certainly not a criticism of Sam in any case, that the opportunity cost is too high. I mean, look with a video, the video we're making right now is probably going to be watched by a million people. If I wanted to write another book that reached a million people, it would take me two years of writing, and then a year of marketing, and the probability that will happen,

even though I'm already a successful author, is still extremely low, whereas we can do this in two hours, and reach a million people. What was it some said, he's perpetually finding more urgent things to do? Right. Something like that.

Right, right, right. And the repetitive communication online is insane. Well, think about who was the guy that you did that watched you do the lecture series on in Nashville. He was the... P-J. P-J. Yeah, right.

How long that take? Two, two half days. Plus prep. Three, something like that. Three half days, plus a week of prep or something like that. Right. Right. Power laws, man? Yes, absolutely. Well, and, and then there's no leg to publication. Right. And, and it's an ever-growing platform. And it's accessible to 10 times as many people.

And it's just as permanent as a book. Now, you might say, why ever write a book? Not actually a real question. It's a question I've asked myself because some of the themes that I'm exploring in my next book, I've already talked about in YouTube videos, let's say, and they've had quite an explosive reaction to some of the ideas. I talked about the nature of the crucifixion and the snake, the relationship between the image of the crucifixion and the image of the snake. I talked about that on Rogan, and that was like two weeks ago, and I think probably 500,000 people have seen that clip. Like that's more than a best-selling book. Instantly, so why am I writing the book? And the answer is there's nothing that requires you to think more deeply than to write a book.

And so there's still an intellectual advantage to that. And a lot of the things that I'm able to say so quickly, let's say, like I did on Rogan, you know, it took 30 years to think. Because you wrote those through. Because I know you. Yeah, exactly. Well, I find this, my newsletter, I do it once a week. And it synthesizes whatever I've learned of the last seven days. Right.

It takes me, you know, a couple of hours to write or whatever, and it's less than a thousand words. You can read it in three minutes, three minute Monday. And so much of the stuff that I value now that I talk about with friends or on podcasts is something that imposter adaptation. That was something I've been thinking about. I wonder if I can write this in 500 words. I wonder if I can get it down, in casual language, but it concretises what you do. This is why I say people that don't have an outlet where definitely if they don't have conversations, but also potentially if they don't have the opportunity

to write about what they think, is that your thoughts are just notions. They're just this, it's like a, a resolution, a femoral, very difficult to grasp, wishy-washing thing, put it into words, outside of your brain, put it into words, say it to someone or very difficult to grasp, wish you wasn't doing. Put it into words outside of your brain. Put it into words. Say it to someone or write it to someone.

See what happens then. It concretizes things. Well, it also edits it because so when you're writing, part of it is revelatory. You write down what you think, but you select what you think from the multitude of revelations. You don't write down everything you think because you can't. So you have to select right away and that's editing. And then when you actually technically edit what you've written, the same thing happens. You shrink it.

You organize it. You make it coherent. You get rid of what's irrelevant. And so that's tightens up your thinking. And then if you're speaking with someone about what you're thinking, it's the same thing because they'll object or they'll reward some of it. So that's all that dialogue is some of it's the generation of new ideas, but a tremendous amount of it is editing what you

what's already you've already revealed to yourself in this very vague sort of dream-like way. So anything you want to say before we finish up? I'd like to thank everybody who's watching and listening and to thank you and your crew for making this possible. I mean, you guys, you know, you put a lot effort into this, come over from the UK with your crew and you set this up professionally and and it's a straightforward interview with no tricks and so that's not an easy thing to manage and I appreciate the opportunity and

That's both that John Peterson ladies and gentlemen. Thank you. Good to see you Chris.