The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - What To Do When You Have No Vision For Your Life

Episode Date: July 12, 2026

What do medieval alchemists, your recurring bad memories, and the reason you can't feel joy have in common? In this lecture, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson traces a single thread from Carl Jung's strangest work to a revolutionary discovery that emerged in four different scientific fields at once, one that changes how you understand every movie you've watched and every choice you've made. Along the way he reveals the writing exercise he built with colleagues from Harvard and McGill that can measurably lower your stress, the 90 minutes a week that determine whether a marriage survives, and the question our culture never asks anyone even once in their life. The night closes with a live Q&A where Dr. Peterson does not hold back on the state of Canada, and a story about a suit that changed more than he expected. Lectured filmed in Abbotsford, Canada on April 1, 2025 Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:50 Jung, Alchemy, and the Birthplace of Ideas 05:56 Why Science Only Emerged in the West 10:11 The Ethics Hidden Inside Science 14:53 Powerful Tools Demand Better People 18:22 You See the World Through a Story 21:58 Where Positive Emotion Comes From 24:02 Fiction Is Hyper Real 29:06 Deep Communication or a Failing Marriage 32:02 Raising Kids on the Edge 36:52 The 90 Minute Marriage Rule 39:53 The Self-Authoring Suite 43:54 Why Old Memories Won't Let You Go 48:03 Future Authoring: Who Could You Be in 5 Years? 58:51 The 7 Domains of a Meaningful Life 1:09:57 Up or Down: The Decision We Are All Making 1:15:53 Q&A: The State of Canada 1:24:12 Q&A: Drug Decriminalization 1:30:06 Q&A: The Kermit Suit Story Unlock the ad-free experience of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast and dive into exclusive bonus content on DailyWire+. Start watching now: http://dwpluspeterson.com/yt ALL LINKS: https://feedlink.io/jordanbpeterson // LINKS // Peterson Academy https://petersonacademy.com ARC https://www.arcforum.com Books - https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/books/ #JordanPeterson #JordanBPeterson #DrJordanPeterson #DrJordanBPeterson #DailyWirePlus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello, everybody. I'm pleased to release another lecture in my We Who Wessel with God collection. I plan to make this a Sunday ritual far into the foreseeable future. Today's topic, how can you become a good person? We're all dreaming up how we should act and we produce our theories. Our great storytellers aggregate those theories and portray them back to us in dramatic form. We imitate the hearer. of those stories. Thus, we move ever closer to being good. We can do this consciously, too,

explicitly, and aim at becoming the heroes of our own personal stories. On to the show. So a long time ago, it was probably in the mid to late 80s, I spent a lot of time reading, Carl Jung's work, the Swiss analytical psychologist, student of Freud, student of Nietzsche, both in equal proportions. Very profound person, incredibly imaginative, deep, deep thinker. Sort of thinker that frightens psychologists so badly, I would say they won't read him. And so, and I was reading his works on alchemy, which of all the things Jung wrote are the most difficult and the deepest. And he said something, he said a number of things that I found extremely fascinating.

He construed alchemy, the alchemical endeavor, which lasted thousands and thousands of years, as a kind of dream. It was Jung's idea, derived in part of the alchemical endeavor, which lasted thousands and thousands of years, as a kind of dream. part from Freud with influences from Nietzsche that are explicit ideas, you know, the ideas that we can state and that we understand most completely and can communicate most directly, had their origins in the imagination and in dreams. And that's a good way of understanding dreams, is that, so Freud sort of thought that dreams shed light on what you had repressed and did not want to face or hadn't integrated. And Jung believed that dreams were the birthplace of ideas.

Like, ideas have to come from somewhere, you know, and our notions of where we get our ideas are unbelievably shallow. You ask yourself a question. You think up the answer. Or do you? or does an answer appear to you? And if it appears to you, where did it come from?

And if you think it up, why didn't you know it to begin with? So, the source of ideas is extraordinarily mysterious. You know, Jung believed that ideas appeared in the same way. You know, if you walk into a kitchen and the table appears in front of you,

you don't really think that you conjured up the tent. table and it's not that much different in the realm of thought. If you ask yourself a question, you get an answer. There is the answer, but it isn't any more obvious that it was you that conjured it up than it is that it was you that conjured up the table when you walk into a room. In any case, you believe that the dream was the birthplace of the idea. Now, to think about it, there's another thing. you can think about, I suppose, is that, you know, there are things that, there are things you just

absolutely don't understand at all. You don't even know you don't know them, right? There are mysteries that are just absolutely so far beyond you that they're invisible. Then there's the things you know you don't know, and that's a large category of things too. It's not as large as the category of the things you don't know that you don't know, but it's pretty large. And then there's the things you sort of understand, and then there's the small handful of things you've actually got figured out. And there's a developmental progression from the realm of the absolutely unknown to the realm of the thoroughly explicit.

And the dream stands on the edge of the absolutely unknown. And that's partly why dreams are so mysterious. You think, well, you dream, you have a dream at night, or maybe you're daydreaming, but you have a dream at night, let's say. And you don't really understand the dream. you'd think, well, what is this dream doing? And why doesn't it make itself clearer? Why does it need to be interpreted, let's say?

And obviously it doesn't need to be, because you dream whether you interpret them or not, but you can interpret dreams, and it can be extremely helpful. I did a lot of dream interpretation when I was a therapist with my clients who dreamed a lot. And you don't have to interpret your dreams. They still function, even if you don't. But if you do, sometimes you can accelerate your development a lot. And it's analogous to the difference in some ways between reading a book, like a fiction book, let's say, which you can do and never think about the book at all. You can just read it.

Or you can read the book and you can think it through and you can analyze it. And, you know, there's additional value in the book if you also think it through and analyze it, which is partly the utility, let's say, of a humanities education or of the study of literature in general. The story has a function independent of your explicit interpretation. But if you're careful and you think and you collaborate with others and you discuss, then you can probe more deeply into the book. And in principle, that's a value. And same thing happens on the dream front. Now, Jung believed that he was trying to understand why the Western world developed the scientific

endeavor. Recently, 500 years ago, I mean, you could trace its roots back in some ways to the rational philosophy, let's say, of the Greeks, but that's even that's only 3,000 years. And in the entire history of humankind, that's like yesterday, right? We've been creatures genetically identical to ourselves for at least 350,000 years. And so 500 years or 3,000 years is just a tiny fraction of that. Why did science emerge in the West and nowhere else? Nowhere else in history.

And this baby doesn't like alchemy, I'd say. Jung believed that the alchemical endeavor, remember, that was the endeavor to make gold out of base metals, out of lead. But it was more than that. He believed that the alchemical endeavor was the manifestation of a dream. But a collective dream that lasted literally thousands of years. And the dream was an intuition that if you studied the transformations of the material world,

you could benefit. Now, animals don't do that. Animals don't systematically study the material objective world to benefit from it. We do that, and we had to figure out that you could do that, and then we had to figure out how to do that, and before we could figure out that you could do that, we had to dream up the notion that it might be a useful idea. Now, the philosopher's stone, which is what the alchemists were searching for,

was a miraculous substance, that would confer upon the user immortality, perfect health, and indefinite wealth. And you might think, well, that's a fiction or it's a delusion. But it's not. It's a hypothetical ideal. And it's a dream. And the dream is there's something hidden in the world of matter that if discovery, would bestow upon us longer lives, better health, and abundant wealth.

And that is what happened when we developed the scientific process. We learned to be healthier, we learned to live longer, and we learned to be spectacularly more wealthy. And so the groundwork for that endeavor was laid by this dream. By the time 500 years rolled around, the early scientists, Newton, Bacon, in particular, Newton in particular was an alchemist, and most of what he wrote was on alchemy and religion.

Physics was sort of a side venture for Newton. They were searching for the philosopher's stone too, but they formalized the new technologies that became the scientific endeavor. And then Jung believed what happened. There was an ethical element to the alchemical dream. the alchemists were wrestling with trying to understand what sort of people they would have to transform themselves into so that they could pursue the deepest mysteries in the best possible way.

You know, you actually do get trained that way if you're trained as a scientist. There's an ethical element to it, which is actually paramount. This isn't exactly formalized by scientists. It's more implicit. So one of the things, this is why I think someone like Richard Dawkins, for example, who's one of the world's most famous atheists, is actually a deeply religious man. And the reason I believe that is because he embodies a kind of ethic. And the ethic is that, well, here's part of it. There's an order in the material world.

That's a hypothesis. If you conduct yourself properly, you can understand that order. to conduct yourself properly as a scientist would mean that you follow what the what careful observation you follow the pathway that is laid down by careful observation and you don't deviate from it regardless of your personal concerns you have to put the pursuit of truth above all and any scientist who's worth his salt does that any scientist who doesn't do that never discovers anything All they do, in fact, is pollute the scientific endeavor and make things more difficult for everyone else. Then you have to believe that if you pursued the truth properly and assessed the logic in the world,

that that would be beneficial to you and to other people. Right? There's none of that's proved to begin with. Those are your starting assumptions. Those are the rules of the scientific game. Those are the religious rules of the scientific game. Now, a question that arises out of that is how do you make yourself into? to that kind of person.

And I would say, we don't know how to do that. That's why it's implicit in scientific training. I mean, my graduate supervisor at McGill, you know, he was a practical person. He helped his students learn how to conduct themselves so that they could communicate well, let's say, with other scientists, so that they could present their data well, so that they could move their independent careers forward in the practical sense. but he also insisted explicitly and by example that you didn't muck about with the data. So you couldn't gerrymander your statistics so that you got the result that you needed

so that you could publish the paper that you needed so that you could go to the right conference to get a job. If you do that, you're done as a scientist and so is everybody else who's relying on you. But it's a tricky thing to manage because you can do a study as a scientist and you can spend a year on it and it doesn't work. And you got nothing. And, you know, a year is a long investment and nothing isn't a good return. And you have to be willing to take that risk if you're going to actually discover something. And maybe it won't be a year.

It'll be five years of false trails, right? And you have to accept that. So how do you make yourself into that sort of ethical person? Well, there's a broader question under that, which is, well, how do you make yourself into an ethical person in general? Or even why should you bother? Well, in the scientific realm, if you're not ethical, you're not a scientist. You're the sort of narcissist who leads yourself and many other people astray, much to the detriment of the entire enterprise and to the broader society,

especially given the power of scientific tools now. Peterson Academy. Peterson Academy, if you want an actual education. With hand-selected professors from top universities around the world. Bringing the best professors together, making sure they're not censored in any way, giving them the audience and the remuneration and appreciation they deserve. And you were true to your word. You gave me absolute intellectual autonomy.

I have had it through every course. We figure we can offer people a high-quality university-level education for under $2,000. Well, congratulations, Jordan. It's honestly brilliant. I can't wait to enroll myself. I'll be doing that straight after this. Fanjo. So the question of how to make yourself an ethical actor is actually paramount in the scientific world,

even though we don't know the answer to it. And I would say it's equally paramount in the general world. Now, Jung, the alchemists were wrestling with this notion of what sort of person you'd have to be to discover the philosopher's stone. What attitude would you have to adopt? How would you have to construct yourself if you were going to pursue the truth?

When alchemy turned in, and there was a technical element to the alchemical enterprise as well, the alchemists were the earliest chemists, and they were playing around with matter and its transformations under conditions of heat and pressure, and they didn't have any idea what they were doing, but they were starting to play. And the technical side of science blew up like mad, starting 500 years ago. And so we cottoned onto a technique that enabled the investigation of the material world to progress at an exponential rate.

And here we are, and we ain't seen nothing yet. I mean, all of us have lived through technological transformations that are just a string of miracles. And now they're happening every day. And God only knows what the consequence of that's going to be. But Jung said, well, we developed the technological side of the enterprise, but we left the ethical side unconscious. And that's not good. Because as your tools become more powerful,

you better be better if you're going to use them because for obvious reasons if you're you know two-year-olds just by sake of example two-year-olds are the most violent human beings if you group two-year-olds together with other two-year-olds they fight and they steal and they bite and they kick they scream and they have cantrums

they're ready for university at that point And then they learn over the next few years, most of them, how to regulate themselves as social beings. But two-year-olds aren't very dangerous because they're this high and they can't do anything. So the fact that they're violent doesn't matter and uncontrolled doesn't really matter. You know, even if they get in a fight, two-year-olds fighting aren't going to do that much harmed each other. But the impulse is there. Well, we're not two-year-olds. We've got major league tools.

weapons and boy if we don't have our act together those things are going to kick back and that might be more true on the artificial intelligence front than it's being true of anything we've developed yet I mean the hydrogen bomb is a test case you know and so far we've been wise enough thank God not to use them and they're sufficiently terrifying like self-evidently so that not even Stalin was tempted to actually launch them, although there is evidence that he was quite tempted to use them. AI is more amorphous in that manner, because it isn't as evidently dangerous,

but we're going to teach hyper-intelligent machines to be like us, so we better be good. Well, how should you be good? Is there even any such thing? And the thing is we don't really have, we don't have a solid theory of that exactly. We're very confused about that. Most of us are, we're materialist determinists. That's the first problem.

We think that if we just gathered enough facts, we would know how to act. That's actually not true. It's technically untrue. It doesn't matter how many facts you gather. You can't figure out how to act from the facts, partly because there's an infinite number of facts. So the mere aggregation of facts does not make you wise. There needs to be more to it than that.

There's some other domain of knowledge that's necessary. Now, when I wrote Maps of Meaning, I started to figure something out. I made a hypothesis in that book that I've been working on differentiating for still. I'm doing that now on stage, still trying to work it through. I started to understand that there really were two separate domains of knowledge. They had to overlap, but they weren't reducible to one another.

And one is the domain of scientific investigation. It's the domain of the objective. You know, when people say, well, there's nothing but the objective facts, but as I said, that runs into a major impediment because there's an infinite number of facts, and you can't orient yourself in the world of facts unless you sequence the facts in terms of their relative importance. And as soon as you sequence the facts in terms of their relative importance,

you're making a value judgment, right? Because to say one thing comes before another, that's a value judgment. To say that this is more important than that, that's a value judgment. And it turns out you can't even perceive the world without making a value judgment. judgment. You have to decide where to point your eyes every second. Just to see, you cannot see the world without imposing a structure of value on it. There's a revolutionary discovery. It's emerged in about four different disciplines over the last 30 years. No one really understood that that was the case, but that's being demonstrated incontrovertibly. There's no among people who know their field, AI engineers, robotics engineers, literary critics, and biologists and psychologists studying perception. They all came to the same conclusion.

That's the conclusion. You see the world through a hierarchy of value. A hierarchy of value when you describe it is a story. You see the world through a story. You have to see the world through a story. In fact, part of the reason we like stories so much is because we have to see the world through a structure of value. And stories are how we transmit that.

for example, when you go see a movie, what you're doing is you're adopting the value structure of the character you're watching on the movie screen. You can imagine it. Imagine a Batman and the Joker. That's a very good example. You know, Batman is a hero. He's a positive figure, complex positive figure, because there's a darkness to him, but he's a complex positive figure. And the Joker, obviously, evil clown figure, he's satanic, essentially. And if you're watching Batman, well, then you embody the ethos of the hero, and that's the experience that you're having in the theater, is the author sketches out for you the aims of the hero, the targets, and you adopt those targets, and then your emotions are guide, your emotions are guides to

the trajectory of that aim. So, for example, if a hero's aiming at something, you're watching a movie and he makes a move towards that goal. Successfully, you'll feel positive emotion. He'll act that out on stage, but you'll feel that because that's what positive emotion is for, by the way. Positive emotion indicates to you that you're making progress towards a valued goal. That's a good thing to know too, because it means if you don't have any goals in your life

or if your goals are spread out and fragmented or trivial, you'll have hardly any positive emotion. You have to unify your goals, and you have to have a high-order goal, and you have to be able to progress towards it, or you have no positive emotion. And then if the hero is facing impediments and complexity in his pursuit of his aims, he'll act out negative emotion, frustration, anger, disappointment,

anxiety, that's the biggest one. And in the case of failure, depression, pain, disappointment, and depression, and you'll feel that too. And what you're doing is you're trying to replicate emulate, imitate the aim of the hero, and to experience the emotions that are associated with that, so you can evaluate that as a pathway. So if you see a romantic adventure, you might find that stimulating and exciting, and you think, that's a good way to live, right? Or if you're watching an anti-hero, the Joker or a horror movie, you might think, that's a really good thing to

avoid. And then the movie helps you sort of sketch out the domain of things that you should desire and approach and the domain of things that you should cast aside and avoid. It's teaching you how to separate the wheat from the chaff. And so the domain of knowledge that orients you ethically is the domain that is literary. It's fiction. It's fiction. And we, modern people, we contrast fiction and fact. Fiction isn't real. Fact is real. It's like, yeah, fiction is real too.

It's real like an abstraction is real. You know, you might say, well, James Bond isn't real. It's like, no, James Bond is hyper real. It's like mathematics. Is mathematics real? It's like, no, it's hyper real. It's more real than reality, and you can tell that because as soon as you're a stellar mathematician, the whole world opens up to you. I mean, all our computational power is a consequence of mathematical mastery.

It might be an abstraction, but that doesn't make it not real. And fiction is the same. Fiction is abstraction, but that doesn't mean it's not real. It's hyper-real. You don't go to a movie to see the same old thing. You can just see that at home. You go to a movie to see what's real distilled into what's most real. You know, I've recommended to people frequently that if they're interested in fiction,

they might consider reading Dostoevsky. And I would say, read Crime and Punishment, because it's like the world's greatest thriller. It's an amazing book. It's incredibly plotted, tense characterization, amazing conflict, brilliant psychological analysis. But it's also a fast-paced thriller. Like, he really nailed the noir crime genre.

And Dostoev's characters are hyper-reel. They're like you except expanded and multiplied, right? Or you could think, like, his villains are like, you take 10 villains and you mix them together and you pull out the hyper-villain, and, you know, that's Raskolnikov in crime and punishment. And this is what happens in movies. You get distillations of story, of character.

You get distillations of character. That's what fiction is. It's distilled character. A character, that isn't the world of facts. Character is a pattern of action and attention in the world. It's a different domain. How should you, what should you attend to? That's a question.

What should you attend to? What should you orient yourself? towards and how should you conduct yourself? How should you act? The world of literature, fiction, that's its domain of exploration. Then there's a hierarchy of fiction. And you all know that. Everyone knows that. And you might say, well, why is this relevant? You know, who the hell cares about the domain of literature? I'm interested in stories, but so what? It's like, well, yeah, you live in a story. You live a story. So that's so what? That's another thing I learned from you.

He thought that certainly part of the purpose of psychotherapy, but really part of the purpose of enlightenment itself in life was the discovery of what story was living through you or that you lived. Because there's a story. It might be a tragedy. It might be a fragmented tragedy, which I wouldn't recommend.

It might be a fragmented tragedy that's seriously aiming down, living through you. You probably want to figure that out because it's possible you don't want to live out a seriously fragmented tragedy that's aiming down. You know, there's the pleasures of martyrdom in that. Poor me,

everything's going from bad to worse. Look at how much I have to bear. The whole world is conspiring against me. You know, and you can make that true, but that's just a pathway to, you know, hell. And maybe you don't want to go there. And you might think, well, this has nothing to do with me. It's like you're either living out a great story or a pathetic one.

There's no non-story root here. And then you might ask, well, then what's the greatest story that could grip you or that you could live by? And that is the central question. It's the central question of literary criticism. It's actually the central religious question. And I sort of mean that by definition. So here's a way of thinking about that. You know, if you come home after work, you turn on the TV, you want to watch, that's sitcom maybe.

You know, it's shallow. It's shallow entertainment. It's not nothing, but you know it's not deep. And you know the same thing if you're listening to music. You know, there's the kind of music that sort of catches your attention. The first time you hear it, you like the song. But once you've heard it three times, you never want to hear it again. And then there's another class of music where you might not understand it the first time you listen to it.

You listen to it, you know, five or ten times. You start to understand it. And there's some pieces of music you can just listen to forever. They're deep. And stories are like that. There are shallow stories. And there are deep stories. And you all know that, right?

And it might be that after a hard day at work, you just don't have the mental acumen for a deep story. And you just want something to preoccupy yourself. But now and then, you know, you might be in the mood for something with a bit more depth. The same thing sort of applies on the conversational front. You know, you can have a shallow conversation with the people that you know, stay on the surface of things. And sometimes that's just there to pass the time and maybe pleasantly enough. But, well, that's not going to work with your wife,

not over the long run or your husband. Like, because you have to live with each other and because you have to mutually confront the terrible problems that make up life, if you only communicate in a shallow way, you won't form a relationship or a personality that has the resilience and wisdom to deal with terrible situations. And so you have to engage in deep communication with your partner, or you will suffer the consequences when a deep problem comes along. And the reason that you have to look deep into the domain of ethics, let's say,

into the fictional domain, into the domain of character, is because one reason is because, look, difficult things are coming your role. way. 100% certainty. And you're either going to be there to dance with them when they make themselves manifest or they're going to come along and there's going to be no you there and it's just going to grind you up. And even something that might have only hurt you can just destroy you instead. And that seems like not a very good medium to long term plan. So that's the reason for depth. And you kind of know this too, eh, because you'll go to movies, you go to see horror movies, for example. Or you go see movies about serial killers. You'll go to movies that disgust you and upset you and frighten you, paralyze you even.

And you think, well, what the hell are you doing? Why in the world would you choose voluntarily and pay for the opportunity to go and expose yourself to a bunch of terrible things? And the answer is, because part of you knows that there's some wisdom in going to voluntarily expose yourself to terrible things. Because terrible things are coming your way. And you better get used to it and maybe even get good at it. And one of the ways you can do that is to practice a bit. And fiction, simulation, because fiction is simulation, can help you simulate that. And you don't want to, you don't have the, want to have something terrible that happens to.

be the first difficult thing you ever contended with. Like, that's just a recipe for disaster. And that's a good thing to know about your kids. It's like, well, how much should you protect your kids? It's like, you're not there to protect your kids. You're there to help them learn how to confront everything that's coming their way. And hopefully to master that. And that means that you have to courageously expose them to the whole world.

And that's a terrible thing, you know. There's this great sculpture by Michelangelo, Pieta, it's Mary. And she has the body of her son, Christ, as an adult, in her arms after he's been taken off the cross, and he's all broken to bits. And she's displaying him. That's a good way of thinking about it to the world. And Michelangelo carved that thing, I think, when he was 24, which is really something, because it's a piece of work. I always think of it as the female crucifix. Why?

Well, because it's a portrait of a mother offering her broken child to the world. Well, that's what you do as a mother. Or you're what breaks your child. You know, that's a vicious choice. Freud knew this, you know. He knew that one of the central dangers in families was an Oedipal. relationship. And in an Edipal relationship, the protective capacity of the mother is over-emphasized. And so she holds the child too cloaks. And there can be a sexual element to that, because when things

get out of hand, all sorts of things get out of hand at the same time. And in the Edipal situation, the mother encourages the child to remain infantile. And then she becomes the destructive force, Because no infantile adult can, can what? No infantile adult can, well, certainly can't thrive because you have to be an adult to deal with the world because the world's difficult. And so you have to prepare your children to deal with that. And you do that by pushing them forward.

You know, maybe right on the edge of their ability to develop. And you have to establish a relationship with your child to do that. because you have to know how much they can take, right? Some kids, man. When I used to take my little kids to the playground, when I took Michaela to the playground, she would sort of hang around my legs for a while. You know, she'd sit, stand off to the edge,

and watch the other kids. And it would take her two or three minutes before she'd start moving away, you know, into the playground. And then she'd be out there playing. She had that watchful cautiousness. And Julian, my son, he was like a puppy that you hold over water. If you hold a puppy over water,

their legs will be going before they hit the water. And that was, he was like on the playground. You'd take him to the playground. And before you put him on the ground, his legs were already moving, and he was just gone. You know, and so different kids have different paces. And the rate at which they can expose themselves to novel and dangerous situations varies.

And there's temperamental variability there, just as there is with all people. And you have to establish a relationship with a person to see where the proper edge is for them, and then you have to keep them on the edge. That's what you want to do and should do and would find most exciting and attractive

if you managed also with your wife or husband. So you want to keep them on their toes. And that's what they want too. And, you know, the word Eve, you know, Adam and Eve, Eve, the word Eve means beneficial adversary in Hebrew. you think, well, what does that mean? It's like, well, it's like a sparring partner. Or maybe it's one-on-one pick-up basketball, and you have to pick an opponent.

It's like, you could pick someone, you could just stomp, and then you'd win. Or you could pick someone who's a match for you, or maybe even a little bit better at some things. And so they keep you on the edge, that edge of development. And that's an exciting place to be. It's a challenging place to be. And if the game gets a little rough, then, you know, things can go too far. But fundamentally, you want to be in that zone. It's called the zone of proximal development.

That's the place where you're learning optimally. And if you're challenged, if you're dancing with someone properly, then you're in the zone of proximal development. That's also the zone of play. Tammy touched on that a little bit tonight when she was talking. You know, she said that one of the things she realized was that you couldn't enter that domain of play if there were issues between you that were not thoroughly negotiated through. And that's a really useful thing to know. I knew as a clinician, I noted that with my clients,

they had to spend about 90 minutes a week in business discussion with their wives, let's say, or their husbands, to clear out just the mechanical issues that, arose from the difficulties of joint life. Economic issues, issues of household maintenance, how to deal with the kids, like day-to-day practicalities, you know? And it's not that surprising because running a household is as complex as running a small business

and the notion that you'd have to spend a certain amount of time every week dealing with, let's say, managerial and administrative issues. It's sort of self-evident when you think about it that way. But it's also very interesting to know, and I do think it's true that if you don't do that, well, two things happen. You don't get to play. That's not good.

But then the other, this is the other thing that happens because you might say, well, I don't want to do that because difficult things come up. It's like, well, that's for sure, because life's difficult. And my advice, I suppose, for my clinical clients was, well, you could either spend 90 minutes a week talking to your wife or you can spend 90 minutes a week talking to her divorce lawyer for, you know, $300 an hour for 10 years. while you fight over your kids. Those are your options.

Or, you know, if you don't make it to the divorce court, you can just leave all these things that should be talked about undone, and then your whole life will degenerate into a kind of abysmal complexity of, what? Confusion and bitterness, and there's no play in that. That's for sure. There's just an ever-accelerating agent,

and if things go badly enough, the desire just to hurt each other, that just seems like a very bad idea. So you spend 90 minutes a week, discussing how to keep things straight and where you're both aiming and why you're both aiming in that direction and how you do it jointly. Okay, so back to the dream and the story.

Well, the literary endeavor is the dream of, It's the collective dream. That's a good way of thinking about it. We're all dreaming up how we should act. And our great storytellers aggregate our theories about how we should act and portray them back to us. They do that in movies. They do that in books.

They do that in TV shows. Anything that's got that fictional and dramatic end is the reflection back to us of our dreams about how we should act. How might you make that practical? Taking a page from Jung, Jung said, you're going to act out a story. It might be a tragedy. You should figure out what your story is and you should figure out what you want it to be.

And then maybe you could act that out instead. So I made these exercises with my colleagues. My former graduate supervisor, Robert Peel, who is a very good guy, who I still work with. He's in his mid-80s now. And a student of mine at Harvard, who was an MIT trained engineer, Daniel Higgins. And we talked through this sort of thing a lot and we wanted to do something practical about it and we had some rules for how we were going to proceed practically when we were developing psychological interventions and the rules were we had to build an intervention that wouldn't hurt anyone. That's the first thing you should do if you're a medical practitioner or a clinical practitioner. Your first rule should be don't do something stupid that will hurt people. That's the Hippocratic oath, you know. Um, and yes, well, yeah, the other thing that you learn as a wise social scientist as well is that just because you think your stupid thing will help people doesn't mean it will. Because there's way more ways to hurt people than order to help them.

And your mere good intentions, that's nothing. So I'll give you an example of that. So for a while, psychologists put psychopaths in prison in group therapy. Yeah, well, see, look, there's some wisdom. there, you can see why that maybe wasn't such a good idea. And the reason it wasn't a good idea was because they got a lot better at being psychopaths with all that practice. And so, and now it's actually quite well documented because, you know, dealing with antisocial people is a real problem. And psychologists and other professionals have tried to crack that problem for a long time. And one of the things they definitely learned was don't group psychopaths together so that they can communicate and

don't teach them psychological tricks. So, you know, and it sounds like a good idea. Take the poor psychopaths, let them unburden their soul, walk them through the psychotherapeutic process with other people. Everyone will win. It's like, yeah, especially the psychopaths, as it turns out. So that's just one example. So we wanted to build tools that wouldn't hurt anybody. We wanted to build them so that they were extremely inexpensive and widely distributable and scalable and would require no administrative overhead or intermediation, no supervision. And we wanted to do all that at a profit so that we could continue generating more tools and also generate enough capital to market the resultant programs. And so the first program we built was the self-authoring suite. And so I'll

just tell you about it a bit. It's something you might think about doing. Like, you don't have to do it, But you have to do something like it. And you do do something like it, you're either going to do it badly or well, and you might as well do it well, and you might as well do it consciously, because otherwise you'll do it badly and unconsciously, and that's not as good.

And it takes a lot more time, and there's a lot more misery along the way, so you might as well do it consciously. One of the things you do as a psychotherapist is you help people flesh out a vision for the future, and you help them straighten out the story of their, past. And story is like a map, I suppose. It's a description of the territory with an indication of how you should conduct yourself while you're traversing the territory. And in the self-authoring suite, there are three

exercises, and the first one helps you deal with your past. Now, some people, this is germane to rule nine. If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely. If old memories still upset you, if they still grip you, they come back involuntarily, it means that there are holes in your map of the past. There are places you've been that you went to accidentally that were not good places and you don't know how the hell you got there. And the wise, unconscious parts of your mind that are concerned with threat, they don't like that. They think, Your map of the world was faulty enough so that you deviated into this hellish place once before, and you don't know why.

So that means it could happen again. And so insofar as that part of your mind is convinced that it could happen again, because you don't know what happened, it'll never let you forget. You can't forget anything you don't understand, especially if it hurt you. So in the past authoring program, this is what you would do in therapy, which one of the things you might do in therapy is we have you break your life down into seven epochs. You can break it down however you want. You know, we kind of naturally do that if you tell the story of your life to someone.

When I was in elementary school, when I was in junior high school, when I met my wife, my first relationship. However, that appears to you. Imagine you broke your life down into seven sections and then said, well, just write down the most significant things that happened to you during those times. Negative and positive. And then why do you think the negative things happened? And what were you doing right so that the positive things happened? And how could you do more of that and less of the things that got you in trouble? And that's worth revisiting, you know, because some of the things you do when you're like 17 or 16 or 5 or 30. You know, you were young and you didn't know what the hell was going on and you did stupid things. and now maybe you're older and somewhat wiser,

and you can go back and take a look and you can think, well, here's how I should have conducted myself. And if I conduct myself like that, improved me going forward, things will work better. And the part of your mind that keeps track of how unstable your existence is will be very pleased to see you sort those things out. And that's very good for your health, by the way, because one of the ways your brain computes,

how stressed you should be, average, is by computing how many terrible things have happened to you in the past that you don't know how to fix. And the more of those there are, the more your brain thinks that's how dangerous the world is. And the more dangerous the world is, the more you're on edge and stressed. And stress makes you old. Like, the more stressed you are, the faster you will age. There's no distinction between those things. And so if you can clean up your past, you lower your levels of stress, you improve your minimal.

functional and you decrease the rate at which you age. Plus, you won't be plagued by horrible memories, and you should be able to move forward with more effectiveness. So that's a pretty good deal, and you can do that badly. And so one of the instructions we have in the self-authoring program is, don't be writing this down perfectly. It's like, what the hell do you know? And you're not a professional writer anyways, and so just get it down.

As stupidly as necessary. And it'll improve as you write through it. You can edit it and clean it up, make it more coherent. And you want to work on it until you think, now I've got it, because you want to have it, because it's your bloody life. And so you want to have it. And then the future authoring program, this is the one we did the most research on, there was a fair bit of evidence before we made these programs that if you got people to write about their lives, that that did produce improvements in physical and psychological.

health and that those improvements were proportionate to the degree that deeper understanding had been reached. It wasn't a consequence of emotional expression or catharsis. It was a consequence of coming to a more sophisticated understanding of how you got to where you were and the ability, development of the ability to protect yourself against that as you were going forward. Why do you remember the past? So that you can duplicate things that worked in the past and so that you can cease to do the stupid things that hurt you in the past in the future. You don't remember the past to keep a record of it. You remember the past so you can extract out useful information going forward. Well, that's the story of your life. That

useful information going forward, that's the story of your life. On the future side, so here is, imagine there's a couple of different ways of conceptualizing yourself. You sort of conceptualize yourself as a clockwork robot that's driven forward by deterministic impulses and needs and drives. And you're sort of a machine, a deterministic machine, driven forward by causal processes in the world. That's the modern metaphor for a human being. And it's wrong. It's wrong partly because no machine that works like that can survive into the future because the future is unpredictable. And so if you're just an automaton, you'll do the same thing that you did in the past,

but the future isn't the same as the past. So that's not going to work. So whatever you are, it's not that. It's also not exactly the case that what you confront is a world of objects that drive you forward. What you seem to confront, what your consciousness is for, is to take the possibility that's in front of you, and to determine how it might be shaped. Now, you know this.

You wake up in the morning, and you're not thinking about the furniture in the bedroom. You're not thinking about the objects around you. You're thinking, oh, it's a new day, and maybe you're happy about that, maybe you're not, but you're definitely thinking it's a new day, and you're starting to grapple with the possibilities of the day, right? Because the day is a set of unrevealed possibilities. That's what it is. It's not a set of determined objects. It's a set of unrevealed possibilities.

and you have a certain degree of choice in relationship to that set of possibilities. And if you have any sense when you're sitting there in bed, you're trying to figure out how to turn that realm of possibility into the actuality that you would like it to be. Now, you can be all bent and warped in that pursuit because maybe you're angry and bitter and resentful, and all you can do is conjure up images of how you could make your life worse or someone else's and extract out the revenge that goes along with that.

Or you could be thinking, you know, seize the day. What could I do with this expansive possibility that's in front of me? That'll certainly be true on a daily basis, and it's true in a weekly basis and monthly and yearly. It's this tremendous expanse of potential in front of you, and you're called upon to grapple with it. To what end? That's the question.

That's always the question. To what end? To what end? That's the question of fiction. Towards what end? Hero or villain? There's a choice. And that's just the beginning of the choice.

To what end? Well, the future authoring program helps people figure that out. So it's based in part on a prayer. I think thought, by the way, is secularized prayer. Because this is what you do if you pray. You ask yourself a question that you want the answer to. You have to want the answer. You actually have to want the answer.

And that's a dangerous place to start. You know, because you might ask yourself, do you want to know what your wife thinks? And generally the answer to that is, no, not really. But probably it'd be better if you knew. Even though it would mean there was a lot of work in front of you, might be work that would be good for you to do. You know, and that and vice versa, of course.

What might you pray for, let's say? Well, you might think, well, if I could have, if I could be who I could be, and if I could have what I needed and wanted, who would I be and what would that look like? And this is a question, and our culture is remarkably bad at this, like miraculously bad at this. We never asked people this question, not seriously, not even once, in their whole life. And that is a kind of miracle of stupidity. Because there isn't a more important question, and so this exercise helps you grapple with that. It's like, here's the deal.

There's a gospel phrase that underlies some of this conceptually. Knock and the door will open, ask and you will receive, seek and you will find. You think, well, there's no way that's true. It's like, maybe you're not asking with enough commitment. Because if you really want the answer to a question, it means, you really want the answer. That means you'll give up anything to get the answer. And that's a hell of a thing to decide. Especially when the answer is going to be a little on the unsettling side. Because you can sit on the edge of your bed and you can think, what stupid things am I doing to muck up my life?

And if you want to answer, you'll get it. So generally, you don't ask the question, but you could. In this exercise, you're asked to put yourself into a particular state of mind. It's like a meditative state of mind. It's not any kind of, you know, Zen Buddhist, Western, mystical, you know, West Coast, California, mystical exercise. It's just, it's pretty straightforward. It's like, just imagine for a moment that would be okay if things were set right around you, despite all your flaws. Just give yourself the benefit of the doubt.

what would you say? As an act of mercy, I suppose. Who could you be in five years? If you could be who you wanted to be, what would that look like? Just in principle. Let yourself dream. That's the reference back to the dream.

Let your imagination run to daydream like a kid. Five years from now, you can be who you want to be. You can have what you need and want, but you have to figure out what it is. You have to allow yourself to envision what it is. And that's dangerous too,

because once you know what you want and need, you can deny it to yourself. You can betray yourself. And so people will break rule three. Do not hide unwanted things in the fog. We hide from ourselves what we most deeply want and need because we're afraid we'll betray ourselves in the pursuit. And fair enough, because you betray yourself,

but it's a very bad strategy. Because you will not get what you want less you aim for. and you will not aim for it if you don't know what it is. And you won't know what it is unless you let yourself in on the secret. Okay, so write for 15 minutes. What do you want? What do you need? And who could you be?

Don't edit. Don't criticize. You're not going to get it right anyways. But you can sketch out an approximation, right? And that's not bad. That'll put you farther ahead than you are now. And then you can work on it again in a year or two years when, you know, you're a little sharper because you've moved a little farther down the path. Any plan that's conscious and thought through is better than no plan. And so you might think, well, I'd make a stupid

plan. It's like, fair enough. Make a stupid plan. Implement it. Then you'll find out why it's stupid. And then you can make a better plan. And that's life, man. It's a successive sequence of stupid plans that get somewhat better as you proceed. And so, so if you don't make a stupid plan, well, that's right. So you sketch out what you want. Now you've got something to aim for. That's useful because as we already pointed out, if you're not moving towards something that you want to aim at, you don't have any positive emotion. And that means you're hopeless. And so if you set a goal and you see yourself moving towards the goal, now you have hope. And that's a pretty good deal in a that's rife with suffering to have hope, you know, and hope is a good bulwark against catastrophe.

And so if you're aiming at something you regard as noble and worthwhile, now you have hope. And then you can break it down so that even someone who lacks talent as much as you could make some progress in that direction. And it turns out that's all you really need to do, because progress feeds on itself and starts to accelerate. And so, you know, if you set your goal and you're moving slowly to begin with, as long as you're moving forward, you're going to move faster and faster. And that's an iron law of reality, just like if you're aiming down, you'll aim down faster and faster. And so the next part of the exercise is the reverse. It's like, okay, now we have a vision laid out, positive vision.

You can pursue that. It's got to be something like something you'd commit to, you know, a game you'd like to play if it could only make itself realized. It has to justify the sacrifices that would go along with its pursuit. And you have to be convinced of that. It has to be an honest game. Then you can do the reverse. You can think, okay, if you took stockier faults, which you know of, most of them, some of them anyways, and you really let that get out of hand, what sort of hell could you have in five years?

And you want to make that concrete so you know, you know, meth, addiction, alcoholism, serial affairs of the most tawdry type, catastrophic failure at business, I don't know, whatever your vice happens to be. And you want to think that through. It's like, okay, if I just let myself go, what's the nature of the hell I would find myself in? And you want to write that down. Because then the next time you're tempted in that direction, you can remember. That's where this leads. And it leads away from the place I want to go. How about I don't do it? well, then you have a place to aim from and a place to run away from, and that puts you in a pretty motivated position. And you need to be in a pretty motivated position because there's lots of obstacles to get the hell out of the way.

And then you might say, I had clients who said, well, I don't really know what I want. I don't know what to do. I don't know where the meaning is to be found in life. And so I thought about that for a long time, and I thought, well, where do people find meaning? You know, just on average. It's like, well, here's seven ways of breaking your life into parts. Most people want an intimate relationship. Now, maybe you don't.

You probably do. But maybe you don't, you know, and maybe it's fortunate for someone else that you don't. But usually it's usually a bitter lie that you don't. But maybe you're misanthropic and better off on yourself by yourself. say in every single person has to do all seven of these things but they're good rules of thumb especially if you don't know which way is up it's like here's some ways that might be up have a relationship okay if you could have the relationship you wanted what would it look like and this has to be there has to be some detail in this and you can

imagine this fairly concretely imagine that you're sitting down to dinner at your with your family just for an hour ordinary day and it goes really well and you'll have a little about that. It's like, what does that look like? Well, the food's good, let's say. Maybe you even get served something you'd like to eat without a lot of bitterness as a side dish. And, you know, maybe your kids are there and they're polite. They contribute to the conversation and they're thankful to the person who made the meal. Imagine that. And you communicate a little bit, you know, and maybe there's a bit of game in that, little play in that, you know, and nobody's on their phone. or if they're on their phone, they're on their phone judiciously.

You know, I don't know, whatever your vision is, but that's very concrete. It's kind of mundane in a way, you know, but you're going to have dinner 10,000 times in the rest of your life. It's going to be 10 to 15,000 times, 15,000 hours. You might as well get that right. You know, how you're treated when you walk through the door after you work all day. These are all parts of an intimate relationship.

You might as well have a vision for that. You could always share that. with your partner and join your visions together and maybe you could both be who you need to be and get what you want. Family. Cammy has another story that she tells about how she decided to work on her relationship with her father and her sisters and put that in order. You know, and she did that when she was like 45, pretty, you know, relatively late in life, but she made it a priority and it worked. And so for 20 years, she had a great relationship with her sisters and her father, and that had cascading positive consequences.

It's like, put your family in order. First of all, figure out what that would look like, and you might have some miserable son of a bitch in your family that there's just no moving forward with. And like that happens, you know, you get people who are so ensconced in their misery that there's no possibility of communication. It's like, okay, well, you're going to have to walk around that person.

And, you know, and that happens. I'm not trying to be. you know, naively optimistic about this, but most of the time the people who are in your family are no worse than you. And so, and they'd be actually kind of happy if you made it a priority to sort things out. And one of the ways you can do that is to really listen to them. And that's true with people in general. But that's a good goal. Put your family in order. What do you want on the friendship front? You know, it's good to surround yourself with people who are happy when things are going well for you and who commiserate with you genuinely when things aren't so good.

And it's okay to have friends like that and you could make that a goal. And you might think, well, that means I would have to not associate with certain people. And I would say, well, maybe they need to learn that. Because if they're helping you aim down when you're trying to aim up, that's not so good for you and it's not so good for them. So a little judgment on that front, you know, if it's not, narcissistic? It's a good thing, not a bad thing. You have a plan for your job or your career? Job is something you have to do to keep body and soul together. You wouldn't necessarily pick it.

It doesn't necessarily have to be intrinsically meaningful. But you're pulling against the traces and you're contributing to the community and you're making enough money so that you can support your family and so good for you. And a plan for that would be all right. Maybe you're a bit more fortunate and you have a career. And so you have a job that has some intrinsic meaning and you can develop that too. But either way, job or career, why don't have a plan? You know, I worked with people in my clinical practice. One plan we often made was, let's see if we can figure out how to make you three times as much money in three years. Like what would it take to do that? And that was an interesting game to play, and it often required a certain degree of, you know, radical movement on the part of the

person's involved, but it was almost invariably possible. You know, it took a lot of work. And A lot of patching up of CVs, you know, a lot of re-education and a lot of planning, a lot of willingness to put yourself out on the job market and to learn how to do an interview and to both become and present yourself as the sort of person that an employer would be happy to take a risk on. And development of the ability to find an employer had enough sense to want that, right? It's not an easy thing to manage, but you're not going to manage it unless you give it a shot. And there's no reason that you can't do it in a sophisticated way. People are successful from time to time. One of them could be you. Perhaps if you'd allow it, how are you going to educate yourself?

There's a multitude of ways to do that. So you stay on that developmental edge. How do you take care of yourself physically and mentally? Like you take care of someone else that you cared for. How do you regulate temptation, drug and alcohol? all abuse, you know, the kind of temptations that are out there. Maybe you drink. Well, what kind of drinker do you want to be? You know, you want to be Barney Gumble from Simpsons? You know, do you want to approach your vice with a bit of sophistication? That's worth thinking

through. You might as well have a plan for it. Maybe it means you can't drink at all. Depends on what you want and who you want to be. We added another component, which We haven't worked into the program yet. It's like, what should you do on the civic front? You know, because you have a civic responsibility. Maybe it's just to your family, just. That's quite a lot. But then you can have to take some responsibility for the broader community

because someone has to. And if it isn't you, it'll be some crazy woke bastard. And so, well, and so that's the, that's part of this self-authoring process. What is it, what is it part of? What's part of developing a vision? Vision's a map. Vision's the story of your life. It's a map.

the past, it's a map for the future, it's the story that you live in, it's the structure that directs your attention and aims your action. And you need to develop that. It's going to, you're going to inhabit it one way or another. If you're hedonic and chaotic, it just means that you inhabit a world of fragmentary narratives. You're just gripped by one whim after another. And it's a counterproductive way to live. And if you don't develop a coherent vision for yourself, you'll be the pawn of other people or your whims.

Those are the alternatives. And that's a story too. Like that's the story of someone who's immature and hedonically oriented. That's the story of Peter Pan, you know. Refused to grow up and live in a world of fantasy. Or there's the slave story because if you're not the author of your own ideal, then you're playing a bit part in someone else's story. And they might not have given you the best part. And so, you know, and you can think, too, if the world isn't laying itself out the way you would want it to, if you had your choice, then maybe you're not overlaying the proper structure of interpretation on it.

And then you have to ask yourselves, like, how would I have to contend with the possibility that's in front of me so that the things that would justify my life with all its suffering, how would it lay? How could that lay itself out? So that would work for me? You know, because we all have difficult things to contend with. And we'll have very many difficult things to contend with. And in all probability, you need a reason to contend with them so that you don't descend into like an abyss of bitterness. And maybe you don't have to, because maybe you could structure

the way that you're interacting with the world in a manner that was sophisticated enough so that you could have a great romantic adventure. and it would be of high enough quality so that all of the difficulty associated with it would be, well, optimally, that would be part of the game. You know, when you're playing basketball, you don't put the hoop down where you can just drop the ball through it.

You want to set it up high enough so it's a bit of a challenge to make the shot. It's like, well, how much challenge do you need in your life? Maybe a lot. Maybe enough to justify its suffering. That's a lot of challenge. You know, maybe you have to see yourself as someone who can overcome even the ultimate in obstacles in order to reconcile yourself to existence. And maybe that's what you're like in the deepest recesses of your soul.

And that's the deepest religious claim in some sense, is that that is who you are. You've forgotten it or you're unwilling to realize it. Maybe you're unwilling to take responsibility for it. But it's nonetheless the truth. And I would say, too, that ties the whole story back to the beginning of this talk, too, which is, well, Jung's insistence that, you know, we blew up our technological ability and left our ethical ability primitive. Because what happens if we blow up our ethical ability to the same degree that we've blown up our technological ability? It means that everyone has to wake up to some degree and become developed enough to deal with the tools that we've produced. You know, or I end up like China and quickly.

And that's not such a good idea. And I think that's your problem. You know, part of the reason that Tammy and I continue the tour is because, well, it's ridiculously exciting. It's a great adventure. But it's also predicated on the firm belief that we all are constantly making a decision in terms of the direction that things go, up or down, all of us. And all of us equally in some weird way, and I don't really understand that. You know, it is the case that each of us is a center of the cosmos in some fundamental sense. And it's hard to understand that because you can't really think of something that has multiple centers. But

we are all each centers of consciousness. That's indisputable. And in the final analysis, we really don't know what that means. It means something with metaphysical significance, right? It means that mystery is the mystery of being. It's a very profound phenomenon. What does it mean to be a center of consciousness? Well, it means that the cosmos rotates around you in some fundamental manner and that you shape the manner in which it manifests itself by your choices. And that's really the case.

And then you think, well, that's a hell of a thing. It's like, that's for sure. It's a daunting realization. but it's also one that has an unlimited amount of potential associated with it. Think, well, what would happen if you played a straight visionary game? You know, you figured out just exactly who you could be if you got your act together, and then you spent the rest of your bloody life doing nothing but trying to make that manifest itself. Well, at minimum, you'd be a hell of a lot better off than you are now,

and God only knows what you could develop around you. You know, you know perfectly well that in the past, in your life, There are times when you really put the pedal to the metal, let's say, and you got to where the hell you were supposed to go. And maybe you didn't do that very often. But now and then you did it. You think, yeah, could be like that all the time, maybe. Well, that's a good thing to think.

So what's the conclusion? You're supposed to live out the greatest story ever told. Right. That's the religious duty. You have to figure out how to realize that in your own life, right? Because you're bound by the specifics of your time and place, right? You're you with all your possibilities and flaws. You're in this time that's got its opportunities and its obstacles.

And you have to take that universal story of coping with cataclysm and catastrophe, and you have to realize it in the confines of your own life. That's your ethical duty. And because it's such a cataclysmic problem, you have to have a nobility of vision to manage it properly. And so you have to develop that vision, and you do that by dreaming. You have to dream up something that justifies your miserable existence.

And then you have to pursue that. And God only knows what will happen if you do that. And you can be sure that if you do that properly, it'll be the best thing that could possibly happen. And that'd be a great way to live, eh? To live so that the best thing that was possibly happening, moment to moment, was exactly what was happening to you. And if you developed your vision properly and you pursued it properly, that's the way it would be. And I would say that if enough people do that, then as things speed up, which is what they're doing right now, we'll go up.

And if enough people continue to do what they're doing now, then we'll go down. And then we can all decide. and I think part of the reason that you're all here is because you are decided not. Up or down? So up. How about up? Good enough. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you, everyone. Hey, Tam.

Hello. Hello. Greg said you're kind of articulate. Is that what he said? Yeah. Okay. Judicial activism on both the provincial and federal levels have said legal precedents, harmful to Canadian society.

How do Canadians fight back against this? Was that upvoted a lot? Pardon me? Was that upvoted a lot? Was that question upvoted a lot? Not really. Okay, okay, okay. I was just curious.

Well, you never know. It might have been later, so it couldn't have been right now, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I venture into the realm of the political with apprehension, but I will tell you one thing that I've noticed Tammy and I have been traveling around the world, the Western world, primarily, for quite a long time, really for four years. And we've been a lot of places, and we've met a lot of people. And I can tell you that Canada's international reputation is in shambles.

You have no idea. Like, even if you're not a fan of the manner in which we're currently operating this country, the probability that you understand the way Canada is perceived outside of the country is very low. It's not good. The bank account seizures, that was really the nail in the coffin. That was shocking. That even shocked the socialists in Eastern Europe. There are many things going on in this country that are seriously not good.

And so, and the activism of the judiciary is certainly one of those things. That's the abdication of responsibility on the part of the legislation. legislative branch. They won't make difficult decisions. They slough them off to the judiciary. Because the judiciary now has more power than it should because of that abdicated responsibility, the woke power mongers have invaded the legal field and now they dominate it. The lawyers I know in Ontario who have a clue have told me multiple times that five years ago, when they took a court case, they knew if they're going to win or lose because they knew the precedents. and they knew if they had a strong case or not,

and if they had a strong case, and they knew the precedents, they could predict the outcome. They told me recently that they can't tell it all anymore, because the probability that the judge will take it upon him or herself to arbitrarily decide in some generally woke direction is enough to make the whole bloody process random. And that is seriously not good. The only reason this country is rich is because it's ensconced inside the English common law tradition,

And that's a tradition of precedent. And you demolish that precedent. You're at the hands of the ideologues. And that is not a good place to be. And so, you know, the multiplication of, say, human rights tribunals and that sort of quasi-judicial board, you see that happening in universities too, is that's the activist judiciary spreading its tentacles everywhere.

And then you might say, well, why does that happen? And I would say, and this is something we're thinking about, practically speaking, the rule. Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. That's a good thing to know, you know, if you think that person's not doing his job, that really bothers me. It's like, well, it might be time for you to step in and do the damn job. But another issue is there is, well, opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abandoned. It's like, yeah, opportunity for tyrants lurks. And so, to the degree that ideologically,

addled, tyrant wannabies run the country. It's because we've abdicated our civic responsibility. And so if you're not happy with the people who make up your local school board, it's like, well, how'd they get there? It's not like they're the world's most competent people. The door was open. There was an invitation. No one's doing this. Well, I think I'll take that. It's like, yeah, no kidding. So I would say, if you're not happy with the way the country is being run, it's time to do something on the political front. And, you know, and then we could make this concrete.

You know, if our institutions are so pathological that there's no point in getting, in you getting involved, then you better head for the hills and dig yourself a seller. because that's your basic option. If the institution themselves are salvageable, then someone better salvage them. And then you might say, well, how would you get involved if you wanted to and why would you? And I would say, well, it's easy to get involved.

It's like join a political party. You know, join the worst one if you want. And there is a field of opportunity for you. You know, and then you might say why. And I would say, well, first, First of all, because it's your responsibility, and second of all, how about because if you don't, someone worse will. And then the next thing is, God only knows what you'd learn. You know, maybe you're not a great speaker and you can't think that clearly.

Maybe your, you know, instincts are in the right place. But because the political field in general is understaffed terribly, the opportunity for people who are even vaguely competent is ridiculously high. And so you'll find if you do involve yourself politically at whatever level and you actually do the work, that opportunities will just multiply like you can't believe. It'll actually stagger you because you'll find yourself quickly in a position and you'll think, how the hell did I get in this position? And then you'll think, I was the most qualified person. And then you'll think, that's really terrifying. So like, get the hell at it, you know.

And I don't know what fraction of the civic responsibility you have to take on to yourself, but zero is the wrong amount. And so, you know, there's 6,000 people in this hallway. If everyone here determined as part of their vision to take on a certain degree of civic responsibility, that's enough people just in this arena to completely change, certainly to change this province. So, you know, here's a way of sort of figuring out where you should get involved. What irritates you? You know, you're fuming away while you're watching the news. We have a rule now.

I hate this rule, but we have it anyways. I'm very bitchy in airports because I really hate airports. I think they're training grounds for totalitarians, and they really grate on me. And so I'm just crabby as hell whenever I'm in an airport. And that's not so fun for Tammy because, you know, she knows that I don't like totalitarians, but she also doesn't like, you know, traveling with someone who's like a cactus on fire. And so the rule is now if I'm going to bitch about something, I have to write a column about it. And so if it isn't worth doing something about, then I have to shut up.

That's very annoying. But it's a good rule, you know? It's a good rule. So if something bugs you, that's a marker to your responsibility, because it's bugging you for a reason. It's bugging you because it's your problem. problem. It, for whatever reason, it happens to be your problem. And so if you don't do something about it, either nothing will get done or someone that you don't want to do something about it, we'll do something about it. And then, and then we'll be going wherever the hell we're going at the moment.

And I don't think that's a very good idea. So, all right. Two more. Okay. What are your thoughts on the decriminalization of drugs and the outcome on society? Well, the war on drugs wasn't very effective. There were a lot of reasons for that. One of the unintended outcomes, remember I said earlier that your stupid intervention isn't going to do what you think it is, it's going to do a bunch of things you don't predict. You know, 20 years ago, there was like five substances that you could use to really screw up your life.

there's like 300. And the reason there's 300 is because we criminalized those five, and that just incentivized chemists, many of them Chinese, to produce variants of those chemicals that weren't technically illegal, that were often even more addictive. And so now we have, instead of heroin, now we have fentanyl, and instead of amphetamine, we have methamphetamine. And I suspect that in the not too distant future, we'll have chemicals that will make fentanyl look like pablum. And so no one expected that. It's like, we'll make five things illegal. Now we'll have 300 things.

It doesn't look like that's good policy. Now, the opposite is just let people do what the hell they want. And then you get San Francisco. And that doesn't look good. That doesn't look good either. And lots of Toronto could, lots of Canada could look like San Francisco in the next 10 years if we want that. And so Portugal decriminalized all. drugs, but they didn't do it the San Francisco way. You don't get to make a public nuisance of yourself

on your favorite chemical. And so if you're unable to regulate your own behavior, then you get shunted off to treatment. Now, that's a bit dangerous, right? Because it isn't obvious you want to put mandatory treatment in the hands of the state. But we already kind of do that with prison, because prison is a form of mandatory treatment for misbehavior. So it looks like, it doesn't look like blanket prohibition on drug use is useful. It didn't work with prohibition. It certainly didn't work with marijuana. It didn't really work with cocaine. It caused a huge explosion in the prison population, and then it produced this multiplication of addictive chemicals. The approach in Portugal seemed to work quite well, which is like somewhat liberal attitude towards the availability of drugs, at least

with regards to their criminal punishment. But, on the... insistence on public order and on treatment in the cases where people are no longer able to regulate themselves because of their drug use. And so those policies already exist and there are countries that have implemented them and if the do-gooders in Canada who want to be, you know, welcoming and compassionate to the addicted had the courage of their convictions, they put some stick in along with the carrot. And then, you know, maybe we could guide ourselves. some degree of intelligence. So.

Okay. You are following M.E.K. This is number, this was the number one question. Who, he's an, he's a leader in the Arab world. That's his name. You're following this person. Yeah. And Marianne, Javi.

Okay. On Twitter. M.E.K. murdered more than 50. 15,000 people, does this mean you support them? The fact that I follow someone on Twitter doesn't mean I support them. I mean, why would you draw that conclusion? I follow all sorts of people on Twitter,

and there are often people I'm trying to keep an eye on, not people I support. So, and I would also say that, and this is no doubt due to my, you know, still remaining vast pools of ignorance, M-E-K isn't someone whose activities I particularly concentrate on. And that isn't necessarily because they're not worth concentrating on. It's more the fact that there's only so many things you can concentrate on.

And that isn't one of the things that has announced themselves to me as requiring my concentration at this moment. I'm not even saying that's right. It's just how it is. But there's no reason to assume that mere following means support. I mean, I follow Kamala Harris. you know whatever they I'm not supporting

whatever the hell she's doing I'm not supporting it so so I don't want to be flippant about that answer you know it's like I'm that's that political domain I'm not nearly as informed about as I could be

that's part of the reason why I'm following in the manner that I am and trying to learn about it but it's not a matter of support so that's the answer that question. Okay. One more? All right.

All right. Here's one. Do you have a Kermit the Frog themed suit? Not yet. No, I should tell the LGFG guys that. Yeah. So this suit manufacturer, LGFG, they're called, they came to me about a year ago with this proposal.

They just sent it to me out of the blue. They said they would make me one suit for each rule from my first book. and they made a very creative set of suits. They sent it like an illustrated little book along with it. And I got to tell you about this one because this one's really funny. So this is a tuxedo. And this fabric, which they invented, is a cloth that's saturated with jade, which is why it's green.

Now, so they crushed it, you know, down to the molecular level, I suppose, and impregnated the cloth with it, which is why it's all glittery, like, Liberace. And so, and in the back of these suits, one of the rules is printed on each of the, underneath the collars. Now, this suit has a Renaissance motif. It's the Garden of Eden inside it as the lining. And this is the pocket square, which they custom made.

And it's, I know you can't see it, but I'll tell you what it is. It's Adam and Eve, and there's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and there's the serpent, and they put Justin Trudeau's head on the... So that's... I think he stands for the sin of pride myself, and so that's ridiculously comical, and I walked through the suits they made, and they were funny and witty, and so I thought, fine, you know, if you want to make me those suits, then just go ahead. They made me a Twitter suit, which I've only worn once. It's light blue, quarter. It's a ridiculous thing. It's light blue, first of all, baby blue. It's Jesus.

Like, I haven't seen a baby blue suit since, you know, demented people wore them in the 1970s. And it's corduroy. And then it has this tie that's covered with Elon Musk heads. And so that's ridiculously funny. And they brought this suit over, and I thought, oh, there's no bloody way I'll ever wear that. And so I put it on and I wore it one night.

And I thought, I like this suit. And Tammy at least didn't object too much. And I think secretly she liked it too. And so they've made me some very wild suits. And this one's the funniest. I think this Trudeau bloody pocket square is ridiculously comical. So, you know, and I'll tell you. tell you a story, I'll tell you a little story about this suits and then we'll close. And so

in 2017, I rented a theater in Toronto and I did this lecture series on Genesis and it was the first public lecture series I'd done. And so my family rented the theater and we rented it for 16 shows. And so we took a risk because we didn't know if people would come and listen to the lectures, you know, because I was lecturing on Genesis and, I mean, who the hell wants to come and listen to that? It turned out, lots of people did, mostly young men, which was also completely shocking. And so we packed the theater and, and then we rented a theater in L.A. I had my daughter, I think, Mick arranged that. That was really comical, too, because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I phoned up this theater. And, and I found, and I, I

found out who the theater was, and I think I phoned them. It might have been Michaela. And they were kind of dismissive because it's a big theater. It held 4,000 people. And, you know, first of all, performers don't phone theaters and arrange for the rental. They have agents that do that. They're professionals that do that. So if you phone a theater and ask to rent it, they just think you're insane. And so they didn't know what to make of me, but they did agree to rent the theater to me, and it sold out. And so then they were much more pleased with me after that.

And then we found at that point, because I had arranged to, some people had arranged for me to speak in London at the same time, and as soon as they put the tickets on sale, they all sold out, and so they booked another hall, and they all sold out. And so then the same thing happened in New York. And so then we realized that it looked like

the theaters would sell out wherever we booked them. So we decided to arrange a tour. And this agency, creative artists' agency, got a hold of me at about the same time, they're always on the lookout for people who can fill theaters because that's what they do. And they're good sharks, and they're the professionals at negotiating this sort of thing.

They've handled that ever since. Anyways, we laid out this tour. And I was thinking about how to prepare, and I thought, well, I'm going to prepare 100% because this is a ridiculous opportunity and I'm going to give it absolutely everything I've got. And so I'd always dressed up as a professor. I always wore a suit even when I was very young. And I had my reasons for that.

My father was a teacher and he always wore a suit. And I asked him why he did that at one point. He said it was to show respect to his students. And I thought that was a good answer. My dad was a hunter and kind of a rough guy. And it was like he lived in a suit. he wore it to work. And when I started teaching at Harvard,

I wasn't much older than the students that I was teaching. And wearing a suit was also a good way of establishing the proper hierarchy. And I'm not averse to proper hierarchies. In fact, I know they're necessary. And that helped too, because the students knew who the students were and who the professor was. And we got along just fine as a consequence. So when I went on tour, I thought, I'm going to get some nice suits.

And so I went to this tailor in Toronto and I bought a very nice blue suit. And I spent like more money on it that I'd spent on clothes in my entire life. And it really made me quite nervous because I thought, you know, can you really justify that sort of expense? And I thought, no bloody way. I'm going out to talk to 150,000 people on not leaving anything, anything to chance. And so I bought that suit and a couple of others. And so here was one of the. consequences. This is so cool and it wasn't what I expected at all. Now as we travel around the world

about, now you guys are falling short in this regard, I must say, but I think it's the laid-back BC thing kicking in, but in about a third to a half of the people who come to the shows are dressed in suits. And they're often three-piece suits. Yeah. And the couples who come are often dressed quite formally, like they're at a wedding. And so that's so cool to see. And a lot of the guys that come up in the meet and greets afterwards, because I meet about 150 people after these shows, it's like the first suit they've ever bought.

And they bought it for the event. And I had no idea when I laid out the investment for that first suit, it would have that kind of social consequence, but it has. And it's nice to see people, it's nice to see young people dressed like adults. You know, I mean, there's a place for casual wear and fair enough on all of that. But it's just, it's just another example of the unintended consequences, I suppose, of aiming up. You know, I wanted to do that right.

And then that had a social consequence. And everything you do right has a social consequence. Way more than you think. Way more than you think. Who knows how far it echoes? You don't know. Echoes through eternity. That's actually true.

The good and the harm you do. They both echo through eternity. That's a very daunting idea, but it's true. And so no, I don't have a Kermit suit. But it's a good idea. Maybe I'll ask them about it. So thank you all very much for coming tonight. And thanks, Tim.

You're welcome. Very nice to see you all.