The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - April 2018 Q & A
Episode Date: May 8, 2018Every month, I answer questions from the generous people who support me on Patreon. This is the Patreon Q & A from April 2018. 1. 2:52 : Free will; Sam Harris's opinions on free will2. 16:37 : Chaos v...s. order3. 31:24 : Gay couples raising children4. 35:56 : Distinguishing reality from unconscious projection5. 41:28 : How to combat foggy thinking while working/writing6. 47:24 : How past experiences shape our free will (see q. 1)7. 48:12 : The proper role of a therapist
Transcript
Discussion (0)
music Hello.
So you've lined up a have a number of YouTube videos and podcasts lined up, one with Stephen
Pinker, author of Enlightenment.
Now, one with Warren Farrell, who wrote a very interesting book called The Boy Crisis and also a previous book called White Men Earn More. One with an animator named Nina Paley. One with a young guy
named Charlie Kirk who has organized a large number of campus youth groups more
on the conservative end of things and associated with free will. So all those
are becoming out in the next month and a half, I would say.
And so thank you for your continued support.
It makes all of this possible.
And I'm also going on tour.
I presume some of you know that if you go to JordanB Peterson.com and you look up events,
you can see where.
It's about 40 cities listed so far. Most of them are in the US and a couple in Europe, Iceland, the UK.
But we're announcing, we're going to announce 10 Canadian cities here in the next week as well.
So that's all what's going to be happening with me in the next two months.
So I'll be on the road with my wife
that whole time. Sometimes in a plane, you know, just commercial travel. Sometimes in
a motorhome, depending on where we're going and how. So I'm looking forward to
seeing you. If you come out to the events, I've been enjoying them quite a bit.
It's good to be able to talk to so many people. So 12 rules for life has sold about a million copies now.
So that's really quite something.
And I think we've sold four and rights in 43 countries.
So it'll come out in not quite that many languages, but just about over the next year
and a half, something like that.
So all right, so let's get at it here.
Hopefully I can warm up and get my brain going and answer some questions.
The first one, 343 people have voted this one up.
Could you please discuss free will and Sam Harris' and others' ideas of its non-existence?
Well, that's a good complicated question to kick things off.
So I want to tell you a little bit about how to conceptualize
free will, I think, first, because it's obvious that we don't have infinite free will. Our
choices are constrained in all sorts of ways. And I think part of the reason that there's
a continual discussion about free will and the philosophical literature is because just conceptualizing the issue properly
is extraordinarily difficult. So I like to think about it at least in part the way that you
think about a game. You know, if you're playing a game, obviously the game has rules. So if
it's a chess game or a basketball game, then there are things that you can do and things that you can't do.
But, and so it's a closed world, in some sense.
But the fact that there are things you can't do when you play a game, also seem to open
up a universe of possibilities for things that you can do.
So chess obviously constrains you to a board and to a certain number of men and to a certain
pattern of rules.
But the strange thing is that when you put in those rules, because rules sound like limits,
they sound always like things you can't do.
But when you set up a constrained world like that and you lay out a system of rules, what
you do is open up an infinity of, a near infinity of possibilities.
Same with music, you has rules, obviously.
And if you follow the rules, then you can make an infinite variety of music. And so there's
a very interesting dynamic that's hard to understand between constraint and possibility.
And there's a deep idea that's associated with that, that I read in some Jewish commentary on the biblical stories that I read a long time ago, talking about the relationship between
God and man, and the idea was that God, imagine, had being with the classical attributes
of God, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, all seeing, all knowing, and all powerful.
What is it being like that? Lack.
And obviously, the answer is nothing,
because by definition, those three traits
provide for absence of limitation.
But then that's exactly what's lacking is limitation.
And there's some strange connection
between limitation, and I was saying, say, limitation,
that's rural governed, as I mentioned
before, and the opening up of possibility.
So that isn't necessarily the case that now determined, determinedism and limitation
aren't exactly the same thing, but they're analogous and they need to be discussed together.
Okay, so that's the first thing, is that whatever our free choice is, it isn't limited,
it's, or it's limited, it is, it isn't limited. It's, or it's limited.
It's, it's deeply limited.
Now, here's another thing.
If I take my arm and I go like this, you see, I'll do that again.
Now you see there's a movement like that and then my hand stopped just before my, my
other hand.
Now it takes a certain amount of time for the neural messages to go from my brain to my
arm and back, and the time it takes my hand to go like this and stop is actually shorter
than the time it takes a message to get to my brain and back.
So what that means is that when I plan this movement, which is called a ballistic movement,
it's called a ballistic movement because it's like a bullet.
Once you let it go, it's gone. There's no calling it back. I've actually organized the neurological
and muscular sequences that enable that action before it's implemented. I set all that
up and then it's released and the whole thing cascades. And so once the action has been
released, let's say, then I don't really have any free will because I can't stop it.
Now, so you think about that.
It looks like there's a temporal gradient
with regards to free will, is that as you look out
into the future, maybe perhaps the farther out
you look into the future, the farther down the road,
let's say, the more free your choices are,
but the closer they get to implementation,
the more they your choices are, but the closer they get to implementation, the
more they become deterministic governed by standard causal processes.
And there's some transition point where they change from being what we would describe
as choice that we haven't got to free choice yet, but at least to choice.
There's some transition point between that and ballistic movement.
Here's another way of thinking about it.
Like we know, for example, that people who are expert at playing the piano look ahead of where
they're playing. And they're doing the same thing. They're watching the notes. They're
seeing where they're going. But, and then they're disinhibiting the automated structures
that enable them to play what they've practiced so thoroughly. They're disinhibiting those structures.
And then they go automatically.
And then what happens if you make a mistake
is that consciousness notes the error,
and then unpacks the motor sequences that have been
practiced.
And then you repractice them and sequence them again
until they become automatic and deterministic.
So there's choice in that you're reading ahead,
but there's no choice in that once you've read ahead
and dis-inhibited the actions, then they run ballistically.
And then you can think about the same thing that's
happening when you're driving in a car.
You don't look right in front of you
when you're driving a car, because whatever is right
in front of you, if you're going 40 miles an hour, whatever,
you've already run over.
You look a quarter of a mile down the road,
and that gives you the opportunity
to see what's coming and to set up a sequence of increasingly automated movements that culminate
in whatever it is that you're doing while you're driving.
And so there's a gradation from choice to determinism, a temporal gradation.
And I don't often see that addressed when people talk about free will. Now Sam's issue with free will is that if you get someone to do something like
lift their finger and you scan their brains using a variety of techniques while they're doing that,
what you'll see is that there's an action potential that you and you ask them to voluntarily
move their fingers. So they're doing it, let's say, by free choice. There's an action potential that you can read off the brain that occurs
before the person either moves their finger or, let's say, decides to move their finger.
And that occurs quite a bit before the feeling of volunteerism or that voluntary act. And
so that's been read by Benjamin Limit, who did the experiments
as indication that even the feeling of voluntary choice is determined. But I don't think that that's
a very useful way of addressing the issue because the issue of when you lift your finger in up,
again, is it requires pre-programming to disinhibit. Like you know how to do this, right?
You don't have to learn to do that. So you have a little automated circuit that does this sort of thing.
All these finger movements and everything, you can see babies practicing them and they develop
automated circuitry that tends to be posterior left hemisphere in order to run those automated
processes out. And what you're basically doing when you decide to do something that's a routine that you've
already practiced, or made out of some routines that you've already practiced, is disinhibiting
them.
And the degree to which you might regard that as free exactly is unclear as are the temporal
limitations.
So I don't think that limits experiments demonstrate conclusively that there's no such
thing as free will, even though there are action potentials that indicate that there is brain activity signaling
even the onset of a voluntary choice early. Now, another thing that we might look at in relationship
to that is, yeah, so we can look at it phenomenologically and we can also look at it in relationship to that is Yeah, so we can look at it phenomenologically and we could also look at it in
in relationship to how people treat one another so
phenomenologically it seems clear that we have free choice and it isn't obvious to me why we have consciousness if free choice
Isn't real because consciousness looks to me like a mechanism that deals with
Potential before it's transformed into actuality, let's say and and I think consciousness is also
the the faculty so to speak or a manifestation of the faculty that enables us to pre-program deterministic actions
So again, let's think about someone playing the piano. They're practicing you know after you repeat and you repeat
Your your finger movements if you're playing the piano, any complex motor skill is like that.
You have to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it.
And you're using consciousness to program it, to sequence the motor movements and to pay
attention to them.
That all seems voluntary and it involves the activation of a tremendous amount of your
brain, because if you're doing something new, a lot of your brain is activated.
And then as you practice it, the amount of brain that's activated decreases.
It shifts from right to left and then it shifts from frontal to posterior and a smaller
and smaller area.
So what's happening is that consciousness is creating little machines in the back of
your head that do things in an automated manner. And the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, so, okay, so there's that. There's the phenomenological reality of
voluntary choice and effort as well, because conscious programming of that sort is also
effortful. It doesn't seem to run deterministically like a clock does. And then, finally, there's
also, and I don't know what you think about this with regards to evidence, but what constitutes
evidence is not always that easy to determine even in the scientific domain.
So think about how we think about ourselves and other people and how we treat ourselves and other people.
You can imagine that you're like a clock running down.
And that's like a deterministic model.
But people aren't clocks.
We're dissipative structures.
A clock is something that runs downhill.
But human beings, you can we're dissipative structures. A clock is something that runs downhill.
But human beings, you can look up dissipative structure.
I think that was an idea that was first formulated
by the physicist Schrodinger.
We're not clocks by any stretch of the imagination.
And we take energy in and we disperse energy.
And we're anti-entropic in a temporary sense.
So that makes us, and life is as well.
Shorting a road about that in a book called What Is Life.
And we don't, what we seem to do, this is how it looks to me.
We don't contend with the present and we're not driven by the past. Instead, what we see in front of us is a landscape of possibility.
And in my wilder moments, I think that's associated with the physical idea of multiple universes,
but that's in my wilder moments.
It's just a speculation.
And so what we see in front of us is an array of potential universes.
And those are the universes that we could bring about as a consequence of our actions.
And we make choices to the right or the left.
There's a lot of mythological speculation about that sort of idea too, in an ethical sense,
because we decide what sort of reality that we want to bring into being.
And so we encounter potential like God did at the beginning of time when He made order out of chaos, chaos is this chaotic potential.
We confront chaotic potential with our consciousness and we cast that into reality.
And that, now then you think, well, is that really the case?
Well, that's hard to say because there are limits to our knowledge about consciousness and about reality. But if you treat yourself like you're a free moral agent with choice and that you can determine
the course of your life, then you seem to get along better with yourself and to be less
anxious and to be more productive.
And if you treat other people like that, that they're free agents that are making voluntary
choices about how reality is going to come into being, and you reward them when they do
it properly and you punish them or otherwise discipline them when they don't, when they do it badly.
Then your relationships with them seem to work, and then if we predicate our society on
the presupposition that each individual human being is capable of doing just that, then
we seem to have extremely functional societies.
And so, and this is something that Sam Harris has been taken to task for many times, is
if you dispense with the idea of free will, how is it you organize your relationship to
yourself, your interactions with your family, and your relationships with the broader social
community?
It's a very complicated issue. So I believe strongly that we have free will,
that we're responsible for our choices. Those choices are constrained in many, many ways.
I think there's a gradient of free will from free out into the future to increasingly constrained
as the present manifests itself to deterministic in the moment, in the moment of action, we might think that we enter the realm
of deterministic causality at the moment of action, something like that.
That's how it looks to me.
So, well, so at this rate we're going to answer about five questions,
so that was a very, very hard one.
So anyways, I hope that's helpful.
Mailstrom, who is apparently chaos, given the name, asks me, am I chaos or am I order?
Well, that's a good question.
I would say a lot of the time I'm chaos, but I do everything I can to put things in order.
But I'm going to answer that in a deeper way, I would say, because first of all, everything
and everyone is chaos and
order at the same time.
And I don't mean that in a trait sense, I mean, in a technical sense, which is order,
technically speaking, in my way of viewing the world, is order is that domain you inhabit
when what you're doing produces the results that you want to have happen.
That's a pragmatic perspective from a philosophical perspective.
It's derived at least in part or is analogous to the pragmatism of people like CSPERS and
William James, the American pragmatists.
And there's a great book on all that, you're interested called the metaphysical club.
So order is where you are when what you're doing is producing the results that you intended.
And that validates what you're doing, by the way.
That's a pragmatic form of truth.
Your theory is accurate.
When, if you enact it, then the results that you intend to emerge, that's the definition
of truth from a pragmatic perspective.
It's a very powerful definition, and it's very much associated with the Darwinian notion of truth.
So that's worth looking into.
Now, obviously, there are times when you implement a plan and a world conception that goes along with that plan,
and what you wanted didn't happen.
And so then the domain of chaos comes up,
the domain of the unpredictable and unexpected,
and you have to contend with it.
And sometimes when you are acting,
you do perverse things and things that surprise you,
and then things don't work out well for you,
or maybe you get a surprise,
and maybe sometimes that might even be positive.
And that's because the chaos within you has manifested itself and you've done something
that exceeds the bounds of your understanding.
And you know, that can happen to people so badly that they develop post-traumatic stress
post-traumatic stress disorder.
Sometimes soldiers, especially naive young soldiers, will go on a battlefield and watch
themselves do something they can't imagine they're capable of doing.
And then they have permanent post-traumatic stress disorder.
So there's a chaos within that can manifest itself, that can disrupt whatever order you
are.
And you know that in minor ways because everybody's always running around doing things that
aren't good for them, that they know they shouldn't do and that they can't control.
And so there's a chaotic and an orderly aspect to everything, to the individual, to the family,
to the social world, to the natural world.
It's chaos and order at every level of analysis simultaneously, which is why the Taoists think
of the world is made out of Yin and Yang, which is essentially analogous to the idea of
order and chaos.
And now, but then there's another element too. So you're order and you're chaos.
And the place that you live, the environment is order in chaos as well.
But you're also the process that mediates between the two.
And what that means is you're the force that confronts chaos and casts it into order.
We talked about that in the free will discussion.
That's the basis for the dragon myth or at least part of it, the hero myth. You're the force that confronts chaos and transforms it into habitable order.
And there's an idea that if you do that using truthful speech, it's probably the deepest
idea in the Bible. If you confront chaos and the unknown using truthful speech, then the order
that you produce is good. So that also means that your chaos and order and the process
that intermediates between them.
And that's really the basis of the hero myth.
So part of that is the hero story and the dragon myth
go out, confront the dragon, get the gold, bring it back,
share it with the community.
And the dragon is a representation
of that which dwells beyond the confines
of the safe and habitable space, right?
It's an image of a predator. That's part of what it is, although it's way more complicated than that.
And you're also the force that confronts order when it becomes too tyrannical
and restructures it back to chaos and then restructures the chaos back into more beneficial order,
which is what you do, for example, if you have an argument with someone that you settle, right?
Because the argument takes the orderly relation that you have with that person and then produces
a chaotic interlude, which is all the pain that's associated with the argument, and that's
a disillusion into what Merchaya Elia had, it called pre-cosmagonic chaos, and out of
that a new order can emerge.
And so the best way to construe yourself is not as chaos or as order, but as the process
that mediates between them.
And that's the basis for the ethos of the West, is that the human being is best represented
as the individual, and the individual is that attentive and communicative entity that
is continually capable of mediating
properly between chaos and order. Now, this is a deep idea. You could read maps of meaning if you
would like. The audio version of that is coming out June 12th, by the way, and I will make a video
detailing the relationship between maps of meaning and 12 rules of life. But you can construe yourself, you should construe yourself as the process that mediates
between chaos and order. And you should aim to be the process that does that
properly, using truthful communication, because that's how you keep the
elements of existence properly balanced. And you might say, yeah, but is that
real? Well, if you read maps of meaning, there's a section on neuropsychology that's also buttressed
by a book written by Ian McGillcrest called The Master and his Emissary that lays out
the relationship between the right and left hemisphere.
Now it's quite strange that we have a right and left hemisphere.
It's almost as if we have two consciousnesses dwelling in our being.
And they're quite separable.
If you cut the corpus callosum that unites the two, then the two hemispheres will act
independently to some degree.
You can communicate with each of them somewhat independently.
So they actually view the world quite differently, and that hemisphere distinction is not only
their human beings, but also an animal, so long way down the phylogenetic chain.
Now I made the claim partly because I was reading a man named Elkone Goldberg, who was a
student of Alexander Luria, the most brilliant neuropsychologist of the 20th century, and
Goldberg made the case that the left hemisphere is specialized for what's known, and the
right hemisphere is specialized for a's known and the right hemisphere is specialized for anomaly.
And Fies Ramashandran, who's a famous neurologist and MD in California, has also made a very
similar claim based on his analysis of brain-damaged individuals.
But Goldberg's case was the left hemisphere is specialized for what you know how to do,
and the right hemisphere is specialized for response to what's unknown.
And that maps on to this order chaos dimension right and the right hemisphere now
McGill Christ in his book the master in his emissary has pointed out quite clearly
that the left hemisphere has a tyrannical tendency which Ramachandran also viewed
in his brain damage patients by the way, and that the left hemisphere is always trying
to impose its logical and restricted order on the world and to make the world fit into
that.
Now, it has to do that.
There's reasons for that.
Part of the reason is that if your theory you've worked on for 10 years makes one prediction
error, you shouldn't throw the whole damn thing out.
You should doubt the prediction error, right?
Because you never know when your data is actually data
or is just another kind of theory.
We can't get into that at the moment.
Now, McGill-Crust makes a very strong case.
And I think a more elaborated case
than I made in maps of meaning, but it's
the same argument fundamentally, that the right hemisphere
is concerned with reaction to anomaly. And so what happens in some senses something unexpected happens
That's the domain of chaos and that stops you in your tracks
It freezes you and that's a predator response or prey response actually you're frozen the unknown has manifested itself
You're not in order anymore
You don't know where you are and you don't know what to do. And you can't just shut down like a computer does.
You freeze instead.
And then what happens is that the ancient mechanisms that have helped our ancestors for tens of
millions of years, or perhaps longer than that, react to that which lurks beyond the confines
of the unknown kick in.
And you start, first of all, that's motoric.
So you freeze, and then you cautiously start to explore.
And then it's imagistic.
You start making imaginal representations,
metaphoric representations, dramatic representations
of what might constitute the unknown.
And then those representations are practiced
and implemented in the world, and they
become more and more fine-grained and automatized.
And as that happens, the locale that they're represented in in
the brain shifts from right to left.
So the reason I'm telling you all this is because this is where the metaphysical and the physical
unite, and this is the sort of argument that I was trying to make to Sam Harris, and hopefully
we'll be able to continue doing that because I'm going to meet him three times in the next
few months, so that the Yin Yang idea, the chaos order idea, is metaphorical in some sense to say that
the world is made up of order and chaos doesn't sound like an empirical statement, but strangely
enough, the world to which our brains are adapted is actually the world of chaos and order.
You can think about it as unexplored and explored territory too.
That's another take on it. And so then you think from a Darwinian perspective,
think about it this way. From a Darwinian perspective, there's an axiomatic presupposition.
And that is, reality is that which selects. Reality is the force that selects over evolutionary
time. And so the force that selects over evolutionary time.
And so the force that selects over evolutionary time has selected for hemispheric specialization,
bilateral hemispheric specialization, which indicates that two different modes of looking
at the world are necessary for survival, right?
So that's real.
And so the idea that the world is made out of chaos and order is perhaps the most real idea.
Now here's something else cool that's associated with that.
And this is an antidote to nihilism.
I also think it's an antidote to what would you call ideological possession.
So when you encounter something unknown, you orient towards it.
And that's an involuntary response.
You could even think about it as a deterministic response. It's part of what orients you very rapidly towards predators,
so that they don't kill you before you have a chance to respond. Okay, so you react because the
anomalous thing is meaningful. It's intrinsically meaningful. And the reaction is first terror with
perhaps an overlay of disgust and second curiosity. And it's terror so that you freeze and remain paralyzed.
You turn to stone when you look at the basilisk or the snake or the
gorgon. You turn to stone.
You're paralyzed like a prey animal.
And that's so the prey predator can't see you, at least in part.
And there's other elements of the orienting reflex that are
associated with predator avoidance.
And then if nothing additionally terrible happens, you start to
thaw out and you start to explore.
And you do that with image first and then practice
the appropriate behaviors and then automate those.
Now, look, here's the thing that's cool.
So that orienting reflects to the unknown
is an admixture of threat, fear, and curiosity, incentive reward.
So negative emotion and positive emotion.
Now, and it's dose dependent, the larger the anomaly, which means the larger the map,
it blows out when it manifests itself.
Think of the difference between being irritated at your marital partner because they, you know,
oh, who knows? Because they
were late to pick you up for work compared to how irritated you would be if you found
that they were having an affair. Difference in size of anomaly. The first one disrupts
a tiny little part of your space-time orientation, and the second one demolishes your past, present,
and future. And the larger the disruption, the more negative emotion,
obviously.
And so there's this weird interplay between negative and positive emotion in the response
to anomaly.
But it's deeply meaningful, even if it paralyzes you, even if it's terrifying, it's meaningful.
And then that transforms, perhaps, into intense curiosity, and you start to explore.
Now, the phenomena of meaning is a manifestation
of the complex orienting reflex.
And so you're wired so that you're not just order
and you're not just chaos.
Your order continually confronting chaos
so that the order remains updated.
And you might say, well, how do you know how much chaos
you should confront in order to keep the order continually updated?
And the answer is, meaning.
See, something is meaningful.
The reason that something is meaningful
is because you're getting a deep instinctual signal
that you're encountering anomaly at a rate that
doesn't exceed your capability that's also the rate at which you
can keep yourself updated optimally.
And so meaning isn't epithenomenal and it isn't some kind of delusion that rationality
can and should overcome to say, well, everything's meaningless.
It's like, no, it's not.
Meaning is the most fundamental instinct for adaptation.
And so that's partly why in 12 rules for life, I said one of the rules, I think it's
rule seven, is do what is meaningful,
not what is expedient, because meaning is a really good guide to long-term adaptation. And so then
and the other thing about meaning, which is what happens when you get the balance between chaos
and order, right, is that meaning is the antidote to despair. And so if you and there's all sorts of
reasons in life to be desperate. And so if you immerse yourself's all sorts of reasons in life to be desperate. And so
if you immerse yourself in meaning, you can learn to do that. You can learn to do that.
You can make that goal your highest goal. And so then the highest goal would be to be
the sort of mythological hero, let's say, to embody and incarnate and imitate the mythological
hero, like the imitation of Christ, which is what you're called to do if you happen to be Christian.
That means that you live in meaning and that meaning is the antidote to the suffering of
life that would otherwise make you brutal and vengeful and unhappy and miserable and like
that young guy who just mowed down twelve people in Toronto.
These are real things.
You lose your sense of meaning.
You end up in hell. And in hell you do all sorts are real things. You lose your sense of meaning. You end up in hell.
And in hell you do all sorts of terrible things. These are dreadful realities.
And it isn't as if they're not grounded in the appropriate science.
So anyways, that was also a very complicated question.
Being gay and in a long-term relationship, we are considering kids.
What are your thoughts about gay people raising children?
I think the devil is in the details to tell you the truth when if I was ever talking to
any individuals about that, that's the question is, well, how would you raise them?
I mean, you have problems, right?
If you're both of the same sex, then you're going to have the problem of how to provide the proper model for, you know, let's say you have a boy and a girl.
We know this is indisputable and this is something I've talked to Warren Farrell about.
Kids in intact heterosexual families where the father is present do way better on multiple indices than kids who are part of single-parent families.
Now that doesn't mean that there are no single-parents who do a good job, right?
That's not the same bloody claim.
Those are different claims.
But on average, not only do kids where fathers are present do better, but societies or even
local societies where there are more fathers present do better not only
for the kids that they're fathering but the kids in the neighborhood where there are lots
of intact families with fathers do better.
And so I believe quite firmly that the nuclear family is the smallest viable human unit.
Father, mother, child.
Smallest viable unit. And if you fragment it below that then you end up paying
now that that doesn't mean that there are way there aren't ways that you can
Operate in a smaller unit or a different unit effectively, but you have to contend with the fact that it's necessary for
people for kids to have models for both sexes.
And that means accepting that the sexes are different,
even though there's a fair overlap between them,
accepting that they're different,
and that both sexes play their role.
It looks like what fathers do,
and I talk to Warren Farrell a lot about this,
and I'm gonna release this video this month,
about what fathers do,
and a lot of what they do is rough and
tumble play with the kids which kids really really really like and it's really
important as Yacht Panks app a great affective neuroscientist laid out in his
studies on rats he discovered the play circuitry and fathers this is something
Pharaoh told me which was extraordinarily interesting is that fathers used the
joy of the possibility of play as a scaffold to help children
learn to delay gratification. So imagine a father spends a bunch of time playing with his kids and
they're having a great old time, they're wrestling around and pushing each other's limits to find
out where they are and and learning the physiological dance that goes along with direct contact,
direct exciting contact, learning what hurts and what doesn't, and what
constitutes fair play and what isn't, and how everybody can play and still enjoy the game,
and how excited you could get before it's too much, and how much you should win and how much
you shouldn't, and when you can object to being hurt, all of that at a deeply embodied level,
the kids love that. They'll line up for that, and Panks App demonstrated very clearly that rats
will work to play, and that rats play
fair, and they learn to play fair because of iterated play-bouts, and that if you don't
let juvenile male rats play, then their prefrontal cortexes don't develop, and they get attention
deficit disorder, or the equivalent in rats, and then you can treat that with riddle it.
And so this is all very vital material. Now, if you're going to, if you're gay, let's say there's two men or two women,
then you have the problem of what you're going to do for the contra sexual target.
And you can say, well, it doesn't matter because there's no differences between men and women.
And you can gerrymandor the damn question that way and avoid your remoral responsibility.
Or you can face it squarely and say look you've decided to
step outside of the cultural norm and to
organize a non-standard relationship which
puts a tremendous rent responsibility on
you and then you have to figure out how
you can provide for your children what it
is that they would get in the classic
minimal human unit so and more power to
you I hope you can do a good job of it
you know I think there's
a room in the world for a diverse range of approaches to complex life problems like having
kids and finding a partner. But that doesn't mean you get to bury your head in the sound
about the absolute realities of life and the fact that there are biological differences
between men and women. To deny that is reprehensible in my estimation and besides the empirical doubt of the scientific data are crystal clear so and so
okay
Carl Jung says that everything unconscious is projected into reality
How do you know if you are perceiving reality accurately or are just projecting great?
Yeah, well, that's partly why I'm a pragmatist. Well, there's a bunch of ways
There's a bunch of ways that you know
pain tells you
If you make a mistake and you hurt yourself well, then your stupid theory was wrong, right?
That's what the pain says your stupid theory was wrong
And that's a pragmatic you see that's another
indication of pragmatic theory of truth. You lay out, look,
when you look at the world, you look at the world with a set of presuppositions. I outlined that
in chapter 10 in in rules in 12 rules for life called Be precise in your speech. It indicates that
when you look at the world, you look at it through a value structure. You can't help that because
you're always aiming at something in the world and you're always aiming at something you want and you're trying to get it. And so that means that you look at the world through a value structure. You can't help that because you're always aiming at something in the world and you're always aiming at something you want and you're trying to get it. And so that means
that you look at the world through a value structure. Now the question is whether or
not that value structure is valid. And that's a very complicated question. Okay, so how do
you know if it's valid? Number one, you lay it out and you act it out, you implement it
perceptually and then you act it out. And if you get what you wanted, what the theory predicted, that's another way of thinking
about it, but wanted is a better way of thinking about it.
Then the fact that that behavioral routine and perceptual structure produced the intended
result validates it as a tool for obtaining that result and that's a form of truth.
Now, it might be the only form of truth, although I'm not convinced of that completely, but it might be.
It's a very complicated question.
Now, how do you know if your stupid theory is wrong?
Okay, A, it fails, and your hurt, pain tells you pragmatically, your theory was wrong.
So, that's why you should pay attention to your own pain, because your suffering is indication that you still have things to learn.
And maybe the suffering of other people is also that.
Maybe something unexpected or unpredictable happens when you're laying out your plan.
And then the anomalous manifests itself, the unexpected or chaos.
And then you get anxious.
Well anxiety is an indication that your plan, your arrow didn't fly to its mark.
So you aimed wrong.
And that might mean a small error, you know,
maybe a tiny adjustment of your bowl, or it might mean you just don't know what the hell
you're doing at all, and everything is lost. And so anxiety tells you if your theory is
wrong. And then, and then other people tell you that, and that's why you want to surround
yourself with other people. Because you distribute your cognitive resource, you distribute your
problems to the cognitive resources of the social group. That's what we do when we price
things, right? Everyone votes on the price of something because it's so difficult, because
the price of something has to be established in relationship to the price of everything
else, and that's always in flux. And so it's computationally impossible problem.
And so we outsource it to the market,
which is the free cognitive decision of millions of people,
and that's how we determine price.
And so one of the things you do to make sure that you're not any stupider than you have to be,
blind, ignorant, biased, and all of that,
is you surround yourself with other people,
and you try to treat them well enough so that they can tolerate you and then every time that you do something stupid because one of
your theories is in is vague or incomplete or wrong or biased or you're willfully blind, then they
slap you on the side of the head. They ignore you because you're boring. They don't laugh at your
jokes because they're stupid. They are irritated at your actions because you're not taking your own long-term interests
or the interests of other people into account.
And so you have pain, you have anxiety, you have the reward of success, that's a positive
indicator that your theory is okay, and then you have the reactions of everyone else.
And if you're clued in, you pay attention to all of those things and you try to update
your order, which is your perceptions, you try to update your order constantly as a consequence
of being humble in the face of your errors, which is why humility is the precondition of
her learning and why it's one of the highest moral virtues.
And perceiving reality accurately, you don't really perceive reality, and you don't
really perceive accurately, you perceive small portions of reality, extraordinarily limited
in space and time, and accurately means well enough so that when you do what you're doing
it works.
That's why I'm a pragmatist.
I mean, not only.
I mean, there's lots of other philosophical streams that have influenced my thought.
Existentialism, phenomenology, to mention two others.
But the thing is, you can't perceive reality accurately because you don't know everything.
And you're full of biases, and you're ignorant as hell.
And so the best you can do is perceive small bits of reality well enough so that you can
more or less get what you need in a relatively short period of time without screwing
yourself up too badly in the medium to long-term. That's pretty much what you've
got and that doesn't mean truth is impossible. It just means that it's very
very complicated to decide what truth is because the question is what is truth
for someone whose knowledge is limited, right? Because obviously because your knowledge is limited and you don't know
everything, saying some fundamental way, you're ignorant or wrong about
everything, but that doesn't help because you still have to act in the world.
So there are bounded truths.
There are bounded truths.
And so all right.
If past experiences shape us, oh, no, I missed one.
You cite a tired brain fog foggy thinking, as the reason to stop answering questions or
giving a talk.
How do you combat this while working or writing daily?
Well, I eat a big breakfast relatively soon on waking.
That really helps.
If any of you out there are anxious and many of you no doubt are, there'll be a large number of you who are anxious and don't eat breakfast and there'll be a whole bunch of
you out there who think, well, I don't eat breakfast. It isn't necessary. It's like, that's wrong. It's necessary.
You fast it all night. If you load yourself cognitively or physiologically in the morning, your brain
stressed will produce, will encourage your body to produce insulin, it will take
all the blood sugar out of your blood and then you're done for the day and then
you'll be anxious. And another lot of the rest you too you'll find if you're
anxious try this it's really really interesting experiment. The next time
you're anxious go eat something eat like eat some protein and fat would be
best. You could have cheese and crackers.
I'm not a big fan of carbohydrates, but whatever.
Eat whatever you're willing to eat, but make it solid.
Don't eat a peanut butter or don't eat a like a chocolate bar or something sweet.
Eat something substantial, a piece of meat, a piece of cheese, some peanut butter, something
like that.
And then wait 10 minutes and see if you're less anxious.
And try that for like two weeks.
Every time you get anxious, eat something.
Because then you can find out if your anxiousness,
if your anxiety is linked to low blood sugar.
And it's very likely that it is,
especially if you also get irritable and foggy in your thinking.
And so, and the best way to treat that
as far as I've been able to tell,
and there's a decent literature on this,
is to make sure that you eat a big breakfast.
And you might say, well, I'm not hungry in the morning.
It's like, who the hell cares if you're hungry?
I didn't say enjoy your breakfast.
I said, eat it.
That's not the same thing.
You know, there's lots of things that you need to do that you don't enjoy to begin with.
You'll get hungry in six months, and then you'll start to enjoy it.
So that's a massive difference.
I take small naps quite frequently.
If I'm wiped out, you know, I'll go have a nap for 10 minutes or 15 minutes, and then that helps
quite a lot.
I try to wake up fairly regular, on a fairly regular schedule.
That's another thing I would really recommend for people whose lives are in disarray and
who are anxious.
Try to fix your wake time.
Sleep going when you sleep, that's not so important. So you can still, you know, stay up late and have fun and all that. But
getting up in the morning is really helpful. So, you know, and you also have to
figure out how much you can work or write. I can't write for more than about
max. My sustainable maximum for writing is three hours a day. And if I push it past that,
then especially if I'm editing, I make mistakes when I'm editing, so that's counterproductive.
And I can't sustain it across time. And so I don't really think you can do more than
about three hours of extremely intense intellectual work a day. Although if you have a nap, you
can stretch that, but I think at least I end up paying for it across time.
So, nap, make sure you eat and make sure you eat protein and fat and not carbohydrates
because carbohydrates are basically poisonous.
That's about that's about and make sure that you get enough sleep.
So that's how I combat it and try to make myself
hyper-efficient, which is also a really interesting thing
to try.
I was talking to my agents at CAA, Creative Artist Agency,
in LA, and I just hired a publicist
to help me manage media in a more intelligent manner.
And we're trying to think about our overarching philosophy.
I first proposed to the CAA guys
that are overarching
philosophy would be something like, because you need an overarching philosophy under which
you nest all your specific actions, it was something like to educate as many people as
possible in the shortest period of time, which seems like a really good goal, like why the
hell not do that.
But then we broadened that a little bit this week, which was to try to do as much good
possible as efficiently as possible.
And that efficiency thing is really fun if you guys who are listening are out for a challenge.
Like one of the things that you can, I think this heightens the meaning in your life is
to try to do difficult things, right?
Aim high.
Don't aim so damn high, you can't manage it and make sure you break down your aims into
reasonably attainable subgoals, but you
want to aim high and then you want to see how hyper efficient you can get.
That's a great thing to do in your early 20s is to see, okay, like discipline yourself,
you think, okay, how much work can I do if I load myself right to the maximum?
How far can I work?
How hard can I work until I exhaust myself?
And then you back off, obviously, because the optimal amount of working, productive engagement,
let's say, is that which is sustainable across decades. So you have to learn that, but you
don't learn that without stretching yourself to your limits to begin with. And, you know,
if your life isn't everything, it could be. And if you're suffering from an excess of
meaninglessness, well, it means you're not oriented in the world of chaos and order properly.
It's like you could learn to discipline yourself.
Look, figure out what it is that you need to do and that you want to do and then see how
efficient you can get.
Because one of the things that's quite fun is to figure out if you have a task, I always
tell my graduate students this if they're doing an experiment too, if you have a task
that you have to do, it's really interesting to spend a few minutes,
sometimes hours depending on how long the task is,
see if you can figure out how to do it
from five to 10 times faster.
It means you'll have to rearrange the way you think about it,
but you can often do it.
And that's how extremely productive people
get so hyper-efficient.
You know, sometimes it means you have to delegate,
and means sometimes it means you have to bring other people
aboard, that's delegation as well, I suppose. But
there's a lot of preconceptions that you hold about who you are and who the world is that
you could dispense with that would make you a way more efficient actor in the world. And
so, all right, so that's that. If past experiences shape us from the moment of birth, how can
an action be ever said to be the result of free will rather than the accumulation of past influences?
Well, it is in large part the accumulation of past influences because that's knowledge,
but I address that I would say already pretty thoroughly in my discussion of free will.
Your free will isn't absolute.
I mean, what are you, a genie?
Even a genie is constrained inside a lamp.
So there's no action without constraint.
There's no action without limitation.
So it's just not conceptualized well.
And all of your choices are constrained,
not least by the fact that you have to keep yourself live.
So just because there are limitations that emerge,
say, as a consequence of the accumulation of past influences,
doesn't mean that you don't still have a massive domain of freedom. So what is your opinion of
attachment-based therapy? And do you think that therapy is at risk of encouraging people
to wallow in self-pity? I'm not going to talk about attachment-based therapy because I
don't know enough about it to provide an intelligent critique, but I can answer the second part
of the question. Do I think that therapy risks encouraging people
to wallow in self-pity?
Not if it's done by a competent therapist.
If you're a therapist is encouraging you
to wallow in self-pity, then it's time
to get the hell out of there.
You've got a therapist who thinks that they're supposed
to offer you a safe space.
That's not helpful.
Look, what do you do as a therapist?
You act as a strategic counselor.
So let's imagine someone comes to see me.
So there's two big mysteries, right?
What's wrong and what would look better?
What's wrong and what would a cure look like?
And I don't know.
And so if you're a therapist, the first thing you want to do is figure out that you don't
know what's wrong with this person and probably neither do they and you also don't know
What's right for them? And so then you start talking to the person to try to solve that problem
It's like okay, you've come to see me because something isn't right in your life
What is it? And so then the person has to talk and talk and talk and you have to ask them questions to find out because you know
Maybe they're depressed. Maybe they're anxious. Maybe they came from a terrible family
Maybe they're really hard on themselves and things, maybe they came from a terrible family,
maybe they're really hard on themselves
and things are actually going better than they think.
Like, you have no idea what's wrong with them.
You're ignorant, you're ignorant, and so are they.
And so you say, look, you can tell me anything
as long, try to tell the truth
because otherwise we're just not gonna get anywhere
because we're trying to deal with reality here.
So tell me the truth, I'm not going to be judgmental in any stupid sense.
I'm going to judge like mad, because I want to help you
do things right.
So I'm going to be judging like mad.
But I'm not going to throw you out,
because of the things you say, you're going to have to wander
all over weird territory to explain your problem,
because you don't even know what it is.
So you have to listen a lot.
The first thing you want to figure out is, okay, what's wrong here?
And the person will tell you 100 things that might be wrong.
And that they're quite painful to listen to often.
You know, they'll tell you about their past and their present.
I don't mean painful in that it's not engaging or that it's not worthwhile.
I mean, people's lives have a lot of pain in them.
So it's painful to partake in that.
So they'll tell you like 100 things that might be wrong.
And then you do an analysis with them and you think,
well, okay, how many of those things
really probably aren't a problem.
The first thing that happens is if you let a person talk about,
let's say they tell you about 100 problems.
The first thing you find out is that
90 of them aren't real problems.
And the person just figures that out
as they talk them through.
So they say, oh, well, that's linked to this, and maybe that's not really a problem.
That's not as bad as I thought it was.
We can probably ignore that.
It's like they have a handful of cards that aren't organized, and they don't know what to
do with them.
There's too many cards.
And so you say, look, lay your cards on the table, all of them.
This is also what you do when you're listening to someone you're intimate with and they're
trying to solve a problem and you have to be patient to do this because they're all upset
about something, right?
And you don't know what it is.
And maybe they're upset about you and maybe they're upset about themselves and they're
not handling it very well.
And they're impulsive and volatile and hard on you.
And you say, all right, Christ, I'm going to listen to you.
It's like, what's your stupid problem?
And then they lay out their problem, right? The problem space. And you have to listen and
not jump in there too quickly with a damn solution because what the hell do you know? So you
listen to them lay out the problem space. They lay their cards on the table. Then you
say, well, we don't have to pay attention to this. We don't have to pay attention to this.
We don't have to pay attention to this. And that's the cutting the dragon of chaos down
to size. That's what it is. You the cutting the dragon of chaos down to size.
That's what it is.
You look at the dragon of chaos, and it starts to shrink.
OK, so that's because by looking at it,
you indicate to the dragon that you're bigger than you thought
you were and that you're bigger than it thought you were.
And that's very, very useful.
So anyways, you lay out your cards, and then you start to organize
them.
It's like, well, I actually only have 10 problems. All right. So then you think, well, how can we
break those problems down into manageable subproblems and how can you go about addressing them?
That can be very complicated. I hate my job. Well, do you have an alternative? No. Well,
why not? Well, I don't have a resume. I hate being interviewed. I'm afraid to make a
resume. I, I, I lost up my education. I don't have any options.
It's like, yeah, that's a lot of problems, man.
And those are strategic problems.
So then you have to figure out how to help the person strategize
and then implement the strategies.
And so the next step is, okay, now we know your problems.
If you could have a solution, like, that would be the opposite of the problem.
What might a solution look like that would be the opposite of the problem, what might a solution look like?
Same issue.
It's like, well, there's lots of solutions.
I don't know what to do with my life.
I don't know what job to have.
I don't know what person to establish a long-term intimate relationship with.
I don't know what I would like to do with my family.
I don't know how to use my time outside of work.
I don't know how to resist my time outside of work. I don't know how to resist temptation, like drug and alcohol abuse.
I don't know how to take care of myself mentally and physically.
All these complicated problems.
It's like, OK, let's sketch out a potential solution.
If you could have what you wanted, so that would be a cure.
What would that look like?
We formalize this, by the way, in the future authoring process.
So if you do the future authoring program,
which is part of the self-authoring suite,
it will guide you through doing this.
And it's unbelievably useful to do that, because you're not going to hit what you don't
aim at.
So then you have the person lay out, OK, well, where we headed, it's a map.
Now we know where we are, and it's a problem.
Now we have to figure out where we're headed.
And so, and then finally, once we figure out where we're headed, we have to figure out where we're headed. And then finally, once we figure out where we're headed,
we have to figure out how to get there.
We have to make the map.
It's got a beginning place.
It's got an end place.
Now we have to map out the terrain.
So like, well, I didn't finish my degree,
or maybe I didn't go to college,
or maybe I didn't finish high school.
It's like, well, do you need a different job?
Yes.
Do you need a high school diploma to get that?
Yes.
What steps do you have to take to need a high school diploma to get that? Yes, what steps do you have to take to
get a high school diploma? Maybe you have to start with one course, right? Okay, where do you find a
course? You go look it up online. What things make you afraid to go back to school? Which of those
things are stopping you? How are you going to overcome those fears? So you take the large-scale vision,
which is the place you're headed to in the future. that's the cure. And then you break it down into the strategic elements that are
necessary to be implemented on a day-to-day basis. And you do that so that they're difficult,
but attainable. And then the person, if they're not difficult, then they're not worth attaining.
Obviously, obviously you're not pushing yourself and you want the person not only to develop
in the direction they're supposed to develop, but you want to get them better at developing.
So you want to push them just like you do with kids or yourself if you have any sense.
And so you break it down into small, implementable daily processes and then you review those
with your client.
None of that's wallowing itself, pity man, quite the contrary, quite the contrary.
So psychotherapy is, get your story together.
Who are you?
Where are you going?
Where are you going?
What's your strategy?
How are you going to learn to overcome
the frightening and unexpected things
that are going to pop up at you
when you implement that strategy?
So in those can be some of those things can be the natural world.
I'm afraid of death.
I'm afraid of illness.
I'm afraid of insanity.
And some of those can be the social world.
I'm afraid of my boss.
I'm afraid of my wife.
I'm afraid of my friends.
I'm afraid of being humiliated.
I'm afraid that people won't like me.
Those are the two big classes of fear.
It's right, fear of the great mother, nature, fear of the great father, culture.
And if you're really afraid, you get to have both those fears at the same time.
So there's nothing about that that's wallowing itself, Pity, quite the contrary.
It's a bad therapist that does that.
They're not there to make, to feel sorry for you.
They are there to be on the side of the part of you that's aiming up and to encourage you and to allow you to have a space where you can lay out your thoughts using your free speech to think where you can lay out your thoughts about what's wrong with you and how that might be set right.
There's nothing to do with wallowing and self-pity.
I don't want to calculate high resolution utopia for myself only to have it squandered by fortune. How do I ensure the meaning I experience is self-determined?
Well, you can't because there's an arbitrary element to existence, so it is going to be
squandered to some degree by fortune.
But that's not the point.
What are you going to do?
Just sit back on your laurels and wait for things to roll over you?
So what you do, look, the hero myth basically says, go out
there, confront the dragon, get the gold, share it with the community, and live properly.
Or it says, the alternative is, face the tyrant, enter the desert as a consequence because
everything falls apart, recast structure, find the promised land.
Those are the two elements to the hero myth.
And that's divine.
It's the closest thing to divine that we know.
You might say, well, what happens if you follow the divine path?
And the answer might be, well, everything turns out perfectly because God is on your side.
It's like, no, that isn't what happens because things don't turn out perfectly. It's your best bet. It's your best strategy
Right, that's the thing and you know dragons wouldn't be dragons if they couldn't eat you and so
But that's okay. That's okay. And this is something I found so useful about the biblical stories
Supposed especially about the Abrahamic stories, which I didn't know that well till I lectured about them last year
You know God calls people to the adventure of their lives biblical stories, especially about the Abrahamic stories, which I didn't know that well till I lectured about them last year.
You know, God calls people to the adventure of their lives. And so you could say in part, God is that force within you, which calls you to the adventure of your life.
And it says, get away from your family, get away from your blind and unconscious comfort, and get the hell out there in the world.
Well, God calls Abraham out from his fathers where he stayed far too long and from his kin where it's secure. And like the first thing he encounters is a famine, and
then he encounters a tyranny inhabited by people who want to steal his wife. It's like
you think, well, Abraham should have just stayed in bed and ignored God. Obviously. Well,
that isn't how it is. It's like we're built for struggle, us human beings. You know,
not after the bubbles of bliss that Dostoevsky described in notes from underground,
we're built to contend with the world, we're built to contend with reality.
You want a challenge and the best way that you can take on a challenge because a challenge
fortifies you.
So, you don't want to be secure, you want to be strong and you get strong by taking on
optimal challenges.
And so, you lay out your destiny in the world and you take the slings and arrows of fate
and you make yourself stronger while you're doing so.
And you might fail and fortune might do you in, but it's your best bet.
And you know, people have also people that have extracted unbelievable successes out of
catastrophic failures.
And so and I'm not saying that in a naive way.
I know perfectly well what happens to people, you know.
You're doing fine in life and then you get cancer.
And then six months later, you're dead.
And all the heroism in the world isn't going to save you
at that point.
But that's not the point.
That's not the point.
Life is bounded by mortality.
But that doesn't mean that you don't get out there
and contend.
And you develop by contending. and you minimize the net amount of
Suffering in the world and that's something man that's something to do so it's it beats
Laying in your basement and getting bitter and then doing the terrible things that bitter people do so
You can't ensure that the meaning you experience is self-determined, but you can play your role to the best of your
ability. And that will be good enough. And that will be good enough. That meaning, the meaning that
you all find in that, I believe, is sufficient to be sustaining and perhaps even sustaining through
the flood. So it isn't that you can avoid catastrophe, it's that you can prepare yourself to deal with it honorably when it arrives. That's what you've got. I have
very high orderlyness and low
industriousness. 23rd I have very high orderlyness 90th percentile low
industriousness 23rd percentile. What can I do to remedy this and get a higher-industryness?
Okay, first of all, that's not that low.
Okay, we've got to think about percentiles here for a minute because they're not percentages,
they're different.
If you're at the 23rd percentile and there were four people in a room, you'd be the
least industrious of four of them.
That kind of puts you in the average range.
It's not that big a deal.
Those problems with it will get to that. Although you may, maybe, you're high in the average range. It's not that big a deal. Um, those problems with it will
get to that. Although you may, maybe you're high in openness to it. Anyways, I won't get into that.
Lowell would be 5th percentile because that makes you 1 in 20 or second percentile because that
makes you 1 in 50. It's kind of interesting to visualize a fairly large high school class and then
to think of yourself as situated in there. If you're the least industrious person out of 50, that's going
to be a problem. You better be smart or have some other things going for you
because you're going to have a hard time being diligent enough to be successful.
Okay, having said that, so and maybe first percentile makes you one in a hundred
and point zero, point one percentile makes you one in a thousand.
So you got to think about percentiles properly.
So having said that, let's say you're not very high in industriousness, what should
you do?
A, make a damn plan.
Okay, you need a plan for your life.
And I would say use the future authoring program because that will help you make a plan
or make a plan on your own.
That's fine or make a plan because you talk to someone.
But you know, we put the future authoring program together to help you make a plan or make a plan on your own. That's fine or make a plan because you talk to someone. But we put the future authoring program together
to help people develop a vision of where they could be,
a counter vision to scare the hell out of them
by helping them think through how catastrophic things could
become if they let all their stupidities get the upper hand.
And then a second part of the program
that helps you make a strategy.
And we know the future authoring program helps people, young men in particular, who are
doing worse by the way in academic situations.
It increases the probability that they will stay in college and university by between 25
and 50%.
So make a damn plan and make one you want.
Like, don't make a plan that is what you should do, even though it will be what you should
do.
Make a plan that outlines a future so that you can sit back and say, look, if I had that
future, then all the horrible things that are going to happen to me are going to be
worthwhile.
That's what you want.
So you want to think, this game is worth playing despite its tragedy.
That's what you've got in life.
Enough meaning to serve as an antidote to tragedy.
All right. Now, and then you generate a strategy.
And then the other thing you should do if you're not very industrious,
and that's industrious, is discipline yourself.
And so what do you do with that?
Eat three times a day at regular meal times.
That's a good thing to practice, because that starts to put some stability into your life.
Get up at the same time.
I would highly recommend all those young people
out there who are listening.
You want to get a jump on life,
get the hell out of bed in the morning.
As I've got older, I've got up earlier and earlier.
Now that's partly because you don't need as much sleep,
but it's also partly because I've got more and more
disciplined.
Get up early in the morning and get your things done.
Man, learn to get up at 6 in the morning
and you'll be one deadly creature, especially
if you can get to work.
You'll have half your damn day done by the time other people haul their sorry asses out
of bed.
And so that's a massive, massive advantage.
Look, we'll feral, Warren Farrell, not the comedian, Warren Farrell, the author.
He outlined data in Why Men Earn More, which is a book I would recommend by the way
showing that if you work 13% longer hours you make 40% more money
It's non-linear. So you think why is that? Well, imagine you had 10 employees and one of them works an extra 10%
It's not much. Well, how often is that person going to be
Promoted assuming you have a clue as a boss
It's like you're going
to look at the 10 people and you're going to think, oh, that guy's always here, like 45
minutes early.
It's like, why don't we give him the promotion?
Obviously, right?
So these small edges that you can manage like that work an extra 10% or extra 13% have
non-proportional payoffs.
That's part of the Pareto distribution.
So get your sleep cycle organized. so you get up in the morning.
Learn how to do it.
No excuses.
I'm too tired in the morning.
I don't like mornings.
Who cares?
That's not relevant.
It's like discipline yourself so you can manage it.
Schedule your meals because that's a good disciplinary routine.
And then learn to use a calendar, like Google Calendar.
Most of you, many of you out there, do not use a calendar.
OK, a calendar is not a prison, and it's not a tyrant.
Not if you use it properly.
A calendar keeps anxiety at bay.
It makes sure that you do what you need to do, which
is important, because otherwise you fall behind.
But if you use it properly, it also helps you plan what you
want to do.
So I could say, well, lay out your damn calendar and design the days you would like to have.
That's what your calendar is for. So you can put in all sorts of things in there you want to do
and that would be good for you. And that's a really good, really good way to start being more
industrious. Make a plan. You need a plan for three years.
You need a plan for the next year.
You need a plan for the next six months.
You need a plan for the next three months.
You need a plan for the week.
You need a plan for the day.
You need a plan for the hour.
All of that, all of that.
I make lists constantly of what I have to do.
And they're like daily, weekly, monthly, yearly.
Right now I can't look out more than about six months, you know, because my life is too complicated and chaotic.
But, but you need a vision of who you could be, what character you could have, three to
five years out, you can't go much farther than that because life is too unpredictable,
I think, to make vision that's longer term than that subject to, there's too much chance associated with
it to spend a lot of time on.
Maybe you can stretch it to five years and in rare cases you can have a 10 year goal,
but it has to be pretty low resolution. music Hello.
So you've lined up a very large number of questions today.
So a couple of things. First of all, I have a number of YouTube videos and podcasts lined
up, one with Stephen Pinker, author of Enlightenment. Now, one with Warren Farrell who wrote a very
interesting book called The Boy Crisis and also a previous book called Why Men Earn More.
One with an animator named Nina Paley.
One with a young guy named Charlie Kirk,
who has organized a large number of campus youth groups,
more on the conservative end of things,
and associated with free will.
So all those will be coming out in the next month and a half, I would say.
And so thank you for your continued support.
It makes all of this possible.
And I'm also going on tour.
I presume some of you know that if you go to Jordan B. Peterson dot com
and you look up events, you can see where. It's about 40 cities listed so far.
Most of them are in the US and a couple in Europe,
Iceland, the UK.
But we're announcing, we're going to announce 10 Canadian cities
here in the next week as well.
So that's all what's going to be happening with me
in the next two months.
So I'll be on the road with my wife that whole time.
Sometimes in a plane, you know, just commercial travel.
Sometimes in a motorhome, depending on where we're going and how.
So I'm looking forward to seeing you.
If you come out to the events, I've been enjoying them quite a bit.
It's good to be able to talk to so many people.
So 12 rules for life has sold about a million copies now.
So that's really quite something.
And I think we've sold four and rights in 43 countries.
So it'll come out in not quite that many languages,
but just about over the next year and a half, something like that.
So all right, so let's get at it here.
Hopefully I can warm up and get my brain going and answer some questions.
The first one, 343 people have voted this one up.
Could you please discuss free will and Sam Harris' and others' ideas of its non-existence?
Well, that's a good complicated question to kick things off.
So, I want to tell you a little bit about how to conceptualize free will, I think, first, because it's obvious that we don't have infinite free will. Our choices
are constrained in all sorts of ways. And I think part of the reason that there's a
continual discussion about free will and the philosophical in the philosophical literature
is because just conceptualizing the issue properly is extraordinarily difficult.
So I like to think about it at least in part the way that you think about a game.
You know, if you're playing a game, obviously the game has rules, so if it's a chess game or a basketball game,
then there are things that you can do and things that you can't do. And so it's a closed world in some sense.
But the fact that there are things you can't do when you play a game
also seem to open up a universe of possibilities for things that you can do.
So chess obviously constrains you to a board
and to a certain number of men and to a certain pattern of rules.
But the strange thing is, is that when you put in those rules, because rules sound like
limits, they sound always like things you can't do.
But when you set up a constrained world like that and you lay out a system of rules, what
you do is open up an infinity of, of a near infinity of possibilities.
Same with music, you know. Music has rules, obviously.
And if you follow the rules, then you
can make an infinite variety of music.
And so there's a very interesting dynamic that's
hard to understand between constraint and possibility.
And there's a deep idea that's associated with that
that I read in some Jewish commentary
on the biblical stories that I read a long time ago, talking about the relationship between God and man, and the
idea was that God, imagine a being with the classical attributes of God, omniscience,
omnipotence, omnipresence, all seeing, all knowing, and all powerful.
What is a being like that? Lack.
And obviously, the answer is nothing, right?
Because by definition, those three traits
provide for absence of limitation.
But then that's exactly what's lacking is limitation.
And there's some strange connection
between limitation, and I was saying, say, limitation,
that's rural governed, as I mentioned before, and the opening up of possibility.
So, that isn't necessarily the case that now, determined, determinism and limitation aren't exactly the same thing, but they're analogous and they need to be discussed together.
Okay, so now, so that's the first thing, is that, or whatever our free choice is, it isn't limited.
It's, or it's limited. It's, it's deeply limited.
Now, here's another thing.
If I take my arm and I go like this, you see, I'll do that again.
Now you see there's a movement like that and then my hand stopped just before my, my
other hand.
Now it takes a certain amount of time for the neural messages to go from my brain to my
arm and back.
And the time it takes my hand to go like this and stop is actually shorter than the time it takes a message to get to my brain and back.
So what that means is that when I plan this movement, which is called a ballistic movement,
it's called a ballistic movement because it's like a bullet. Once you let it go, it's gone. There's no calling it back. I've actually organized the neurological and
muscular sequences that enable that action before it's implemented. I set all that up and
then it's released and the whole thing cascades. And so once the action has been released,
let's say, then I don't really have any free will because I can't stop it.
Now, so you think about that. It looks like there's a temporal gradient with regards to free will,
is that as you look out into the future, maybe perhaps the farther out you look into the future,
the farther down the road, let's say, the more free your choices are, but the closer they get
to implementation, the more they become deterministic governed by standard causal processes.
And there's some transition point where they change from being what we would describe
as choice that we haven't got to free choice yet, but at least to choice.
There's some transition point between that and ballistic movement.
Here's another way of thinking about it.
Like we know, for example, that people who are expert at playing the piano look ahead of where they're
playing.
And they're doing the same thing.
They're watching the notes.
They're seeing where they're going.
But and then they're disinhibiting the automated structures
that enable them to play what they've practiced so thoroughly.
They're disinhibiting those structures.
And then they go automatically.
And then what happens if you make a mistake is that consciousness notes the error and
then unpacks the motor sequences that have been practiced.
And then you repractice them and sequence them again until they become automatic and
deterministic.
So there's choice in that you're reading ahead, but there's no choice in that once
you've read ahead and disinhibited the actions, then they run ballistically.
And then you can think about the same thing that's happening when you're driving in a car.
You don't look right in front of you when you're driving a car because whatever is right
in front of you, if you're going 40 miles an hour or whatever, you've already run over.
You look a quarter of a mile down the road and that gives you the opportunity to see what's coming and to
Set up a sequence of increasingly automated movements that culminate in whatever it is that you're doing while you're driving
And so there's a gradation from choice to determinism a temporal gradation and and I don't often see that addressed when people talk about free will
Now Sam's issue with free will is that if you get someone to do something like lift their
finger and you scan their brains using a variety of techniques while they're doing that, what
you'll see is that there's an action potential that you, and you ask them to voluntarily
move their fingers.
So they're doing it, let's say, by free choice.
There's an action potential that you can read off the brain
that occurs before the person either moves their finger
or let's say decides to move their finger.
And that occurs quite a bit before the feeling
of volunteerism or that voluntary act.
And so that's been read by Benjamin
Limit, who did the experiments, as indication that
even the feeling of voluntary choice is determined.
But I don't think that that's a very useful way
of addressing the issue, because the issue of
when you lift your finger in up, again,
is it requires pre-programming to disinhibit.
Like you know how to do this, right?
You don't have to learn to do that.
So you have a little automated circuit that does this sort of thing.
All these finger movements and everything, you can see babies practicing them.
And they develop automated circuitry that tends to be posterior left hemisphere in order
to run those automated processes out.
And what you're basically doing when you decide to do something that's a routine that you've already practiced or made out of some routines
that you've already practiced is dis-inhibiting them. And the degree to which
you might regard that as free exactly is unclear as are the temporal
limitations. So I don't think that limits experiments demonstrate conclusively
that there's no such thing as free will, even though there are action potentials that indicate that there is brain activity signaling even the
onset of a voluntary choice early.
Now, another thing that we might look at in relationship to that is, yeah, so we could
look at it phenomenologically and we can also look at it in
relationship to how people treat one another. So phenomenologically it seems
clear that we have free choice and it isn't obvious to me why we have
consciousness if free choice isn't real because consciousness looks to me like a
mechanism that deals with potential before it's transformed into actuality, let's say.
And I think consciousness is also the faculty, so to speak, or a manifestation of the faculty
that enables us to pre-program deterministic actions.
So again, let's think about someone playing the piano.
They're practicing, you know, after you repeat and you repeat your finger movements, if
you're playing the piano, any complex motor skill is like that. You have to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it.
And you're using consciousness to program it, to sequence the motor movements, and to pay attention
to them. That all seems voluntary and it involves the activation of a tremendous amount of your
brain, because if you're doing something new, a lot of your brain is activated. And then as you practice it, the amount of brain
that's activated decreases. It shifts from right to left, and then it shifts from frontal to posterior,
and a smaller and smaller area. So what's happening is that consciousness is creating little machines of your head that do things in an automated manner. And the consciousness looks like consciousness appears
and feels that would be the phenomenological end
as if it's doing that voluntarily.
And it is associated with a different pattern
of brain activity.
And so, OK, so there's that.
There's the phenomenological reality of voluntary choice
and effort as well, because conscious programming of that sort
is also effortful.
It doesn't seem to run deterministically like a clock does.
And then finally, there's also, and I don't know what you think
about this with regards to evidence,
but what constitutes evidence is not always that easy
to determine even in the scientific domain.
So think about how we think about ourselves and other people
and how we treat ourselves and other people.
You could imagine that you're like a clock running down,
and that's like a deterministic model.
But people aren't clocks.
We're dissipative structures.
A clock is something that runs downhill.
But human beings, you can look up dissipative structures. A clock is something that runs downhill. But human beings, you can look up
dissipative structure. I think that was an idea that was first formulated by the physicist Schrodinger.
We were not clocks by any stretch of the imagination. And we take energy in and we disperse energy.
We take energy in and we disperse energy and we were anti-entropic in a temporary sense. So that makes us, and life is as well.
Shorting a road about that in a book called What Is Life.
And we don't, what we seem to do, this is how it looks to me.
We don't contend with the present and we're not driven by the past.
Instead, what we see in front of us is a landscape of possibility.
And in my wilder moments, I think that's associated with the physical idea of multiple universes,
but that's in my wilder moments. It's just a speculation.
And so what we see in front of us is an array of potential universes.
And those are the universes that we could bring about as a consequence of our actions. And we make choices to the right or the left. There's a lot of mythological
speculation about that sort of idea too, in an ethical sense, because we decide what
sort of reality that we want to bring into being. And so we encounter potential like God
did at the beginning of time when He made order out of chaos, chaos is this chaotic
potential. We confront chaotic potential with our consciousness and we cast that into reality.
And that now then you think, well, is that really the case? Well, that's hard to say because
there are limits to our knowledge about consciousness and about reality. But if you treat yourself like you're a free moral agent with choice and that you can determine
the course of your life, then you seem to get along better with yourself and to be
less anxious and to be more productive. And if you treat other people like that,
that they're free agents that are making voluntary choices about how reality is
going to come into being, and you reward them when they do it properly and you
punish them or otherwise discipline them when they don't when they do it badly.
Then your relationships with them seem to work and then if we predicate our society on
the presupposition that each individual human being is capable of doing just that, then
we seem to have extremely functional societies.
And so, and this is something that Sam Harris has been taken to task for many times, is
if you dispense with the idea of free will, how is it you organize your relationship to
yourself, your interactions with your family, and your relationships with the broader social
community?
It's a very complicated issue.
So I believe strongly that we have free will,
that we're responsible for our choices.
Those choices are constrained in many, many ways.
I think there's a gradient of free will,
from free out into the future to increasingly constrained
as the president manifests itself to deterministic in the moment,
when in the moment of action, we might think that
we enter the realm of deterministic causality at the moment of action, something like that.
That's how it looks to me.
So, well, so at this rate, we're going to answer about five questions, so that was a very,
very hard one.
So, anyways, I hope that's helpful. Mailstrom, who is apparently chaos, given the name,
asks me, am I chaos or am I order?
Well, that's a good question.
I would say a lot of the time I'm chaos,
but I do everything I can to put things in order.
But I'm going to answer that in a deeper way, I would say,
because first of all, everything and everyone is chaos
in order at the same time
and I don't mean that in a trait sense I mean it in a technical sense which is order
Technically speaking in my way of viewing the world is order is that domain you inhabit when what you're doing
produces the results that you want to have happen that's a pragmatic
Perspective from from a philosophical perspective.
It's derived at least in part, or is
analogous to the pragmatism of people
like CSPERS and William James, the early American pragmatists.
And there's a great book on all that,
if you're interested, called the Metaphysical Club.
So order is where you are when what you're doing is producing
the results that you intended.
And that validates what you're doing, by the way.
That's a pragmatic form of truth.
Your theory is accurate.
When, if you enact it, then the results that you intend
to emerge, that's the definition of truth
from a pragmatic perspective.
It's a very powerful definition,
and it's very much associated with the Darwinian notion
of truth.
That's worth looking into.
Now, obviously, there are times when you implement a plan and a world conception that goes
along with that plan, and what you wanted didn't happen.
So then, the domain of chaos comes up,
the domain of the unpredictable and unexpected,
and you have to contend with it.
And sometimes when you are acting,
you do perverse things and things that surprise you,
and then things don't work out well for you,
or maybe you get a surprise,
and maybe sometimes that might even be positive.
And that's because the chaos within you
has manifested itself, and you've done something
that exceeds the bounds of your understanding.
And you know, that can happen to people so badly that they develop post-traumatic stress
disorder.
Sometimes soldiers, especially naive young soldiers, will go on a battlefield and watch
themselves do something they can't imagine they're capable of doing.
And then they have permanent post-traumatic stress disorder. So there's a chaos within that can
manifest itself, that can disrupt whatever order you are. And you know that in minor ways because
everybody's always running around doing things that aren't good for them, that they know they
shouldn't do and that they can't control. And so there's a chaotic and an orderly aspect to
everything, to the individual,
to the family, to the social world, to the natural world. It's chaos and order at every
level of analysis simultaneously, which is why the Taoists think of the world as made
out of Yin and Yang, which is essentially analogous to the idea of order and chaos.
And now, but then there's another element too. So you're order and you're chaos.
And the place that you live, the environment is order and chaos as well.
But you're also the process that mediates between the two.
And what that means is you're the force that confronts chaos and casts it into order.
We talked about that in the free will discussion.
That's the basis for the dragon myth or at least part of it, the hero myth.
You're the force that confronts chaos part of it, the hero myth.
You're the force that confronts chaos and transforms it into habitable order.
And there's an idea that if you do that using truthful speech, it's probably the deepest
idea in the Bible.
If you confront chaos and the unknown using truthful speech, then the order that you
produce is good.
So that also means that your chaos and order and the process that intermediates between
them.
And that's really the basis of the hero myth.
So part of that is the hero story and the dragon myth go out, confront the dragon, get
the gold, bring it back, share it with the community.
And the dragon is a representation of that which dwells beyond the confines of the safe
and habitable space, right? It's an image of a predator
that's part of what it is, although it's way more complicated than that. And you're also the force
that confronts order when it becomes too tyrannical and restructures it back to chaos and then restructures
the chaos back into more beneficial order, which is what you do, example if you have an argument with someone that you settle, right?
Because the argument takes the orderly relation that you have with that person and then produces a chaotic
interlude which is all the pain that's associated with the argument.
And that's a disillusion into what Merchaya Elia had it called pre-cosmagonic chaos.
And out of that a new order can emerge. And so the best way to construe yourself is not as chaos or as order but as the process
that mediates between them.
And that's the basis for the ethos of the West is that the human being is best represented
as the individual and the individual is that attentive and communicative entity that is
continually capable of mediating
properly between chaos and order.
Now this is a deep idea.
You could read maps of meaning if you would like.
The audio version of that is coming out June 12th by the way, and I will make a video
detailing the relationship between maps of meaning and 12 rules of life.
But you can construe yourself, you should construe yourself
as the process that mediates between chaos and order.
And you should aim to be the process that does that properly,
using truthful communication, because that's
how you keep the elements of existence properly balanced.
And you might say, yeah, but is that real?
Well, if you read maps of meaning,
there's a section on neuropsychology that's also buttressed
by a book written by Ian McGillcrest called The Master and his Emissary that lays out the
relationship between the right and left hemisphere.
Now it's quite strange that we have a right and left hemisphere.
It's almost as if we have two consciousnesses dwelling in our being.
And they're quite separable.
If you cut the corpus callosum that unites the two,
then the two hemispheres will act independently
to some degree.
You can communicate with each of them somewhat independently.
So they actually view the world quite differently
and that hemispheric distinction
is not only their human beings,
but also an animal,
so long way down the phylogenetic chain.
Now, I made the claim partly because I was reading a man named Elkone and Goldberg, who was
a student of Alexander Luria, the most brilliant neuropsychologist of the 20th century.
Goldberg made the case that the left hemisphere is specialized for what's known and the
right hemisphere is specialized for anomaly.
And V. S. Ramashandran, who's a famous neurologist and MD in California, has also made a very
similar claim based on his analysis of brain-damaged individuals.
But Goldberg's case was the left hemisphere is specialized for what you know how to do,
and the right hemisphere is specialized for response to what's unknown.
And that maps on to this order chaos dimension, right?
And the right hemisphere now, Miguel Christ in his book, The Master in his
Emissary, has pointed out quite clearly that the left hemisphere has a
tyrannical tendency, which Ramachandran also viewed in his brain damage
patients, by the way, and that the left hemisphere is always trying to impose its logical and restricted order on the world and to make the world fit
into that. Now it has to do that. There's reasons for that. Part of the reason is
that if your theory you've worked on for 10 years makes one prediction error.
You shouldn't throw the whole damn thing out. You should doubt the prediction error.
Right? Because you never know when your data is actually data
or is just another kind of theory.
We can't get into that at the moment.
Now, McGillcrest makes a very strong case
and I think a more elaborated case
than I made in maps of meaning,
but it's the same argument fundamentally
that the right hemisphere is concerned
with reaction to anomaly.
And so what happens in some senses, something unexpected happens, that's the domain of chaos.
And that stops you in your tracks, it freezes you, and that's a predator response, a prey
response, actually.
You're frozen.
The unknown has manifested itself.
You're not in order anymore.
You don't know where you are and you don't know what to do.
And you can't just shut down like a computer does.
You freeze instead.
Then what happens is that the ancient mechanisms that have helped our ancestors for tens of millions
of years, or perhaps longer than that, react to that which lurks beyond the confines of
the unknown, kick in.
You start, first of all, that's motorics.
You freeze, and then you cautiously start to explore.
It's motoric. So you freeze and then you cautiously start to explore. And then it's imagistic.
You start making imaginal representations, metaphoric representations, dramatic representations
of what might constitute the unknown.
And then those representations are practiced and implemented in the world and they become
more and more fine-grained and automatized.
And as that happens, the locale that they're represented in, in the brain shifts from right to left.
So, the reason I'm telling you all this is because, you know, this is where the metaphysical and the physical unite,
and this is the sort of argument that I was trying to make to Sam Harris, and hopefully we'll be able to continue doing that,
because I'm going to meet him three times in the next few months. So that the Yin Yang idea, the chaos order idea,
is metaphorical in some sense to say that the world is made up of order and chaos
doesn't sound like an empirical statement.
But strangely enough, the world to which our brains are adapted is actually the world
of chaos and order.
You can think about it as unexplored and explored territory too.
That's another take on it. And so then you think from a Darwinian perspective, think about it this way. From
a Darwinian perspective, there's an axiomatic presupposition. And that is, reality is that
which selects. Okay? Reality is the force that selects over evolutionary time. And so the force that selects over evolutionary time has selected for hemispheric specialization,
bilateral hemispheric specialization, which indicates that two different modes of looking
at the world are necessary for survival, right?
So that's real.
And so the idea that the world is made out of chaos and order is perhaps the most real
idea.
Now, here's something else cool that's associated with that.
And this is an antidote to nihilism.
I also think it's an antidote to what would you call ideological possession.
So, when you encounter something unknown, you orient towards it.
And that's an involuntary response.
You could even think about it as a deterministic response.
It's part of what orients you very rapidly
towards predators so that they don't kill you
before you have a chance to respond.
OK, so you react because the anomalous thing
is meaningful.
It's intrinsically meaningful.
And the reaction is first terror with perhaps an overlay
of disgust and second curiosity.
And it's terror so that you freeze and remain paralyzed,
you turn to stone when you look at the basilisk or the snake or the gorgon, you turn to stone,
you're paralyzed like a prey animal and that's so the prey predator can't see you at least
in part.
There's other elements of the orienting reflex that are associated with predator avoidance.
Then if nothing additionally terrible happens, you start to thaw out and
you start to explore and you do that with image first and then practice the appropriate
behaviors and then automate those. Now look, here's the thing that's cool. So that
orienting reflects to the unknown is it's an admixture of threat, fear, and curiosity incentive reward.
So negative emotion and positive emotion.
Now, and it's dose dependent, the larger the anomaly, which means the larger the map,
it blows out when it manifests itself.
Think of the difference between being irritated at your marital partner because they, you know,
oh, who knows, because they were late to pick you up
for work compared to how irritated you would be if you found out they were having an affair.
Difference in size of anomaly. The first one disrupts a tiny little part of your space time
orientation and the second one demolishes your past, present, and future. And the larger the
disruption, the more negative emotion, obviously.
And so there's this weird interplay between negative and positive emotion in the response
to anomaly.
But it's deeply meaningful, even if it paralyzes you, even if it's terrifying, it's
meaningful.
And then that transforms, perhaps, into intense curiosity and you start to explore.
Now, the phenomena of meaning is a manifestation of the complex
orienting reflex. And so you're wired so that you're not just order and you're not just
chaos. Your order continually confronting chaos so that the order remains updated. And
you might say, well, how do you know how much chaos you should confront in order to keep the order continually updated?
And the answer is, meaning.
See, something is meaningful.
The reason that something is meaningful is because you're getting a deep instinctual signal
that you're encountering anomaly at a rate that doesn't exceed your capability, that's
also the rate at which you can keep yourself updated optimally.
And so meaning isn't epit phenomenal and it isn't some kind of delusion that rationality can and should overcome to say,
well, everything's meaningless. It's like, no, it's not.
Meaning is the most fundamental instinct for adaptation.
And so that's partly why in 12 rules for life, I said one of the rules, I think it's rule seven,
is do what is meaningful,
not what is expedient, because meaning is a really good guide to long-term adaptation.
And so then, and the other thing about meaning, which is what happens when you get the
balance between chaos and order, right, is that meaning is the antidote to despair.
And so if you, and there's all sorts of reasons in life to be desperate. And so if you
immerse yourself in meaning, you can learn to do that. You can learn to do that. You can
make that goal your highest goal. And so then the highest goal would be to be the sort
of mythological hero, let's say, to embody and incarnate and imitate the mythological
hero, like the imitation of Christ, which is what you're called to do if you happen to be Christian.
That means that you live in meaning, and that meaning is the antidote to the suffering of life that would otherwise make you brutal and vengeful and unhappy and miserable,
and like that young guy who just mowed down twelve people in Toronto.
These are real things. You lose your sense of meaning, you end up in hell. And in hell you do all sorts of terrible things.
These are dreadful realities.
And it isn't as if they're not grounded in the appropriate science.
So anyways, that was also a very complicated question.
Being gay and in a long-term relationship, we are considering kids.
What are your thoughts about gay people raising children?
I think the devil's in the details
to tell you the truth when, if I was ever
talking to any individuals about that,
the question is, well, how would you raise them?
I mean, you have problems, right?
If you're both of the same sex, then
you're going to have the problem of how
to provide the proper model for, you know, let's say you have a boy and a girl.
We know this is indisputable and this is something I've talked to Warren Farrell about.
Kids in intact heterosexual families where the father is present do way better on multiple indices than kids who are part of single parent families.
Now that doesn't mean that there are no single parents who do a good job, right?
That's not the same bloody claim.
Those are different claims.
But on average, not only do kids where fathers are present do better, but societies or even
local societies where there are more fathers present do better not only for the kids that
they're fathering but the kids in the neighborhood where there are lots of intact families with
fathers do better. And so I believe quite firmly that the nuclear family is the smallest viable
human unit, father, mother, child, smallest viable unit. And if you fragment it below that, then
you end up paying. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't ways that you can operate
in a smaller unit or a different unit effectively. But you have to contend with the fact that
it's necessary for kids to have models for both sexes.
That means accepting that the sexes are different, even though there's a fair overlap between
them, accepting that they're different, and that both sexes play their role.
It looks like what fathers do, and I talk to Warren Farrell a lot about this, and I'm
going to release this video this month about what fathers do.
A lot of what they do is rough and tumble play play with the kids which kids really really really like and it's really important as
Yacht Panks app a great affective neuroscientist laid out in his studies on rats
He discovered the play circuitry and fathers. This is something Farrell told me which was extraordinarily interesting is that fathers used the joy
Of the possibility of play as a scaffold to help children learn
to delay gratification.
So imagine a father spends a bunch of time playing with his kids and they're having a great
old time, they're wrestling around and pushing each other's limits to find out where they
are and learning the physiological dance that goes along with direct contact, direct exciting
contact, learning what hurts and what doesn't and what constitutes fair play and isn't, and how everybody can play and still enjoy the game, and how
excited you could get before it's too much, and how much you should whine and how much
you shouldn't, and when you can object to being hurt, all of that at a deeply embodied
level. The kids love that. They'll line up for that, and Panks App demonstrated very
clearly that rats will work to play and that rats play fair and
they learn to play fair because of iterated playbouts and that if you don't let juvenile
male rats play, then their prefrontal cortexes don't develop and they get attention deficit
disorder or the equivalent in rats and then you can treat that with riddle it.
And so this is all very vital material. Now if you're going to, if you're gay, let's say there's two men or two women, then
you have the problem of what you're going to do for the contra-sexual target.
And you can say, well, it doesn't matter because there's no differences between men and
women.
And you can gerrymandor the damn question that way and avoid your remoral responsibility.
Or you can face it squarely and say, look, you've decided to step outside
of the cultural norm and to organize
a non-standard relationship, which
puts a tremendous responsibility on you.
And then you have to figure out how you can provide
for your children what it is that they would get
in the classic minimal human unit.
So and more power to you.
I hope you can do a good job of it.
I think there's a room in the world for a diverse range of approaches to complex
life problems like having kids and finding a partner.
But that doesn't mean you get to bury your head in the sound about the absolute realities
of life and the fact that there are biological differences between men and women.
To deny that is reprehensible in my estimation.
And besides the empirical doubt of the scientific doubt here are crystal clear.
So and so okay.
Carl Jung says that everything unconscious is projected into reality.
How do you know if you're perceiving reality accurately or are just projecting?
Great.
Yeah, well that's partly why I'm a pragmatist.
Well there's a bunch of ways.
There's a bunch of ways that you know. Pain tells you. If you make a mistake and you hurt yourself,
well, then your stupid theory was wrong, right? That's what the pain says. Your stupid theory was wrong.
And that's a pragmatic. You see, that's another indication of pragmatic theory of truth. You lay out,
to see that's another indication of pragmatic theory of truth. You lay out, look, when you look at the world,
you look at the world with a set of presuppositions.
I outlined that in chapter 10, in 12 rules for life,
called Be precise in your speech.
It indicates that when you look at the world,
you look at it through a value structure.
You can't help that because you're always aiming
at something in the world and you're always aiming
at something you want and you're trying to get it.
And so that means that you look at the world through a value structure.
Now the question is whether or not that value structure is valid.
And that's a very complicated question.
Okay, so how do you know if it's valid?
Number one, you lay it out and you act it out, you implement it perceptually and then
you act it out.
And if you get what you wanted what the theory predicted
That's another way of thinking about it, but wanted is a better way of thinking about it
Then the fact that that behavioral routine and perceptual structure
Produced the intended result validates it as a tool for obtaining that result and that's a form of truth
Now it might be the only form of truth, although I'm not convinced of that completely, but it might be.
It's a very complicated question.
Now, how do you know if your stupid theory is wrong?
Okay.
A, it fails, and your hurt.
Pain tells you pragmatically your theory was wrong.
So that's why you should pay attention to your own pain because your suffering is indication
that you still have things to learn.
And maybe the suffering of other people is also that. Maybe something unexpected or
unpredictable happens when you're laying out your plan. And then the
anomalous manifests itself, the unexpected or chaos. And then you get anxious.
Well, anxiety is an indication that your plan, your arrow didn't fly to its
mark. So you aimed wrong. And that might mean a small error, you know, maybe
a tiny adjustment of your bowl, or it might mean a small error, you know, maybe a tiny adjustment
of your bowl or it might mean you just don't know what the hell you're doing at all and
everything is lost. And so anxiety tells you if your theory is wrong. And then, and then
other people tell you that and that's why you want to surround yourself with other people.
Because you distribute your cognitive resource, you distribute your problems to the cognitive
resources of the social group.
That's what we do when we price things, right?
Everyone votes on the price of something because it's so difficult, because the price of
something has to be established in relationship to the price of everything else and that's
always in flux and so it's computationally impossible problem
and so we outsource it to the market which is the free cognitive decision of millions of
people and that's how we determine price.
And so one of the things you do to make sure that you're not any stupider than you have
to be, blind, ignorant, biased and all of that is you surround yourself with other people
and you try to treat them well enough so that they can tolerate you.
And then every time that you do something stupid because one of your theories is vague
or incomplete or wrong or biased or you're willfully blind, then they slap you on the side of
the head.
They ignore you because you're boring.
They don't laugh at your jokes because they're stupid.
They are irritated at your actions because you're not taking your own long-term interests
or the interests of other people into account.
And so you have pain, you have anxiety, you have the reward of success, that's a positive
indicator that your theory is okay.
And then you have the reactions of everyone else.
And if you're clued in, you pay attention to all of those things.
And you try to update your order, which is your perceptions.
You try to update your order constantly as a consequence of being humble in the face of
your errors, which is why humility is the precondition of her learning and why it's one
of the highest moral virtues.
And perceiving reality accurately, You don't really perceive reality,
and you don't really perceive accurately.
You perceive small portions of reality,
extraordinarily limited in space and time,
and accurately means well enough so that when you do what you're doing, it works.
That's why I'm a pragmatist.
I mean, not only.
I mean, there's lots of other philosophical streams that have influenced my thought.
Existentialism, phenomenology, to mention two others.
But the thing is, you can't perceive reality accurately because you don't know everything.
And you're full of biases, and you're ignorant as hell.
And so the best you can do is perceive small bits of reality well enough so that you can
more or less get what you need in a relatively short period of time without screwing yourself up too badly in the medium
to long term.
That's pretty much what you've got.
And that doesn't mean truth is impossible.
Just means that it's very, very complicated to decide what truth is.
Because the question is, what is truth for someone whose knowledge is limited, right?
Because obviously, because your knowledge is limited and you don't know everything, saying some fundamental way,
you're ignorant or wrong about everything. But that doesn't help because you
still have to act in the world. So there are bounded truths. They're bounded
truths. And so, all right. If past experiences shape us, oh, no, I missed one.
You cite a tired brain foggy thinking as the reason to stop answering questions or giving
a talk.
How do you combat this while working or writing daily?
Well, I eat a big breakfast relatively soon on waking.
That really helps.
If any of you out there are anxious and many of you no doubt are, there'll be a large
number of you who are anxious and don't eat breakfast.
And there'll be a whole bunch of you out there who think, well, I don't eat breakfast.
It isn't necessary.
It's like, that's wrong.
It's necessary.
You fast it all night.
If you load yourself cognitively or physiologically in the morning, your brain stressed will produce,
will encourage your body to produce insulin.
It will take all the blood sugar
out of your blood and then you're done for the day and then you'll be anxious.
And another lot of the rest of you too, you'll find if you're anxious try this, it's
really, really interesting experiment.
The next time you're anxious, go eat something.
Eat like, eat some protein and fat would be best.
You could have cheese and crackers.
I'm not a big fan of carbohydrates, but whatever.
Eat whatever you're willing to eat, but make it solid. Don't eat a peanut butter or don't eat a like a chocolate bar or something sweet.
Eat something substantial, a piece of meat, a piece of cheese, some peanut butter, something like that.
And then wait 10 minutes and see if you're less anxious. And try that for like two weeks. Every time you get anxious, eat something
because then you can find out if your anxiousness, if your anxiety is linked to low blood sugar and it's very likely that it is, especially if you also get irritable and foggy in your thinking.
And so, and the best way to treat that as far as I've been able to tell, and there's a decent literature on this,
is to make sure that you eat a big breakfast. And you might say, well, I'm not hungry in the morning.
It's like, who the hell cares if you're hungry?
I didn't say enjoy your breakfast.
I said, eat it.
That's not the same thing.
You know, there's lots of things that you need to do that you don't enjoy to begin with.
You'll get hungry in six months and then you'll start to enjoy it.
So that's a massive difference.
I take small naps quite frequently.
If I'm wiped out, you know, I'll go have a nap for 10 minutes or 15 minutes, and then that helps
quite a lot.
I try to wake up fairly regular, on a fairly regular schedule.
That's another thing I would really recommend for people whose lives are in disarray and
who are anxious.
Try to fix your wake time.
Sleep going when you sleep, that's not so important.
So you can still stay up late and have fun and all that.
But getting up in the morning is really helpful.
So you also have to figure out how much you can work or write.
I can't write for more than about max.
My sustainable maximum for writing is three hours a day.
And if I push it past that, then especially if I'm editing,
I make mistakes when I'm editing, so that's counterproductive.
I can't sustain it across time.
I don't really think you can do more than
about three hours of extremely intense intellectual work a day.
Although if you have a nap, you can stretch that,
but at least I end up paying for it across time.
So, nap, make sure you eat and make sure you eat protein and fat and not carbohydrates
because carbohydrates are basically poisonous. That's about that's about and make sure that
you get enough sleep. So that's how I combat it and try to make myself hyper-efficient, which is also a really interesting thing
to try.
I was talking to my agents at CAA, Creative Artist Agency
in LA, and I just hired a publicist
to help me manage media in a more intelligent manner.
And we're trying to think about our overarching philosophy.
I first proposed to the CAA guys that are overarching
philosophy would be something like, because you need an overarching philosophy
Under which you nest all your specific actions
It was something like to educate as many people as possible in the shortest period of time
Which seems like a really good goal like why the hell not do that
But then we broaden that a little bit this week which was to try to do as much good possible as efficiently as possible.
And that efficiency thing is really fun if you guys who are listening are out for a challenge.
One of the things that you can, I think this heightens the meaning in your life is to try to do
difficult things, right? Aim high. Don't aim so damn high, you can't manage it and make sure you
break down your aims into reasonably attainable sub goals, but you want to aim high and then
you want to see how high-perefficient you can get.
That's a great thing to do in your early 20s is to see, okay, like discipline yourself,
you think, okay, how much work can I do if I load myself right to the maximum?
How far can I work?
How hard can I work until I exhaust myself?
And then you back off, obviously, because the optimal
amount of working, productive engagement, let's say, is that which is sustainable across
decades. So you have to learn that, but you don't learn that without stretching yourself
to your limits to begin with. And, you know, if your life isn't everything it could be,
and if you're suffering from an excess of meaninglessness, well, it means you're not
oriented in the world of chaos and order properly.
It's like you could learn to discipline yourself.
Look, figure out what it is that you need to do and that you want to do and then see how
efficient you can get.
Because one of the things that's quite fun is to figure out, if you have a task, I always
tell my graduate students this if they're doing an experiment, too, if you have a task
that you have to do, it's really interesting to spend a few minutes, sometimes hours depending on how long the task is, see if you can figure
out how to do it from five to ten times faster. It means you'll have to rearrange the way you
think about it, but you can often do it, and that's how extremely productive people get so hyper
efficient. You know, sometimes it means you have to delegate, it means sometimes it means you
have to bring other people aboard. That's delegation as well, I suppose.
But there's a lot of preconceptions that you hold about who you are and who the world is that you could dispense with that would make you a way more efficient actor in the world. And so
All right, so there that's that
If past experiences shape us from the moment of birth, how can an action be ever said to be the result of free will rather than the accumulation of past influences?
Well, it is in large part the accumulation of past influences because that's knowledge,
but I address that I would say already pretty thoroughly in my discussion of free will.
Your free will isn't absolute.
I mean, what are you, a genie?
Even a genie is constrained inside a lamp.
So there's no action without constraint. There's no action without limitation.
So it's just not conceptualized well. And all of your choices are constrained, not least by the
fact that you have to keep yourself live. So just because there are limitations that emerge, say,
as a consequence of the accumulation of past influences, doesn't mean that you aren't, that you don't still have a massive domain of freedom.
So what is your opinion of attachment-based therapy?
And do you think that therapy is at risk of encouraging people to wallow in self-pity?
I'm not going to talk about attachment-based therapy because I don't know enough about
it to provide an intelligent critique, but I can answer the second part of the question.
Do I think that therapy risks encouraging people to wallow in self-pity?
Not if it's done by a competent therapist.
If you're a therapist is encouraging you to wallow in self-pity, then it's time to get
the hell out of there.
You've got a therapist who thinks that they're supposed to offer you a safe space.
That's not helpful.
Look, what do you do as a therapist?
You act as a strategic counselor.
So let's imagine someone comes to see me.
So there's two big mysteries, right?
What's wrong and what would look better?
What's wrong and what would a cure look like?
And I don't know.
And so if you're a therapist, the first thing you want to do is figure out that
you don't know what's wrong with this person and probably neither do they.
And you also don't know what's right for them.
And so then you start talking to the person to try to solve that problem.
It's like, okay, you've come to see me because something isn't right in your life.
What is it?
And so then the person has to talk and talk and talk and you have to ask them questions
to find out because, you know, maybe they're depressed, maybe they're anxious, maybe they
came from a terrible family, maybe they're really hard on themselves and things are actually going better than they think.
Like, you have no idea what's wrong with them.
You're ignorant, you're ignorant, and so are they.
And so you say, look, you can tell me anything as long, try to tell the truth because otherwise,
we're just not going to get anywhere because we're trying to deal with reality here.
So tell me the truth, I'm not going to be judgmental in any stupid sense.
I'm going to judge like mad because I want to help you do things right. So I'm going to
be I'm going to be judging like mad, but I'm not going to throw you out because of the
things you say, you're going to have to wander all over weird territory to explain your problem
because you don't even know what it is. So you have to listen a lot. The first thing
you want to figure out is, okay, what's wrong here? And the person will tell you 100 things that might be wrong. And that there's quite painful to
listen to often, you know, they'll tell you about their past and their present. I don't
mean painful in that it's not engaging or that it's not worthwhile. I mean, people's lives
have a lot of pain in them. So it's painful to partake in that. So they'll tell you like
100 things that might be wrong. And then you do an analysis with them and you think, well,
okay, how many of those things really probably aren't a problem? The first thing that happens
is if you let a person talk about, let's say they tell you about a hundred problems. The
first thing you find out is that 90 of them aren't real problems. And the person just figures
that out as they talk them through.
So they say, well, that's linked to this.
And maybe that's not really a problem.
That's not as bad as I thought it wasn't.
We can probably ignore that.
And it's like they have a handful of cards that aren't organized.
And they don't know what to do with them.
There's too many cards.
And so you say, look, lay your cards on the table, all of them.
And this is also what you do when you're listening
to someone you're intimate with. and they're trying to solve a problem
and you have to be patient to do this because they're all upset about something, right?
And you don't know what it is and maybe they're upset about you and maybe they're upset about themselves and and they're not handling it very well
and they're impulsive and and volatile and hard on you and you say, all right, Christ, I'm gonna listen to you
It's like what's your stupid problem?
And then they lay out their problem, right?
The problem space and you have to listen and not jump in there too quickly with a damn solution because what the hell do you know?
So you listen to them lay out the problem space. They lay their cards on the table. Then you say, well, we don't have to pay attention to this
and we don't have to pay attention to this. We don't have to pay attention to this. And that's the cutting the dragon of chaos down to size.
That's what it is. You look at the dragon of chaos and it starts to this. And that's the cutting the dragon of chaos down to size. That's what it is.
You look at the dragon of chaos, and it starts to shrink.
OK, so that's because by looking at it,
you indicate to the dragon that you're bigger than you thought
you were and that you're bigger than it thought you were.
And that's very, very useful.
So anyways, you lay out your cards, and then you start to organize
them.
It's like, well, I actually only have 10 problems.
All right, so then you think, well, how can we break those
problems down into manageable sub-problems?
And how can you go about addressing them?
That can be very complicated.
I hate my job.
Well, do you have an alternative?
No.
Well, why not?
Well, I don't have a resume.
I hate being interviewed.
I'm afraid to make a resume.
I allow stop my education.
I don't have any options, it's like, yeah,
that's a lot of problems, man.
And that's, you know, those are strategic problems.
So then you have to figure out how to help the person strategize and then implement the
strategies.
And so the next step is, okay, now we know your problems.
If you could have a solution, like, that would be the opposite of the problem, what might
a solution look like?
Same issue.
It's like, well, there's lots of solutions.
I don't know what to do with my life.
I don't know what job to have.
I don't know what person to establish a long-term
intimate relationship with.
I don't know what I would like to do with my family.
I don't know how to use my time outside of work.
I don't know how to resist temptation,
like drug and alcohol abuse. I don't know how to take care of myself mentally and physically.
All these complicated problems, it's like, okay, let's sketch out a potential solution.
If you could have what you wanted, so that would be a cure, what would that look like?
We formalize this by the way in the future authoring process.
So if you do the future authoring program, which is part of the self-authoring suite, it
will guide you through doing this. And it's unbelievably useful
to do that. Because you're not going to hit what you don't aim
at. So, so then you you have the person lay out, okay, well,
where we headed, it's a map. Now we know where we are, and it's a
problem. Now we have to figure out where we're headed. And so,
and then finally, once we figure out where we're headed,
we have to figure out how to get there.
We have to make the map.
It's got a beginning place.
It's got an end place.
Now we have to map out the terrain.
So like, well, I didn't finish my degree,
or maybe I didn't go to college,
or maybe I didn't finish high school.
It's like, well, do you need a different job?
Yes.
Do you need a high school diploma to get that?
Yes.
What steps do you have to take to get a high school diploma to get that? Yes, what steps do you have to take to get a high school diploma?
Maybe you have to start with one course, right?
Okay, where do you find a course?
You go look it up online.
What things make you afraid to go back to school?
Which of those things are stopping you?
How are you going to overcome those fears?
So you take the large-scale vision, which is the place you're headed to in the future,
that's the cure, and then you break headed to in the future, that's the cure.
And then you break it down into the strategic elements that
are necessary to be implemented on a day-to-day basis.
And you do that so that they're difficult, but attainable.
And then the person, if they're not difficult,
then they're not worth attaining.
Obviously, obviously, you're not pushing yourself,
and you want the person not only to develop in the direction
they're supposed to develop, but you want to get them better at developing.
So you want to push them just like you do with kids or yourself if you have any sense.
And so you break it down into small, implementable daily processes and then you review those
with your client.
None of that's wallowing itself, pity man, quite the contrary, quite the contrary.
So psychotherapy is, get your story together.
Who are you?
Where are you going?
Where are you going?
What's your strategy?
How are you going to learn to overcome
the frightening and unexpected things
that are going to pop up at you
when you implement that strategy?
So in those can be,
some of those things can be the natural world. I'm afraid of death. I'm afraid of illness. I'm afraid of insanity. And some of those
can be the social world. I'm afraid of my boss. I'm afraid of my wife. I'm afraid of my friends.
I'm afraid of being humiliated. I'm afraid that people won't like me. Those are the two big
classes of fears, right? Fear of the great mother, nature, fear of the great father, culture.
And if you're really afraid, you get to have both those fears at the same time. So there's
nothing about that that's wallowing itself, pity, quite the contrary. It's a bad therapist
that does that. They're not there to make, to feel sorry for you. They are there to be
on the side of the part of you that's aiming up and to encourage you and to allow you to have a space
where you can lay out your thoughts using your free speech to think where you can lay out your
thoughts about what's wrong with you and how that might be set right. There's nothing to do with
wallowing in self-pity. I don't want to calculate high resolution utopia for myself only to have it
squandered by fortune. How do I ensure the meaning I experience a self-determined? Well, you can't because there's
an arbitrary element to existence, so it is going to be squandered to some
degree by fortune, but that's that's not the point. What are you going to do?
Just sit back on your laurels and wait for things to roll over you. So what
you do? Look, the hero myth basically says, go out there, confront the
dragon, get the gold, share it with the community, and live properly. Or it says, the alternative
is, face the tyrant, enter the desert as a consequence, because everything falls apart,
recast structure, find the promised land. Those are the two elements to the hero myth.
And that's divine.
It's the closest thing to divine that we know.
You might say, well, what happens
if you follow the divine path?
And the answer might be, well, everything turns out perfectly
because God is on your side.
It's like, no, that isn't what happens
because things don't turn out perfectly.
It's your best bet. It's your best strategy.
That's the thing. And, you know, dragons wouldn't be dragons if they couldn't eat you.
But that's okay. That's okay. And this is something I found so useful about the biblical stories,
especially about the Abrahamic stories, which I didn't know that well till I lectured about them last year. You know, God calls people to the adventure of their lives.
And so you could say, in part, God is that force within you, which calls you to the adventure of your life.
And it says, get away from your family, get away from your blind and unconscious comfort, and get the hell out there in the world.
Well, God calls Abraham out from his fathers where he stayed far too long and from his kin where it's secure.
And like the first thing he encounters is a famine, and then he encounters a tyranny inhabited
by people who want to steal his wife.
It's like you think, well, Abraham should have just stayed in bed and ignored God.
Obviously.
Well, that isn't how it is.
It's like we're built for struggle, us human beings.
Not after the bubbles of bliss that
Dostoevsky described in notes from underground, were built to contend with the
world, were built to contend with reality. You want a challenge and the best way
that you can take on a challenge because a challenge fortifies you. So you don't
want to be secure, you want to be strong and you get strong by taking on
optimal challenges. And so you lay out your destiny in the world and you take the slings and arrows of fate.
And you make yourself stronger while you're doing so.
And you might fail and fortune might do you it, but it's your best bet.
And you know, people have, also people that have extracted unbelievable successes out of
catastrophic failures.
And so, and I'm not saying that in a naive way.
I know perfectly
well what happens to people, you know, you're doing fine in life and then you get cancer
and then six months later you're dead. And all the heroism in the world isn't going
to save you at that point. But that's not the point. That's not the point. Life is bounded
by mortality. But that doesn't mean that you don't get out there and contend and you
develop by contending and you minimize the net amount of suffering in the world.
And that's something, man, that's something to do.
So it beats laying in your basement and getting better and then doing the terrible things
that bitter people do.
So you can't ensure that the meaning you experience is self-determined, but you can play your
role to the best of your ability.
And that will be good enough. And that will be good enough. That meaning, the meaning
that you all find in that, I believe, is sufficient to be sustaining and perhaps even sustaining
through the flood. So it isn't that you can avoid catastrophe. It's that you can prepare yourself to deal with it
honorably when it arrives. That's what you've got. I have very high
orderliness and low-industryness. I have very high orderliness, 90th percentile low-industryness,
23rd percentile. What can I do to remedy this and get a higher industrialist? Okay, first of all, that's not that low. Okay, we've got to think about
percentiles here for a minute because they're not percentages, they're different. So, if you're at
the 23rd percentile and there were four people in a room, you'd be the least industrialist of four
of them. And that kind of puts you in the average range. It's not that big of a deal. There's problems
with it and we'll get to that. Although you
may maybe you're high in openness to it. Anyways, I won't get into that. Lowell would be 5th percentile
because that makes you 1 in 20 or second percentile because that makes you 1 in 50. It's kind of
interesting to visualize a fairly large high school class and then to think of yourself as situated
in there. If you're the least industrious person out of 50, that's going to be a problem.
You better be smart or have some other things going for you because you're going to have
a hard time being diligent enough to be successful.
Okay.
Having said that, and maybe first percentile makes you 1 in 100 and 0.1 percentile makes
you 1 in 1000.
So you've got to think about percentiles properly.
So having said that, let's say you're not
very high in industriousness, what should you do?
A, make a damn plan.
You need a plan for your life.
And I would say use the future authoring program
because that will help you make a plan or make a plan on your own.
That's fine or make a plan because you talk to someone.
But we put the future authoring program together
to help people develop a vision of where they could be,
a counter vision to scare the hell out of them
by helping them think through how catastrophic things could
become if they let all their stupidities get the upper hand.
And then a second part of the program that
helps you make a strategy.
And we know the future authoring program helps people, young
men in particular, who are
doing worse, by the way, in academic situations.
It increases the probability that they will stay in college and university by between 25
and 50%.
So make a damn plan and make one you want.
Like, don't make a plan that is what you should do, even though it will be what you should
do.
Make a plan that outlines a future so that you
could sit back and say, look, if I had that future, then all the horrible things that are going to
happen to me are going to be worthwhile. That's what you want. You want to think, this game is worth
playing despite its tragedy. That's what you've got in life, enough meaning to serve as an antidote
to tragedy. All right, now, and then you generate a strategy.
And then the other thing you should do if you're not very
industrious, industrious, is discipline yourself.
And so what do you do with that?
Eat three times a day at regular meal times.
That's a good thing to practice, because that starts to put
some stability into your life.
Get up at the same time.
I would highly recommend all those young
people out there who are listening. Like you want to get a jump on life, get the hell out of bed
in the morning. You know, as I've got older, I've got up earlier and earlier. Now that's partly
because you don't need as much sleep, but it's also partly because I've got more and more disciplined.
Like, get up early in the morning and get your things done. Man, learn to get up at six in the morning
and you'll be one deadly creature, especially if you can get to work. You'll have half your damn day done by the time
other people haul their sorry asses out of bed. And so that's a massive, massive advantage.
Look, we'll feral, Warren Farrell, not the comedian, Warren Farrell, the author. He outlined
data in Why Men Earn More, which is a book I would recommend, by the way, showing
that if you work 13% longer hours, you make 40% more money. It's non-linear. So you think
why is that? Well, imagine you had 10 employees and one of them works an extra 10%. It's not
much. Well, how often is that person going to be promoted, assuming you have a clue as
a boss? It's like you're going to look at the 10 people and you're going to think,
oh, that guy's always here like 45 minutes early. It's like, why don't we give him the promotion? Obviously, right?
So these tight, these small edges that you can manage like that work an extra 10% or extra 13% have non-proportional payoffs.
That's part of the Pareto distribution. distribution. So get your sleep cycle organized so you
get up in the morning. Learn how to do it. No excuses. I'm too tired in the morning. I don't
like mornings. Who cares? That's not relevant. It's like discipline yourself so you can
manage it. Schedule your meals because that's a good disciplinary routine. And then learn
to use a calendar, like Google Calendar.
Most of you, many of you out there, do not use a calendar.
OK, a calendar is not a prison, and it's not a tyrant.
Not if you use it properly.
Calendar keeps anxiety at bay.
It makes sure that you do what you need to do, which
is important, because otherwise you fall behind.
But if you use it properly, it also
helps you plan what you want to do.
So I could say, well, lay out your damn calendar and design the days you would like to have.
That's what your calendar is for.
So you can put in all sorts of things in there you want to do and that would be good for
you.
And that's a really good, really good way to start being more industrious.
Make a plan.
You need a plan for three years. You need a plan for the next
year. You need a plan for the next six months. You need a plan for the next three months.
You need a plan for the week. You need a plan for the day. You need a plan for the hour.
All of that, all of that. I make lists constantly of what I have to do. And they're like daily,
weekly, monthly, yearly. Right now I can't look out more than about six months,
because my life is too complicated and chaotic.
But you need a vision of who you could be,
what character you could have, three to five years out.
You can't go much farther than that,
because life is too unpredictable,
I think, to make vision that's longer term than that subject
to too much chance associated with it to spend a lot of time on. that's longer term than that subject to
There's too much chance associated with it to spend a lot of time on maybe you can stretch it to five years and in rare cases
You can have a 10-year goal, but it has to be pretty low resolution
But you want plans at all those levels of resolution you want to write the things down and what because what are you gonna do You're gonna stumble around and get what you need? You're gonna stumble around and be useful to other people and it's useful to be useful to other people
You know they want to work with you then they want to do things with you
They want to have you around they trust you they open up opportunities for you
And if you stumble around like you're blind you're not gonna get anywhere and then you're gonna suffer
And then you're gonna be bitter and then you're gonna be cruel
So that's a that's So that's a bad that's hell.
That's a bad outcome.
So unless you want that, don't aim for it or aim for the opposite because that's how
you get out of it.
So physical attractiveness is extensively studied in departments of psychology.
How big of a determinant of success is it apart from IQ or any of the other big five
traits?
That's tough one because physical attractiveness is a very complex trait.
It's also, for example, it's a marker of health and of course health is a prerequisite for
success.
So you can't take attractiveness as a unitary dimension and measure it sufficiently accurately.
Wait, I should back up on that.
No one that I know of has taken physical attractiveness as a unitary concept, measured it
accurately, and then pitted it against IQ and the big five to see if it, to what degree it adds
incremental validity to the prediction of long term success.
But physical, but, and so I can't give you a technical answer.
You know, I can say, well, in a complex job over the long run, IQ accounts for maybe 20%
of the variance in success, leaving 80% therefore random events and, and the big five traits
and connection networks and, and family background and all those other things,
gender, perhaps, that all the other things that determine success.
We know that people who are physically attractive, though, are given the benefit of doubt by other people.
They benefit from the positive halo effect.
And the positive halo effect is the propensity of people to assume good things about someone
if there is one outstanding thing about them that's easily evident, that's good.
And so if you stand up straight with your shoulders back, so that's rule one and 12 rules
for life, then people are going to see you as more attractive.
If you're symmetrical, you're more attractive.
If you're thin, but not too thin, you're more attractive.
Well, then there's like good skin and good teeth and good hair and all of those things and
proper proportions and youth.
And there's a whole slew of things that feed into that.
If you are characterized by a plethora of those features, then people are also going to
assume that you're more competent and more worth having around, let's say.
But the problem is that you are.
So separating out the attractiveness
from the things the attractiveness is correlated with
is very hard.
That's why you have to do multi-variant analysis.
That's multi-variable analysis in any complex social science
because a lot of these traits overlap.
But you know, you can, there's some things you can do about that.
Postural adjustment is helpful to work out with weights.
That's extraordinarily helpful.
That increase improves your posture and makes you more confident.
And, and, and, and, and, and you can dress reasonably well and intelligently.
And, all of those things to help yourself capitalize
on whatever attractiveness you can muster.
So, what is your view on psychological egoism?
If we're all ultimately acting out of self-interest, then does altruism have any merit?
I don't think the question is well-posed.
And that's one of those questions that leads into a philosophical dead end because it's
not well-posed. There isn't any such thing as self-interest. It's not the right way to
think about it because you're not alone. And so this is why I like Piaget, John Piaget
because he thought about this intelligently. Look, first of all,
who self-interest do you mean? Do you mean you're immediate self-interest in the next
second? So that would be impulsive pleasure. We're all acting for the gaining of impulsive
pleasure and to hell with everything else. Well, obviously that's a stupid way to behave
because, and everyone knows that because you can do impulsive short term gratifying things like snort cocaine now and you can
keep doing that and it'll pay off real real well in the extremely short term and it'll just
auger you into the ground in the medium to long term. So if you're acting in your own self-interest,
let's take that apart. Over what period of time? Your self-interest in the next second? Your
self-interest in the next hour? Like if you're impulsive and you want to gratify an impulse,
you're obviously acting in your self-interest in the next second, or the next two seconds
or the next minute. But you know, you'll pay for that. Maybe you punch someone, or you
slap someone because you're so angry and they knock you for a loop and then they charge you with assault.
So, well, it was great in your self-interest in the second, but like, future, remember
that Simpson's episode, Homer Dranka, Quartamannes and Vodka, and Margin, all his kids were telling
him not to, and he said, well, that's a problem for future Homer.
I sure don't envy that guy, it's like, which is one of the best Simpson's lines ever, I think. And, well, that's
it exactly. It's like, well, there isn't just you. There's, there's now you and there's
tonight you and there's tomorrow morning you. That's the one that'll have the hangover
by the way. And there's next week you and next month you and next year you and old you.
And so if you're going to act in your self-interest, you have to take that collective of use across time into account when you make your decision. And now here's the
cool thing about that. So then that's say, well that would be acting in your self-interest, writ
large right across time spans. But the thing is future you and someone else that you have to live with
right now that's not you are pretty much the same people.
And so if you're going to act in your self-interest and you have other people around you,
then you also want to act in their self-interest because otherwise they won't like you.
They won't cooperate with you and they won't compete with you in a reasonable manner.
And so that's going to be a catastrophe. And so you want to act out what's good for you now and
what's good for you next month and next year. And you want to do that in a way that's good for you now and what's good for you next month and next year. And
you want to do that in a way that's good for you and your family and your community right
now next week and next year. And you're going to take all those things into account at the
same time. That's an equilibrated game from a Piagetian perspective. And it was his idea
that that constituted the basis for proper moral judgment. And it's a brilliant idea.
It's a brilliant idea.
And so that's your true self interest.
There's no difference between your interest and the interest of others, not in any fundamental
sense.
Even your enemies, which is why you're enjoying to treat your enemy as if he was yourself,
because he is.
You know, when you think, well, you should wish your enemies well.
Well, why? Well, it isn't that you hope they get a bigger house than you. It's that,
let's say you're, you're being pursued and tormented by someone who's truly reprehensible.
That person is, they have a miserable life, man, in all likelihood. Let's say they're
truly malevolent. You know, they live in hell. And what you might hope for them is that
they could figure out how to get out of there,
because it's not good for them and it's not good for anyone else.
Think, well, even your enemies, it's like, wouldn't it be good if they could get their
act together and stop being so unnecessarily malevolent?
And that's in your self-interest.
So the idea that your self-interest is somehow opposed to other peoples, or that if you
maximize your self-interest, you're not operating in the best interests of other people is predicated on a poor idea of what
constitutes your self-interest, because you're not separate in any real sense from other
people.
You may be not separate from everything in some real sense.
You know, I mean, Jung, Jung in his book, Mysterium Caniontionus, he had this idea, I'm going
to go through it real quick.
It's a complicated idea that this is how you put yourself together.
The first thing you do is you join your emotions and your rationality so that your mind and your emotions are one thing.
He called that the first conjunction.
So that your motivations and your emotions and the way that you think about the world are all acting in the same direction.
Okay, so that's the first conjunction and you get your act together that way.
So that would mean incorporation of aggression and sexuality from a Freudian perspective.
Those parts of you that are difficult to integrate come to be integrated into one thing.
So you can use your anger when you need to and you have your sexuality under control,
it doesn't have you, but you know how to use it and it's a power for you.
And you're properly assertive in all of those things.
And so, you build yourself into one psychological unit and then you embody that.
So that's the second conjunction.
The second conjunction is take your mind, emotion, motivation, unity and act it out, act it out in the world.
So that there's no distinction between you and what you do, between you and the way you think about the world and your philosophy and how you act.
That makes you a second kind of unity.
And then the final conjunction, which is the most difficult one, is to stop thinking that the world is different than you are. This is why I asked people to clean up the rooms
It's like your room is you it's you and
So you go in there and you clean up your room you're cleaning you up to the same way
You're developing discipline you're putting yourself in order you're developing a vision of the future
You're figuring out how to dress you're figuring out how to take care of your things
You're interacting with the microcosmos that you have in front of you and learning how
to balance chaos and order.
There's no difference between you and what's around you.
That's a very difficult thing to understand.
You want to act in a way that's good for you, but good for everything else at the same
time.
That's a high moral virtue. And that's so there is that's the right way of thinking about the relationship
between psychological egoism and altruism. It's like if you're as you move towards a broader
conceptualization of things, you start to understand that there is no selfish self-interest. There is no selfish self-interest.
It isn't how life works.
Like if you're married to someone, for example, and you're stuck with them for the next
50 years, it's like, you can't win an argument with them.
You can make peace because they're you, man.
They're you.
They're a huge part of your experience.
You have to treat that person as if they're you. They're a huge part of your experience. You have to treat that person as if they are you and
That it's not it isn't like well. I'm gonna treat you well because you're me
It's because people don't treat themselves very well often. It's way more complicated than that
You just you don't want to defeat your wife man because then you live with a defeated wife
And if you think she isn't gonna take revenge on you then you're you're not very bright
with a defeated wife. And if you think she isn't going to take revenge on you, then you're not very bright. So you want to listen to what she has to say, and you want to listen to
her problems, and you want to help her solve them because she's you, and you want to do the
same with your kids, and then you want to do the same with the people around you if you can do it.
And so the whole idea of like, well, we're basically wired to be selfish.
have, like, well, we're basically wired to be selfish. Well, we are when we're not very wise, and we act impulsively. But as your view of the world broadens, you start to understand
that this is why in the Buddhist philosophy, you know, Buddha attained Nirvana. So that
meant he could stay in union with the gods. So to speak, he attained the highest form
of subjective experience,
which might be something like totally immersion
in bliss and meaning, but he rejected it
because he went back into the world
to help other people attain Nirvana,
or at least to move towards it,
because he realized that there was no individual redemption
without the redemption of all.
And if you don't understand that,
then you're just not very wise.
And so you're trying to be a force for good in the world.
And that doesn't mean just good for you.
That's just, it's just blind.
Because there isn't any isolated you.
That isn't how things are.
That is now reality.
Lays itself out.
So, what is your current thinking on Orthodox Christianity? The Orthodox Christians
like me. I don't know why, but I think I have some idea, I guess. I've got a lot of
letters from religious people, a lot of from Muslims, from Jews, from Orthodox Jews, in
particular, strangely enough, from Christian monks, but a lot from Orthodox Christians, and I think the reason for that,
as far as I can tell, is that the Orthodox look at Christianity from a slightly different
angle than the Protestants in the Catholics, and I'm not putting down the Protestants in
the Catholics.
They have a perspective, a reason for their viewpoint.
But what's happened in the West, I think, and this is a dreadful over simplification.
So please forgive me, is that the West has viewed Christianity more as a set of beliefs
that are analogous in some sense to a cognitive theory of the world. So to be a Christian in
the West, you have to accept that Christ died for your sins and that you're redeemed. So you have to accept Christ as your Redeemer.
And that really means to state that you believe a set of propositions about Christ, that
he was the Son of God and that his death and resurrection, his sacrifice, redeemed mankind.
And then you partake in that redemption by laying out that accordance with a set of facts, let's say.
I don't, I understand why that's how it's worked out,
but I think there's a big risk in that.
And I don't think the orthodox fell into that
to the same degree.
Their idea, more, and this is there in Protestantism
and Catholicism too, it's there,
but it's given more secondary, more implicit emphasis, and I think that's
a problem, especially in the modern world.
The Orthodox would say, as near as I can tell, that you should pick up your damn cross and
stumble up the hill.
That's your job, right?
And the cross is the X, where everyone is located.
You're right at the center of reality.
You're suffering and dying and being reborn all the time at the center of reality as you transform. And you have to accept that and
embrace it. You have to, and that's very, very hard thing to do because it means to embrace all your
flaws and the flaws of reality and the tragedy of existence and your death and the sum total of
human evil, all of that, unbelievably demanding requirement.
But you do what you can to do that.
And then not only do you pick up your cross, so to speak, but you stumble uphill towards
the city of God.
You stumble up towards what's good.
And that's your destiny.
And that's where meaning is to be had.
And the Orthodox lay that out quite well.
That's your goal is the imitation of Christ.
And Christ is the logos, this is the Christian story. Christ is the logos that God uses
at the beginning of time to transform pre-cosmagnic chaos into habitable order, truthful
speech. So that's the thing. The fact that you're capable of uttering truthful speech
is an indication that you've shouldered your cross and are stumbling uphill.
A very coherent theory, and the orthodox, I think,
have done a very good job of keeping that idea at the forefront of their belief.
And so that's what I think about orthodox Christianity.
Do I have any thoughts on the Myers-Briggs personality test?
Yes, it's old.
It isn't psychometrically valid.
It wasn't derived by factor analytic techniques.
It should be replaced by the big five or the big five aspect scale, which you can use
if you go to understandmyself.com. We've put it online for people to use and to generate
a personality report. Myers and Bragg's attempted to make a questionnaire, predicated on Jungian
presuppositions, and perhaps they did a fine job for the 1930s,
but that was a long time ago and there weren't any powerful computational devices of the kind
that were necessary to sort out the structure of personality properly, which we've managed to do
since about 1960 onward. So now, the Myers-Briggs is a perfectly useful tool if what you want to do is
get people to talk about the fact that there are individual differences in personality and corporations is that it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. It's not a big deal.
It's not a big deal.
It's not a big deal.
It's not a big deal.
It's not a big deal.
It's not a big deal.
It's not a big deal.
It's not a big deal.
It's not a big deal.
It's not a big deal.
It's not a big deal. it's no longer properly valid.
And so, that's that.
How can women who waited too long to have children find meaning in their lives once they realize
their mistake?
How can we cope with the regret?
Jesus, that's a hard question.
Well, you know, there are other avenues to meaning, right?
I mean, that's the first thing to realize is that there's intimate relationship.
There's familial relationships that aren't in accordance with children.
There's other people that you can serve.
There are other children that you can serve.
So what you have to do, because intimate relationships are so important, and I'm including
that close familial, I'm not talking about sexual relationships. I'm talking about very
close social relationships. The thing about having children, if you're lucky,
is that you have a relationship there of a depth that you don't get anywhere
else with the possible exception of your parents and siblings and your
partner. But there's something about the child relationship that's even more
fundamental because the thing
about having a child is that if you have any sense, as soon as you have a child, you are
no longer the most important person, right?
You're no longer the person that you have primary responsibility for.
It's now your child.
And that produces a psychological transformation and it produces a relationship of a depth
that can't be easily duplicated elsewhere.
But it's not like that's the only thing that there is to do in life.
There are other relationships, and I would say what you do is you foster them to the degree that that's possible.
And maybe you can find other kids to serve.
There's always the possibility of volunteering for hospitals or working in places where children need service.
So that's a possibility as well.
And so, there are a variety of sources of meaning
in people's lives.
And they're not unlimited.
There's career, there's education, there's what you do
that's meaningful, meaningfully engages you outside of work.
There's your social relations, your friends, and so forth.
And so maybe you have five legs to stand on. And
you missed one because you didn't have kids or maybe you missed two because kids are a big deal.
But that doesn't mean the rest of them aren't accessible to you. And so you optimize your
functioning along the dimensions that are left to you. And then I would also say, maybe you try
to forgive yourself a little bit. You know, like it's very difficult to go through life without
yourself a little bit. You know, like it's very difficult to go through life without regrets, without making mistakes. You know, and you can't beat yourself to death for it because then everyone
would beat themselves to death all the time. And so you think, well, that's, that's, I'm too soon
old and too late wise to use an old cliche. And you think, well, that's the lot of mankind.
We learn things too late often, and that's too bad.
And you forgive yourself because you're stupid, and you don't know what you're doing, and
you're unwise just like everyone else.
And maybe you're somewhat capable of learning if you're careful.
And then you go out and you try to foster relations and do good in the world to the degree
that you can outside of the necessity of children. And maybe you
have nephews, nieces, and you can lavish some attention on them and find your substitute
where you can. But I would say to forgive yourself is a big part of that. It's like people
make mistakes, man. Big mistakes. And the people that I've watched through life that have
been successful, it's not like they didn't make mistakes because everyone makes mistakes
and they do things they regret and they miss opportunities and it's a bloody
catastrophe. But they treat themselves with some degree of mercy along with the justice.
It's like, yeah, while I screwed up there and I'm going to try to learn and I'm not going
to do it again, but I'm not going to beat myself to death so that I can't get up again.
And so you do what you can to forgive yourself.
You know, it's a confusing time to live in in many ways because we have the birth control
pill now.
And that means reproduction has now become voluntary.
Well, it's a good time to reproduce.
Well, never because who would ever think about doing that?
It's so ridiculously irrational and complicated and the burden of responsibility
is so insanely high and you're never secure enough to have the proper place to bring children
into the world. And you have to get your career going and your intimate relationship and
maybe you have some struggle doing that. And one day you wake up and it's a bit late.
It's like, yeah, well, you're a product of your time.
And one of the prices that we're going to pay for having
birth control, for having reliable contraception,
is that some people are going to make the wrong decision
with regards to having children.
And then you view yourself as a product of your time.
And that's a catastrophe, because to be a product of your time
is in some ways a catastrophe, you know, because to be a product of your time is in some ways a catastrophe.
So, but there's other things to do in life and and auguring yourself into the ground with
regret and and and and self-recrimination is not useful, right? I mean, you have to
learn you less and you have to take your lumps, all of that. But have some mercy, you know. That's
it. You have said that the only moral absolute is always to tell the truth. What if you have
Anne Frank in the attic and the Gestapo on your doorstep, then I would say that there
has been a lot of lies that have got you to that point. So you may be in a situation where you're damned if you turn
right and you're damned if you turn left.
And what that means is you made a lot of mistakes along the
way.
So if the totalitarians are knocking at your door, if the
totalitarians are knocking at everyone's door, that means
everyone should have spoke up a lot sooner.
And then they wouldn't end up in a situation where the
Gestapo was at the door and Anne Frank was in the out was in the attic. So you're now and then you end up
in a situation where you've made so many mistakes that all you've got is hell around you.
And that was certainly the case in Amsterdam, sayer and in in when the Nazis came in on
I mean the Dutch are an admirable people. And I know they were invaded by the Nazis and
that was a terrible thing.
But many, many, many, many, many people
made many, many terrible moral errors
for all of that to occur.
And you have to be awake.
And do everything you can to make sure your society doesn't.
This is the answer.
You be awake and you make sure everything your society
doesn't lead to the point where the Gestapo's at your doorstep,
and you have Anne Frank in the attic.
It's a little late to be thinking then, I would say.
Why have confidence in an opinion when it could be wrong?
Well, partly because it could be right.
That's why it's better to think about opinions as tools,
or maybe just dispense with opinions altogether,
because who cares about your stupid opinion?
But what you want is tools to work in the world.
And you think, well, I have a tool, and it might work.
So like, let's say that you're going into negotiate
with someone while your toolkit is the conceptual structure
and the habits that you have that enable you
to construe the situation and to conduct the negotiation. Well, you have to have
confidence that your that your toolkit is appropriate or you wouldn't go out
there and test it. And you say, well, I might be wrong. It's like, yeah, but you're
not going to learn if you're wrong unless you go out there and test it. So you have
to have provisional. Look, let's say that you're, look. Let's say that you're using a hammer to hammer in a nail.
And you think, well, am I going to hit the nail?
Well, you aim at the nail and you hit it.
And you watch.
And if you didn't hit it quite right, then you aim
a little different.
So you have enough confidence to swing the hammer.
But that doesn't mean you're not paying attention
to the outcome.
So you want to have confidence. and maybe this is the best answer.
You don't want to have confidence in the opinion exactly.
You want to, you want to believe in the necessity of moving forward in the world with your limited
toolkit.
And also you want to make the, the vow, let's say, that as you implement your tools in the world that you're going to pay attention to
What happens and you're going to modify them as necessary as you move along?
That's the adoption of the hero myth again because that's you know, let's say your opinion is a little screwy
And so you laid out in the world and you get responses that aren't positive
It's like you think oh, okay. Well that didn't work quite right. The I'll go retool my opinion. And so you move out into the world, not as a collection
of opinions, but as a collection of tools, and as the process that can re-cast those tools.
And then you think, well, it's not so much that I have confidence in my opinions. I have,
I know that they're necessary to express them because sometimes the work and if
they don't work, then I can learn.
And that's, and that's the recipe for forthright action in the world.
Our daughter ended her life at 24 due to depression.
If someone is determined to end their life, how can one change their mind?
Oh, well, first of all, that's, I'm very sorry about that. That's a terrible thing.
Look, I had this friend.
Her.
Sorry. There's been a lot of depression in our family, so it's a question that cuts close to the
bone.
Anyways, I had this friend, a friend of my parents and her granddaughter committed suicide,
you know, she was just beating herself up about that.
What could have I done?
What could have I done differently?
This is the problem with suicide.
It leaves everybody behind thinking, oh my god, what could have I done?
I could have treated the person better.
I could have listened.
I could have been there.
It's like, and she was just beating herself up about this really feeling that
she wasn't a useful person that she'd failed as a grandmother. She's a really good person,
you know. And so I went for a walk with her and I said, and she's married and she likes
her husband and he's a really good guy. And I said, um, look, You're you're blaming yourself for the for your granddaughter suicide
It's like are you blaming your husband?
Are you sitting him down and telling him what a useless bastard he was as a grandfather because his granddaughter committed suicide and how he failed completely
She said no, I'd never do that. So I said well
Don't do it to yourself. No. People, depression is a terrible
thing. And many, many, many things cause it. And we don't understand. We, we understand
some of them, but lots of them we don't understand at all. You know, sometimes people get depressed
because they're really sick. We know that depression can be an inflammatory disease. It might be associated with autoimmune
dysfunction. There's lots of reasons that people get depressed and depressed people can
go places that are so dark you just cannot imagine it. And it isn't necessarily the case
that you can always rescue someone, you know. But drowning yourself in the aftermath of a suicide is not helpful.
There's a good room for self forgiveness there. Maybe you did some things you shouldn't have
done that were reprehensible. You don't want to beat yourself up. Remember the presumption of
innocence. Innocent until proven guilty. You have to apply that to yourself. I don't think
I think there are times when people are so depressed that there isn't anything that anyone can do.
You know, and the depressed person thinks, and this is probably the worst part of it,
the depressed person thinks everywhere I look, it's nothing but catastrophe.
Everywhere I look, it's nothing but catastrophe. And I can't see any way out of it.
I can't see any path forward whatsoever.
And then they think as well, and maybe it's the combination of these two thoughts that
really make people suicidal.
It's like, it's hopeless.
It isn't going to get any better.
No matter where I turn, there's no escape.
The suffering is unbearable.
And I'm absolutely no use whatsoever to anyone. It would be better for everyone if I was
just gone because I'm going, if I'm not so much of a burden now that it's going to destroy
their life, then I'm going to be that much of a burden in the future. And so, try to imagine
what that's like for people, but it's dreadful.
And there's lots of ways you get there.
And so, you can listen to people, you can desperately encourage them to seek the help they
need.
You know, like I've seen antidepressants work miracles on very, very many people.
Now, they don't work for everyone.
And they're not a panacea.
But, you know, they
have side effects and all of that. But one of the side effects of untreated depression
is that you kill yourself and there is no recovery from that. And the, the probability
is actually rather high. So you can go to war with them about antidepressants. If the
person can't get out of their depression and they're, and they're suicidal, it's like,
what do they have to lose? One month on antidepressants.
They'll know they might have to experiment longer because it would depend on,
you know, some people respond better to some classes of antidepressants than the others.
It's worth having a war with someone if they're in dire straits and they won't do everything
they can to get better.
ECT works, electric convulsive therapy works for intractable depression.
It's a terrible thing to contemplate, but the modern versions of ECT aren't
one flu over the cuckoo's nest.
And again, it's like, there's no coming back from death.
So, look, it isn't clear.
You can't rescue everyone.
People get sick and they die. And sometimes the way they die
looks like it's depression. Depression is a multifaceted phenomena. You can be there for them,
you can listen, you can watch, you can intervene, you can try to understand, you can hold them
accountable, you can do all of those things. But that, but
everyone has their own destiny, you know, and you're not omnipotent. And so sometimes
a catastrophe occurs, like your daughters, and then, and then you should try to drag the least amount of misery forward that you can.
Once you recover from your grief.
Yep.
I'm going to answer one more question.
Due to a recent incident, my company is making me undergo implicit bias training.
How should I come to terms with my possible firing when I refuse?
Look, there's no sense in burning yourself at the stake.
You know, if you're going to take a principled stance on something at work and you're going
to refuse, you have to get your
tools in order. You have to get your quiver full of arrows. You know, what the hell good is it
going to be for you just to get fired? I maybe have a family that depends on you. That's not helpful.
That doesn't mean I think you should be weak because you have a family. You should be stronger.
I would say, is your resume in order?
Is your CV in order? Is it updated? Have you sent out other job applications? Are you prepared?
Do you have a lateral move? Like this is a war, not a battle, and you don't want to lose.
And so, set yourself up and then make your case. And when you make your case, don't apologize,
but don't do it carelessly. You know, you need a lateral move because otherwise you're too
exposed. So, and if you're going to refuse, have your arguments at hand, you
know, have them in writing, make sure that you share them with the appropriate people. Don't make unnecessary enemies.
And do yourself the least amount of harm possible. Now look, having said that, you know, so you're
going to, you know, you're going to pay, you're either going to pay and you're going to go do
up implicit bias training and you're going to sell a bit of your soul to do that or
you're going to pay because you're going to refuse and you're going to take that price.
So you got price to pay both ways.
If you're going to refuse, do it intelligently, do it programmatically, do it philosophically,
do it strategically, right?
Stupid martyrdom is just stupid martyrdom.
It's not helpful.
So either maybe people you need to talk to,
there may need to be more than one of you, you know. So, you may need to make contact with the press.
Like, you got to be strategic about this, you got to be intelligent about it. You don't want to
just light yourself and fire and out of protest, because maybe there'll just be a pile of ashes
that people sweep up and go on with their idiocy. So, all right, everyone. Nice talking with you all. Thank you for the
questions. Come and see me if you want. If you go to Jordan Peterson, JordanBPeterson.com,
you can see the upcoming events. They've gone, they've been going real well. I'll talk about my book and about all the other things that I'm thinking about or not all of them, but some of the other things that I'm thinking about am I try to make every talk different.
Even though you know the outline is the same because I'm talking about my book.
I guess that's about it. Thank you for all the Patreon support. I know it's been a little while since this last Q&A. That's life, I guess, at the moment. And I'll try to do one
within the next month. I'm on the road, a lot I'll probably do with my laptop. So what
should I say in closing? Get your act together. Much as you can, there's things to do in the
world. And it would be good if everyone was out as you can. There's things to do in the world.
And it would be good if everyone was out there doing them. Let's see how we could
beat this old globe back into some reasonable shape or into better shape than
it's ever been. That would be lovely thing to do. So, goodbye for now. you you