The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 275. Beyond Order: Rule 3 - Do Not Hide Unwanted Things in the Fog

Episode Date: August 2, 2022

In this episode of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, we continue our dive into Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. This compilation episode is focused on Rule 3: “Do Not Hide Unwanted Things in the Fog" It includes interviews with Dave Rubin, Aubrey Marcus, and Theo Von. // SUPPORT THIS CHANNEL // Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/jordanbpeterson.co...Donations: https://jordanbpeterson.com/donate // COURSES // Discovering Personality: https://jordanbpeterson.com/personalitySelf Authoring Suite: https://selfauthoring.comUnderstand Myself (personality test): https://understandmyself.com // BOOKS // Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life: https://jordanbpeterson.com/Beyond-Order12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: https://jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-...Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: https://jordanbpeterson.com/maps-of-m... // LINKS // Website: https://jordanbpeterson.comEvents: https://jordanbpeterson.com/eventsBlog: https://jordanbpeterson.com/blogPodcast: https://jordanbpeterson.com/podcast // SOCIAL // Twitter: https://twitter.com/jordanbpetersonInstagram: https://instagram.com/jordan.b.petersonFacebook: https://facebook.com/drjordanpetersonTelegram: https://t.me/DrJordanPetersonAll socials: https://linktr.ee/drjordanbpeterson #JordanPeterson #JordanBPeterson #DrJordanPeterson #DrJordanBPeterson #DailyWirePlus #Psychology

The Christ in the Gospels is quite merciful. And one of Jung's propositions was that there's an ancient line of religious thinking that has mercy and justice as the two hands of God. Too much mercy is the devouring mother. Everything's okay. No one's ever called to account. And so no one ever matures and takes responsibility. But justice without mercy is too harsh because we all fall short of the mark.

So God rules with a balance of justice and mercy. And the Christ and the Gospels, although there's hints of temper and judgment, he's presented in quite a merciful manner. But in that revelation, he's a judge quite a merciful manner, but in the revelation, he's a judge. It's like, no, you're unworthy and the select are few. And you think, well, what does that mean? It's like, well, imagine sorting yourself out into the select and the unworthy.

Perhaps most of you is select, but I doubt it. And you certainly aren't going to start that way. You know, nothing that isn't approximating the ideal is select, but I doubt it. And you certainly aren't going to start that way. You know, nothing that isn't approximating the ideal is select. So in any case, his proposition was that every ideal is a judge. And that makes perfect sense because an ideal is something to which you aspire. And the gap between you and that ideal, if it's your ideal, is felt as judgment. And so that's one of the reasons people are very afraid to have an ideal, to make it,

that's why I wrote, do not hide things in the fog. It's like, well, you should lay out an ideal, you should pursue an ideal. Why wouldn't you? Well, when you make your ideal explicit, it turns into your judge. Well, then you can listen to that judge and and move forward and transform, but you know, it's pretty damn harsh because especially to begin with, we pause it an ideal, especially if you're in a mess. God every bit of you is being judged as unworthy.

Yeah, there's endless reasons not to want that. every bit of you is being judged as unworthy. There's endless reasons not to want that. And then the way forward is to have that ideal because those ideals are in some ways noble truths. These things about loving the collective because the collective is the same. It's true whether people want to adopt it or not at least in my opinion, that there's things that our consciousness knows to be true.

So those are ideals that exist. I think it's true because you are in fact, a community across time. Right. So there's no difference between what's good for you and what's good for other people. There's actually no difference. Not if you extend it far enough.

They are technically the same thing. So you have this ideal that is there, whether you acknowledge it or not, and you feel it, and you feel that thing. But where it gets you get tripped up is when you have an expectation that you're going to magically travel and teleport from where you are, which is full of your own corruptions and full of your own selfishness to meet that ideal immediately. So the mercy comes from saying, this is the ideal. But the expectation of judgment that I'm going to be at that right away is false. So let me appreciate myself right here where I am in this journey with all of my faults.

However many they are, open up my entire closet of internal monsters, pet them on the head and say, okay, here we go, eliminating more of those and becoming more like the ideal, surrendering to the journey rather than that expectation. And there, the judge no longer carries the sting in the bite and the harshness, because it's your judging yourself according to a timeline where you're hoping to get closer to this. Yes, while in the hallmark starts to become improvement.

Right. Exactly. That's great. That's a really sustaining process, too, because technically speaking again, seeing yourself move towards a desired goal is the essence of the positive emotion that nourishes us. And I mean that technically, that's dopaminergicly mediated incentive reward. And so you don't have to get to the goal. You have to aspire to the goal and move towards it.

And then that doesn't even matter if the goal receives, which it will as you approach it, because your ability to conjure up what constitutes the ideal is going to become more sophisticated as you move towards it. And you might think, well, that's terrible, but it isn't because it means the game doesn't have to end. Right? Because if you may, you hit the ideal. It's like, oh, well, game over, reset, you know, but no, no, that isn't going to be how it works. It's just it's going to get better and better and better and It's it's why its life is the perfect game I mean if you have a really good for those of us who've played video games

You have a really good video game or even a really good book or even a really good movie series or a show And it comes to the end and you're like oh there's a huge letdown at the termination of this thing That's been incredibly engaging. Even if you win. Yeah, exactly. You win and you get this moment satisfaction, but it's replaced almost immediately by the disappointment of the cessation of the game and the recognition that you're in a finite game when you really want to be playing the infinite game and that's what life is. The infinite game of renewal of life.

And that's why it's so good. We'll never replace it. It can't get better. And it's hard as hell. And it's hard as hell at the same time. And that's that's the way we would want it. Well, it seems like that's the way we wanted. I mean, that's another thing I talk about a little bit in a new book is like, well, when you look back on your past, it's generally having having done something difficult that you remember positively, I would say. So then there's something about you that craves difficulty, optimal difficulty at least, strangely enough.

Do not hide unwanted things in the fog, which seems to me we live in a constant state of distraction now. You've mentioned Twitter a couple times. It's like, is Twitter bringing any of us happiness or is it keeping us all in a constant state of fog? Any, you know, the overload and the endless obsession with politics, that all seems like a fog to me. You know, I do my August off the grid and I do that to get out of the fog.

So we're so key at. and I do that to get out of the fog. So, yeah. Distraction is definitely fog. You'll distract yourself. I think you distract yourself mostly when your conscience is bothering you because you don't want to face what it is in your life that is uncomfortable.

That chapter is again quite practical. It's a reminder to pay attention often to negative emotion, resentment and that sort of thing because it can tell you well resentment is very useful. Maybe your partner is talking to someone and they're a little bit more animated than you'd like and you get jealous and that jealousy is associated with a whole set of insecurities Or maybe they're flirting and they shouldn't be It's not that easy to determine and maybe you'll have a big fight about that But you could just as well pretend that didn't happen You know your the motion comes up. I'm jealous. I'm resentful. It's associated with experiences like that in the past.

The psychoanalysts would have called that a complex. You could notice that, you could think, well, should I be jealous? Is there something wrong with me or is there something wrong with my partner? There's something wrong with the relationship. And you have to untangle that. And who knows what you'll have to untangle to get that straight? Or you can bear the jealousy and see what will happen in the relationship, or maybe it'll disintegrate because your partner is flirting and you ignore that.

It's not like you repress it exactly. And this chapter is an attempt to distinguish repression from this hiding in the fog. It's that you get a hint that something's wrong. And then you have to unpack that hint to pull the information out. You know, so maybe your partner is flirting and they shouldn't be. And so then you have to find out why they're dissatisfied with the relationship or what's tempting them or, or what is crooked in their soul at the moment or what they're dissatisfied about.

Terrible journey of exploration and discovery. You know, that's always presented as something that's positive. It's often not at all. It's so hard. It's like doing surgery on a separating wound. It's no wonder people avoid it, but it's not helpful. You know, because all it does is leave that, those things grow and multiply in the dark. And if you ignore them, they just cascade.

Do you think so? It's better that's just self-protection for most people, that most people, they see it, they know that truth behind them, whether it's about their partner or whatever it might be. But they just, it's just self-protection. Like, oh, I just got to keep moving on as things are, that we're just creatures of habit or something like that. Well, sometimes it's that, and I especially gets to be that if it's accumulated for a long time

because if you wouldn't deal with it when it was a kitten, you're not going to deal with it when it's a full-grown lion. But I think mostly it's something else I return to in the book is it's deceit, resentment, and arrogance. I already know what I need to know. That's arrogance. Deceit is I don't have to pay attention to that. And resentment is, well, things can go to hell and so can he or she. You know, and that's a pretty dark triad. And you don't want the spirit that embodies that to take over your life, that's for sure.

Well, motherhood isn't as high status and occupation as it should be. That's a cultural failing, but we're also. You just got so many moms following you, you just got so many more fans. And just like that. I saw this, you know, when my wife fans. And just like that. I saw this. No one, my wife had little kids.

It was often the case that she wasn't well treated in restaurants and so forth, especially if I wasn't there. So and that wasn't good. I thought that was a sign of real cultural sickness that a mother with a young child isn't, is treated badly. That's very bad idea. And that's part of this casual contempt. So anyways, when you're 18 or 17 or 19 or 22, it's like, what do you want exactly? What do you want? And

that's, I wrote about that in chapter three of this new book, Beyond Order. Don't hide things in the fog. You have to let yourself know what you want. Well, so you make a list of what you want. And what is that? Well, you want someone who's productive and generous and honest. That's a real good start. You want someone that you're physically attracted to. Yes. You want someone who's education and intelligence roughly match or exceed your own. I should stop reading. Daddy Peterson's dating rules can't you go in? Well, and then if you find someone like that, then that's who you want, right? And you should know that and you should notice that.

And because then at least you're looking in the right place. Like there's some. Maybe you could also put into one of your podcasts or things because you, I know a lot of young men follow you to ask the girls out. I do. I do. I do say that. Okay. I don't know. It's all of a sudden. All the time. You don't want to do a little extra bump.

I tell them all the times I get out there and ask and send my clinical practice to. It's like you're not going to find someone less you ask. And you know, for all their, there's a lot of criticism aimed at the, you know, those, those, the men's movements, the teach men how to be a player, how to attract women, how to, there's a lot of negative press aimed at those. And I can understand why because there's kind of a psychopath, how to attract women, how to, there's a lot of negative press aimed at those. And I can understand why, because there's kind of a psychopathic element to it. But one of the things those movements do do is to really encourage young men to overcome their fear of approaching women and even asking them a further phone number or for a date or for a conversation or for a coffee and

put a profile up on on a dating profile, dress up nicely, get a professional photograph taken, you know, put your best foot forward and have enough courage to approach some women and maybe get over your fear. And it's so, but I would say to young women, if you find someone who you think fits your criteria and you're not being asked out, ask them. Fine, I'll do it and I'll report that. Well, what's the alternative to weight and wither on the vine? That doesn't seem very useful.

I don't wanna do that, no, that sounds horrible. What would you say would be that the keys to your success of 50 years of loving each other and being in a, what seems to be a healthy functional relationship when in society today, there doesn't seem like many of those. Well, we really do our best not to lie to each other about anything. And we also have fights when they're necessary. We don't let things, we don't hide things in the fog. That's the title of chapter three of my new book, don't hide

things in the fog. And we've worked through our issues. If we have a dispute, we do our level best to get to the bottom of it, to find out what in the world's causing it, whose needs to change and why and how and when, and then how we can progress forward into the future without having that issue, dog us or drag behind us or interfere with us at all. And that means a fair bit of confrontation, I would say. But in less so over the years as we've settled more and more things, but everything's out in the open. Everything that we can get is out of out in the open. You can't have a relationship without trust. And you trust your partner courageously if you're not naive, knowing that you can be hurt and that you can be deceived and that you can also do both of those things.

So you offer your partner your trust as an invitation to them to be honest and forthcoming. And while in then issues come up and you delve into them and straighten them out. In my marriage and in my relationship with my children and in my clinical practice, it's you have to negotiate. That's what men and women have to do. And so I talk about that, particularly in chapter three of my new book, which is Don't Hide Things in the Fog. talk about that particularly in chapter three of my new book, which is don't hide things in the fog. It's like, well, let's talk about sex, for example. That's a good one. There's a stumbling block in a relationship. Let's talk about sex. Well, that's hard. People don't do it. They're uncut. You know, like they'll have sex. They'll engage in sexual acts, but they won't represent them abstractly and discuss them. You know, so, well, how often should we have sex?

Well, how are you going to solve that problem? Well, first of all, each person has to admit how often they'd like to have sex. They might be uncomfortable with that right off the bat. They might not even know because they're so uncomfortable about it. They never even asked themselves. And then you have to ask yourself, well, what will I do if I don't get that? And people don't like that question either, because it means why you're gonna get better

and you're gonna get resentful and you're gonna get mopey and whiny and you're gonna justify having an affair or at least looking elsewhere and you don't wanna admit that about yourself so you won't have the damn discussion. As soon as you know that you're flawed deeply and if you're sexually frustrated, you're more likely to stray, then you can be afraid of yourself enough to overcome the fear to have the conversations.

Like, look, a woman, if we don't make love three times a week, I'm so whiny and immature that I'm going to go to strip bars and that doesn't work out well for our relationship. And you know, and she might say, well, why don't you grow the hell up? And, you know, I'm so overworked, I have 50 hour a week work week because I'm a lawyer and I have three small kids and they're clamoring for my attention. And my goddamn husband is such a miserable ranch that he threatens me with, you know, marital disintegration if I don't pull out

another four hours a week to please him. It's like fair enough, those are two good arguments and who the hell wants to have that discussion. But my sense is it's tyranny, slavery, or negotiation. And I've walked couples through this process many times. There's a part in chapter three where you talk about fear and you talk about the fog. And I wrote down a sentence that says that sometimes you're so afraid that you will not allow yourself to even know what you want. I think that's very common.

It really hit me hard because sometimes I admit I'm afraid to like, I'm afraid to even map out, even to really write down and map out what I want. But I don't know exactly. I tried to really drop down and figure out what the fear was, like why am I afraid? Like, and I had some trouble really figuring that out. Like, am I afraid that I'll have to then do it? Am I afraid that I'll then feel inadequate based

upon what I really want and where I currently am? So I just wanted to, you to maybe expound on that a little bit and just kind of share like, what did you think? Why do I get afraid to really admit, even admit to myself what I really want? If you know what you want, then you know when you're failing. If you don't allow yourself to know what you want, you can keep that foggy. If you don't set out to know what you want, you can keep that foggy.

If you don't set out the conditions for your success, then you can avoid your responsibility because again, that's not clear. The problem with wanting something is that in all probability, you're going to have to work for it, you're going to have to make sacrifices. And it's certainly possible that you want to avoid that. You might be afraid to make it clear because other people could deny it to you too, which is something I write about a fair bit in that chapter. The problem is, and failing to make any of that clear protects you right now, but it's really hard on you over the

medium to long term, because if you don't make it clear to yourself what you want or to other people, the probability that you're just going to stumble into it is pretty low. And you can put that off indefinitely day after day, but the problem with that is that you age while you're doing that and there's obviously a price to be paid for that. So that chapter,

that's chapter three, do not hide things in the fog. I mean, it's a warning about failing to pay attention. You know, knowledge emerges in a very strange way. It emerges obviously when we learn something, we start it out by not knowing it. And so what that means is that knowledge goes through a transformation process from being absolutely not there to being explicit and fully detailed. And one step of that process is emotion. And so for example, you might find yourself frustrated, disappointed about the events of the day, but be unable to exactly specify why. That's extremely common. You know, you go home to your partner,

and you be in a bad mood, and you know, you'll snap at them for something, and they'll say, well, what's up with you? And you'll say, well, nothing, you're just being annoying when it's perfectly clear to both of you that there is actually something up with you. And then that disappointment and frustration, anger and sadness, let's say are anxiety, is a sign that something isn't right. But it isn't like, it isn't necessarily that you're repressing knowledge of what's not right. It's that you just, you actually don't know. And the emotion is the first step in the process by which that knowledge emerges. And you might have to sit and think and talk to your partner or to a friend

for God only knows how long before you're actually going to put your finger on what it is that you're upset about. And it could be very far removed from whatever happened to trigger you in the moment. And so that's the fog. And you can keep things in the fog just by not doing that. It's really easy. It's no more difficult than just sitting there doing nothing because creating knowledge is active and difficult. Yeah. Well, it's, you know, we've created such a perfect fog these days. Like really, the fog has been, it's become such a, the fog is such a perfect fog these days. Like really the fog has been, it's become such a, the fog is such a business. Every little thing that can be created

to take away your attention from, or that can take away our attention from figuring out who we are, or like kind of spelunking inside of ourselves and trying to get some answers, has really been created. It's almost, it's pretty masterful how much has been created out here on the outside to keep our attention away from delving inside of ourselves.

Well, you know, attention is the basic currency, right? Everyone fights for it. And it's incredibly valuable. And it certainly is the case that it's also very tempting to turn your attention to things that grasp your short-term interest rather than say pursuing the causes of negative emotion. That's a good example. And of course, we have massive corporations working night and day to continually attract our attention. And there's something sinister about that, obviously, but you can't exactly lay responsibility

at their feet because there isn't that. There's a tremendous overlap between educating people, informing them, and making them attend to you and the lines between all of those things are very foggy, let's say, and difficult to lay out. It's certainly the case that one of the ways that you can keep yourself in a fog about yourself is by distracting is through distraction with external with anything in the external world. And obviously computer technology, cell phones, games, well, not negative in and of themselves, perhaps,

are there at any moment to distract you. At any moment, yeah, the little things that are time consumers like it's, yeah, there's companies, there are businesses where that is their business, is to get your attention, everything's trying to get our attention. Sometimes I worry that the forces that are out there

that have started to really create algorithms even on how to get our attention and how to keep it, that those forces are stronger than our human abilities to keep them away from us. Do you feel like that's true or do you feel like that that's just a feeling? I think I really do believe that that's true. I look, as far as I can tell, we are teaching computers to read our minds as fast as we possibly can, and they're way better at it than they were 10 years ago,

and they're going to be so much better at it in five years that we won't even be able to imagine it. And when I say read our minds, I'm not talking about something magical, but... Oh, yeah. For example, I'm like, guess what's happening. It's not like they're going to guess what we're thinking or guess what we want for dinner or anything like that probably. Well, they might, but they won't do it by directly reading our brain waves or anything like that. They're already algorithms that target advertisements to send that you are pretty good at deciding what it is that you're motivated to pursue. Oh yeah. I just got an ad on my phone for your

new book actually. Oh, yeah. Well, good. So I'm involved in the same process, the same nefarious process. Oh, just joking. I've read that that I think it's Facebook, but I might be wrong about this that owns Oculus and the headset, the VR headset company. Now, you can track eye movements with VR headset and psychologists use the tracking of eye movements to map attention in high detail. Now, look, if you look at our eyes, you see that there's a colored circle and a dark circle in the middle

and then that's surrounded by white. And that makes your eye very visible to other people, animals too, but other people particularly human eyes are quite unique in that regard. And it looks like we've evolved to have highly visible eyes. And the reason for that is that other, we communicate with other people and they can read our motivations by watching our eyes. So if you stand on the corner and you look up at nothing in the sky and you stand there long enough, someone else will join you and then if there's two people, then there'll be ten right away.

And the reason for that is that we, and this is again something uniquely human. We attend to where other people point their eyes, assuming that if they're interested in it, we might be interested in it too. And so that's, and human beings are visual animals. About half our brain is, is taken up with visual processing. We're much more visual than virtually any other animal. And so computers are soon going to be able to track where we place our eyes, which of course advertisers are incredibly interested in. And that's going to speed up the ability of high-powered computational devices to understand human beings as a group, but also each of us

individually to an immense degree. And I think we're probably 10 years away from computers that understand us better than we understand ourselves. AI machines are going to get extremely good at this because it's so lucrative to be able to gauge attention. There's nothing that's more valuable than that. And so, do you feel like it's, do you feel like there should be,

it's hard to say there should be legislation because I hate to put anything on the, you know, that the government's responsibility. But should there be like rules or legislation between allowing computers and AI to get that advanced or is it still just fall on the feet of us between allowing computers and AI to get that advanced or is it still just fall on the feet of us as humans just to battle kind of the dark arts of these machines that can sort of like take us

into a trance and then monetize the trance at the same time. I think that legislation in some senses sense, is it's going to be playing couch up, and it's going to be farther and farther behind all the time, because this is moving so fast and with such power, and it's so distributed that no one is going to be able to even keep track of it, much less regulated. I mean, the interconnected environment is changing so rapidly that even if you're reasonably tech savvy, you can't keep up with all the major

changes. And there's no evidence whatsoever that that's going to do anything but accelerate. And so I can't see how legislators have the ghost of a chance at keeping up with this even if they knew what to target or what to Legislate. Yeah, and you know more and more engineers are I think China now graduates more engineers every year than the United States has Engineers. Oh, yeah, China. You could be eight years old and China and be a damn engineer. I've been over there and I've seen a I've seen a six year old build a damn bridge in front of me. You know what I'm saying? They're highly capable. Yes, well, in lots of other cultures are coming online very rapidly. And so we're at well, and there's no shortage of unbelievably proficient amateurs online as well. And, and programming. And, and so we haven't seen nothing yet. And I really do believe computers are gonna,

your computer is gonna understand you. So well, I think it won't be long till it knows what you're going to do more accurately than you do. I think that's already true to some degree. But. Well, then we're at a real loss because then if I've been afraid to make a plan for myself in my life, and I've been afraid and I've been living in the fog and I've been just, you know, kind of side stepping, really

putting my fucking pants on as a human and taking some action. If I'm in that fog and then the computer is able to figure out what I'm going to do before I've even done it, but I haven't even made a plan, then surely the computer is able to figure out what I'm going to do before I've even done it, but I haven't even made a plan. Then surely the computer is going to make a plan for me. It feels like I think the computer is making a plan for you all the time already. By default, look, that's exactly what advertising is. Is advertising makes a plan for you?

There's no difference between those two things, except maybe one of sophistication. So you know, I mean, when you're watching something and an ad pops up, that's a little world that you could visit. And the advertiser obviously wants you to visit that. And the problem there, because you might think, well, it would be really good. The computer can help you make a plan, but I think what's more likely to happen, because at least to begin with, the computer is going to be paid, so to speak, by the advertisers to capitalize on your short-term impulsivity is that ever

more attractive distractions are going to be dangled in front of you. And that's likely to keep you in the fog. And what can I do to battle the fog like what can I do you know as a human to retain my humanity as things get more tech and more and as tech becomes far smarter in some ways you know in in technical ways than I'll ever be you know, I wish I knew the answer to that. I don't, partly because the landscape that's unfolding in front of us, because it changes so rapidly, it's unpredictable. You know, other rules in my two books address that.

To some degree, I think your best bet, the best bet you have virtually all the time is to try not to lie to yourself. In my first book, 12 Rules for Life, I said, do not lie or no, I said the rule was tell the truth or at least do not lie because you might, I mean, can you tell the truth? You'd have to know the truth. You might be able to tell some partial truths, but you can't tell the truth, but you can not say things that you know to be false. And in the second book, the new one, Rule 5 is, do not do things that you hate, which is also a kind of lie. And I don't mean don't do difficult things like get out of bed at 6 in the morning and exercise, you know, you might say, well, I hate

going to the gym. And that isn't what I mean. You don't really hate going to the gym. You just find it difficult. I'm thinking more that you might observe yourself engaging in activities that you find despicable even right then, but certainly later when you're conscious dwells on them and that you should stop doing that because that's a form of behavioral lie. I think the only thing we have to orient ourselves is as individuals is our willingness to live a life that's relatively free of unnecessary deceit or of deceit at all. The better a worst life is short, that's that's that'll add a sense of urgency by noticing, you know, I calculated, I don't know, my parents are when my parents were in their 70s, 60s, perhaps, I usually saw them about once every two years,

we communicate a lot more than that, but we live a long ways apart. So I calculated, you know, while my dad's probably going to live till his mid 80s or late, you know, somewhere in there. And he's six, he's seven, he let's say, I'm going to see him 40 more times. It's like, okay, 40 more times. That's urgent. So you better get it right, because you don't have it. You don't have that many opportunities. You know, it's the same when you're formulating relationships in your adolescence, laid out lessons in early adulthood. You don't have that many experiments to run.

You know, and you get a lot faster than you think. So... Attention, attention, attention is an underrated faculty. It's not the same as thinking, it's watching to see what's there in front of your eyes and to guide yourself as a consequence of what you perceive. It's the faculty that transforms thought if you let it. And your conscience alerts you as well. Tick, tick, tick. You're wasting time. And very few people are happy with that.

Some are burdened by it more than others, but virtually no one escapes that voice of conscience. I suppose to some degree that's the willingness not to engage in self-deception. Chapter three in Beyond Order is about that. People don't really repress the things they don't want to face. They just fail to unpack them. You know, like maybe you're on YouTube fail to unpack them. You know, like maybe you're on YouTube regularly. And every time you shut the computer off, you feel somewhat disgusted. But you don't pay any attention to that for a while, for two years. But then you decide you're going to pay attention, then you find out what the reason you're disgusted is because you're wasting your life and you know it. And that disgust is indicating that. But unless you attend to the disgust in unpacked,

let it reveal itself as informative. You don't know what the message is. You just have a sense of disquiet. It's not easy to transform that sense of disquiet into an actionable plan. And often you have to talk to someone about it as well. You have to discover. So it's not like you're repressing the emotion exactly. It's that you don't undergo the difficult process necessary to unpack it. It's effortful.

It comes back to that assessing assumptions that we said before. If the goal of life is to live a life which in retrospect we are glad that we lived, it's important to give ourselves perspective, to develop that metacognisance, to step away from the urgent, to step away from the phenomenological day-to-day existence because the present self is a petulant child. It's lazy and it wants the path of least resistance and that glass of wine and that new movie on Netflix and the couch looks really comfortable. Very rarely does it do. Yeah, well that's the danger with impulsive happiness is that it does have that present bound

quality. And in retrospect, that can lead to a life that's not well lived. lead to a life that's not well-lived. Generally that, yes, yes, life definitely places philosophical demands on you, whether you want it to or not. And so it is just useful to step back. I mean, that's likely why the trade openness evolved. That's the creativity dimension. That's the dimension that allows people to engage in philosophical discourse and to think laterally. It does allow you to step back and look at things on a broader scale and to generate creative alternatives.

The problem with examining your assumptions is it's very disquieting. Because you want things to act the way you predict and desire them to act. And you work within a set of axioms and you act them out in order to maintain that predictability, that desirable predictability. If you mess around the more fundamental the axiom that you question the more fundamental the axiom that you question, the more uncertainty you release, and some of that can be positive, but a plenty of it can be anxiety provoking.

I mean, just imagine that you're in a relationship and, you know, it's maybe a year into it. You haven't formalized and finalized it, but then one day you allow yourself to ask the question, is this the relationship I want to be in? Well, that's a fundamental question. But just imagine now you're destabilizing your entire future. You're destabilizing your present. You're destabilizing your past. Because while engaging in the relationship,

you're acting out the assumption that it's the proper relationship. But now you question that. That means the story you told yourself about what was happening, well, it happened, even though it's already happened, was wrong and something else had happened. And then you have to think through what actually happened. So it's unbelievably demanding. And the more axiomatic the assumption, the more certainty is cast into into trouble, some chaos Now, you could say, yeah, but the alternative is worse. And I believe that often that's true. But the thing about the alternative is that you can always for stall it. Right. Mannyana, Mannyana.

That question tomorrow, you bet, you bet. And it's a very powerful temptation and no wonder. You know, do you want to dig up the body now or do you want to wait a month? It's like, well, it'll be more rotten in a month, but it's not a month. It's not now, right? It's not now. And so I understand why people don't want to delve into things,

even if their emotions indicate that they should. I mean, I would see this all the time. If you're trying to settle an important issue with your partner, let's say, that can be a tremendously troublesome excavation process. And there's no shortage of pain, but if you sort it out, then maybe things can be better. It doesn't mean it's easy or pleasant, quite the contrary. It's like surgery. And it's not, it's like surgery to remove something

that shouldn't be there. It's necessary, but man, it's still surgery. I think it's possible to develop a cathartic emotion towards that. I think it's possible to down-regulate the level of discomfort that you feel when you do assess your assumptions. On this show, a lot of the time I try and present uncomfortable truths. So insights that are accurate, but disquieting to learn. And that, to me, gradually exposing people and myself to more and more of these and learning that it's not an existential threat.

It's not going to destroy my ego. Well, or learning, or learning that it is an existential threat, but that you can handle it. Correct. Which is really what people learn in exposure therapy that's effective is the thing they're afraid of is frightening, but they're tougher than they think. And so, and that's very useful to learn. And yes, I do believe, well, it's also the case that if you decide that you're going to delve into trouble as it arises, you're likely not to avoid the delve in process more than necessary. So the thing won't grow into a monster that's quite so large. And so once the relationship you have with your intimate partner is

reasonably well-constituted and you decide that you're going to address problems as they arise, then it's less burdensome than the total Reconfiguration that might be necessary before any of that has has been has been started It's like meant it's a form of mental hygiene, I would say, in some sense. And you do get better at that with practice. You perhaps you also get less likely to jump to the worst possible negative conclusion. And that's also useful.

You don't catastrophize so much. If you feel like you're built for more, if you want to grow, if you want to improve, if you want to become a better human, but you don't have people around you that also want to, you're scared that you're going to lose friends, you're scared that you're going to be alone as you start to go out on a journey of self-improvement. How can people find the courage to do that? How can people find the courage to do that? Well, one thing they can do is contemplate the consequences of not doing it. You lose friends. Well, you're going to lose the friends who don't want the best for you. Those are the friends you want in 10 years?

I mean, you lose friends. Well, maybe you gain new friends, maybe you gain better friends, or maybe miracle of miracles. Your friends pick up their their mess too and move forward. Maybe not and I'm not naively optimistic about such things, but you have to contemplate the price you pay for in action. And this is something I did with my clients all the time. It's like, well, I don't want to change jobs. Well, no wonder. It's like you have to go put yourself out to be interviewed. You have to send out 500 resumes. You have to be rejected 499 times. You have to polish your interview skills. You have to update your CV, which means you have to take a real look at the inadequacies in your preparation. And maybe you won't find a better job. It's like no under you're afraid of that. Okay, you're in this job you hate and it's 10 years from now.

How does that look? Think about that. You already know you're in a little hell. You know perfectly well, it's going to get worse, which is more frightening. Action or inaction. Well, the thing about inaction is you're blind to it, hey. So you can hide from it. Well, that's chapter three. Again, do not hide things in the fog. Do not make the assumption that in action has no price and so then you think I'm terrified of this But I'm even more terrified of that And now you know people have asked me for example I suppose why I was willing or am willing to I suppose why I was willing or am willing to engage in the troublesome process of objecting when I think something isn't going well.

Because I'm more afraid of the consequences of inappropriate silence. It's not that I'm brave. It's that I'm more terrified of the alternative. So, so I don't engage in the alternative and I don't know, maybe I have a knack for that to some degree. Maybe it's a consequence of clinical training, but you know, I can walk into people's houses and look around and I think, okay, there's something up here. And I mean, people have that ability. You know, I walked into a house once, and the dishwasher was in the middle of the kitchen, and it was undone, and had obviously been there for a couple of weeks, and the fridge had food in it

that shouldn't, was no longer food. And the cupboards had unopened wedding gifts in them, like five years after the marriage. I thought, there's a lot of things in this household that are being swept under the rug. And that was all laid out in the practical environs. It's like they hadn't negotiated who was responsible for cleaning the fridge. They hadn't even been able to open their wedding gifts. It's like, something's rotten, deeply, so.

And so I could see where that was headed without a tremendous amount of effort on the part of the, and it didn't work. They were divorced, you know, a couple of years after that in a very ugly manner, or for very ugly reasons. Well, I knew where that was headed. You know, and under different circumstances, I would have said, what the hell is that box doing there? Oh, you know, it's nothing. Yeah, no, wrong. It's not nothing. That's a little portal to hell. I can see it. And so could you, if you looked, but you won't. And I mean that literally because people won't look. They'll walk into a room like that. And they will not look at that thing. Absolutely. And that's because if they look, they'd see. don't want to see and no wonder but the consequence of blindness is worse. It's it's worse.

I mean, I have this, you know, my family is would like some peace because I seem to be embroiled in one thing after another and you know, they have a point, but peace is very hard to obtain. And I can't be blind to what I see in the broader world around me, not if I see it. If I see it, it's like, there it is. I say something. Who could you be? Exactly. You see that in children.

I watch little children play. And what they're doing, you know, they're attempting to grow forward, but they toy with identities. I'm my little granddaughter. I wrote about her in this book too. It's so funny watching her. She had Pocahontas, the Disney movie, and she had a Pocahontas doll, and she watched that movie a number of times. And then for, while it's been a year now, she's only three and a half, for a whole year, she has two names, Scarlett and Ellie, and one's her middle name, but she's called one or the other, and it seems to be perfectly comfortable with both. If you ask her if she's Ellie, she'll say yes.

And if you ask her if she's Scarlet, she'll say yes. But if you ask her if she's Pocahontas, she'll also say yes. And then if you ask her if she is Scarlet, Ellie, or Pocahontas, she'll say she's Pocahontas. And she's been insisting on that for a whole year. And so she's playing out this role. I don't know how much of her imagination is devoted to it, but enough for this trip. Like that's, if you're, how old are you? Forty-something? Forty, just turned 40. Yeah, okay. So, you know, imagine that you had a fictional identity for 15 years. That's approximately the same relative length of time and

The kids you know they they weave up a fantasy world and then they let play out an identity in that and then they weave out Another fantasy world and they play out an identity with that and they shape that identity By their interactions with other children and adults. And hopefully they find an identity that suits them that other people also accept because your identity has to be something that other people accept or it isn't going to work for you. But that's all part of this exploration of who they could be. You know, the play is in fact the exercising of that realm of possibilities. And so a good father, a good parent for that matter, but I think this, I think at least is an archetypally

paternal role, puts a border of security around the child. And the mother might be inside that border of security when she has young children. And play can take place there. And the play is the investigation of multiple entities with the hope of finding one that is functional, that is also socially desired, because those things can't be dissociated.

One of the reasons I think that the identity politics has bothered me so much, speaking of snitches, it's bothered me, it's like this bothers me. And I've only recently realized that some of it had to do with what I saw as limitations on free speech, which is I have to say the words that, you know, some authority or some population demands that I say, which I don't like. But there's something else too, which is that it's based on a very misleading theory of identity. else too, which is that it's based on a very misleading theory of identity. Your identity is not just how you feel about yourself at this moment, and you can't impose that on other

people because they don't know how to deal with that. Like, even if they wanted to, they wouldn't know the rules of the game. You have to negotiate your identity with other people, and so then you have to think of identity as something that's negotiated with other people. And so if you have an implicit theory of identity, like the one that seems to be increasingly dominating the cultural landscape, which is identity is something that's only subjectively determined and can also change from moment to moment, then you're misleading people as they develop because they come up with a very unsophisticated notion of what identity is.

And that's not good because that's a core. And part of your identity is your value to other people. That's a huge part of it. And that's not subjective. That's other people make that decision. Yeah. And you talk about that and I think it's chapter three where you say that's one of the ways we keep our sanity is talking to other people and the interaction with our community and all of these other things that isolate us more and more to a single subjective perspective is going to lead to a certain madness. It is definitely well, exactly.

Well, I tried to impress upon some of the trans activists that were after me, when I first made some public statements, I said, look, I don't think I didn't say it this eloquently, unfortunately. I said, what I would have liked to have said now, at least, was it isn't obvious to me at all that your theory of identity is going to serve the function that you assume it is. It's not psychologically sophisticated enough. It's not sociologically sophisticated enough.

You can't insist that other people play a game that they don't know how to play, especially when you also don't know how to play it, except to say that it exists. And this sanity issue is, you know, a lot of us is externalized because we're such social creatures. And everyone has weaknesses, you know, you're going to degenerate along your weakest weaknesses, you know, you're gonna degenerate along your weakest axis. And if you're fort and you won't be able to control yourself because some of your weakness will be precisely that inability to control yourself on that axis, like maybe you have a biological predisposition to alcoholism and you know you have three shots of vodka in 20 minutes and you're like on

top of the world, you know, there are people like that. They often have extensive family histories of alcoholism. It's a biological phenomenon. You can tell if you're like that if it's really difficult for you to stop drinking once you start. It's a real warning sign. And means alcohol is a great drug for you, subjectively speaking. But, you know, hopefully, when you drink too much much other people are going to start telling

you. It's like, no, you're, and that's actually how you start diagnosing alcohol abuse. Are you getting in trouble with the law? Is it interfering with your intimate relationships? Is it interfering with your ability to hold a job? It means that the addictive substance is starting to dominate your life in a manner that's counterproductive. And other people are there to ensure that you stay balanced enough so that you don't deteriorate entirely. You're lucky if you have that.

And the part of the point I make in that chapter, and I would say in both books, and in maps of meaning as well, is that the primary obligation of a parent is to serve as a proxy for the social and the natural world. But let's say the social world, why? Well, because you want to train your child to be not only acceptable socially, but highly desirable socially. And the reason for that is that by the time there are about three, three to four is the transition period. They're going to be spending more time being socialized by their peers than by you. And that will increasingly be the case as they develop. And if you haven't made them, if you haven't encouraged them through

judicious attention to be socially desirable. They're going to be rejected by their peers and then they fall farther and farther behind on the developmental trajectory. So that's partly how you help them with their identity. They can't be the sort of person that insists that everyone else always play the game they chose. And it's honoring that they can play whatever game they want for themselves. Like your granddaughter, she can play Pocahontas.

And if she wants to have that identity as Pocahontas. Great. But to demand and to shame anybody who decides to call her Ellie, for example, who just doesn't know any better knows that name. That's where I think it gets really, that's where the ugliness of it comes out, like the freedom to express ourselves how we want, but then softening the edges of this thing and just recognizing, okay, you know, if you know somebody and they really prefer to be called something, it was like, when I was 30, I changed my name from one of my middle names was

Chris and the other middle name was Aubrey. My my name from one of my middle names was Chris, and the other middle name was Aubrey. My legal name was Michael, and it was all a big mess. I decided to take my grandfather's name Aubrey. So there was a window there where my identity changed. Well, at least the name from Chris to Aubrey. And so lots of people would call me Chris, and I would just gently say, hey, you know, I changed my name to Aubrey.

But whatever, it wouldn't like cause it wouldn't be a screeching halt to the day or anything like that. I don't know, it would just be gentle encouragement that I didn't take personally, because I wasn't attached to that identity as the end-all-be-all. I attached to, I am an infinite being, a point, a locus of consciousness that is embodying a certain identity at this transitory time. This is my own personal spiritual belief. And that, to me, is the solid ground, right? So these other things, this is how we play. This is the way, as Ramdha said, this is us being God and drag, right? Like, this is us playing out our role. And it's, in my opinion, it's fine to play out another

role. But the moment you get so attached to that infinitesimal aspect of self and build these walls rather than opening up the community, that's where I think it leads to the result, as you said, it leads to a result that you're not actually desiring in trying to do this, change this identity. Well, that's what I saw as the danger, I would say, is that it was the use of force, which is what happens when you put something into law. It's forces not only implied, but relatively stated,

relatively explicitly. And then there was the problem with the positive of identity and the interference with free speech. the, you know, posity of identity and the interference with free speech. And I, I don't think that those concerns were misplaced. I think that there's something about that issue that's central to the continuing culture war and is a war to some degree about what constitutes identity. But at least we should have a more sophisticated notion of identity.

It's just not helpful otherwise. I mean, part of what I was doing constantly as a clinical psychologist was helping people craft an ever more sophisticated identity. And what you want, you want to have the kind of identity that makes people line up to want to play with you. And if you ever have to use force, well, that's, look, sometimes force is inescapable. But if you have to use force to get people to comply, it is a sign that you're not playing

a very good game. Now maybe you can't think up a better one. There's nothing that's going to work. A state of emergency might, you know, because we allow governments to use extra force during a state of emergency. But nobody thinks that's optimal. So, if people won't play because you're inviting them, then the game isn't configured very well, and it's very unlikely to be stable. Rule three is mechalus favorite. Do not hide unwanted things in the fog, right? And this is the opposite of hiding unwanted things in the fog, this is confronting them.

And that's a variant of St. George and the Dragon, which is an unbelievably pervasive, mythological and artistic motif. And perhaps also the oldest story that we have, the oldest stories that we know are variants of King George and the St. George and the Dragon. So tell me about this one. That was difficult because there were too many items

to that shouldn't look separated, although the woman should be separated. So what I've done is using a fabric, fabric of hers and fabric of hers, flying into the same direction, and that's the connecting point. Castles should be separated, so I wasn't worried about the castle, but the dark sky and the dragon work in, sure. 45 degrees yeah. Right, absolutely.

So the mass of the dragon and the mass of the sky are balanced against the, against the force. Yeah, against the force. And that gives it a symmetry across the, from the top left corner to the bottom right corner. So we're all lying there, it's symmetrical across that axis. And the castle had to be there,

and the dragon had to be there, and the woman had to be there. All those elements are crucial. And so this is what you do when you don't hide things in the fog, you confront them, and you free something of value as a consequence. That's one of the most magnificent discoveries of human beings that human beings have ever made. And images like this are an attempt to make that conscious, to serve to their guide to a particular kind of action in the world. That's the voluntary confrontation with things you don't understand and that you are afraid

of. And the promise that something of extreme value will emerge as a consequence of that, even though it looks dire initially. And can be, I mean, this is no joke because if you go off to fight dragons, there's always the possibility that you'll die or worse and that's a real possibility. It's it's not something that can be hand-waved away with any amount of psychological nonsense, let's say. Rule three, do not hide unwanted things in the fog. Maybe you could tell us a bit about that one Jordan. That sounds interesting.

Well, you know, there's this Freudian idea of repression. Right. And that's sort of you do something wrong and then you decide you're gonna put that away. You have a full model of it. You put it away and you don't, you know, you force it down into the unconscious and rattles around down there causing trouble. you don't, you know, you force it down into the unconscious and rattles around down there causing trouble. That isn't exactly, that can happen, I think, but that isn't generally the key to what makes what Freud was trying to get at with repression so clinically and practically valid. What, what, it's more reasonable to think about it as a form of voluntary inattentiveness. So let's say I use this example in the book. Let's say you find yourself irritated at your wife when she's showing some attention

to a neighbor and even a bad mood because of that. And you know you're in a bad mood and you notice it but you don't go there. You know you can have discussions with people and you think, well I'm not going there. And the reason you're not going there is because it's sort of surrounded by negative emotion, anger, defensiveness and all that. And you know that there's something under the surface that hasn't been made explicit. And if you delvedved into it it would cause a lot of trouble. And you know maybe you'd figure out what was wrong but there would be a lot of trouble. Well that's the fog. It's like you react in a way that you don't want.

So let's step one step backwards. You're acting. Why? Because you want to get what you want. You want to get what you desire. All right. Well you perform your action and you want to get what you want. You want to get what you desire. All right. Well, you perform your action and you don't get what you desire. You don't get your wife's attention, let's say. Maybe you're trying to pick up someone in the bar and you keep getting rebuffed. Well, that re the rebuffed is a kind of fog. Right. You don't know why you're being rebuffed. If you're rebuffed 50 times in a row, there's going to be a lot of information in all those rejections.

And you're going to have to think for a long time about what the patterns are that characterize those rejections. And then you're going to have to extract from that a picture of why you're inadequate or why the opposite sex is corrupt and deceitful and prejudicial, which is the wrong conclusion to drive. And you'll build a picture of your own inadequacy and then you have to notice how far you are away from the ideal as a consequence of that inadequacy and then you have to rectify it. So you see, you can extract out information that would be salutary for the development of your personality, from doing pattern analysis of repeated failures. Right, sure. Or you can just not do that.

I mean, that relates very much to, you know, when you talk about internal versus external locus of control, let's suppose I have failed three times in businesses, so to link back to your story about, you know, the rejections of the bar. But in this case, I'm an entrepreneur who has failed on three separate occasions in three separate business endeavors. If I am someone who is going to attribute each of those failures externally, it's God. It's because consumers are dumb. It's because they're not, they weren't sufficiently ready. The market wasn't ready for me. So I always attribute those failures externally. I am removing the

possibility of having a feedback loop of learning where I attribute some of those failures to decisions that I made so that when I go to my fourth business endeavor, I actually don't implement some of the reasons why I failed. So in a sense, your attribution style, internal versus external, could be contributing to you either going into the fog or getting out of the fog. Correct? Yeah, that's a useful way of looking at it.

We could talk about internal versus external there, too. So if you have an external locus of control, you view yourself as at which is being acted upon. Now, that can be useful in many, many circumstances. So because you might say, for example, about the Sontrapreneur that he should take failure base rates into account. Three failures is nothing.

Maybe you need a dozen failures before you've gathered enough information to be a successful entrepreneur, right? So that's where external focus of control is actually useful. So you can't necessarily tell to begin with which one is going to work. If you always use an external focus of control,

the problem then is is that you're never driven to change anything about your fossilized ideas, and the old dead king that is operating your thoughts never gets dethroned. So that's a problem. The problem is, is if you have an internal locus of control, and it always operates, the probability that you're going to get depressed is quite high, because every failure is your fault. It might be indicative of a fundamental flaw. So it's really tricky to get this balance right. As a matter of fact, I mean, of course, you wouldn't know this since you just hinted

at it. When I tell my students about this fundamental attribution error of attributing successes internally and attributing failures externally. The only group that doesn't suffer from that glowing rosy fundamental attribution error are depressive, right? And I'm not sure if the research now has said it clearly, whether it's because I start off with a non-rosy view of the world that causes me to be more likely to be depressed or is it when I am in a

bout of depression, the glowsy goes away. Have they resolved the chicken? Well, Jesus, this is okay. So this is a good place to talk about something else that's somewhat archetypal. Every time you learn something, generally speaking, it comes as a surprise, right? There's no, and this is technically true. That, which is not surprising, contains no information. It's virtually a definition of information.

Right. Okay. If it surprises you, it means it violates one of your presuppositions. Okay. So then, now that means that presupposition has to die. And I mean die because it's actually instantiated on a biological platform. Let's say it's a neural structure or a neural pattern. I don't care. It's still a structure, even if it's a pattern. It'd be the interconnections between neurons. That thing has to be punished out of existence. It has to be extinguished. Now, exactly how much of it has to be extinguished, that's a very, very difficult question.

Like, if you get rebuffed when you try to pick someone up in a bar, it might be because you are the most undesirable creep in the world. That's actually true for one person, somewhere, right? So, and it might be you. Hopefully, you don't leap to that conclusion immediately, and you start with a smaller presupposition that there might be some externalization in that In any case a little part of you every time you are surprised by something a little part of you has to die some part of you has to die

sometimes that now Imagine that presuppositions are in a hierarchy so some are essentially irrelevant to your continued actions and some are crucial. So a crucial one, imagine you're planning the future and you're married. Okay, the existence of your wife is a critical presupposition to your future plans or many of them. And so if your relationship becomes endangered, or if her life is put in danger,

then that's going to be very impactful, because her absence is going to destroy a huge chunk of your map of the world. All right. The price we pay for learning is to die a little bit. The trick is to not die too much. Okay. And that's... So I think it was offered North Whitehead said that, you know, we have to let our ideas die instead of us. That's the purpose of abstract thought. We can let

our ideas die instead of us. But that needs to be rebuilt to some degree because your ideas are you and they're actually alive too. And so when one of your ideas dies, that's a part of you. And it might be a big part of you. And it actually on some, sometimes might be such a big part of you that you actually can't survive the experience. And that's a traumatic experience. It's like it's blown out so much of your presupposition network that you might not be able to get yourself back up and going again If you look at the Genesis of depression major depressive disorder. It's very very frequently the case that the first episode

Is brought on by some major trauma like some genuinely horrible event and then the nervous system is somewhat compromised after that, and lesser events can produce an equal response. So, well, so it's no wonder we hide things in the fog. But sometimes when we hide something in the fog, it just grows. And then when it does come out, it's trauma. Like instead of having an argument about, if flirting, you end up in divorce for, you know, debating who's gonna have custody of your kids for the next 10 years.

Well, on a very pragmatic level, I could tell you that in my own marriage, the way that my wife and I deal with, I mean, we rarely, truly frankly, have any conflicts. But the equivalent of your story about the flirtatious, sorry, there's a haircut, a flirtatious neighbor, if that were to happen, I'm someone who doesn't let things fester in me. And so I will confront the negative emotions that I'm feeling at the moment, deal with them, and then we hug it out and we move on. I'm very, very intolerant internally to an environment of stress, of poutiness, of turning.

I just, maybe it's part of my openness. Maybe it's my gregariousness. Maybe, so I can't function in that environment. So if I'm angry, you'll know it. I How sensitive are you to negative emotion? I mean, you're very enthusiastic. You're obviously very extroverted. How sensitive are you to negative emotion? So meaning that if I experience a negative emotion, how, how, how catastrophic will it be for me? Yeah. I mean, I think I could handle it well. I mean, probably the most negative feedback

that I ever can receive is one that is created in my own mind, meaning that I am my worst critic, I am my worst, right? I am a pathological perfectionist person. So most of the, what I call the looping thoughts, right, the intrusive looping thoughts that would constitute the majority of my lived experience in terms of negative emotions internally,

stem from me imposing this on myself. You know, I was wondering because you said you're someone who's intolerant of poutiness and that sort of thing. And that I'm like that too, to the degree that I engage in conflict, it's usually because I see something like that happening and I want to get it cleared up. Exactly. And I think that might also be true on a social basis, you know, in

so far as at least my temperament operates that way. I think, oh, oh, I can see where this is going. Yeah. It doesn't look good. I'd rather say something about now than later. And if I were going to do a Freudian thing of linking it back to childhood and so on, I would say that, and I've never shared this ever publicly in the past, my home life with my parents was such that my parents, although they were married for 60 plus years, they got married in 1950, they're still both alive, had an acrimonious relationship

with one another, and that there was a lot of, if not overt hostility, certainly latent under, you know, I used to always joke that whatever all the horrors that I experienced in the Lebanese Civil War was nothing compared to some of the horrors that I experienced in the Lebanese Civil War was nothing compared to some of the horrors of the conflicts between them. Which wasn't always, it's not like they were beating each other up, but there was this constant hostility. And so maybe in part because of that, I seek to exactly never recreate that in my own home. And so, you know, my wife and I have a lot of public displays of affection towards

each other and I think my God I mean my children see the love that my wife and I express to each other in a given day more than the amount that I've seen my parents exhibit towards one another in 50 years and so maybe that is part of the intolerance which is I live that and I don't want to replicate that so So maybe that seems plausible. So the fog is what's created when you engage in acts of willful blindness. When you could know, but you decide that you don't want to. Beautiful.