The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 430. The Attack on Faith, Family, & Science | Dr. Phil

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

Jordan Peterson sits down with clinical psychologist, author, and media mogul Dr. Phil McGraw. They discuss his new book, “We’ve Got Issues,” and from this delve into the three pillars of western society that are now under assault, as well as the 10 working principles he prescribes to defend them. They also discuss how to live with intention, the importance of personal identity removed from outward labels, the difference between questioning and deconstructing, how the establishment failed our children during the pandemic, and the obvious outbreak of social contagions plaguing the world today. Phillip McGraw, PH.D. is the author of 10 New York Times bestsellers. For 21 seasons he hosted the award-winning talk show “Dr. Phil,” one of the most successful daytime programs in television history. His new book, “We’ve Got Issues – How You Can Stand Strong For America’s Soul and Sanity,” is available now. This April, he hosts “Dr. Phil Primetime,” on his own cable network, Merit Street Media, providing essential news and entertainment. McGraw resides in Dallas, Texas with his wife, Robin. They have two adult sons and four grandchildren.  - Links - 2024 tour details can be found here https://jordanbpeterson.com/events   Peterson Academy https://petersonacademy.com/    For Dr. Phil: “We’ve Got Issues” (Book)https://www.amazon.com/Weve-Got-Issues-Strong-Americas/dp/1668061708 On X https://twitter.com/DrPhil?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Dr. Phil Primetime (website) https://www.drphil.com/ 

Hello everyone. I have the opportunity today to talk to Dr. Phil McGraw, who's probably, perhaps the world's most well-known practicing clinical psychologist, certainly on the media side of things, and he's been doing that with extreme success for decades, and that's quite something to pull off. And he's come leaping forward once again, not only with a new network that's going to launch on cable and elsewhere on April 2, but also with a new book called We've Got Issues, which is definitely the case both psychologically and socially in the West. And so that's what we're going to walk through. He offers a diagnosis.

He sees that three fundamental pillars of Western society and psychological stability under assault, ideological assault, practical assault simultaneously, pillars of faith, family, and free speech. So that's a bit of a diagnostic enterprise. And then he offers 10 working principles to deal with those assaults. And some of those are valid psychologically and some of them valid socially. They all circulate around a central ethos, you might say. So we discuss all 10 principles. We discuss the ethos around which they circulate. We discuss the necessity of principle,

conception, and action for psychological stability and social unity, and that constitutes the discussion. So you're welcome to watch and listen. Thanks very much. All right. Well, hello, Dr. Phil. It's very good to meet you, and thank you for agreeing to talk to me today. It seems like you're everywhere at the moment, and I want to talk about how you manage that, but I suspect it has something to do, at least with the topic of your new book, which is we've got issues.

Yeah, well, that certainly seems to be the case. And you start the book by outlining in your estimation, by making the case that there is something that's under attack or a set of things that are under attack, and you concentrate on free speech, faith, and family. And so I guess the first obvious question is, why do you believe that we're under attack, so to speak? Why that metaphor under attack by what?

And why did you pick those three principles as the central focus of your alert and your defense? Great question. And it's so good to sit down and talk to you. So thank you for having me as a guest. I'm honored to be here. Listen, I've been doing this for a long time as have you, and I've been dealing with the public for a long time

and listening to their questions. We get tens of thousands of emails, you know, writing in and I've noticed that they've really changed across time because when you think about it, when I started out, my career in psychology, it was way back in the 70s. So I've been through the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, all the way up till now.

When I started out on television, it was 2002, and the first text message hadn't even been sent at that point. So things have really changed, and the rate of change has really accelerated across time and you know a lot of this technology is good. I mean there are great benefits from it of course, but there are a lot of unintended side effects as well and when I when I look at what's going on in this country I

I think that the backbone of any society is the family. I think that's the strength of any society and when I say it's under attack, I think it's under attack in part unintentionally by technology and in part because there are people that are pushing narratives in current society that have nothing to do with reality, have nothing to do with science, have nothing to do with fact, nothing to do with history. They're just running an agenda that's very self-referential and it is not in our best interest at all

to sit silently by and allow these people to hijack what's going on, the narrative of this country. And I'll tell you further that I believe that if we don't speak up this, I call it the tyranny of the fringe, I think if we don't speak up, they're going to hijack and start taking over. They're gonna take over language, they're gonna take over language, they're gonna take over priorities

and how those priorities are pursued. And I hear I'm talking about things that I think could absolutely undermine society, like this equality of outcome concept. To me, I can't think of anything more destructive to a society than teaching everybody that we're going to work towards an equality of outcome. That's been tried.

We've got 100,000 corpses to prove that doesn't work. And so I think that we've been just same in America and in Canada has been built on a meritocracy where hard work was rewarded, talent was rewarded, added value was rewarded. And now all of a sudden we're violating some of the most fundamental principles of the psychology, sudden we're violating some of the most fundamental principles of the psychology, like just simply don't reward bad behavior, don't support things you don't want to see more of. I mean this is psych 101, but it seems like people skipped that course. It seems like those that are trying to run some of these agendas don't understand that you have to have an insight into how people are motivated, what gets them passionate, what gets them moving forward.

And when I see these things happening, I say, well, somebody's got to step up and call this out for what it is, which is lunacy. And, but, you know, we're, people are three times as unwilling to speak up now as they were in 1950. I mean, a number of people unwilling to take the risk has tripled since 1950. Okay, so let me walk through these things. Again, I'll lay out a bit of my understanding and then if you could push back and elaborate on that, that would be helpful. So it seems to me with regard to family, so human beings are unique biologically because of the unbelievably extended dependency period

of our children. And so we have a particular reproductive strategy. Other creatures have that reproductive strategy to some degree, but we are the ultimate exemplars of low reproductive rate, high investment strategies. And it seems to me that the corollary of that is that raising children is sufficiently challenging,

and difficult, and also important that one person can't do it well on average. And so the rule seems to be both morally and perhaps arguably biologically that the nuclear family is the necessary minimum of social arrangement that allows for propagation. It's something like that. And so if we fragment the family

below the level of the nuclear, then things fall apart. Now, maybe the nuclear family is also too fragmented, but we could start with it as a minimal basis. And so any attempt to, for example, put forward the claim that all familial structures are of equal value is counterproductive if it's the case that raising children is so complex that a minimum of two people have to engage in it. So that's on the family side. On the free speech side, I don't think there's any difference between free speech and thought

fundamentally. Thought can be awkward because critical thought requires that people dispense with their foolish ideas and that can be painful. And people who push the no offense agenda would like to believe that we can think, and we can think critically without any emotional consequences. And I don't think that's true because it's actually painful to have your ideas

exposed as foolish and then to dispense with them. And so we seem to have entered a situation where compassion for short-term consequences means that we're willing to allow foolish things to propagate even though that will cause long-term catastrophe. And there's a technical description of morality in there too, which I think you kind of point to when you talk about your working principles. Don't reward bad behavior, support conduct. You do not value, for example, that's an injunction, not to let foolish things occur in the present,

even if stopping them causes some emotional disruption, because then worse things will happen in the future. And then the last one is faith. And faith is a hard thing to defend in some ways because people say faith in what? But my sense is that we have to move forward in faith because we're ignorant. And that means that we have to bet on some things

rather than others. And so the question there starts to become, what is it that we should bet on? And so with regard to faith, how do you negotiate that? You're a scientifically oriented thinker as well. And so when you're making the case that if faith is under attack, we're in trouble, how do you justify that claim?

Well, for me, I think there are some things that we know, there are some things we don't know, there are some things that we know, there are some things we don't know, there are some things that we can't know and we have to kind of sort those out and that's where faith comes in. I think back, you know, scientifically, there was a time that we didn't have the instrumentation to see a molecule.

That didn't mean it didn't exist, we just didn't have the instrumentation to observe it. And I'm the same way about what you were saying about thoughts. I guess if I was gonna categorize myself value-wise from a professional standpoint, it would lean more toward cognitive behaviorist than anything. And in cognitive behaviorism, we treat thoughts as behaviors because they are observable to a public of one.

And so the fact that it is an observable event, even if to just a public of one, I tend to treat those as behavior. So I think we have to look at what our thoughts are and think about, okay, we see this, are we being rational in our thought or are we not being rational in our thought? And to me, it's not irrational to recognize

that we are not all knowing, we are not the repository of all knowledge and to assume that just because we can't show you faith on an x-ray, just like we can a broken leg, is the same thing about depression. People don't understand how psychometrics work. They think we're measuring depression and in fact we're not.

What we're doing is saying, we're gonna give you these psychometrics and And what we're going to do is tell you that you have an awful lot in common with people who have been observed to be depressed. They have higher suicidality. They spend more time crying. They spend more time with flat affect or whatever. So we can't tell you you're depressed,

but we can tell you you answered these items consistent with an awful lot of people who are depressed and that we have observed. And so, again, there's a certain extrapolation from that that we have to rely on. We can't measure it like we do with an X-ray or an MRI with a brain scan. And it's not a big leap to me to say that I do have faith. I mean, I am a Christian. I've never seen a conflict between that and my approach to science. I just look at this as something

that we don't yet have observable measurement for, just like we didn't for the molecule or other smaller units of function. So I don't have trouble reconciling that, but I guess I take it on faith, which is kind of defining something by itself. And I know that's circular in nature, but it works for me. And I think an awful lot of people

find comfort in the belief system that there is a higher power that I choose to call God that is kind of involved in our lives on as active a basis as we want to acknowledge. And I'm one of those Christians, Jordan that believes in pray to God, but row for the shore. So that's why I don't see it as conflict.

I'm still going to do everything I can do. I'm still gonna work as hard as I can work. I'm gonna do everything, because I believe that if there is a God and I believe there is, then I think I've been given certain gifts, talent, skills, abilities, and free will to do what I can and will do. So to me, I don't see that there is equity in creating a conflict

between science and faith. So I'm going to elaborate on the faith idea here too, because you pointed out that because we're ignorant, we have to rely on our judgment to move forward. And we're permanently ignorant because we actually can't predict the future. The future is actually not predictable. The world is not deterministic, and we know this for a number of reasons, many of which are scientific. So we have to move forward in faith. And so the monotheistic hypothesis is that there's an ultimate unity and also that that's what we should have faith in.

And so I want to run something by you and you tell me what you think about this. So there's a, there's a, an autobiographical account in the gospels of one of Christ's reactions to a particular question. And so he's being tormented by the scribes in the Gospels, have one of Christ's reactions to a particular question. And so he's being tormented by the scribes and the Pharisees and the lawyers.

So nothing's really changed. The Pharisees are hypocrites, the scribes are academics and the lawyers, well, they're still lawyers. And what they're essentially trying to do continually in the Gospel account is to trap Christ into making a heretical statement so that they can have him arrested and destroyed. And so they're attempting to reputation savage essentially. And so at one point, this is a very famous scene

and I'm sure you know it, one of his opponents challenges Jesus to describe one of his opponents challenges Jesus to describe which of the commandments is the primary commandment. And the hope there is that he'll pick one and by picking one will denigrate the others and because he's denigrating the others in comparison they can bring him up on charges of heresy. And he says something quite remarkable. He says that the Ten Commandments are manifestations of an underlying unity of moral conceptualization and that they circulate around a particular theme.

And the theme, you can express the theme quite concisely in a twofold manner. You should aim at what's best, God. You should align yourself with the highest possible aim. That's number one. So that orients you. And then number two, you should treat other people as you would like to be treated.

You should put yourself in their position and work for that harmonious unity that would emerge if you treated other people the way you would want to be treated if you were treating yourself properly. So it's interesting. So really what he's doing, it's so interesting. He's taking a cloud of conception, which is the Ten Commandments, which were themselves derived from an analysis. It's an analysis like you said you conducted in some ways by listening to the tens of thousands of comments that you've received from the people

who've been watching and listening to what you've been doing. You accumulated all of this cries from the people, let's say. You derive a set of principles as a consequence of that, but those principles themselves orient around something that's central. That central point of orientation, I think, is equivalent to God, and it's also equivalent to what we should have faith in. And so I would say, you tell me what you think of this is where the question is. Now you outlined a set of problems, attack on free speech, faith and family, and then you identified 10 working principles. So what do you think of the idea that that which you have faith in, and I'm speaking personally here, that which you have faith in is equivalent to the spirit

that all of these principles point to. You see what I mean? That there's an underlying unity there that makes those principles coherent. Does that strike you as plausible? It does strike me as plausible, and I leave room for that to be defined differently by each person that is sorting through

the events of their life. The first principle that I have in We've Got Issues, how you can stand strong for America's soul and sanity, which is, I think that the subtitle of this book is as important as the title because the book is very prescriptive. Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one back.

And I don't like it when people criticize and then don't offer a better alternative. If you don't have a better alternative, why don't you just shut up? Because all you're doing is just poking holes in something. And I think you need to have an alternative. And I think it begins with something that, the reason I say that I think it's,

each person comes at it from a different point of view, even though there is a unifying principle, is I think we all have a personal truth. And that personal truth is what we think, feel, and believe about ourselves when nobody else is looking, And that personal truth is what we think, feel, and believe about ourselves when nobody else is looking, nobody else is listening, we've taken off the social mask, and we're being honest with ourselves.

And unless people have made a concerted effort to do some repairs, we all have a damaged personal truth. And so it means, I think about it like a brand new shiny yellow cab rolling out in New York the first day, and it looks great and it's shiny and everything is perfect. And you catch up with it 20 years later, it's gonna look like a dog's been chewing on it out in the backyard. It's gonna be dinged up, it's gonna have had fender benders,

it's gonna have people that have thrown up in the back seat, it's gonna, I mean, it's gonna just have taken on a lot of hits along the way. And I think we're that way in life. And some of us more than others, and I think the reason personal truth is so important in getting to that unifying principle is we generate the results in life. We think we deserve.

And so if we think we're a second class citizen, if we think we don't measure up to everybody else in some way, we're going to generate the results that are consistent with that. This will sound arrogant, but I think most people are capable of doing this. There are certain people I can see just walking down the sidewalk and without any other information than just what I'm looking at, there are certain things that I know about that person. I mean, if there's somebody that A, doesn't take care of themselves,

their clothes are unkept, doesn't matter how nice they are, it's just they're unkept. You know, they're kind of heads down, they're shuffling along, it just seems like every step is barely what they can do. I know for one thing for certain in my mind every step is barely what they can do. I know for one thing for certain in my mind is that person has a damaged personal truth

because they're generating that existence in their life. They're not walking with their head up and their shoulders back. They're not out in the middle of the sidewalk. There's kind of skulking along the side. They're generating exactly what they think they deserve. And I think that 80% of society can wind up in that role if they feel guilty about what they think and believe. And we have evidence of this in that the number of people willing to speak out has tripled, unwilling to speak out has tripled in the

last 75 years. So there's a lack of passion and conviction, perhaps, and a fear of being canceled, attacked, having the Woke Mob come after them. And I'm a perfect example of it. I grew up with an alcoholic father. Um, it was a chaotic and oftentimes violent home. Um, a lot of times we didn't have money to turn the electricity on. Um, I had three sisters, two of them were married 11, between them 11 times,

which you think is pretty hard to do unless you start when you're like 14 and then you can get some in fairly early on. And I lived with all of this and people make this mistake and it's why our young people right now, I'll get to that in a minute maybe, but it's why our young people right now are experiencing a mental emotional crisis with high levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, suicidal ideation,

and suicidality, because people compare their personal truth with other people's social mask. And I could go to school and I know that I just left a house that was in chaos. The utilities were turned off. We didn't have food. My dad was drunk in the street, and I'm sitting next to a kid with a pressed shirt on and a washed face and his hair's all combed.

And if I compare my reality to his social mask, I'm gonna lose every single time. Now, he may have it worse off than I ever thought of having. But if you compare your reality to his social mass, you're gonna lose. No, we elaborated on the idea that, you elaborated out a set of principles and that there's a unifying theme behind them.

And then you said, you bought that explanation. But then you pointed to the fact that other people may come to the table with a different set of principles. And so there's a way that the universal particularizes itself in each life. I would say, tell me what you think of this proposition. So imagine that another person might generate a different list of 10 working principles, but that the higher order principle from which those are derived would remain essentially constant. And I would think that would be equivalent to the undamaged car that you described. So there's an Old Testament account of the prophet Elijah, and Elijah is the first prophet who posits that God is the voice of conscience.

Now, when you made the case that, you made the case at least by inference that people are blessed with the ability to find, to establish a relationship with something that calls to them from within. Now, that might be slightly, that might happen in a different way for each person. I mean, that's really the difference

between people's personality and their temperament. Then you made the case that if they deviate from that, that becomes so obvious that you can even see it in their day-to-day behavior. You can see it when you're watching people when you walk down the street. You know, Dr. Phil, one of the things I've noticed is that most people don't watch other people

when they walk down the street. Right? They look at the ground or they're in their own little bubble. I mean, if you watch people on the street, you can get an eyeful of who they are very, very rapidly. And you know, if people are particularly angry and bitter and they're walking down the street and you pay attention to them, that actually sometimes makes them angry, which is why people will avoid eye contact. Because you reflect back to them the hell that they've trapped themselves in,

and they find that very unpleasant. Now, part of the reason I wrote in my first book, I wrote the injunction to people to stand up straight with their shoulders back, was to reflect in the microcosm of their behavior, an orientation upward towards what the good was, and that that is embedded in everything that people do, and every glance they make, and every step they take forward.

So, I think it is the case that people can have their own set of principles. That would be the same in some ways, is that they come to what is highest in their own personal way. But that doesn't indicate that the landscape is morally relative or that there's no unity towards which our conscience and our moral orientation point.

So that's a way of reconciling that plurality. Go ahead. I would even say that they come at it with a different point of view. They might not even want to change the 10 principles, but they might interpret them differently in how they apply to their own existence. So they may not even change the 10 principles.

And some of them are so universal. Like the 10th principle I talk about in the book is treat yourself and others with dignity and respect. And a lot of people can look at that and say, look, doc, don't need to buy a book to know that. That seems pretty forthright and self-evident, but it is not. And I will tell you why I think it is not. That seems pretty forthright and self-evident, but it is not. And I will tell you why I think it is not.

It's the first two words, treat yourself with dignity and respect. Because I believe you can't give away what you don't have. So if somebody doesn't treat themselves with dignity and respect, if they don't heal that damaged personal truth, and however that damage came about, maybe it's a woman that has been sexually abused growing up by an uncle or whatever. And we know 95% of molestation is by someone they know to the family. It's not the predator in the raincoat at the school yard

saying, you want to see some pictures in candy. I mean, it's somebody we know and trust usually in these situations. But let's say it's a woman that has been molested and raped in her childhood and that's never been healed in her. Well, if she doesn't deal with that trauma, if she doesn't heal that trauma,

then her children are not going to get 100% of their mother. They're not gonna get 100% of the woman that is that mother, or if it happened to the father, they're not gonna get 100% of who he could be, who they could bring to the table, the mother or the father bring to the parenting table, unless they heal that damaged personal truth. And, you know, for me in my situation,

growing up with that, I had to heal that personal truth. My father died when I was 42 years old. And by that time, I had graduated number one in my class with a double core of PhD programs, one medical psychology and one clinical psychology. And I had a very successful business, I had very successful marriage and children, and I'd gone to school on two

athletic scholarships. I, yeah, I'm not saying I was the greatest son in the history of the world, but I had had some achievement. But by the time he passed away in 42, when I was 42, not one time ever did he speak the words, I'm proud of you. I never heard that from my father, and so I learned early on,

sometimes you have to give yourself what you wish you could get from somebody else. You know, sometimes you gotta step in front of the mirror and say, I'm proud of you. Maybe he can't say that, but you can, and so you have to go through whatever's necessary to heal yourself and your personal truth, where you say, I'm into, this success over here,

this peace, this happiness, this tranquility, is not just for other people. That can be for me too. I deserve that as much as anybody else does. And unless and until you can do that, you're cheating everybody around you that loves you, cares about you, or interfaces with you out of all of who you are. And I think right now what I'm seeing in this country is, in this society, is intimidation. People are not necessarily

yet willing to step up and say, I deserve for my values to be considered. I deserve for my voice to be heard. I deserve to be considered. And I think they are intimidated because we've got these fringe factions that have weaponized certain ideals and turned them into attack strategies. And I think we have to fortify these people and then treat others with dignity and respect.

But as I say, you can't give away what you don't have. So, you know, it all starts with yourself. Now, if you do that, if you look at number one, which is be who you are on purpose, be who you are on purpose, live with intention. I mean, it drives me crazy to see people that get up and just go with the flow, whatever comes their way,

what are we gonna do tomorrow? Well, we'll see. No, we won't see. You need to decide what you're gonna do tomorrow. Live with intention and own it. I mean, people criticize me sometimes, and I own what I say, I own what I do. You wanna criticize me, criticize,

somebody's gonna criticize you no matter what you do. So you might as well do what you're passionate about, what you believe in, and if they come for you, then I'm easy to find. I realize that, so I'm an easy target, just as are you. But we have to decide, we're gonna be who we are on purpose, we're gonna live with intention, and then you jump to number 10, treat yourself

and others with dignity and respect. And that's a jump from one to 10, but to me they're very highly related. And no matter what walk of life you come from, whether you're well educated or you're not, whether you're black, whether you're white, whether you're male, whether you're female, whatever, you may come at that from a different point of view,

but those principles to me are important to how you live your life. And I think they fit everybody from a different point of view. Okay, so I'm gonna talk about your principle 10 to begin with here, well, to elaborate on what you said. The first thing you said was that you could be criticized for putting forward truths that are so obvious they don't need to be put forward.

My books have received that criticism too, and my response to that generally is, is sometimes what was formerly self-evident now needs to be buttressed and explained. But I'd like to make some counter-proposals to your principle 10, just so people know what's even more self-evident. Right? So here's some things you could do instead of abiding by your principle number 10. Treat other people as if they are the short-term means to whatever end you're pursuing in the moment. Okay, so that's what you do if you're an immature hedonist, is you look at other people and you think, not only what can I get from this person,

but what can I get for this person to satisfy the whim that I've allowed to possess me this moment? Right? And the ultimate expression of that, as you know clinically, is something like narcissistic psychopathy, right? Where every single other person is nothing but a landscape of opportunity for pleasurable and immediate self-gratification. And that's the core of truly anti-social, criminal and predatory behavior.

Or you can take another perspective that would be other than treating people with dignity and respect and you can say, well, treat other people as if they're your pawns if you can exercise power over them. Now both of those principles are in some ways equally self-evident. If I can get what I want from you right now, why the hell shouldn't I do it? And if you're weak and stupid and I can force you into things, why shouldn't I do it? And I mean, I, and I picked hedonism and power for a particular reason. Like, one of the things I've figured out, Dr. Phil recently was that when the uniting principle dissolves, so when God is dead,

let's say, in the Nietzschean terms, that what comes up immediately to supplant him is hedonism on the one side. And so that's the pull of instinctual whim and the drive to power on the other. And those two have a dance. And so your principle 10 is you aim it, you don't treat other people like their means to your own short-term ends ends and you don't worship power.

Does that seem reasonable to you? And then you've aligned it with rule one or with principle one and I'll get to that in a sec. But what do you think of that take on your 10th principle? Well, I think it's a good take, but it's also not challenging for everybody to be totally altruistic if there is such a thing. Right, right, right. And we can talk about that probably till the cows come home. But my point is, like I can go make a deal. You and I could make a deal.

We could open a business and we could say, okay, Jordan, you're gonna show up every day at eight o'clock and you're gonna close every night at eight p.m. And we're gonna be 50-50 partners. And you can be so excited about it that you say, well, you know, okay, well, that's not a good deal for me because you're not gonna sit still for that for very long. It may look like I made a great deal, but I didn't make a great deal because you're not gonna sit still for that for very long. It may look like I made a great deal,

but I didn't make a great deal because you're gonna rebel against that in a really short period of time. Because you're gonna be thinking, that was stupid. I'm doing all the work and he's getting half of the profits out of this, so it really doesn't work out if you exploit, manipulate. The thing is, narcissists just don't learn.

You know, you can't argue with them and they only see things from their point of view, so they don't learn. Um, and they can't generalize from one situation to another, but I think most people can and, and this isn't really asking for altruism. It's asking for people to say, look, do what works, and it really works if you treat yourself with other people with dignity and respect, because now you get collaboration, and together we're better than we are separately. Right.

Well, so what you're saying is that sustainable reciprocal altruism is not stupid self-sacrifice. Right? That's basically the issue. Well, and I think you pointed to the proper rationale for that, is that if the deal you make with someone that iterates, so like a partnership or a marriage, it's going to extend across some time. If it's not predicated on something like principles of universal justice, which would mean equality of worth within the relationship, then all that's going to happen is it's going to devolve into a counterproductive bitterness. And so if you're

establishing, I'll give you an example. I set up a business enterprise with my son, and we had been working on a project, and he was working at another job, and we had been working on a project. And he was working at another job, but he decided that it might be worthwhile to stop doing his other job and to focus entirely on our project because he thought it had some legs. So, what I suggested to him was that he go away. So he wanted to know, because we had worked on it jointly, what sort of deal I would be willing to enter into with him. I said, why don't you go away and come back

with a proposal for me that you're really thrilled about bringing to me, that you think would also maximize my incentives. Because there's a certain utility being associated with me partly because I have a lot of marketing clout. Let's say if you want to make it just a capitalistic decision. So I asked him to go away and come back with a plan that would maximally motivate him, while simultaneously maximally motivating me. And that's a good, like there's no stupid self-sacrifice

and that's a great thing to bring to a marriage, for example. My wife and I have got better at this in recent years, especially since our children left, you know? Our deal now, the deal I have with her, for example, about whether or not she should accompany me on tour and how we decide to go about doing the next things we're going to do is I've told her and vice versa that she doesn't have to do anything that I don't want her to do anything that she's not fully on board

with. Right now I could force her and compel her and manipulate her and all of that but your point is that well if you do that with someone they they're gonna kick back. And so that the relationship won't be sustainable. How long have you been married? 34 years, but I've known my wife for 52 years. Yeah. We've had a friendship for 52 years. So a long time. Yeah, that is a long time.

I've been married 47 and we've been together 50 as well. So it didn't take her as long to make up her mind about me, I guess. Yeah, well, yeah, that could easily be the case. So let's go through this first one, then let's turn to this one. Be who you are on purpose, right? And so that's very much akin, I would say, to your principle number five, which is consciously choose

which values deserve attention. So there's an intentionality there. Okay, so do you think you can differentiate for everyone who's watching and listening what the difference is between that kind of conscious intentionality and the exploitation of others. No, because it's tricky, right? Even with this interview,

I could come to this discussion with an end in mind. I could say, well, I wanna leverage the chance, the fact that I have a chance to talk to Dr. Phil, I wanna leverage that to my advantage. I wanna increase my viewership and listenership. I want to attract his fans. And the funny thing is, you know, there's some of that that's actually relevant and important

because I wouldn't be doing a podcast with you if I didn't think that it would be of interest to the people that I'm already have listening but also to attract new people. But then if I bend the interview to my narrow ends, then I'm manipulating you and using you, and it becomes, so I'm wondering how do you help people negotiate that line between developing an intentional vision

and consciously choosing their values, and yet serving something like a higher order good? Well, I think that when you look at number five, consciously choose which voices in your life deserve the most attention. What you're really focusing on here is making an informed decision, which may be part of number one, when you be who you are on purpose, you have to decide, am I going to just pay the most attention to the loudest voice just because they're the loudest? Is that what

I've been doing? And if it is, is that what I want to do? And when you get to number five, it's, I'm going to consciously choose, which goes up to number one, being who you are on purpose, which voices deserve the most attention in my life? And maybe it's your conversation with yourself. Maybe it's your conversation with God. Maybe it's your conversation with people outside your bubble. Maybe it's people that challenge what may be a confirmation bias.

You have to decide which voices you choose to make an investment in. And I used to think, I've employed a lot of people in my life because I've always been entrepreneurial. And I know at times I've employed as many as a thousand people in, you know, collective endeavors. And I used to think, for example,

that if I had two people sitting in front of me that were the same in everything that I could determine and the only difference was that one had been to college and one had not, that if there were no other tiebreakers that frankly I would tend to go with the one that had graduated from college. Even if the degree was in art history or something that wasn't germane to the job

I was hiring them for. And the reason was I knew something about that person I didn't know about the other. I knew they could sustain the pursuit of a long-term goal. I knew they could get along with assholes. I knew they could work as a team. I knew they could get along with assholes. I knew they could work as a team. I knew they could meet deadlines. I knew that there were a lot of things about them

that I knew that I didn't know about this other person. That other person might could as well, but I knew that about this person. I don't know that anymore. I don't know that about college graduates anymore. Because now they don't have the attitude that it's their job to get along with the professor. It's their attitude that the professor has the job to get along with them.

It's, I have no idea how much their mind has been poisoned by what I've termed intellectual rot from some of these elite universities. So what I used to have is kind of a tiebreaker because I knew something about a graduate, I didn't know about a non-graduate, is not valid anymore. So I've had to change which voices I'm willing to listen to and what things I'm willing to give weight to.

And so in being who I am on purpose, I've had to make adjustments as the world has changed around me. So this, in this question, be, or this principle, be who you are on purpose. So one question that arises out of that is, well, who am I? Okay, so I'd like to propose to you that there are default answers to that question.

The default answers are the immature answers we described earlier. So if you're not intentional in who you are, you end up being your instinctual whims and your drive to power. So basically it's what a two-year-old does. And I even mean that neurologically. It's like, you know, a two-year-old isn't very mature. They aren't who they are on purpose. They're operating on instinct and

whim, and they have to be socialized into the adoption of a higher order self. So you might ask yourself, if you're not your short-term desires or your short-term avoidance, your short-term wish to avoid pain, who are you? Right? And that would be be who you are on purpose. So you might say, well, where can you find who you are? And so I want to ask you what you think about this. There's a gospel statement that describes the nature of our relationship with divinity in a very optimistic manner.

And it proposes that if you knock, the door will open. And if you ask, you will receive. And if you knock the door will open and if you ask you will receive and if you seek you will find. And so I've tried to make that concrete. Let's say when I was operating as a behavioral therapist, when I was trying to help people discover who they were. And so one gateway to that is to ask yourself, this is in keeping with your principle 10, two, to treat yourself with dignity and respect. Imagine that you are caring for yourself as if you're valuable.

Give yourself the benefit of the doubt. And then ask yourself, this is part of the development of the vision, ask yourself if you could have what you needed and wanted in a manner that would be best for you, what would that look like? And you'll get an answer to that question. You'll start to be able to develop a vision of what your life would be like if you were deeply who you are in a way that was sustainable. And then you can start doing that on purpose. Now, the reason I'm asking you that question and presenting those possibilities

is because the question of who you are, that's the question of identity, is begged by your first principle. You know, when people are saying now that they're their sexual identity, right? That's the biggest claim in our society. And that they should be proud of that claim. And to me, that just reduces who someone is to, well, to essentially, to a very unidimensional biological drive that seeks immediate

gratification. It's a very low-order conception of who you are. So when you say be who you are on purpose, what do you think you're pointing to in that who you are? I think it is a much harder question than people anticipate when they begin, which is why I say, you've got to really sit down and think about this. Because when you ask somebody, tell me who you are and you cannot use your occupation

or what you spend most of your time doing in the answer. If I take that away from them, like if you're an accountant, that's what you do all day, 50, 60 hours a week. And I say, tell me who you are and you can't use your occupation in the answer. It's astounding to me how people struggle because they identify themselves with labels. And I'm an accountant or I'm a welder or a welder's helper. And now, as you say, a lot of people have adopted a cause, and so they put that like

they want to tattoo it on their forehead. That's not who they are. And sometimes do. Yes, exactly. But that's not who they are. Who they are is multi-dimensional. It cuts across interpersonal, interpersonal, spiritual, familial.

It cuts across a lot of different levels. And I think it comes down to a real heavy, if you're doing a weighted equation, you have to give heavy weight to what they believe and what they're passionate about. And if in that description, there's not something in there that they're really passionate about,

I really say, wow, you, I would encourage you to seek that passion. Because I think going through life without a passionate pursuit, man, that's gotta look like nine miles of bad road. I mean, you're just, you're just pushing a rock up a slippery hill. If you're not passionate, if you're passionate about something, then all of a sudden work becomes something that you, you want to do it becomes something.

It's, it may be your, your work and your, your vocation and your application can't be the same thing. But if you ever hit that, uh, you've won the, you've won the lottery. If you love what you do enough that it's both your vocation and your avocation. Right, well I think that's the fortunate circumstance that you find yourself in when you align what could otherwise just be whim with a higher order calling. And I think the traditional insistence, you know, there's a traditional insistence that the spirit of God is the divinity in calling, right?

And you're pointing to that, you're using secular language and likely purposefully, but your notion is that there are things that will interest and compel you in your life. And your job is to, that's the call of the treasure that the dragon guards, that's a good way of thinking about it. And that if you pursue that, that enthuses your life with a kind of sustaining meaning.

You know, when I wrote my first book, when I wrote Maps of Meaning, I wrote a chapter in that book called The Divinitive Interest, and it was really a pan to calling. And I knew it was incomplete, and so I wanna run this by you because I think this is implicit in your principles too. You know, you say, for example,

don't reward bad behavior or support conduct, you do not value, that's number three. Do not stay silent just so others can remain comfortable, actively live and support meritocracy. Those seem to me to be pointers to integrate conscience with calling. So imagine that there's two mechanisms that orient you towards your higher realization. Let's put it that way. One would be the calling that infuses your life with significance and meaning. But it can go off track, right?

It can become a delusional enthusiasm or a whim. You need another countervailing force that's something like conscience. And maybe that's the voice of integrated negative emotion, you know, the warning voice. And so the calling says, go this way. And the conscience says, yeah, but stay on the path. Right?

Don't be tempted by short-term callings. Stay on the path and watch, keep yourself in check. And so that seems to me to be manifested, for example, in this, let's look at number six just briefly. Do not stay silent just so others, you could say as well. Do not say stay silent just so others, you could say as well, do not say stay silent just so others and yourself can remain what comfortable. And you mean temporarily comfortable, I would presume, in that utterance as well.

So the question that begs is, well, look, if I can stay silent and other people are comfortable, then why shouldn't I stay silent? And so, so let's, let's walk into that. What's your sense of that? Well, my sense of that is that you have a lot of people right now that are going to be uncomfortable if you call out some narratives that are being pushed on society that don't jail with your values, don't jail with your sense of factual base and science. And that's why if you look at number four, measure all actions based on results and all thoughts based on rationality.

And you're right, I'm describing these in secular terms on purpose, but, and people think, well rationality is not a word I use every day. So how can I use that? It's really very simple. Number one is that thought based on verifiable fact. So if you have a thought and we tend to believe ourselves, right, I mean, if I put a blindfold on you

and walk you around downtown or whatever, and you believe I've walked you to the edge of a 10 story building and you believe that, we tend to believe ourselves and that's what you're telling yourself. You're going to fight like trying to put a cat in a sack if I'm getting you to take the next step. You're like, whoa, no, I'm not going to do this because I've told myself this is going to be a doozy when I take this step. So if you're telling yourself that, you tend to believe yourself. Well, we've got to start getting people to verify their

thoughts. Um, I, I say that to people that are suicidal all the time, test the rationality of your thoughts is what you're telling yourself. This, do you, are you telling yourself you want to die or are you telling yourself you want to stop the pain? Those are two very different things, and both of them have long-term consequences. So let's really test that out. Second, does it protect and prolong your life?

Does it get you what you want? I mean, there are just some very simple questions that you can ask yourself, and all of a sudden, if it fails any of those simple criteria, then you go, okay, I got to replace this with something that fits the criteria. Now, people aren't just kind of wandering around deciding, well, I trusted myself, but I didn't really know how to test my thinking. Well, I'm just giving them a very simple way to test their thinking. Number one being, is it verifiable fact,

what you're telling yourself? And if it's not, you don't even go to number two. You've got to deal with facts and reality. And people that are rejecting science saying biology just doesn't apply, we're going to decide that we're changing all that. There aren't men and women, we're gonna change all that. Well, I'm sorry, you don't get to just decide that.

Yeah, I guess you can decide that for yourself, but you're certainly not gonna decide it for me. And if you're pushing that agenda, that's where you can't stay silent so others remain comfortable. You just can't let them run rough shot over you and everybody else with that agenda, just so they don't get upset with you for saying, no, sorry, I'm not going to let you rewrite biology for me and my family, me and my life.

I'm not going to let you pretend we didn't have slavery in our history just because you've decided that it's not good for kids to hear about that. Well, I've decided it is good for kids to hear about that. Well, I've decided it is good for kids to hear about that. I've decided they need to know that there were dark times in our history and we can only learn from those dark times by acknowledging them. You can't change what you don't acknowledge, you've got to acknowledge this.

And so I think I'm trying to get people to start thinking, but if you give them some rules for thinking, they're going to be more efficient about it. Right, okay, so you're integrating, in that answer you integrated principle three, four and six. Three was don't reward bad behavior or support conduct, you do not value, do not stay silent just so others can remain comfortable. That's six. And four was measure all actions based

on results and thought and rationality. So if I understand you correctly, one of the things you're pointing out is that you're called upon to make your opinion known. You're called upon to say something. You're called upon to differentially reward and punishment based on the concordance of what you're hearing with what you know to be true rationally. And so the idea there would be that part of your conscience calls you to oppose opinions that are not aligned with the natural order of things. I mean, it's tricky, right? Because you hear all the time in the Enlightenment rationalist types, they say follow the facts.

And that's a weak argument because facts themselves don't specify a destination. On the other hand, there are opinions that fly in the face of what's real so egregiously that if you attend to them, you're gonna walk into a pit, you're gonna walk into a pit, you're gonna walk off a cliff. And so if you, your principle number six,

the justification you had for that was that you shouldn't stay silent just so others can remain comfortable when you know that what is being said violates a reasonable understanding of the natural and social order. It's something like that. And so that indicates a belief in an order that's beyond the mere verbal. Right?

You know, like the Derrida in particular, I think it was Jacques Derrida in On Grammatology. He famously said, there's nothing outside the text. Now, he walked that back to some degree when he was pushed on it, but I think it does get to something that's core in the post-modernist ethos, which is the idea that there's nothing to truth, but the consensus of words,

and that if you can change the consensus of words, you can change the truth. But the thing is, is that the verbal order has to reflect the intrinsic order of the cosmos or it becomes delusional. Like a delusional verbal representation is internally consistent, right? And people can even develop a consensus around it, which is what a fad is or a social contagion. And so your hypothesis is something like conscience calls us to speak when the consensus has become delusional.

It's something like that. Does that seem reasonable? That is a reasonable interpretation. And you know from your clinical experience that how difficult it is to penetrate a well-structured, deeply-entrenched delusional system. I mean, sometimes you can spend months and months and months trying to penetrate a individual's delusional system and think you're making all the way into world. I had a woman one time that I was working with that was convinced that she was being followed, monitored and hearing voices from her walls.

And I've spent all this time and felt like I really had made progress. And she said, yeah, you've convinced me. I'm a hundred percent. You got me cured, Doc. I'm, I'm, I'm great. Uh, and on the way out, she said, I, I did, however, cut the wires to all the intercom system in the house. Cause that's where I'm sitting here in the voices. So it's like I'm with you.

But on the other hand, I did strip all the intercom out of the house. And I thought, you know what? I'll take that partial victory, but you get into confirmation bias with people. And folks don't understand. When you're dealing with people with confirmation bias, research tells us if you bring them solid evidence to the contrary, they just dig in their heels.

It gets worse, not better. Even if you show them scientific, verifiable evidence to the contrary, they just dig in their heels more. So you got to deal with that first before you can get that new data to take out. Yeah. Well, do you suppose that's maybe a reflection of something that you pointed to earlier? I mean, you know, in the story of Exodus, the story of Exodus indicates that when people leave a tyranny, they enter a desert, right? They don't leave the tyranny and go to the Promised Land. They leave a tyranny and they go to a desert.

And maybe the problem with treating delusions with rational argumentation is that you break down the person's self-imposed interior tyranny, but you present them with the desert. So I wonder to what degree, maybe this is reflected in the fact, you know, one of the most effective long-term cures for addictive behavior, especially alcoholism, appears to be religious transformation. And part of the reason for that an AA

capitalizes on that but AA also provides people with a community that isn't focused on addictive behavior. I wonder if the solution to the supplantation of a delusion isn't deconstruction, you know, isn't just poking holes in the delusion, but the simultaneous elaboration of a more comprehensive system of explanation that doesn't have the same flaws as the delusion.

And you kind of intimated that when you said that it was immoral to do nothing but deconstruct, to do nothing but poke holes without providing a solution. So I don't know what you think about that clinically. And I haven't occurred to me before with regard specifically to working with delusions. Yeah. Well, I've, I've seen it in the real world in working with juries. Um, I think one of the biggest myths is, uh, the burden of proof is on the prosecution.

That's a myth that may be written down in the rule books, but if you're really going to defend someone, you better present the jury with an alternative explanation. Right, right, right. Just proving a negative is very hard to do to begin with, but they wanna hear, if we're not down here for the reason we're told we're down here, then you better give me a alternative explanation of how this happened and why we're down here. Um,

and until you give them an alternative explanation, you're fighting an uphill battle for sure. And I think that's true with what you're saying about delusions. You need to give them an alternative existence outside that delusional system that's not a desert. Yeah, well, I think, I mean, I think part of the reason people need a coherent belief system because otherwise they're incoherent, right? And so what happens, I think this is also why power and hedonism have become focuses of identity, is when the higher forms of identity collapse,

then people default towards narratives of power, that's what the Marxists do, right? Or this metamarchism we have now is every single dimension of potential comparison between people devolves into explanation of power, right? Is that all there are is an infinite number of dimensions of oppression. And it's an interesting explanation because when systems deteriorate, they do deteriorate in the direction of power and oppression.

So there's almost no system that you can point to that can't be explained in part with a power narrative. And alternatively, you can have a narrative of instantaneous gratification, something like that. And it's better to replace that with... Well, that's what we're struggling with in this conversation, right? Is that you want to replace those narratives of power and gratification with a higher-order narrative that offers more and explains more simultaneously. You at least want to replace it with a social system where you're not in a situation where you've,

I would, and I'm not the first one to say this and it's been said better than I can say it, but I would a lot rather have questions I can't answer than answers I can't question. I can't answer, then answers I can't question. And right now we're in a situation too often where we have answers we can't question because if you question an answer, you're labeled a hater. You're labeled some kind of phobe. You're labeled some kind of heretic. Just by asking a question, God forbid you disagree.

But I would a lot rather have a whole set of questions we haven't found the answers for yet, than have a whole set of answers I'm not permitted to even challenge, question, dig in on. And I think that's where we are when we're dealing with cults, when we're dealing with power mongers. So imagine that it's easy to confuse a questioner

with a deconstructionist, right? So let's say I'm in a comfortable delusion and you come along and start asking questions. Now my objection to you could be, you're doing nothing but poking holes. Now you're making the claim, and I think this is actually a pointer to what the higher part of identification should be. So, for example, the ancient Egyptians

worship the open eye. That's the eye of Horus, and their notion was that the force that renews everything is the eye that pays attention. And it's akin to the idea of questioning, right? The redemptive questioner questions to build. He doesn't question to destroy, but it's easy for people who are entrenched in the delusion to treat every questioner as if he's nothing but an agent of destruction. And you know, you mention something here which is work hard to understand the way others see things. If you're a questioner and you're using your questioning to do nothing but destroy the other person's belief system, to elevate your

moral stature, right? To show that you're smarter, to show that you have all the answers. That's like the sin of intellectual pride, I would say. It's easy to be viewed as a deconstructive agent, and then you can understand why people get defensive about their beliefs. So you need to question in the attempt to replace what's insufficient with something better, right? So you have to be a builder and a questioner. And it seems to me that that conception of who you are that's part and parcel of treating yourself and others with dignity and respect,

or even being who you are on purpose, that means something like the recognition that you're a building questioner, right? Not a destroying questioner, and putting that at the center. I think that requires you to do something that most people I don't think come to naturally, and that is we have to determine what other people's currency is.

Because we assume that people have the same currency as ourselves and that not only is not true, it's often not the case. For example, I think, and I work a lot with law enforcement and I've done training with law enforcement on interrogation techniques, how to do deception detection, things of that nature. And I always love talking to the negotiators

about how to get where you wanna get in a negotiation. And Chris Voss, who's probably the most experienced negotiator with the FBI, who's now retired, will tell you this very thing. He will tell you that your best shot of ever getting hostages out from a hostage taker is if you can get that hostage taker to fully and completely believe that you understand why they took that hostage to begin with, whether it's a domestic violence situation or a political situation or whatever, if they understand that you get why they did what they did to begin with. So they feel heard that a big part of their currency

is I wanna be heard, I wanna be understood here. I want people to understand and get why I felt driven to this desperate act, that if you can convince them that hey, I get it, I'm not saying I agree with you, but I see through your eyes how the world looked and why you did what you did. Not saying I agree with it, not saying you're going to get away with it. I'm just telling you I understand how this looked from your point of view. And I mean, that's true all the way down to a teenager wanting to have a later curfew.

down to a teenager wanting to have a later curfew. They can assume, well, you know, my mom and dad just want to control me and they're saying he's just wanting to be more independent. And if you really listen, you can find out, wait a minute, they're being motivated by the currency of safety. They know that most of the accidents happen between when the bars let out in the next two hours. They want me off the street for safety purposes. And if they understand, he wants to be with his friends when all the funds happening right at the end of the evening and they could negotiate where they both get what they want.

If they can just agree, you're gonna be at somebody's house, verifiably hanging out during that time, then we can negotiate something in between. You're off the street, but I don't have to be home with mommy and daddy. So if they understand they each have a different currency, giving becomes much easier.

And, but to do that, you've got to really listen and learn from somebody to know what's important to them. Right, well, you're, well, and you're pointing to something there that's a source of inestimable reward in relationship to listening, because, you know, a skeptic might say, well, for example, why should I listen to you

if I can just force you to do what I want? And there's a couple of answers to that. I mean, the first answer is, well, you might be able to force the person now, but that doesn't mean you're going to be able to force them tomorrow. And it certainly doesn't mean you're going to be able to force them once they come along with all your friends and tell you to go to hell. And so solutions imposed by force tend to be unstable. So that's very much worth knowing. And I interviewed Chris Foss, by the way,

but I also interviewed Franz DeWall about chimpanzees. And he's one of the world's foremost primatologists. And he's pointed out quite clearly that chimp elfas who use force have very short-term and violent rains, and they rain over very fractured and destabilized chimp troops. So you can use force for a while, but it'll come back to haunt you. So then you might say, well, what's the alternative?

And you laid that out to some degree with work hard to understand the way others see things. If I can understand what it is that you value, and then I can negotiate with you a solution that enables you to move forward to what you value, while I move forward simultaneously toward what I value, then we've instantly created a relationship that will survive without supervision. Right, that's one of the things that's so cool about that

is that if you pay attention to someone and you understand what motivates them, and then that's built into your agreement, you don't have to be a tyrant and you don't have to micromanage because you and the person will walk side by side without mutual supervision. Right, so Jean Piaget figured this out by the way

when he was studying children. You know, he figured this out technically. He said, if you put, imagine you put two systems in head to head competition with one another. One system was a canarystocratic tyranny popped down using force, and another system was bought bottom up using voluntary agreement. The system based on voluntary agreement will always out-compete the system based on force,

because the system based on force will waste energy in enforcement. Well, and he was exactly right. And, you know, Piaget also showed that actual learning that would be incorporated and saved was much better from the bottom up than from the top down because people felt a degree of cooperation. And Piaget was right about that. Right, right, right, right. Yeah, well, that's partly why too, even in psychotherapy.

You know, part of the reason you don't give people advice as a psychotherapist is because if you haven't walked through the process of coming to the conclusion, the conclusion itself is rather weak. So if I deliver my client already, you know, now and then you know this is now and then you've got someone in your therapeutic practice and they're in a fix and you know how they could get out of it. You could just tell them.

But if you tell them, first of all, they don't get to solve the problem. And you can take credit for that. You steal that from them. And second, they actually haven't gone through the effort necessary to generate the knowledge structure that will enable them to solve similar problems in the future. It's like you can control everything your child does and nothing bad will happen to them, but as soon as your child doesn't have you around, they're completely bereft.

You know, maybe that was your goal all along if you're like a devouring mother, for example. But I wonder how much of that, is that associated with your principles seven and eight, said actively live and support meritocracy and identify and build consequential knowledge? Because there a bridge to that, what would you say, that willingness to take it upon yourself to solve problems and to deal with your own affairs? Well, you're certainly right about the meritocracy.

I believe this. We've made some really bad decisions and I saw it happen with, you know, COVID where the United States government spent $5.5 trillion in giveaways during COVID and $4.4 trillion of it went into checking or savings, which means it wasn't urgently needed. People just tucked it away and said, yeah, thanks, we'll take that and tuck it away. And then they pay people more not to work than to work.

And I mean that literally, when you take all of the bonuses and the credits and extending unemployment plus the $600 a week bonus on top of unemployment and the person is able to stay home and not pay what in LA was $7 a gallon for gas at one point so they don't have to do the commute and have that expense and they don't have any wardrobe expense and all and they can just sit on the couch and not work and then all that's over and they can't understand why the supply chain is paralyzed. Well, you know, let's think that through guys. You pay people not to work and so you get people not working.

Hell lassie could figure this one out. You pay people not to work and so you get people not working. Hell, Lassie could figure this one out. You got what you paid for. We had so many lifelong businesses wiped out by the mismanagement of COVID that it's heartbreaking. I mean, these people that spent generations building these family businesses that worked so hard and the margin was narrow and a high percentage of those businesses never recovered.

They never came back. And you see what happened. And one of my problems is we do have a generation that is experiencing a mental emotional crisis with the highest levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness since records have been kept. And the agencies that keep those records, the CDC and the Department of Education and others are the very ones that shut the schools down. They shut the schools down. And as I said early in our conversation, I was fine with that for a couple of weeks, but then it turns into

months and then it turns into a year. And in some cases, it turned into two years with remote learning and then it turns into a year, and in some cases, it turned into two years with remote learning that they knew did not work, particularly with low socioeconomic and inner city populations who didn't have good Wi-Fi connections, didn't have parents there to help them along the way. And when they shut the schools down for that long, they did that knowing these kids were in a mental and emotional crisis, and they knew that those schools were a lifeline to those kids, that they needed that for emotional development, they needed it for educational achievement,

they needed it so they had social development, and they shut it down anyway. They also knew that the mandated reporters, the teachers, the counselors, the cafeteria workers, and bus drivers, and coaches were at the schools. And those were the ones who had their eyes on these children and could report if they saw signs that the child was being molested

or the child was being abused in the home. They shut all of that down. And when they did, those referrals dropped 40 to 50% in some major markets. And these kids were sent home behind closed doors, locked up with the very abusers. It's not that the abuse went down 40 or 50%. It probably went up because of the frustration

of being locked up at home behind those doors. And they shut the schools down without any plan for bringing them back. And so you ask questions about it and they say, well, we did the best we could with what we knew at the time. No, you did not do the best you could with what you knew at the time. You had information that these children were not as susceptible to this disease as everyone else was.

You knew they were in a mental health crisis. You knew this was their lifeline, and you yanked it out from under them. And you damn well knew what you were doing when you did it. So lurking behind that, your principles seven and eight, I've got about three more questions I hope we can address. And so we'll start with this one. I think I've been thinking a lot about what might constitute a

meritocracy from a technical perspective. And so, well, the first thing we might point out is that hopefully we could all agree that there are some things that are worth doing in comparison to other things. And if we can't agree on that, we can't ever get anything done. So some things are worth doing in comparison to others. Doing the things that should be done efficiently and effectively means that we can do more of them or we can do the good thing faster. And so that seems to be good.

And then a meritocracy is, it's essentially reward for those things. It's reward for those things and punishment for failure to do it, right? So once you decide that something is to be done, you've valued it, then you value those actions and patterns of attention that will lead to that outcome, and that's a meritocracy. Then you could add another level of definition there that ties in with what we've been describing is that if the proper you, if the proper self is something like long-term harmony established voluntarily with others,

then a proper meritocracy is a system that rewards behaviors that are aimed at that and punishes those that aren't. And that's also what you would be called upon to speak about, for example, when you're not staying silent, just so others can remain comfortable. So there's a technical issue with regards to meritocracy here. Now, I wanna, so you can tell me what you think about that,

but then I wanna tie that into something you mentioned much earlier too, which is the tyranny of the fringe. So I think there's always a fringe. And I think the fringe generally tends to be people who are pursuing power and people who are pursuing short term hedonistic self-gratification. And the fringe is much noisier and much louder and much more dominant than it's been, certainly, that I can ever remember. And I'm wondering, Dr. Phil, do you think maybe it's... I've been wrestling with this idea. You know, we're all connected together now, and there's no reason to assume that what's pathological can't spread with equal rapidity compared to what's valuable.

Right, so now we're all hooked together. We can say, well, good ideas spread faster, but we can say, well, yeah, bad ideas, bad contagious ideas also spread faster. Now, part of what stops bad contagious ideas from spreading in real life is that there's, you can identify the people who are spreading them and you can stop them. It's because you see them face to face and maybe you in principle continually interact with them, right? So they can be held responsible.

So here's a hypothesis. It's a deep hypothesis. You tell me what you think about it. It's a deep hypothesis. You tell me what you think about it. Virtualization enables psychopathy. And the reason it does is because it decouples action from consequences. It means almost like a definition of virtualization, right? I mean if I'm an anonymous sadistic troll, I can say whatever the hell I want to anyone whenever I want. And not only do I not have consequences, I may get attention for it, right? So the incentive structure. So imagine this, and I'm asking you your opinion

as a psychologist. So two questions. Do you think virtualization might enable psychopathy? And if it does, then what do you think of the danger that poses? Well, I'll answer both of those questions and I answer them pretty much in the affirmative. I don't think that situations create heroes, for example. And I don't think situations create psychopaths.

I think it reveals who they are. And so you get someone that becomes a keyboard bully, you get somebody that goes just completely out of control. I would suggest that they probably were just lying in the weeds, waiting for the opportunity to be who. To exploit. Yeah. To just exploit attack and be who they were without the consequences. And you know,

that's why you see people in road rage yelling and screaming with veins popping out of their neck at somebody in a car that can't hear them, they would never say that to somebody in an elevator. Right, right, right. But they've got the anonymity. That's also that anonymity. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah. And it's the same thing with the keyboard bullies. They've got the anonymity and it may be somebody in their grandmother's basement or it could be, you know, somebody that you work with and they have a different identity and they would never say that to you across your desk. And I think that's a real problem.

So, yeah, I do think it enables them to be who they probably were to begin with. And that's one of the consequences, that's one of the unintended consequences of the technology. And I hear people talking about some of the things with the uptick in activity and the transgender movement and they say, well, we don't think there's a contagion effect here. Well, really, you've got 10, eight, nine, 10 times the activity and with girls

that we didn't have before. I mean, it was typically boys not girls. Now girls outstrip the boys like what, 1100%. And I'm saying that by recall. So I'm not offering that as fact, but certainly by a big number. And I said, but we don't think it's a contagion effect. Well, of course it is. It's gotta be contagion effect.

People are saying that they can say, well, they just feel more free to come out about it. Well, it's the popular, yeah, that's such rubbish. The, not only is it a contagion effect, as we can tell by its insanely rapid spread, but we know it's a contagion effect because psychogenic epidemics have always raged through young women. Like, there's a documented history of that going back 350 years. There's a great book called Discovery of the Unconscious by a man

named Henry Ellenberger, which was a canonical text for psychoanalytic training for about 30 years, and it truly is a brilliant book. And he documents psychogenic epidemics, literally going back, I'd say 400 years. And it's always young women. And it's partly young women, I think, because they are more agreeable, but it's also partly young women

because they hit puberty earlier and have to wrestle with its relatively dramatic psychological consequences at a slightly less developed, at a slightly earlier age. That makes a real difference. The fact that you're pointing to the contagion of the trans phenomena among not its typical sufferers, who as you pointed out, historically were male, but young women, is clear evidence to anyone who isn't purposefully

stuffing up their ears and blinding their eyes that this is a social epidemic. And I'm so embarrassed to be a member, really, of the psychological community at this point, Dr. Phil, because this epidemic has revealed a cowardice among my peers that I would have never believed possible. A level of pathological silence and enabling that runs against absolutely everything that the psychotherapeutic enterprise, in principle, was designed to forestall. So it's a hideous situation. Well, we've seen the, it's more than just silence, I'm afraid, because we've seen the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association,

the American Medical Association, the Academy of Endocrinology, on and on that have all signed off on it. And I- They're complicit, not just silent. Yeah, and I just, I've never seen anything else where people had, where these organizations or professions had less evidence that something didn't cause long-term harm

before they signed off on it ever. Yeah, ever, right. I agree. So I don't get it. And I don't think history is going to be kind. I'm not a physician. So I always tell people, you know, I'm not a physician. So, you know, take that for what you will.

But I think the thing that got me into this profession to begin with is as early as 12, 13 years old, I became fascinated with why people do what they do and don't do what they don't do. And I remember the day that it got a grip on me and I was never the same after that day, but I've been fascinated with that equation, why people do what they do and don't do what they don't do.

And if you understand that, I mean, that is a great tool in life in getting things done and understanding others. And I just, you can't spend your life focused on that and not see things like a contagion effect. You know, there are rules for reporting on suicide, you know, for the media. We'll do a story about young girls. There were two young girls up on the East coast one time that were in love with

the same boy and they had this insane suicide pack. So they stepped in front of one of these high speed trains together. And when it impacted them, it made the shape of together and when it impacted them it made the shape of a heart where it impacted them. All these media were romanticizing this and showing this and I'm thinking, how could you do that? Every girl with a broken heart now can see that and say, oh my God, how romantic is that? You're inviting contagion when you do that. can see that and say, oh my God, how romantic is that? How romantic.

You're inviting contagion when you do that. And we refuse to record it. Dr. Phil, that's gonna happen in Canada. Like, this is what's going to happen in Canada. So I told the Canadian government back in 2016 that their Bill C-16 would produce a social contagion among young women. I said that directly to the Senate.

But now there's something else happening and I'd like your opinion about it. So Canada is going to extend its euthanasia operation to the mentally ill. Now they've already tried to do that, it didn't work yet, but that's where it's headed. So my sense, now I've already seen one case report of this, but my sense is that this is what's going to happen,

is that they'll extend made medically assisted death. It's the Canadian euthanasia program. They're gonna extend that to the mentally ill and to minors. And so what we're going to get is a death romanticism of made suicide among young women. And it'll eclipse the trans contagion, I think. And I think it'll happen for exactly the reason that you just described is we'll get romantic accounts of early suicide among attention-seeking desperate young women who are also tempted. You know this too, because

if someone does have a pronounced depressive temperament, one of the temptations that's going to befall them is the belief that everyone else around them would be better off if they weren't there. Yes, the number one reason for suicide, right? They're a burden. They believe they're a burden. Right, right, right. Exactly, exactly. And that can easily be romanticized, especially if you also want to avoid the responsibility of growing up, right? Because that's another... Well, that's why there are suicidal crises among adolescents is because, you know, they are deciding whether they're going to take on the burden of responsibility

of adulthood and the opportunity and adventure of adulthood as well. Well, how do they... It's easy to romanticize the... Go ahead. How do they answer this question? How does that individual, if they have a mental illness to this level that they want to die, how does that person give informed consent if they're incapacitated to the point with a mental illness that they want to die?

How do they give informed consent? Oh yeah, you and your logic. Look, man, how does a 13 year old give consent for a double mastectomy? We're already way past that. We've blown out the necessity for informed consent long ago and that'll provide absolutely no barrier whatsoever to the people who are pushing

the main agenda in Canada. Like Dr. Phil, that question won't, there'll be endless academic papers written by demented ethicists providing an answer in the affirmative, which will be something like, well, they still have sufficient capacity to decide whether their lived experience indicates that their suffering is such that it would be better if they didn't exist, and you have no right to interfere with that.

There, that's how it'll be justified. Well, Jordan, are we just clinicians that forgot to check our common sense at the ivory tower when we were leaving campus. Is that the problem? Well, you know, I don't know what to make of this because I know perfectly well that the cohort of people I graduated with, say back in the 1990s, were very well-trained clinicians.

I think that, well, what's happened to me in Canada, you may know this, is that my license is being threatened by the Canadian, the Ontario College of Psychologists. It's not just being threatened. I mean, their plan is to take it. Now, they're taking it because of things I've said. Now, the thing about me is that I don't give a damn if they take it, and at this point,

I just assume not be part of their bloody club anyways. But, you know, there's nothing they can do to me. I'm not practicing at the moment except on a broad public scale, and I have multiple independent sources of income, and I don't even have to live in Canada. So I can tell them to go to hell without too much damage, but I'm watching what's happening in Canada. And the colleges, the medical colleges and the psychological colleges, have sufficient clout so that anyone who puts a toe outside the lines can be certain that they will be

the recipient of anonymous denunciations, that they will be subjected to endless, expensive lawfare, and that they could well be stripped of their right to practice. And those are not trivial punishments. And generally, people can't withstand them. So I have a two-part question maybe that we can use to wrap things up here. The first in observation, you've been popping up everywhere in the social media world, especially in the last couple of weeks. And I have a question about that that's personal and also one that's more issues-based, let's say.

I've noticed that it's been very hard for people who've made a name for themselves in the traditional media to transition, so to speak, to the online world. Sort of like watching TV actors try to make it in the movie world. Sometimes that works, but most of the time it doesn't. Now, it does really seem to be working for you.

And I'm wondering why that's working for you and how you've managed it, how that's related to your new book. And what you think is driving you forward to continue speaking as you have in your legacy media career, but now increasingly online. So let's see if we can address all of those points. What is it that you're doing right

to make this transition to the online world and what is driving you forward to continue to speak on these issues? Well, that's a two-part question and I'll treat it just that way. I think the part about social media is probably driven from a negative standpoint in the sense that I think there are a lot of

factions out there that think I'm very dangerous right now because I'm talking about things that don't allow them to remain comfortable and I'm willing to debate anybody anywhere about anything that I'm qualified in my opinion to talk about. Now I'm not in my opinion to talk about. Now, I'm not gonna tell you what to do with your 401k because I can't add two and two and get five every time. But when you talk about the things that are in my book, if you've noticed, there are extensive references

to the professional literature at the end of every chapter because I do my homework and I know that literature backwards and forwards and I've studied it, I've read it. I don't go get my information on Google. I get it by actually reading the core articles and understanding why these things are happening. And I think when I go out and talk about these things, I think it's very threatening to some people.

I've been shadow banned. I've had videos that go up and they just go crazy viral for 15 minutes and all of a sudden bang, they're gone. And my cybersecurity people tell me that they're being targeted and taken down. Things at the border when I've been down there, things that I've talked about, down, things at the border when I've been down there, things that I've talked about,

you know, disconcerting, you know, content in the book. I think that I'm clearly there, it's backfiring. There's an attempt to silence me on these matters. And I think it's backfiring because people want to hear what I have to say and people are getting their information differently now, they're getting their information on YouTube and social media platforms and that sort of thing. So a lot of that stuff, I'm not posting, others are posting from what I've done or said somewhere here, there or yawn. But April 2nd, I do launch Merritt Street Media,

the 24 hour network, and we'll be in somewhere between 75 and 90 million homes. I think it'll be the biggest launch since Fox, as I was saying, so I think it's gonna be prolific for people to find. And you know, you gotta take a position, and I'm willing to take a position. And I think people find that both threatening and refreshing. I think it covers the gambit.

And that's okay. I get a lot of hate mail. I've had death threats. I've, you know, all that. I took a strong position on Hamas and Israel. Um, I was sick and to see students on campuses around the United States, uh, elite campuses out rallying for what I consider to be, uh, assassins and murderers. It's like we're not teaching critical thinking here. How is it? I'm hearing rhetoric that I haven't heard since I had read translated transcripts of the Hitler Youth Movement on American campuses. How is this possible? And nobody was saying anything about it, so I started saying something about it. And boy did that heat things up. You know, you're in a position where your words have authority and you have access to much public attention.

And that's a position that I'm in and have been for a while. And I'm wondering how you differentiate in your own life between the temptations of narcissistic self-aggrandizement in the public eye, let's say, and your duty to speak forthrightly about things you believe to be important. I mean, you have had a long career, you have more than enough money for the rest of your life. There's no need for you in the privation sense to be in the public eye speaking. How do you protect yourself against the fact that you can be tempted towards self-glorification,

let's say, and self-grandizement by the fact of your media presence? And how do you know that you're speaking for what's true rather than blowing your own horn, let's say, and increasing your own, building a tower of babble to your own posterity? Well, absolutely fair question. And I think I've long believed that too much time in the spotlight fades the suit. And I'm in a position where I can go pretty much on any media outlet, any time that I want to, they're happy to have me on. I think it's going to get less so

with some outlets pretty fast. But I think my rule has always been, if it's not real obvious to the viewer why you're there, you shouldn't go. If you're going just because you can, instead of it being really obvious that you're there with a purpose and a passion to speak about things that matter to people who care,

you shouldn't be there at all. And I probably do one out of 10 or 20 media requests I probably do one out of 10 or 20 media requests that I get because I just, I think it's important to play big, not long, play big, not often. And I think if you choose carefully where you speak and what you say, you can have much more of an impact than just being elevator noise, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And why would you say that you're compelled to continue to do it? What do you think you're up to?

What do you hope you're up to? I hope what I'm up to is, you know, I really looked around and was very, very concerned where this society is headed right now. And I also looked around to see who was willing to step up and speak about it. And I am certainly not the only one, but I felt like being trained in clinical psychology and some of the things that I have experience in, that I had a unique perspective to talk about the collective consciousness,

because as you know, there's an individual consciousness and then there's a collective consciousness of the family, of the community, of the region, the state, the country. And I think that I was seeing a void where people weren't really talking about that. They weren't really talking about people exercising their right to have a voice within that collective consciousness. And I was concerned that what we were seeing taught in the universities was going to put a generation in charge of this country next when my grandchildren are going to be out there living their lives that I was just uncomfortable with.

I just thought, you know, we're coddling these students. We're not preparing them for the next level of life. Somebody's got to step up and raise hell about this. And I felt passionate about it. And so that's why I decided to keep going. I see, I see, I see. Well, I can, I hope I can relate to that. No.

So, all right, sir. Well, I'm wondering if there's anything, we covered your book relatively comprehensively. We covered a lot of ground today. I'm wondering, is there anything else? I'm going to continue to talk to Dr. Phil, as many of you know, on the daily virus side. I'm going to delve into autobiographical matters a bit

and get to know him on the personal side. And so if you're inclined to join us for that, that would be well and good. On the free speech side, it doesn't hurt to throw some support the daily wire way because they are doing what they can to be a bastion of alternative opinion in a landscape of woke nonsense. And so that's worth some consideration. Is there anything else that you would like to bring to people's attention on this side before we bid each other farewell? Well, I would just like to say

it's really been refreshing to talk to somebody that knows what the hell they're talking about. And I'm talking about a lot of these concepts and principles that are sometimes nuanced. And you obviously did your homework on this and I really appreciate that. And I know how busy you are, but to have a clinician on the other end

that picks up the nuances of what we're doing has been very refreshing, Jordan, so I can't thank you enough. It's a pleasure to talk to you, and I appreciate the fact that you took the time to talk to me today and to everyone that's watching and listening. And to all of you who are watching and listening as well,

your attention is never taken for granted, and it's much appreciated. And to the Daily Wire Plus folks for making this possible here in Florida today. I appreciate the effort that went into that to the film crew here as well for handling this so professionally that's also much appreciated and so and and so farewell to all you who are watching listening and and Dr. Phil very good to talk to you today. Look forward to talking again soon. Thank you.