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you say you are morally obligated to do remarkable things why well I think partly because life is so difficult and challenging that unless you give it everything you have the chances are very high that it will embitter you and then you’ll be a force for darkness and not good and so you know the the fact that life is short and can be brutal can terrify you into hiding and avoiding but it it can also you can flip that on its head and understand that since you’re all in anyways you might as well take take the risks that are adventurous and that’s a very good thing to understand and what is also useful to understand in that is that there isn’t anything more adventurous than the truth this is something that took me a long time to figure out well you can craft your words to get what you want you know and people do that all the time they craft their words so they can avoid taking responsibility for things they should take responsibility for they can craft the words to gain an advantage that they really don’t deserve that’s what you do when you manipulate and the problem with that you might say well why not do that if I can get what I want and the answer that is you aren’t necessarily the best judge of what you need and it’s easy to be diluted in what you want and that’s the sort of delusions that people chase if they chase power if you decide instead that you’re going to just say what you believe to be true you have to let go of the consequences and you might think well I don’t want to let go of the consequences because I want to control what’s going on but what you miss then is Adventure because if you don’t control what’s going on you don’t know what the hell’s going to happen and maybe that’s exciting and actually there’s no doubt about it and then you have the additional Advantage if you’re attempting to say what you believe to be true and attempting to act in the manner that you think is most appropriate that’s genuinely you and you have the force of reality behind you and obviously that’s what you have if you’re trying to say live in the truth is you have the force of reality behind you that seems like a good deal then you have the reality and the adventure so why is that a moral obligation well if you hide and you don’t let what’s inside of you out and you don’t bring into the world what you could bring and you become cynical and bitter you will start doing very dark things so you’ll start in not only will you not add to the world what you could add but you’ll start being jealous of people who are competent and doing well and work to destroy them so that’s the pathway to hell really so one of the trends that I’ve been railing against most recently has been cynicism is this pervasive belief that everything is terrible and it can’t get better and the people who believe that it can improve a dumb and delusional and the problem and I I don’t know where it comes from I don’t I don’t it’s the beginning of wisdom cynicism this is part of the reason why it’s hard to combat you know because people start out naive and naive people are optimistic but not really they’re just naive and naive people have no idea that there’s say malevolence in the world they have no idea that there’s malevolence in their own heart they’re sheltered and dependent and when that breaks it often breaks into cynicism and so cynicism is actually an improvement the veils have fallen from your eyes exactly exactly the problem with cynicism is that especially if it’s allied with a kind of arrogance is that you can end there and that’s a big mistake so then the question becomes what once you once you’ve been bitten hard and you’re no longer naive well that is very hard on your optimism let’s say so then the question is how do you restore that without reverting to the naivity which you can’t do anyways without blinding yourself once you’ve been bitten and the answer to that is you substitute courage for naivity and you and you regain your optimism as a moral imperative right so one of the things you might ask yourself is well if the future is likely to be catastrophic in a variety of different ways which is definitely the case both socially and personally then what attitude should you bring to bear on that and the answer might be well if you were courageous and faithful and I can explain what that means then you would conduct yourself in in a manner that met the future headon with the presumption that you can manage it and this is the presumption we should bring to bear politically now these the people who are using fear to Garner power point to the various apocalypses that might befall us and it’s difficult to counter them because the future is always an apocalyptic Horizon like everything can fall apart and and has before and might well again and will in fact in your life as you age and die and so it’s very easy to conjure up an apocalypse then the question becomes the question becomes not is that apocalypse potentially real because the answer to that is yes but what attitude should you have towards that naive that’s not good cynical that’s that’s better but it’s still not good it’s another form of hell and it also tends to make the potential apocalypses more likely well so what do you have when you move Beyond cynicism and what you have when you move Beyond cynicism is wisdom and that’s not naive it’s Courageous one of the things that religious people have done relatively badly especially in recent years is theyve failed to delineate the relationship between faith and courage you know people like Dawkins and the new atheists they point to Faith and they describe it as something like belief in foolish superstitions but that isn’t really what faith in the deepest sense means it means that you are willing to act out the proposition that you can ride the wave no matter how big it becomes and that we can all do that together especially if we do that in Good Will and I think that’s that’s a much more it’s a much more appropriate way to confront the future and it’s also the proper medication for cynicism now the other thing the cynics see the other thing about cynicism that’s interesting too is that cynics aren’t cynical enough about their own cynicism right because you can get doubtful enough to start doub the validity of your own cynicism it’s like what makes you so smart what makes you the judge of being and the Coline kids were like that you know they decided that existence itself was unsustainable given its cruelty and that the proper response was to put up a giant middle finger to man men and God right well here’s a way of being cynical about cynicism how does your cynicism let you off the hook right how does your cynicism justify your desire to avoid necessary responsibility and to pursue your own short-term hedonic gains it’s like why aren’t you cynical about your own doubt and that’s that’s another place where wisdom begins it’s like that so that’s two right cynicism beats naivity but it’s not the ultimate destination and you should be cynical enough to question the moral validity of your own of your own resentment and your own what would you say your own turning away from the world the way that I see it given that we don’t know the future given that much of our motivations are invisible to us we’re not a Crystal Pond that we can see into you have to have some form of delusion about what’s going to happen in the future you’re trying your best to see the way that it’s going to be but given that the glass could be half empty or half full why not have a delusion that’s going to be useful to you one of Hope even in the face and the understanding that things might be difficult and that there’s going to be obstacles yeah there was a there was a line of social psychology that pursued that argument for quite a while that made the argument that people had to have positive Illusions about the future and that that was the fundamental way that people staved off Despair and bolstered their self-esteem but I don’t think I don’t think we need to separate out the distinction between fantasy and delusion you do have a fantasy about the future you have to because like you said it’s not structured so you have to you have to provisionally map the future that’s what a plan is what a strategy is right but that doesn’t make it a delusion like it becomes a delusion when the map Bears no relationship to the underlying territory so if you have a strategy for the future you know maybe let’s say that your strategy for the future just for the sake of argument is that you have 5 million YouTube subscribers in 3 years well well you have no evidence of the strict sort that that’s how it’s going to be because Anything could happen between now and 3 years from now let’s say but you there’s no reason to call that a delusion it’s a it’s one it’s one hypothetically possible path of potential and then you can make the sacrifices necessary to bring that about so even though it’s a fantasy because it something that isn’t there it’s not a delusion it’s a delusion when you’re ignoring elements of your own experience that would inform your fantasy more effectively you’re ignoring them so that you can live in a positive representation of the future without having to pay the appropriate price for it one of my favorite ideas I learned over the last couple of years is the inner Citadel from isai bin do you know this MH so isai bin says when the natural Road toward human fulfillment is blocked human beings Retreat into themselves become involved in themselves and try to create inwardly that world which some evil Fate has denied them externally that’s a delusion often if you cannot obtain from the world that which you really desire you must teach yourself not to want it if you cannot get what you want you must teach yourself to want what you can get this is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth into a kind of inner Citadel in which you lock yourself up against all of the fearful ills of the world mutual friend Henderson explained it in a simpler way if your leg is wounded you can try to treat the leg MH and if you can’t then you cut the leg off and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued and I think that we see this everywhere well okay so you so imagine that you lay out a plan and it meets with an impediment and it knocks the slots out from underneath the plan okay now you Retreat okay now you have an option when you’re retreating and one option is to construct a world in fantasy where you’re taking revenge on those who wronged you and getting what you want that’s that’s a pathway to Madness so often people who develop serious delusions do develop um what would you call them their their compensatory fantasies and then they start to dwell in them and often for hundreds of hours so the the kids again who shot up the Coline high school they dwelt in a fantasy world for hundreds of hours before they undertook their Dreadful actions right but you can also flip back back into yourself let’s say and you can this is like this is like confession and atonement it’s the proper way to think about it is you can think about what it is that you did wrong or insufficiently that led to the collapse of your plan right so that’s the first investigation I made some sacrifices I attempted to bring about a particular form of the future it didn’t happen okay why well the world is set against me and the cosmos is evil and there’s no God and I’m bitter and cynical that’s one potential explanation right poor me right and and I’m not trying to be flippant about this because sometimes people’s dreams are quite realistic and they still fail catastrophically you know it can be brutal you know maybe you did make a lot of good decisions and you suddenly got ill or someone in your family did and everything went to hell on you it doesn’t have to be because you’ve done something cardinally foolish that you fail you know it’s built into the structure of the world but doesn’t matter you can also Retreat into and you can say something like all right I need to retool my conception of strategy but also potentially my conception of goal you know maybe I’m looking in the wrong place maybe I have to look somewhere else and you can open yourself up to a revelation so there’s a gospel statement that’s very relevant to this so Christ tells his followers that if they knock the door will open if they ask they’ll receive and if they seek they’ll find and so it sounds like it sounds magical it sounds like like the sort of thing that the new atheists would have a field day with but that isn’t that’s not an wise interpretation of that saying the proper interpretation is something more like a recognition of the way thought works so imagine your plans didn’t work out okay now you sit down and you say to yourself I’d like to know even if the world was conspiring against me and my failure was 95% % the fault of external occurrences and other people what did I do that wasn’t as good as it could have been and where did I fail to look so that the probability of my failure was higher now now to ask that question you have to want the answer that’s that’s what it means to knock or to ask or to seek this this is no joke it’s like you have to want to know and it’s a very painful thing to do because especially if you had given it you’re all to the degree you are able and you have reason to be bitter you’re going to be searching for the errors that you still made and discovering your own errors is always extremely painful right especially if they’re errors that you’re in love with and so you have to be willing to strip yourself down that’s what humility means fundamentally and then but the advantage is this is why it’s so useful to listen to people you might find out where you’re stupid and then you could start stop being stupid and so one of the reasons you confess your sins let’s say is because you want to discover where you’re insufficient now it’s painful you know it’s painful to encounter an impediment in the form of someone else’s opinion that might show you where you’re blind and ignorant or willfully blind even but the advantage to that is you can rectify the error and then as you move forward you’re stronger you know one of the things I taught my kids and I hope Le at least somewhat successfully was that you should always ask a stupid question and and that doesn’t mean the sort of question that someone who wasn’t paying attention would ask if you’re listening to someone and you don’t understand what they’re saying and you reveal that you’re revealing your ignorance you know and maybe you’re in a room full of people and you think you’re the only person stupid enough to not get it which is very rarely the case by the way the thing is though if you if you reveal that ignorance to yourself and to the other person they can Rectify it and if you do that a thousand times you’re not ignorant anymore and and this is a real Pathway to success too you see it you do this because you ask real questions in your podcast and Rogan does this okay Rogan’s always trying to be a little smarter than he already is and then that works iterated like if you ask a thousand dumb questions and you listen to the answer then you know a thousand things some of them deep that you didn’t know before so that’s the that’s the advantage to searching your soul let’s say for the for unrequited sins and attempting to atone that’s not a delusion right it’s an attempt to set yourself right it’s the opposite of a delusion even though there can be a Fantastical element to it yeah the uh conversation around people who try their best do as many things right as they could and yet still fall short because the world is random and and unfortunate things happen happiness as far as I can see it sits in the gap between your expectations and reality but the problem here is that people who have high standards often end up feeling a lack right how can people who strive like this avoid feeling despondent at falling short of their own high standards I’ve heard you talk about the Statue of David saying something like you are not all that you could be yeah and as soon as you posit an ideal you begin to compare yourself to that ideal so well part that’s a good question I mean um the ultimate ideal is also the ultimate judge because the ultimate ideal is is something against which you fall far short and that might be so painful that you can barely stand it but then what you do is you you you two things I suppose is you lower the ideal and you raise your estimation of your Poss of your potential and what do I mean by lower the ideal well if you’re you’re comparing yourself to someone or even to a future self and the Gap is so painful that it paralyzes you then you’ve created a dragon that you don’t have the tools to master and so what you have to do is you have to scale the dragon down to size and you want to scale the dragon down to size until it’s a size that you are willing to move toward however small that is now you know if you’re here and you’re deal is here and that Gap is unbearable then you reduce the Gap and you reduce the Gap and you’re going to have to do that anyways because you’re not going to move from where you are to perfect in one Fell Swoop right there’s going to be incremental steps so you have to fill in that that hierarchy of progression with with a high enough resolution representation so that you can start to move forward and and then you should be butress there’s another gospel comment that’s very interesting it has to do it’s called the Matthew principle and the Matthew principle is to those who have everything more will be given and from those who have nothing everything will be taken now it’s brutal because it implies that reality works like this when you’re moving up you go like this right and that’s pretty nice that’s a lot better than this but when you’re going down you go like that right it’s like downhill downhill Cliff okay so you want to avoid the downhill path well if the uphill path is like this which is like exponential let’s say or geometric then what that means is that it doesn’t matter how big the first steps you take uphill are even if they’re trivial even if they’re shameful in their in their size because you’re so useless that if you’re if you’re disciplined in that you’ll speed up extraordinarily rapidly and so that’s the good news you might say is that you can take very small step STS even ones that might be shameful in their size and you have to admit that to yourself but once you get the ball rolling it doesn’t roll in a linear fashion it rolls in a geometric fashion and this is a really good thing to know because it can take the sting out of the realization of your own stupidity it’s like yeah you know everybody has their weak sides let’s say things they’re embarrassed about when I first started going to the gym I was like how old was I 198 5 23 and I think I weighed 135 lbs and I was F 6’1 very very thin a TW right 27 inch waist something like that I smoked like mad and I drank too much like I wasn’t in good shape the first the first attempts forward I took in the gym I went to this swim sze class Jesus it was me and this like really fat guy young guy probably not in any worse shape than me and like seven old women over 70 and they could outswim me like it was pretty damn humiliating and so I did a semester of that and got myself in somewhat better shape and then I started to go to the gym to work out to lift weights and that was also rough because you know I’d be underneath the bloody bench press trying to lift 75 lbs off the off the rests and you know some muscle-headed bastard would come over and tell me how to do it and it’s like yeah thank you but you know it’s embarrassing and lots of times people won’t do things like go to the gym because they’re so embarrassed about how they look or what sort of shape they’re in and it’s a pain to start at the bottom but you start at the bottom where you’re weak and if you want to rectify what’s weak you have to accept the fact that you’re at the bottom and that the first steps are going to be painful you know I it took me about 3 years but I stopped smoking and then I stopped drinking and I gained 40 lbs of in like 3 and a half years something like that I basically had to stop doing that cuz I had to eat like six times a day it was crazy but I got a lot more physically confident and a lot more coordinated cuz working out with dumbbells makes you coordinated right because it it exercises all the small ligaments and the tendons and so my lower body in particular got a lot more coordinated then I could dance so that was better when I was going out dancing because I did a lot of that in graduate school and but the point of all this is if you’re going to rectify your weaknesses you have to admit your insufficiency to your own shame now if the gap between you and your ideal is so great that it paralyzes you you shrink that right we’ll get back to talking to Jordan in one minute but first I need to tell you about Maui NE venison Maui Nei venison is the most protein dense and nutrient-dense red meat on the planet thank you plus they’re the only stress-free 100% wild harvested meat available my favorite method for cooking it is straight from Frozen salt the hell out of both sides 12 minutes in an air fryer at maximum temperature turn it over 12 minutes again and it is perfect every single time it is such a life hack actually taught to me by Jordan’s daughter Michaela and all she does is eat meat so that’s the way to do it all of the cuts are spectacular but their venison sticks have been my new favorite while I’ve been traveling on the road you can get the healthiest red meat on the planet delivered directly to your door by following the link in the show notes below or going to mauw venison docomo wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout that’s 20% off by going to M aui Nui venison tocom wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout one of the things I’ve been talking about in the live shows is your comparison group is incorrect the fact that you know we have the opportunity to sit down and listen to anybody on the planet right the best Minds the best athletes the best thinkers the most articulate that are alive right now or listen to the people that have died that were around when video cameras existed and you can compare yourself to that group yeah but that’s not your comparison group if you have the impetus to sit down and listen to me and you waffle on for three hours about these deep topics these interesting ideas you are so already selected out of the normal group you’re already already asking yourself questions that almost nobody almost nobody else is right but because your comparison group of people that are unbelievably High performing I remember before I started my podcast I’d listen to to you or to Sam or to Joe and I’d think God that recall is is amazing it’s so it’s like that they they’ve just got this identic memory and everything that they’ve ever read is able to come to the surface and they’re able to say it in this way that’s completely seamless and all the rest of it you go okay well are you really person that’s never recorded a podcast before going to compare yourself to Joe Rogan man that’s recorded a thousand and spent 10,000 hours on stage and done all of this UFC commentary and done all of this stuff in terms of TV is that really who you’re going to compare yourself to and it’s unfair and the problem that I see is people who have big dreams for themselves and want to do great things they like to set their sights High yeah and yet they feel despondent In the comparison so I think well there’s a pride in that too e like can be I want to be well or that’s who I should be comparing myself to right that’s the pride and the pride is something like I should be that or even I could be that it’s like well maybe you could but you’re certainly not going to do it as you already pointed out without the apprenticeship right so you could say that the despondency is actually is is in proportion to the to the false Pride now I wrote a chapter in I think my first book which was compare yourself to who you are today not to who someone else is it’s sorry I I mangled out to some degree but you get the point the proper comparison group for you is you yesterday because you can make first of all you’re the you’re your you’re the only control group that’s appropriate to you because you have a certain set of talents and possibilities and limitations and tragedies that are truly unique to you and so you might be comparing yourself to someone else on some Dimension but it’s not a reasonable comparison because you don’t know what talents they were blessed with and you also don’t know what opportunities they had that you didn’t Etc it’s just not a reasonable comparison it’s a lot better to think about who you were and then to think well could you be somewhat better in some Dimension and the the positive thing about that is the answer is almost always yes now you can Orient that transformation towards some Stellar Target and that a reasonable thing to do but that doesn’t exactly mean that you should compare yourself to that Target aiming at something and comparing yourself to it are not exactly the same thing plus your bloody comparison is also a delusion you know that’s another thing that you have to understand is that you look at the person you’re jealous of and really what you’re doing is you’re you’re looking through a very narrow aperture at a very thin slice of their life you’re looking at the thin slice of their life that’s turning out the best but you’re also looking at a thin slice of their life that’s marketed to be the best right and you have no idea what the horror of that person’s life might be in its totality and you have no idea if like if the deal was say you wanted to be Russell Brand there’s a good example you want it to be Russell Brand you want it to be as charismatic and as famous as he is well your real wish is that you get to have everything Russell Brand has but none of his problems well come on I mean that’s just it’s just it’s no wonder that a vision like that would make you despondent because it’s it’s naive it’s resentful it’s jealous it’s bitter and it’s unreasonable you have to take the good with the bad you have to take the bad with the good and people very rarely think about that when they’re thinking about you know the famous people they think they’d like like to be there was a recent interview with Elon Musk where he said something my mind is a storm I don’t think most people would want to be me right they may think they would want to be me but they don’t they don’t know they don’t understand what do you think of that elon’s someone that people probably look up to and admire and aspire to be one of the downsides to high level genius is you might describe it as hypermania so here’s a simple test that people can do so this is a test of something called verbal fluency and verbal fluency is associated with creativity and so a ver here’s a simple verb verbal fluency test write down as many four-letter words as you can in three minutes that begin with t okay that’s that’s pretty constrained four letters and T or or write down as many words as you can in three minutes to begin with S that’s less constrained all right so there’s quite a powerful correlation between the sheer number of words that you produce and your lifetime creative achievement right especially in the artistic and verbal domains that’s different than vocabulary vocabulary is how many words you understand fluency is how many words you can produce in a given Dey of those words yeah well people vary to a degree that you can hardly imagine so some people if you get them to do the four-letter test in 3 minutes they’ll write down like 12 words and some will write down 150 and the ones who are writing down 150 their minds are going at a hypomanic rate they’re just thinking five times as fast yeah without any remission whatsoever and you know when that gets completely out of control you have manic you have someone who’s Manic and there’s nothing fun about manic that’s where the word maniac comes from from and someone whose manic has a thousand different plans Each of which are one sentence long that they’re hyper enthusiastic about they’ll spend every scent of their money pursuing them and things just go immediately to hell and so that’s the that’s the outer limit of pathology on the creative front and someone like musk who’s clearly a genius that’s what he’s contending with in his internal landscape now I’m not saying that he’s manic because I see no signs of that but someone that creative is on that edge or you see someone like Ben Shapiro I mean it’s very interesting to talk to Ben because and Russell Brand is the same way Shapiro speaks I think more rapidly than anyone I ever met but if you’re with him you see very clearly that he’s probably thinking five times that fast and that’s a lot and when I was writing maps of meaning which was my first book I had a very difficult time shutting off my mind I was obsessed with that book and so I was writing about three hours a day and then I was thinking about the material like for 12 hours as and the thoughts came as way faster than thinking they probably came about as fast as I can read I can read about 12200 words a minute if the material isn’t overwhelmingly dense and so it was just nonstop thought for like 16 hours a day that’s part of the reason I started lifting weights because if I was lifting heavy enough think 12200 words a minute while I’ve got 100 pound on my back it was enough it was enough to shut it down and it was also one of the reasons that I drank because that was another thing that would shut it off yeah well I I think the price that people pay to be the person that you admire is just such an interesting frame to look at someone like Elon Musk my mind is a storm I don’t think most people would want to be me the price that you would have to pay in order to be me is not one that you would but you’re one of the richest men on the planet and you get to you know dance on stage and and release cars that bu proof and put rockets in space and stuff well yeah but what about all of the baggage what’s the price what’s well he also he also appears to me to be hyper conscientious and I know people who’ve worked with him like musk isn’t just a creative genius he’s also an extremely conscientious engineer which and really conscientious Engineers they have very interesting Minds I like talking to Engineers because my brother-in-law is a great engineer and when when he understands something Jim when he understands something thing he understands how to build it out of atoms right like he understands it at every single level and musk appears to me to be someone who’s this rare combination of hyper creative but also hyper conscientious and I know that he works all the time yeah does that sort of uh hypertrophied executive function help to Wrangle some of the diffuse Creative Energy oh we’re going to put it into this one thing at least for a while and then we’ll move on to another thing yes yes definitely definitely you Eric Weinstein’s a good example of someone I hope Eric isn’t annoyed by this but Eric is unbelievably creative but he’s not particularly conscientious and so his and and I think he found an occupation where that works extremely well because he’s he I don’t know if he’s still doing this but he worked with Peter teal for quite a long time as his idea man right and Eric’s an extremely interesting person musk is hyper creative and as far as I can tell hyper conscientious and the conscientiousness does Focus you know it it and and that lots of people who are creative aren’t conscientious well it’s rare like if you’re one in the there’s no correlation between creativity and conscientiousness okay so if you’re one in a thousand if you’re the most creative person in a thousand and you’re the most conscientious person in a thousand you’re one person in a million and musk is probably more like one person in a 100 million right something like that maybe more but or maybe a billion right maybe yeah it’s interesting to consider the changes that happen to people as well as they as that their platforms as the scrutiny around them continues to increase obviously this has been a journey for you over the last you know nearly approaching 10 years now of was it 2006 was that pH c16 2016 2016 yeah sorry um how have you found Fame change you what’s been impacted or changed due to the the scrutiny and the surveillance and the Adoration and the criticism well the first thing that changed I think was that I saw misery on a scale that I hadn’t really seen it before you know I had worked as a clinician for a long time and i’ worked with say 20 people a week and I was always in the realm of difficult existential problems wrestling with my clients’s problems alongside of them and I liked that a lot and then I had my research and I had my family and various business interests and so that misery in some ways was contained and boxed in and I had a lot of structure around that to be able to function despite the fact that you know I was neck deep in 20 people’s serious problems which I really like by the way when when I started speaking on a larger scale and meeting more and more people this scale of demoralization really hit me I didn’t know that I didn’t know how deep the demoralization in our culture had become and I think that was especially obvious to me at that point among young men now it looks like this is Jonathan Height’s research is indicating this that possibly young women are even in worse shape but for whatever reason most most of the people I was meeting at least to begin with were young men I think it was probably because most of them far more people on YouTube are young men and so the it was shocking and brutal to see how much demoralization how widely spread the demoralization in our culture was other than that and that that was a real shock and it it was very hard on me I would say um everything else about it has been at minimum ridiculously interesting I have an unbelievable wealth of opportunity I’d be a fool to be anything but abjectly grateful I mean the misery that I saw was a shock and it hurt me and it it was part of what made how did that how did that impact you did it change the way that you see the world at all it made me understand more deeply how important it was to offer people an encouraging word I could see that so many people were dying psychologically or actually for lack of an encouraging word and so it made being in the position to provide that much more necessary mean part of the reason that Tammy and I too are const LLY is because it seems to be good it seems to be a good thing you know we’ve even seen changes in the audience so five years ago six years ago when we did our first tour a lot of the people who came to the talks were in pretty rough shape there were more men than there are now like the proportion of men to women was higher and the men were generally there alone and they were a lot of them were looking pretty ragged around the edges and now five years later half the audience comes in suits like it’s as if they’re dressed for a wedding most of the guys are there with some woman um the the audience members are doing much better and the lecture events are extremely positive you know if you looked at my life from the outside you’d think that I was in a constant storm of you know aggravated controversy but all of that virtually all of that is virtual it’s just in the online world now it touches the actual World from time to time because I am being pursued by my regulatory College inario yeah yeah yeah which is you know mostly just an annoyance and a Preposterous annoyance a Preposterous expensive and timec consuming annoyance but apart from that everything that’s happened around me has been positive H that’s a strange thing too positive at such an intensity that even that is daunting you know you’d think it’s hard to imagine that you could be in a situation where things are so positive that you can barely stand it but but I am in that situation and it’s quite something to contend with I I was fortunate I suppose to some degree that it didn’t happen to me till I was old CU I’ve never really I’ve never really got accustomed to it I’ve had a thought about this observing what’s happened to you and you know the Weinstein are a good example of this too we often hear the Perils of getting Fame too young the McCoy Culkin of the world the Britney Spears of the world you know uh individuals who don’t have any sense of identity being thrust into a non-representative experience of the world and they’re completely unmowed but I think that there’s an equally interesting question to ask okay and what happens if you think you know who you are if you’ve spent de decades five decades six Decades of your life understanding your place your status the trajectory that you’re on and then out of nowhere you get ripped away from all of the areas of reference all of the way markers that you thought you knew and now you’re just floating in the air I imagine that could be even more disquieting in some ways well when everything blew up around me to begin with it was stressful I would say because my job was on the light my university job and I never thought that would happen I mean my when I worked at Harvard Anna at the University of Toronto that was all positive like I really liked working with my graduate students I had at least cordial relationships with my with my fellow faculty members at Harvard they were more than cordial at the University of Toronto most of the faculty members that I started to develop friendships with were also those who ended up moving away and so and they were often people who got offers from other places and you know they they would disappear and so a lot of the friends I developed at the University of Toronto went elsewhere and so I didn’t get as tightly tied in with regards to Friendship networks among my peers as I had at Harvard for example but I had great relationships with undergraduates and with my graduate students that was plenty like I loved working with my graduate students and so it wasn’t like I was pining and alone not at all and I had a good network of friends and um and so then that was threatened and really disappeared in 2016 um and my clinical practice was threatened and so that was unsettling I think there were things that continued though even when I was teaching as a university Professor the way I taught wasn’t typical the things I taught weren’t typical I thought for decades you know eventually someone’s going to find out what I’m teaching and and you know there’s going to be trouble I couldn’t believe I was allowed encouraged to teach what I was teaching um but you know the universities and this was particularly true of Harvard in the 90s that’s how they were structured what was so rebellious about what what you were teaching well there wasn’t really anybody who was concentrating on the Nexus between say architect ideas archetypal and religious ideas in Neuroscience so that wasn’t a thing I mean there was a few people Yak panp was one of them who a lot of the researchers who were interested in the Neuroscience of emotion became interested in deep narrative because they started to understand that our emotional life is a story that’s a good way of thinking about it and that we’re guided you know we’re Guided by our emotional instincts and what are emotional instincts do is put us into certain stories that’s what it means to be in love for example is that you’re in a love story and it’s not it’s not uh a particular balance of oxytocin and endorphins that you are aware of it’s not broken down to its constituent Parts no definitely not part of a narrative that you tell yourself about what this means and how this feels right right well and it’s interesting that the Instinct manifests itself as a story and so I was very interested in narrative and story and I and also see no psychologist study Carl Yung like literally virtually none really now oh yeah yeah oh definitely not I mean psychology psychology really developed in some ways as the materialist antithesis to psychoanalysis so Freud and Yung and even Adler to some degree they were off limits for for scientifically trained behavioral psychologists and that’s what I was and am like I trained at Migel there were no courses in psychoanalytic theory at Mill I read Freud and Yung completely on my own uh flying in the face of the advice that I was getting even from my well-meaning graduate supervisor who was a great guy and who never got in my way in the least quite the contrary but I was warned for example when I went on the job market not to talk about the things that I was truly interested in and I ignored that by the way and what that meant was some places that I went to apply for a job didn’t want me but then Harvard did so that worked out quite nicely you know and that’s one of the advantages too also of being true to your own vision is that you won’t get what you don’t want see I didn’t want to go work somewhere where they wouldn’t want me I wanted to go work somewhere where they wanted me so my strategy was well this is who I am and if you don’t want me you know that’s a drag because I’m looking for a job but by the same token I’m not going to pretend to be someone other than who I am so I can work here what a stupid way of starting your career well that goes back to the truth right telling the truth what are you going to if you tell a sufficiently seductive lie what is the best that you can hope for right the person that you’re telling the lie to falls in love with a projection right right absolutely well when I applied to graduate school I wrote a crazy admissions letter and I basically out who I was flaws and all and what I was interested in and two people three people bit and the one that I liked best partly because he was at Mill and I wanted to be in Montreal was my graduate supervisor Robert Peele and he knew what he was getting and we had a great time I still work with him like I had one of the best relationships with Bob that I’ve ever had with anyone in my life and it’s lasted four decades and it was because like Bob’s a very honest person we were very different he’s very practical he’s a very good administrator managerial type although he’s he’s super smart he had an exhaustive knowledge of the relevant research psychology literature and I came in you know flying on a mat of psychoanalytic theory and philosophy and religious ideas very very different although we shared a real deep interest in the practicalities of research and he taught me how to fall in love with the more scientific end of the research distribution but the point I’m making is that he knew he knew what he was getting right from the beginning and so did I and that worked like a charm there was no re reason for any sort of subterfuge and it turned out that our his talents and mine dovetailed extremely well so and we had a blast I loved working with well like that’s why we been working together for 40 years I traveled all over North America with because we also started a business and uh it was great it was great the thing is you know if you tell people who you are and an opportunity opens up it opens up for you yes not for this thing you’ve created this lie this this story that Douglas Murray told me about one of his first bosses at an early newspaper that he worked at I can’t remember the gentleman’s name this guy is a legend within the industry he’s been working for a long time he’s accumulated a number of uh haters and and fans and toward the back end of his career as Douglas is starting his he decides that he wants to release a West End play about the life of Prince Charles in rhyming couplets adventurous as as West End plays go and obviously there was all of this scrutiny because he was this very welln individual within the publishing world and uh opening night by the halftime interval there was no one left in the entire Auditorium including the cast and this guy was devastated right and he was mocked in the press and all the rest of it apparently Douglas saw him shortly afterward and asked him kindly he was like look like what were you thinking West End play about the life of Prince Charles and [ __ ] rhyming couplets he said well Douglas I followed my instincts and instincts that may sometimes Lead You Wrong mhm but they’re the only thing that’s ever led you right right right and that stuck with me because yeah well well there there there’s something very relevant there too on the instinctual front Okay so things will beckon to you and call to you and you’ll have intuitions about which pathway to take and you will in all likelihood follow those because what else do you have you have these orienting instincts this is another reason why you don’t lie CU if you lie and you practice lying you pathologize your instincts and then your intuitions lead you wrong and so there’s a sin that’s laid out in the gospels it’s the sin against the Holy Ghost and it’s unforgivable and people have been debating for like 2,000 years about what this particular sin is but it’s something like the pathologization of the instincts that Orient you if you sacrifice your relationship to the truth you warp your vision and then you can’t see and then one day it’ll be dark and there’ll be sharp things in the fall in front of you and you’ll wander right into them because you’ve pathologized your own Vision yeah you don’t want to lie because you you program yourself falsely and then you automatically see what isn’t there and then of course the world will slap you in the face continually and you’ll think oh my God the world’s such a pathological place when the truth of the matter is is that no you just keep running into things that you refuse to see and then you think well the world’s made of nothing but obstacles it’s like well you put the obstacles in your own path and you did that by developing these complex self-serving delusions a story that you tell other people about who you are that isn’t true you’re trying to lay out a map that bears no relationship to reality and you keep wondering why you wander off the path and into a pit it’s like well how could it be otherwise if see if you really un this people have commented to me many times about my bravery and I I I don’t like that I it’s it’s it’s not right I’m afraid of different things than the typical person maybe that’s a good way of thinking about it I’m way more afraid of the consequences of saying something that’s false or wandering off the appropriate path than I am of whatever consequences might come for saying what I believe and doing what I believe to be the case I’m way more afraid of that you know I’ve been reading the gospel of St Matthew I’m I’m writing a book at the moment called we who wrestle with God and one of the things Christ says to people continually is to not damage their vision is to not put that’s the best way of putting it don’t olude your eye you can see what’s in front of you if you’re willing to see it and if you’re willing to see it the terrible OB many of the terrible obstacles in life you can just walk around but if you blind yourself purposefully to follow your own narrow self-serving delusion you’re going to run into terrible things and terrible people and the terrible part of your own soul all the time that’s what you should be afraid of well the best thing that you can hope for if you do do that is to fluke success living somebody else’s life right right great wonderful yeah exactly you get to be you get to be a successful fraud I remember this documentary about Ron Jeremy I think they called him the Hedgehog he was this famous porn star I’ve seen a music video with him in yeah yeah okay not one of the world’s most attractive people physically and you know he lived in this very interesting world he lived in this world he was stopped constantly on the street by people who thought Ron Jeremy was a hero right so he was in hell because the people who admired him were the people who admired he was surrounded by the people who thought that he was an avatar of of success right and so he got what he wanted I suppose he had easy access to easy women in other news this episode is brought to you by manscaped if you are a gentleman who is still using an old face shaver from three Christmases ago to trim your gentleman’s area what are you doing join us here in the modern world there are purpose built tools for the 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checkout well let me give you let me give you this this is why I think the beginning of the incel movement and the black pill movement was born out of pick a partistry the origin if you trace it back using internet history of the incel blackpill uh ideology was a I think it a subreddit or a website called Pua hate pickup artist hate and what it was was a group of men who had been through the pipeline of pickup Artistry yeah and come out the other side with a very jaded and even more jaded view of the world even more jaded yes and I’ll tell you why so what happened Happ s if a guy learns old school mid2 norts pickup Artistry is you realize that there is a particular set of actions a script that you can run which makes it more likely that a woman is going to go to bed with you right right right right but what you realize when you do that as you learn how to neg and do Kino escalation and tell them that story about the [ __ ] fight outside or whatever your script is that you’re running you then begin to see just how far away that person is from the person that you actually show up as right who you are and this extravagant Persona that you need to convolute into existence in order to get this woman into bed makes you feel worse even F the gap between where you are and what you have to do in order to achieve the thing that you want now what you don’t realize is that there are a million other ways that you could become sufficiently Charming to get this person to like you this is by actually doing it example this is just one that happens to be robust and easy enough to write down in a book and easy enough for it’s basically a form of scripted psychopathy so what a psychopath does is feain competence right so most psychopaths are very emotionally stable and so one of the early stage markers for competence is self-possession and calmness and so if you’re not an anxious person you’ve got an edge on that already and most psychopaths are very high in emotional stability and so they look confident because confident people tend not to be that nervous like if you’re doing something you’re expert at well you’re not nervous because you know how to do it okay so the lack of nervousness is a hint to competence well you can feain that you can feain competence you can feain confidence that’s what the pickup artists teach now I would say there’s even some utility and what they do right because if you’re dependent and bitter and resentful and charmless and self destructive and nervous and socially unskilled the probability that you’re going to be successful with women is very very low okay so you should be other than who you are now if you start putting on this Persona then you could think about that as a new suit of clothes and you could learn through through that how to fill in the gaps take it until you make it absolutely absolutely but if you take on that without doing the effort necessary to integrate that in a genuine way then all that’s happening is that you’re you’re being rewarded for being fake yeah right and that’s part of the problem with that too is that you’re practicing learning how to manipulate people in a psychopathic way and if you practice that of course you’re going to become jaded like there’s nothing more jaded than a psychopath I mean that’s that’s the ultimate extreme of jadedness and if you practice manipulating especially if the women happen to be reasonably good women if you practice manipulating them and you’re successful then you’re learning to be one you’re learning to be one horrible person now you know as your completely useless unproductive and undesirable former self you weren’t exactly Stellar to begin with but substituting psychopathy for that what sort of like substituting cynicism for naivity now that’s a complex problem I mean part of the reason that people like Andrew Tate are so attractive to young guys is because they do put up that confident that false confidence Tate’s a complicated guy because it’s not all false you know real people are complicated the way that like villains in in comic books aren’t hates a fighter it’s clearly the case that he’s got a certain degree of physical bravery that’s real all right there’s an element of what he says that’s very attractive to bed bedroom basement dwelling losers because he’s at least there out in the world you know taken the blows and he’s got a fast car and he’s flashy and he’s attractive to women but a lot of what he’s done especially with women doesn’t just border into the psychopathic it crosses the line and that’s not a good model it’s not an optimal model for people who are trying to progress but it’s a strange thing because just as cynicism is an improvement over naivity right the capacity to be dark is an improvement over the lack of ability to be dark at all and so Tate is attractive in the way that the shadow beckons to people who are undeveloped right because it does it’s like you’re you’re neurotic and you’re dependent and you’re repressed because you’re immature and harmless well one way out of that is to stop being harmless and one of the things you can say about Tate is that he’s not harmless right well that’s that’s a it’s a virtue now it’s a virtue that has to be bracketed it’s like cynicism is a virtue compared to naivity but it’s not it’s not virtuous in and of itself it’s a step on the way and so maybe you can learn how to Fain confidence and you can learn how that works and maybe that’s an improvement I had a guy in my clinical practice who got involved with the pickup artist community and he told me taught me a lot about it and one of the exercises that their initiates had to do was to go out and ask 50 women for their phone number in one day and that’s a great exercise you know and I’m not exposure therapy approach anxiety absolutely absolutely getting over your fear of rejection right and 50 times they’ll do that because you’re going to get rejected the vast majority of times likely 50 times although generally that wasn’t people’s experience you know if if they were even vaguely skilled they’d at least get a false phone number out of the deal but then they could they learn that the rejection wasn’t as catastrophic as they thought but more importantly they learned that they could continue moving forward in the face of rejection so the thing that it makes me think about there is intellectual humility and how tightly people hold on to their beliefs that if you believe that you are always is going to be right that there is nothing to learn outside of you and that any kind of admission that you might be wrong is tant amount to destruction it does exactly the same thing you need to and it goes back to uh asking stupid questions being prepared to ask the stupid questions and look not like the most informed person in the room but also importantly nowhere near the most stupid person in the room because you’re the one that’s asking the question well the stupidest person in the room is the person who doesn’t know and won’t ask or even worse who doesn’t know and won’t ask and acts like they know that’s not good at all yeah there’s a from your see that’s part of that idea that you should love your enemy so you might say well why should you do that well your enemy is going to be your harshest critic now it’s possible that if you have a very good enemy that he will show you flaws in your character that you didn’t know were there and so that’s a it’s a very it’s a very strange way of looking at the world to think that you should welcome an attack you should it and this is but this is right it yeah I’m saying that with all due caution let’s say the most the more vicious the attack the more of your potential hidden flaws might be revealed have you found that to be true oh definitely but I’ve also found that the attacks force you to contend with it to to see if it’s there right to to test it I suppose the attacks that have come after me that have been most successful they they’re almost always journalists and they’re usually British female journalists but not always we produce a a nation of hardhead journalists yeah well and faith in journalists is the lowest in the UK and anywhere in the western world and I can see why you know but there’s some Advantage there’s some real advantage to facing someone it’s a Pharisee problem in in the gospels Christ was always contending with these Pharisees and what the Pharisees were always trying to do was to lay a verbal trap for him so is a Pharisee a person Pharisee was a was a Jewish sect okay and the Pharisees were very legalistic in their interpretation of Mosaic law and so they were sort of they were hypocritical the way they’re portrayed in the gospel S as they’re hypocritical by the book moralists and part of what and most of their morality was for show they like to pray in public they like to be seen being holy at least that’s the criticisms that are levied against them and what they’re always trying to do in the gospel accounts is to lay a verbal trap for Christ so that they can expose him as a heretic and kill them right so every single thing they say is a snare of some sort and there’s lots of journalists like that Nelly Bulls who wrote an article about me for the New York Times which was a very devastating article in many ways and very Serpentine and and subtle she 3 years later she wrote another article about what it was like to work for the New York Times when she was working there and the tricks that the journalists played including her and she said that the game was to devastate someone else’s reputation in the attempt to boost yours right so you could think about it as a game of comparative moral standing so the journalist’s trick is to trick you into saying something that will end your career essentially their social status stands on the shoulders of yours AB absolutely absolutely and so now the the advantage to being in a situation like that is that you have to step if you step extremely carefully and you’re fortunate then you evade the traps and then the interview tilts hard in your favor yeah and so the most the interviews that have done me the most good in the long run were the two interviews that were most hostile one by channels 4 Griffin Kathy Kathy new Kathy Newman Cathy Griffin and Kathy Kathy at least had a sense of humor another one by Helen Lewis who had no sense of humor at all and doesn’t seem to have learned anything at all in the interim but I think that I think that one has 80 million views now twice as many as the Kathy Newman interview like it just keeps racking up views and it was because Helen Lewis she has like 50 tricks or 100 tricks Kathy had like four you know and they were pretty blunt and she had a sense of humor about them but Helen Lewis she was just all tricks and lots of them and smart you know and it’s quite something to talk to someone who’s quite smart and quite educated but all tricks and so but how does it feel looking back on those too they were very formative time it was kind of the inflection point or one of the inflection points I suppose for yourself as well yeah how does it feel looking back on that I remember you said at the time it took you many days to recover from that kind of cantankerous sort of adversarial interview is that does that seem like a different lifetime or is that still very much sort of with you well I’m a lot healthier than I was then so those sorts of things wouldn’t have the same effect on me now as they did then because I was Ill it took me a long time to recover from you know serious bout I mean the first time I talked to Sam Harris not that Sam played tricks like I like Sam and we’ve had very productive conversations I was so ill when the first time I talked to Sam that I could barely sit in my chair talking to Sam Harris makes you ill that’s the No No not not at all no no Sam and I have had very productive conversations that was another good example I suppose of the utility of an adversarial conversation yeah you know I mean Sam comes to a conversation like that pretty well armed but it’s very helpful because it forces you to look in nooks and crannies that you might not have looked in and to be crystal clear to the degree that that’s possible about what you’re actually saying the idea of of loving your enemy is something I’ve been playing with a little bit recently there been I guess my platform’s getting to the level now where uh there’s a reason for someone to have a bullseye pointed at least remotely in my direction because there’s no point in trying to take somebody down that’s got nothing that’s got no status why would you why would you invest the time your the step that you’re going to get in terms of your status standing on their shoulders is so small that no one so it’s a backhanded compliment yeah in some ways yeah um but you’re right man some of the some of the criticisms that I’ve got I was reminded by a friend recently about this uh have been some of the best inflection points very uncomfortable and to see it as a gift to think about that thing as a gift it’s like I know that you weren’t doing this to make me better yeah I know that you weren’t doing this to try and to try and benefit me and yet and yet yeah in reflection it’s like Alchemy it’s like how Rory Sutherland calls it Alchemy taking something that was bad I I had this reflection as well well we we’ve learned my family’s learned like when when a public attack occurs there’s a massive opportunity nested in it if you can reorient it’s like okay this is bad this is vicious this is not this does not look good and maybe it could take me out take us out is there a way is there a way we can play with this that will not only neutralize it but twist it in the other direction I think the thing we did that was most effective on that side of things was when I was written into Captain America as I spoke to you that day I spoke to you that day that it happened yeah the magical magical super Nazi floating Nazi or whatever yeah yeah yeah well it was shocking right it was it was very shocking and then Olivia wild yeah the that was shocking too yeah yeah there’s a Litany of yes yes well and it it became increasingly Preposterous and and the Olivia wild episode was one of the that was so Preposterous that it was almost immediately laugh mercifully that film was so badly made and I’m pretty sure that she’d cast her boyfriend as one of the got rid of someone that was super competent and put somebody in that was pretty incompetent uh and I think that that kind of caused it to flub but yeah man the the the thing I’ve ended up becoming really good friends with one of my harshest critics it’s so strange uh and yet makes complete sense afterward uh you had a how did you end up making friends so I got criticized uh by a pair of podcasters who um do this they they kind of take down or or they have a very critical eye of much of the of the podcasting world and they they did an episode about an episode that I’d done and have a right of reply thing oh yeah uh Sam’s been on to do it uh who else has been on to do it I I did it couple of other Constantin kiss being to do and um I I went on and there was a bit of like I listened to their show I think it’s a very Illuminating way to see how people that have a different perspective about what’s going on in in your world see it and uh I was like yeah I got the opportunity to go on and have a conversation and I did and I found them to both be like way more Charming than I thought that they were going to be and uh I’ve ended up both Chris and Matt all Matt l so but with Chris like we must speak once a month every couple of weeks we one of us will just ring and we’ll catch up about what’s been going on in the world and he has a very different sort of worldview to me he lives in a different area of the world he’s a a a psychologist studying religion I think and and uh sacred rituals and stuff like that rituals rather than religion and now he points out blind spots that I don’t see and that one particular instance was and it was really uncomfortable because this was still this was three years ago or something now maybe and I’m still you super uncomfortable about it and oh my God these people are going to take me down and they’re both academics and they’re really really well educated and they’re going to be smart and they’re going to say things that make me look silly and I said things that made me look silly and picked a particular episode where blah blah blah and yet in reflection it’s been that one instance and the subsequent rumination about it was one of the biggest inflection points for me going from having blind spots that I hadn’t seen to that and I I almost think that the degree of discomfort that I went through was mandatory because had I not felt so much like fear and anxiety and embarrassment about the fact that I’m going to it’s going to be out there and there’s going to be all this focus and attention in not a nice way and there’ll be tweets and all the rest of the stuff that was sufficient uncomfortable to force me to actually genuinely look at the things that I was doing that I was getting wrong and I’m sure that there’s a million things I’m still getting wrong but yeah it was it was as much a gift as it could be we’ll get back to talking to Jordan in one minute but first I need to tell you about element I’ve used element every single morning for over three years now it is the way I start every single day it tastes fantastic it optimizes my hydration it helps to regulate my appetite and it improves my brain health element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium best of all they’ve got a brand new chocolate caramel flavor which you can have hot hot element I hear you say what sort of hydration blasphemy is this but no it tastes fantastic and on cold mornings it’s perfect there is a no BS no questions asked refund policy so you can buy it and try it completely risk-free and if you do not like it for any reason they will give you your money back and you don’t even need to return the Box I’ve used this every single morning for as long as I can remember and that orange flavor is phenomenal plus that chocolate caramel is available right now if you go to the link in the show notes below or head to drink LM nt.com slod wisdom for a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box that’s drink LM nt.com slod wisdom here’s another thing I spoke to David gogins about this last year about how uh I was bullied as a kid and I was quite unpopular in school and I was an only child so I didn’t really have many people to back me up you know in the schoolyard or whatever and I for a long time had a chip on my shoulder about the kids that mistreated me in school as you might expect and then I got toward you know maybe a few years ago and I really really started to reflect on it and realized that so many of the things that I valued in myself were the light side of something dark that had been created during that time in school so um my complete preparedness to just spend time on my own means that I don’t mind about moving out to a country where I don’t know anybody and trying to make this podcast thing work or spending hours and hours working or researching or recording podcasts or doing intros or whatever it is like all of those things um not having a super tight social network as a kid meant that I wasn’t beholden to anybody when I grew up that I I didn’t feel the need to have as much uh um support as I go along to do stuff now other sides of it haven’t been so great because I still seek validation I still a lot of validation because that was something that I was missing as a kid um but yeah realizing not only you probably wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the things that you went through okay there’s step one and then step two is and I’m quite grateful for what I’ve done and then step three would be something like wow I’m proud of myself for having turned something that was negative into something that’s positive but then another level above that would be wow so maybe I should be thankful yeah right well we know we were talking earlier in the podcast about what is the appropriate attitude towards the future and I would say well we could put past present and future in the same bin say well one of the things that you want to do is practice gratitude that’s one of the primary religious rituals you might say is the practice of gratitude and you might say well my life is so horrible do I have to be grateful for and I would say that’s that’s for better worse that’s still a form of blindness right I mean people can have very very difficult situations can be in very very difficult situations and it’s in those difficult situations where the search for gratitude becomes something that is by necessity deeper and more difficult but that doesn’t mean it’s not appropriate you know and there is there is a very tight association between loving your enemy and being grateful in spite of the terrible things that occur in your life I’ve been writing about the Book of Job and job is a story of unjust suffering fundamentally God deems job a good man so we have it on God’s word that job is actually a good man and then all hell breaks loose partly because God makes a bet with Satan which is you know a hell of a thing to do and says do your worst he’s not going to turn on me no matter what you do and so job despite his torment he becomes very ill he loses everything he has his friends he becomes ill in a way that’s disfiguring his friends come around and laugh at him and tell him that he’s a bad man and that’s why all these terrible things have been happening to him and it’s brutal and job refuses to lose faith in himself he says look I’m I’m not perfect I’m but as far as men go I’ve done what I should do and it I’m not being punished in some manner that’s obviously related to my sin it’s more like the random play of tragic forces in the world I’m not going to lose faith in myself no matter what and I’m also not going to his wife says shake your fist at God curse him and die because things have gone so badly for job she thinks that’s all that’s left to him and he refuses to do that so he maintains Faith regardless of what’s happened to him and that’s really the moral of the story of job which is that you are morally obligated to maintain Faith no matter what happens to you and there’s a practical side to that so imagine that God and Satan conspire against you there’ll be times in your life where it feels like that’s happening and then imagine that your reaction to that is to become bitter and resentful and hostile well then whatever hell you’re in merely as a consequence of the Confluence of tragic events you have opened a whole other hell underneath it the hell of bitterness and resentment and ingratitude and well and that turns into the desire for Revenge very very quickly you think things are bad just because they’re bad you wait till you see how bad they can become if you allow yourself to be corrupted by your unjust suffering right and so it’s a and I I I do think that this is the most practical possible advice that can be given to people which is that you are morally required to maintain Faith to aim up and to treat other people the way you would want to be treated no matter what’s happened to you you know and that’s a hell of a thing to say and you know you might say well that’s impossible PE some people have such brutal lives that they’re destined to be corrupt but I would say that’s not true like I’ve met many many people particularly in my clinical practice who had lives that were so brutal that you couldn’t even listen to them without it like breaking you into pieces brutal brutal childhoods of of a depth of malevolence you can hardly conceptualize who decided despite that that they were going to aim up and they were going to maintain faith in themselves and the world and so it’s like that’s on the table for people it seems like an odd Paradox that the people who have brought up under lives of the most privileged uh often the ones that have the most complaints about the world and people who have been brought up in deprivation a lot of the time are able to be perfectly in gratitude seems very strange that that that’s the way yeah well I having so one of the things I saw at the University I saw the faculty members my peers retreat in the face of the advancement of the administration over like three decades to the point where the universities really became corrupted and it didn’t really happen at Harvard when I was there in the 1990s although it was starting to fray around the edges slightly but I really watched it at the University of Toronto in the 20 years I was there the administration kept making demands on us and every time they made a demand we would fold every time 10,000 micro Retreats so then the administrators took over the university and then the woke types took over the administr ation and that was that well the reason what I saw my faculty members do the academics that I worked with is that this is how the corruption starts it’s like when you’re an undergraduate you write down what you think the professor wants to hear to get the grade and then you’re a graduate student and you you have to let’s say get along with your professors and your supervisor you have to tell them what you think they want to hear so that you can get your PhD and then maybe you are on the academic track and you’re an assistant professor there’s three levels of being a professor you’re not tenured as an assistant so you really can’t say what you think or do what you think you should do then because you have to get tenured and then when you’re tenured well you’re not a full Professor yet and so you don’t speak then and back in the back of your mind you have this idea well at some point I’ll have enough security so that I’ll be able to tell the truth but that’s based on this weird idea that the courage to tell the truth is based on security well courage isn’t based on security that’s a stupid Theory you’re not courageous if there’s no risk so your notion is you’ll be courageous when there’s zero risk well obviously that’s a contradiction in terms you’re only courageous if there’s a risk and not only that by the time you’ve sacrificed your word for illusory sec security for 15 years there’s nothing left of you that’s true you’ve already that’s gone a long time ago you you probably look back at the former self who was naive and thought that you could say what you think as just well you’re bit you’re cynical about it you know that person just didn’t know how the way didn’t know how the world worked and then it’s the same thing that you pointed out the idea that you become good because you have material plenty that’s a silly idea why would that be the case it’s like the same as assuming that all rich people have got taste right there poor people who’ve got beautifully designed interiors and rich people who’ve got gy messes right right right right there was yeah well then the poor people are actually rich absolutely uh there’s a a report I wanted to bring this to you it’s so interesting so recent report was released by The Harvard Graduate School of Education detailing the drivers of anxiety for young adults aged 18 to 25 34% reported feelings of loneliness 51% said achievement pressure negatively impacted their mental health 58% reported lacking meaning or purpose in their lives in the last month 50% reported their mental health was negatively influenced by not knowing what to do with my life there has been much examination of the well-being of teens aged 14 to 17 not much has been known about those occupying the critical young adult years and yet young adults report roughly twice the rates of anxiety and depression as teens the young adults are not okay yeah I believe that I saw even with my own kids that the the mo like when I was a kid probably the time between 13 and 15 was the most difficult transition but I saw that become older by the time my kids my kids are 30 now basically by the time my kids were young adults I could see that that transition into adulthood was the place where the difficulties were starting to mount I think perversely that the therapeutic world has a fair bit to do with this partly because therapists who are basically secular liberal Protestants that’s a good way of thinking about them tend to conceptualize mental health as mental as subjective right it’s like mental health is something you carry around in your head like you carry around your identity that’s why we have these ridiculous ideas that you can just Define your own identity I am whoever I say I am well obviously you’re not because other people other people have to go along with your game they’re buddy and they’re either going to do that they’re not going to do it or they’re going to do it voluntarily or they’re going to do it by force if they’re not going to do it you’re screwed if you have to use Force that’s not going to work and if you want them to do it voluntarily then it’s not going to be all about you obviously even no four-year-old can find someone to play with if he always gets to pick the game okay so why might young adults be lost well part of it is that they’re thinking I’m not trying to be judgmental of a whole generation it’s a it’s a form of thought your mental health isn’t dependent on you that’s not the right way to think about it you I don’t think you can be mentally healthy in the absence of a long-term stable relationship so you have to be married let’s put let’s let’s make that part of the precondition for successful adaptation as a young adult you have to be married so you have to establish a relationship with someone that integrates sexuality that’s there for the long run because there for the long run is the same as Saye there for tomorrow they’re for the next minute that’s not sanity that’s impulsiveness that’s aimlessness they’re the same thing if it’s what if it’s all about what you want right now or more accurately all about what something in you wants this moment that’s the definition of immature Insanity you have to commit so you commit to someone else you commit to your family you commit to your community like there are multiple levels of identity that stretch out into the social world and voluntarily adopting those levels of hierarchical responsibility gives you an identity it gives you a purpose it protects you from anxiety it does that in all sorts of ways like you know you said earlier that one of the things you do is seek for validation and you related that to uncomfortable experiences you had when you were very young well it might not be precisely that you’re seeking for validation you might be properly investigating how you should be embedded in a social hierarchy at every possible level it’s like well people think their mental health is something that they just carry around in their head and that if they just got the way they looked at the world right or if other people just played their game that all of a sudden they’d be mentally healthy it’s like there’s no difference between thinking about yourself and being miserable technically if you if you if you look at you can you can group descriptive statements about yourself statistically all the all the descriptive all the descriptors that are reflective of self-consciousness load on negative emotion can you not think about yourself in a positive way probably not really not well let’s take that apart you like doing your podcast and you feel positive about it okay but your podcast isn’t about you right so if you’re thinking about how you’re of utility to a broad number of people you know maybe you would take some satisfaction in that but that isn’t exactly thinking about yourself is it it’s thinking about the relationship you’ve established with other people and it’s a relationship of responsibility why do you like your podcast you can pursue what you’re curious about but you wouldn’t have to do that publicly okay so why do you do it publicly for a few reasons first one being that it keeps me accountable that was one of the main reasons that it kept me accountable because I knew that if I didn’t do it if I wasn’t rigorous and precise and uh aligned with what I’d said and done previously that is an external eye that’s watching keep okay okay so well that’s very interesting so I would also say that’s not exactly about you that’s about your ability to live to establish Harmony between what you say and the way you act and the expectations that an increasingly Broad Social Community has of you as a consequence of what you say and how you act okay that’s not about you that’s about your nesting in a social hierarchy right and so I think I think you can and then you might say too well maybe you’re thinking about yourself when you’re establishing an aim or a goal well not if they’re good aims or goals because if they’re good aims or goals and and I would say what good means technically is an aim or goal that will play out well in the medium to long term across a multitude of situations including many many people so the a solution that iterates across time that and that is situation independent and that’s broadly socially inclusive is a better aim right it’s a higher aim because it integrates more all right now you might want to be setting up aims and you might be pleased about how you’re progressing in relation to those aims but if those aims aren’t don’t have the characteristics that I just described then if the Asim have the characteristics I just described they’re not about you and then we could also ask what do you mean about you exactly what you are you talking about here you know and so we play these identity games in the modern world that are making people anxious and hopeless and one identity game is I’m defined by my sexuality okay so let’s take that I’m defined by my sexuality okay but what do you mean by your sexuality exactly do you mean the opportunity to engage in sex like are you reducing sexuality as such to the act of sex okay let’s say you are so now what you’re telling me is that who you are is who you are when you’re sexually desirous that’s what you’ve reduced yourself to but it’s even more than that it’s the kind of sexual desire that wants gratification right now with no relationship whatsoever so not only have you now reduced who you are to your sexual desire you’ve reduced your sexual desire to the minimal set of preconditions that would satisfy it well then the first question that might come up there is why not just use porn it’s a lot simpler and the answer to that is that is what people are doing well it’s no wonder that they’re anxious and Lonesome and aimless because they’ve they’ve reduced themselves to a short-term desire they found the easiest possible way of gratifying that and they’ve abandoned everything that would be a much broader conceptualization of what sexuality would be if it was embedded properly in well how about a relationship to start with and I’m not just these aren’t just opinions so there are two different strategies of reproduction broadly in the animal world one is zero investment fish m mosquitoes million Offspring they all die but one right so you can reduce reproduction in mosquitoes basically to sex and you make a million mosquito Offspring all you need is one to survive problem solved okay on the opposite end of the spectrum literally are human beings because we have the longest dependency period of any animal by a large margin we have a high investment strategy sexual reproduction strategy so whatever sex is for human beings isn’t you’re off and that’s over that’s not what it is for human beings it’s embedded in a relationship now you might say well we could pull sexuality out of the relationship and just indulge in it for the pleasure okay so now let’s forget about all the other animals now we’ve got two types of human being we’ve got the one night stand human being repetitive one night stands and we’ve got the long-term committed relationship human being and then we might ask okay what are the personality characteristics of the people in those bins so let’s go to the short-term one night stand sequential relationship types okay who are they Psychopathic narcissistic mauian and sadistic all one night stand people if they don’t start out that way they’re going to end that way right because you can’t use yourself or other people for short-term gratification look the definition of a psychopath is someone who uses someone for short-term gratification okay so it’s definitional right so and then you might say well I’m not like that I just like sex it’s like yeah but if you practice that for five years you’re not going to become what you practice you know and I talked to Russell Brand about this a little bit on and I can say this because it was on his podcast so it’s not like this is Secret you know Russell had what Andrew Tate promises his followers he had Fame he was charismatic and he had more or less unlimited access to short-term sexual gratification okay in combination with you know the chemicals that make that even more likely alcohol and cocaine let’s say so what are the consequences well I asked him what were the consequences you had this he said uh despair anxiety and hopelessness right but but not just that because you know Russell got himself in trouble here month and a half ago just about took him out well it was his past coming back to haunt him like and he had to scroll through his psyche and see you know well in with all these short-term relationships these short-term sexual gratification binges that I indulged in did I ever cross the line well the answer is well you’re going to have like 200 encounters like that you’re not going to cross the line when you’re drunk when you’re on cocaine you’re going to cross a bunch of lines and then it’s going to come back and haunt you and so it’s very interesting to see in our culture back to the hopelessness and despair that you were mentioning that’s character in young adults life it’s like well it’s all about me that’s the self-esteem movement but then me becomes it’s all about what I want and then that becomes it’s all about what I want right now then it’s it’s what the lowest part of me wants right now and to hell with everyone else it’s like okay how are you going to play that game without being desperate you’re going to be desperate as soon as you start playing that game and the other thing it’s even worse than that because you’re going to end up with the Jeremy the the the porn star problem anybody you’re not going to be very happy about being with the people who want to play that game with you because they’re not going to be the people that are really going to make you feel that life is worth living they’re going to be the people especially on the female side women who are willing to take advantage of themselves for short-term sexual gratification those aren’t happy women they’re usually damaged women and if they’re not damaged when they start playing that game game they’re going to be plenty damaged by the time they’re done with it the last time that we spoke me you talked about population Decline and the Census Bureau just released today predicting that the US population will decline for the first time ever by the year 201100 after peaking in 2080 so their estimates showed that the US population which is about 333 million at the moment is expected to reach 370 by 2080 but will be back down to 366 by 2100 and even immigration can’t offset this birth rate decline over the last two years do you think things have got better or worse than you anticipated from birth rate and marriage rate standpoint I think they’re probably still getting worse uh and I think musk musk is one of the few people Elon Musk is one of the in case anybody was wondering um he’s one of the few people who who’s called out the danger of you know a one child policy or the idea that we should decrease the population I mean things that don’t grow die but they die for all sorts of reasons and we could we could tie this back to Identity you know what’s my identity I could say well it’s how I feel about myself that’s that’s the line that’s used everywhere now you don’t get to tell me who I am I know who I am I can I’m who I feel I am well first of all I don’t even know what you mean by feel like what the hell what does that mean you’re your emotional state at the moment and you can just impose that on everybody that’s your theory is it that’s the theory of a 2-year-old literally that’s a very bad Theory well where could your identity be other than that well one of my identities when I taught at Harvard was Professor obviously and that was a good identity but you know that wasn’t exactly it wasn’t something I was carrying around in my head it was a pattern of relationship that I had with a whole bunch of people all my students right it wasn’t inside my head now there was a concordance between my representation of myself and how I was acting in the world and that concordance was the health it wasn’t what I thought of myself you like part of the reason that you can take some let’s call it gratification from being a successful podcaster is that you’re actually a successful podcast it’s not in your head it’s in 1.5 million subscribers it’s how many podcasts have you done 700 okay so it’s in 700 podcasts it’s not something you’re carrying around in your head do you remember I love the 42 Rules that created the 24 that you ended up coming up with but there’s one that you didn’t use uh if you have to choose be the one who does things right not the one who is seen to do things exactly absolutely I love that rule oh yeah that’s a great rule that’s a great rule yeah well the thing is is that you can do almost anything you want if you’re willing to take responsibility for it if you don’t want credit one of the most effective political maneuver I’ve ever seen woman who’s she’s so brilliant I won’t tell you who she is but she’s so sharp she’s so brilliant and she told me the last time I saw her she’s had her finger in pies for like 30 years popping up in places you’d never expect I thought I asked just like how the hell did you pull this off and she said oh I decided 30 years ago that I could do whatever I wanted if I didn’t want credit and so that’s exactly what she’s done and she’s had a stellar career stellar and I’ve worked with other people who’ve done the same thing it’s very interesting it’s very interesting thing to realize you might say well why would I want the responsibility without the glory it’s like hey do you want the glory are you so sure that that wouldn’t just get in your way you know there’s something to be said for anonymity and second maybe you want the responsibility because that’s the adventure you actually get to do the thing that someone else just wants to take credit for well maybe doing the thing is plenty of reward in and of itself with regard to Identity you know when when I was a professor I was also a husband and I was also a father well those were identities but they weren’t in my head they were embedded in the relationship I had with my kids and that was a meaningful relationship embedded in the relationship I had with my wife you can’t be you know it’s almost heretical to say this in the modern world you can’t be isolated alone without responsibility and pursuing your hedonistic nonsense and not be insane and miserable those are all the same thing right and so you know it’s got to the point i’ I’ve said things that have made me somewhat unpopular like it’s very difficult for people to mature until they have a child you find a huge part of what you are in that relationship it makes you responsible makes you grow up it gives you the opportunity to Mentor someone you have someone around who’s more important than you well that’s part of being mentally healthy it’s a huge part of it this is this Enterprise that I put together in London helped put together Alliance for responsible citizenship we’re trying to put forward a model of governance it’s called subsidiary model and the idea is that people have multiple social roles that scale know there’s you should take care of yourself integrate yourself which means you can conduct yourself properly across the medium to long run you’re self- sustaining then you can maybe extend that to your partner and then to your family and then to your local community and then to broader communities as you become more and more competent and able to take on that responsibility that’s the alternative to isolated Hedon slavery you slave to your own whims and it’s the alternative to tyranny because if you take on all that responsibility you don’t have any need for someone to govern you and so that’s another example of how I blamed it on the therapists a little bit I called them liberal Protestant secularists and that’s because they think about the Locust of the psyche as in interior subjective that’s what a liberal would do it’s just not accurate that isn’t that isn’t the way the psyche works it’s not in your head you know it’s it’s in your head and in the world at the same time it’s truly the case that your sanity is the concordance between you as an individual and the world that’s the sanity it’s not the proper structuring of your psyche or your brain for that matter inside your skull you’re distributed out into the world and you should be and that’s you want to be that’s where the adventure is you want to be solipsistic the solipsistic porn masturbator Jesus it’s no wonder you be aimless and miserable well God it’s so pathetic why am I so unhappy it’s because you think about yourself no you think about the lowest impulses in yourself all the time that’s why you’re miserable whilst being Arc what I thought was particularly interesting was your live event that you guys did at the O2 on the evening time and everyone was great but Douglas I thought was just a tour to force that evening what have you learned since being friends with Douglas how’s he impacted you or influenced you well douglas douglas is very very disagreeable you know and he enjoyed combat and that isn’t something that really characterizes I don’t enjoy combat at all I mean part of the reason that it’s perverse I suppose in some ways part of the reason that I will engage in difficult conversations is because I don’t want to have them forever and so you know one of the rules I had in my marriage and it was a rule that my wife also was pleased to follow was that if we have a problem we’re going to deal with it right now and we’re going to deal with it right to the bottom and that’s very unpleasant but if you do it sometimes you only have to do it once and the problem goes away and then you don’t have that Bloody problem every day for the rest of your life and sometimes it takes you know 20 times before it’s fixed before you’ve got to the bottom of things and that can be very unpleasant Douglas is very very good at not letting people off the hook he’s very tough and he’s very good at defending himself and and he there’s a pitilessness about him that’s extraordinarily admirable it’s a judicious pitilessness you know and it’s a dangerous game to play because there’s another gospel realization let’s say is the standards you judge other people by will be the standards that you yourself are judging judged by and the reason for that is well how are you going to judge everyone else and not apply the same standards to yourself like that’s not going to happen because you become what you practice and you’ll turn the eye the Hostile eye that you turn on others you will absolutely turn on yourself there’s there’s no way around that and so Douglas plays a dangerous game because he’s very combative but he’s also extremely careful he’s very careful with his words and we’ve had a he toured with through Europe I think we did nine shows together we we split the Q&A he intro he did a little bit of an introduction before my lectures I really liked it I thought it was great it’s been a privilege to get to know him super sharp um very cultured person um very witty so he has a great sense of humor which is also fun which also was one of the things that makes him a very dangerous opponent in a debate because not only does he have the facts at hand like Bjorn lomberg but he’s devastatingly witting witty and cutting and it’s fun to watch that he’s a master at it so it was uh it’s interesting to think about the fact that all you need really in a live debate I think I learned this from you and Sam ages ago if you’re doing a live debate now that’s not a proper intellectual formatted opening remarks so on and so forth if you manage to get sort of two or three real zingers you won regardless of the content if you do two or three real Zinger whole crowd laughs guess what you you got yeah well the great public intellectuals have a vicious sense of humor right and I mean I also think that’s why so many of the successful podcasters have been comedians well at the ark conference I think Constantine Ken’s speech was the overwhelming hit of the convention I think it’s got 600,000 views as of today 650 on the ark side in about 600 on his own channel and Constantine did a beautiful job of merging intellectual content with wh well the thing the interesting thing about uh my live tour that I’m about to start doing bunch of my comedian friends have said to me dude I am so jealous of the tour that you get to do because no one’s expecting you to be funny if you managed to be funny four times in 90 minutes you’ve killed if I’m not funny once every seven seconds I’m a [ __ ] comedian right so the bar is set and obviously coming in with Constantine’s background of Comedy means that he is able to be by far the you know Far and Away way funnier than most public speakers uh but doesn’t get held necessarily to the same standards that he he’s not expecting to be one liners all the time one of the things that Douglas brought up when you guys were talking on stage that I thought was particularly interesting was The Perils of smart people getting captured by culture wars [ __ ] do you ever think about how much time over the last decade some of the smartest people on the planet have had their attention their cognitive horow just yeah taken away arguing about whether men are men and women are women or not or whatever the idea the jure of the day is yeah well this is so I’ve been partnering with the daily wire for about a year and a half so far that’s been very successful they’ve been a pleasure to work with but what they wrestle with constantly all them all of the principles all of the principles at Daily wire would rather in some real way be be concentrating on philosophical theological or dramatic matters so which is partly why the daily wire is turning towards entertainment for kids but also for adults starting to make movies for example and TV shows they’d rather be doing that I had Ben Shapiro um he participated in this seminar on Exodus that I produced with about nine other um extraordinarily interesting thinkers and Ben is Shawn you know he he’s he’s wasted is he wasted on the political the political is necessary but it’s it’s one nation under God for a reason because the political the political isn’t the Pinnacle never it’s never the Pinnacle and if you’re capable of discourse at the Pinnacle political discourse is secondary there’s also evanescent right there’s ways that it can tumble as well there’s uh how would you say degrees of depth of political stuff too because what works on YouTube a lot of the time is in reacts to insane woke Tik toks or does whatever and it’s easy to get pigeon H holded that way yeah yeah and it is is it a waste it’s nonoptimal but it’s a question it’s an interesting question to be asked right about how much sort of ankle or skirt need you need to show from an algorithmic perspective in order to keep the numbers churning because ultimately you’re producing what people click on you don’t want to be completely beholden to your audience that’s audience capture but you also don’t want to be so unaware of having your finger on the pulse of what is trendy that you become obscure and obsolete right right well in that well in that line that you’re trying to walk when you’re dealing with matters that are the highest and also making them publicly accessible that’s a very very tight line to walk I mean Jonathan Paso has done a good job of that although his Market is still relatively Niche and he certainly is more esoteric let’s say than the daily wire guys who tend to devolve into the political and that devolves into the cheap political from time to time right the hit for hit sake or the or the chasing the algorithm and I mean that’s the danger that all politicians have too is that and I’ve seen this with lots of political who have developed a Persona this is particularly true in the United States I would say because Americans are so sales money and I don’t say that dismissively it’s really hard to sell to Market to communicate I I saw the Elvis movie recently and I thought it did a beautiful job of laying this out because Elvis was a stellar talent but his manager who was a real Shyer was also a stellar Talent like Elvis wouldn’t have been who he was without his corrupt manager and you know it’s sort of a deal with the devil but you have to give the devil is due too and the salesman part of American culture can easily devolve into a kind of narcissistic manipulativeness that’s that’s where it would go if it becomes pathological but as you said you have to be aware of your audience and you have to be delivering what there’s a market for and it’s very difficult to get those things right this is a question question that I’ve got about your new book coming out next year I haven’t seen any of it and it sounds like based on what you’re reading at the moment you’re trying to Grapple with religious texts especially the Bible we who wrestle with God is the name of the book we who wrestle with God yeah which is the that’s what the word Israel means Israel means we who wrestle with God and so well it’s very interesting because it means the chosen people are the people who wrestle with God and you might say well who wrestles with God and the answer to that is well everyone wrestles with god well why because you can’t act without making moral decisions like every every step forward is predicated on a moral decision and so we’re all wrestling with God is God a moral decision God is the spirit that guides you when you make the proper moral decisions so I wouldn’t say God is a moral decision he’s the spirit of he’s the Spirit of moral decision that’s that’s actually not a bad definition like part of what I’m trying to do with this book is to point out that a lot of what’s happening in the biblical Corpus is actually definitional right well people modern people think the fundamental issue is do you believe in God but that’s not the fundamental issue the fundamental issue is what do you mean by God and so let me give you an example of this that will make it clearer so there’s no there’s a medieval idea that that God is the sum bonum which means the sum of all that’s good or the essence of all that’s good okay you might say well I don’t believe in that now remember this is a definition of God right God is the sum of all that’s good okay all right so you don’t believe in that all right let’s take that apart do you believe that some things are better than other things well people will say yes okay so then you believe that there is a scale of good okay is there something that all things that are good share in common and the answer that has to be yes because otherwise you don’t have a conception of good right the word good implies that across good things there’s some Essence okay well the definition the medieval one medieval definition of God is the essence of good well okay let’s say you don’t believe in that okay does that mean you don’t believe in anything that’s good okay then how how do you act then because to act means to do something that’s better than what you’re doing now right there’s no action without movement towards the the good and well you might you might say well I don’t believe that there’s a unitary good okay you believe there’s there’s a fractionated good well then what do you do when those things oppose one another right which would be in a conflict of Duty what how do you refer to what do you refer to to help you adjudicate between different Goods well generally what you do is if you could pursue a which is good or B which is good and they conflict then you pick the higher good okay do you believe in a higher good well if you don’t you can’t decide between goods which means you’re paralyzed if you do believe in the higher good then do you believe in the highest good well the highest good is God what do you mean by that by definition okay so now you have a definition now then the next question might be well what’s your relation ship with the highest good and you might say well I don’t have a relationship it’s like well actually you do because you act in relationship to it you can’t help it you one of the interesting things about the biblical Corpus is that it’s based on the insistance that you have a relationship with being and becoming a relationship like a personal relationship when you say biblical culus do you mean the collection of texts that makes up the Bible yeah because it’s a library of of books essentially right the Bible is actually the first library of books it’s written by a v a very large number of different people and aggregated over thousands of years and then sequenced actually sequenced into a narrative interestingly enough because no one really sequenced it or by no one I mean no individual person it was the Endeavor of the collective or the spirit that possessed the collective over thousands of years but the narrative is coherent which is really quite something and so the narrative is an investigation number one into the nature of God number two into the nature of relationship with God and then number three into the nature of the proper relationship with God all of those things and God is the sum of all that’s good so the Bible is an analysis of H the human relationship with the good what what would have to happen after the publishing of we who wrestle with God for you to look back on that publication and consider it a success what is it that you want to happen what do you want people to feel or to take away from that work I think we’re at the beginning of the counter Enlightenment the the propositions the enlightenment view of man is wrong and this you know out of the Enlightenment view came science but the Science Now indicates that the enlightenment view of man is wrong what do you mean well the enlightenment types believe that we could Orient ourselves in the world let’s say empirically that and this is Sam Harris’s proposition you can abide by the facts you can Orient yourself as a consequence of the dispassionate analysis of the facts you can’t and I would say the artificial intelligence Engineers have figured that out the postmodern literary critics have figured that out the psychologists and physiologists of perception have figured it out and the neuroscientists have figured that out so it’s not just the evidence that that view is necessarily incorrect is overwhelming and multi-dimensional you can’t Orient Yourself by the facts why because there are as many facts as there are things in fact if you combine things the nature of the combination is also a fact so there’s as many facts as there are things and combinations of things well you can’t Orient Yourself by that that’s you drown in chaos it’s like you’re standing in the desert and there’s an infinite number of directions you could go well how do you choose a direction and that’s showing up in that most recent survey that I just mentioned people feeling meaninglessness purposelessness I overwhel lost in the desert they’re lost in the desert that’s and the desert is the desert of fact it’s dead facts especially given how few people can agree on is this a fact or is this counter the well that’s also a problem is it’s not like the facts are necessarily self-evident some facts are and I suppose to some degree what the scientific Corpus is is the elaboration of a set of incontrovertible facts I’ve read recently that the whole big bang narrative is starting to come apart you know that was a fact for a long time now I don’t know if that’s the case I don’t know enough about it but my sense is that the new discoveries from the web telescope have made many of the presumptions upon which the Big Bang model was based questionable so now I don’t want to you know fall down a postmodern rabbit hole because alth the issue of what constitutes a fact is a very complicated issue anyways you can cut to the chase by pointing out that we organize facts in a hierarchy of value and you see the thing about I’m trying to make this case in the book you do this when you look at the world you can’t look at the world except through a hierarchy of value so for example as we’re sitting here there’s an infinite number of places we could be pointing our eyes like I could be talking to you and looking at this little spot on the concrete floor or the spot beside it or the infinite number of spots surrounding it constantly but I’m not I’m looking at your eyes okay why because I’m prioritizing them so the fact that dominates in this landscape is the fact of your eyes why I can use your eyes to evaluate our shared Focus right and that’s why we look at other people’s eyes it’s also why humans have got white around the exactly it’s so that we can see what other people are attending to so that we can get insight into the story a story is a description of a hierarchy of value stories can be Fantastical though right if they’re untethered to anything I can make up Harry Potter’s a story now this if they’re untethered to anything you won’t find them interesting because they won’t resonate they they won’t grip you yeah they’re they’re tethered stories are are Tethered to reality in a very very complicated way because reality isn’t what presents itself moment to moment it’s our math there’s a huge debate among philosophers about mathematical abstractions are they real well you could make a case that a mathematical abstraction is more real than the thing from which it’s abstracted how would you make that case if you’re a master of mathematics you master the world so are the mathematical abstractions more or less real narrative abstractions are abstractions but you could say this is what an archetype is an archetype is a narrative abstraction that’s more real than the world than the apparent world it’s behind the scenes and the biblical Corpus is a is a narrative narrative it’s a hyperreal narrative that’s the right way to think about it it’s more real than real it’s more real than reality how could something that isn’t the thing be more real than the thing well that’s exactly the problem with abstraction right is the idea of a church more real than a given Church well it is in some ways because it encapsulates what’s similar across all churches right so it it’s like a platonic ideal a category is like a platonic ideal is it more or less real well you could say that the reality this is what Plato said the reality is a dim shadow of the essence the reality is less real than the ideal and we we certainly and that’s actually in some ways built into our perception like we we criticize we criticize the things that present themselves to us because they are poor reflections of the hypothetical ideal you might say well the ideal isn’t real it’s like well you could make the opposite argument which is that the ideal is more real than the thing itself and I mean I can give you an example of these patterns so in the story of Cain and Abel you have two patterns of sacrifice okay why is sacrifice an issue the reason it’s an issue is because people exist in a sacrificial relationship to the world what does that mean it seems to mean something like human beings are aware of their extended self you know you’re going to be around tomorrow and next week and next month and next year and 5 years from now and 10 years from now now it’s less certain as you go out but you do have the sense of yourself as something that stretches across the decades okay and so what that means is that you have to conduct yourself in a manner that isn’t merely immediate you have to conduct yourself in a manner that will work across time now how do people do that they work work is a sacrificial gesture so you work by definition virtually work is the sacrifice of the present for the future I mean maybe someone can come up with a better definition of work than that but I don’t think so it’s like you you put in time and effort right now it’s something even if it’s something maybe not what you’d like to be doing at the moment you put in time and effort because you believe what the hell does that mean you believe it’ll pay off well is that a contract with the future is it a covenant because the relationship that the biblical Corpus insists characterizes human striving is covenantal it’s a bargain the bargain is you make the right sacrifices and they pay off that’s the bargain now you might say well that’s just part of the social contract but the biblical Corpus insists that it’s deeper than that it’s built into the the structure of reality itself and that if you got the sacrifices right the future would be paradisal I’ve got it in my head that KL young quote beware of unearned wisdom that feels like that feels like it plays a role here like how the work that you need to put in in order to be able to arrive at genuinely knowing the thing the difference between actually being attractive because who you are is attractive and you being able to be a pickup artist that is able to make the mouth noises and the hand gestures that caus those those are the fruits of false sacrifice you could say that unearned unearned moral reputation is the consequence of false sacrifice well this is performative empathy right sure exactly definitely that’s the same as praying in public look at how good I am if the look at if the look at comes before the how good I am right right right right it really re’s havoc on the good claim it’s also I spoke to Douglas about this it seems to almost be a predictor it’s an identifier that you should be a little bit more cautious about what this person is do definitely you know if every single person that’s super sweety and nicey nicy lizo do you see lizo was in the news recently no so she is a uh artist singer uh she the one that that got in trouble for abusing her close compatriots dancers she made her dancers eat bananas out of the vaginas of amster Damian strippers um Douglas said that he oh yeah that’s a little on the hedonistic power mad side well she was supposed to be you know this bass like for the girls and body positivity and all this stuff but it turned out behind the scenes that she was treating her dances terribly body shaming them all of the time but she was the one up front that was the Vanguard of this particular movement but you’d seen the same with uh was it Jimmy Fallon I think he was uh caught up in a fural recently that he was a tyrant to work for and yet out front Ellen degenerous again the same it’s almost actually like if somebody is it’s very much like that overloading on the sweetie nicey I am here for the underlings that you go I’m a little bit suspicious of what’s going on there if you need to Proclaim your Purity and your good standing if it’s all words and opinions and not Deeds one of The Commandments one of the Ten Commandments is do not use God’s name in vain okay now people think that means don’t swear and it sort of means that that’s one of its like tangential meanings but what it really means is do not claim Divine motivation for self-serving Behavior right and that’s performative compassion so what you do is you elevate compassion to the highest place so you make it your God which is big mistake because whatever God is he is not merely compassion you elevate compassion to the highest place and then you say I feel sorry for people and what that does is elevate your moral status to the highest possible place right it’s completely unearned because this is something JK Rowling got so accurate with her Dolores Umbridge character right he was an absolute power mink with little kittens had the kittens on the plates it’s like this toxic sentimentality I’m so nice it’s like yeah I’d like to stay away from you and you’re devouring niceness and the freudians knew about that very very in a very sophisticated way very early because the devouring mother the edle mother is the shadow side of compassion I’ve been trying to come up with the term for this for a while I like Ming things into existence giving them names useful uh and at the moment the best one I’ve got is the the shallow Pond of empathy which is at the moment something which appeases people and does not cause them any discomfort immediately is always prioritized even if the net effect of that over the longterm results in their suffering absolutely that’s exactly what that’s exactly what the edle situation is it’s the prioritization of short-term emotional Comfort over medium to long-term thriving right cuz the mother who kicks the child out of the nest says this is going to hurt now but the iterating consequences are positive Michelangelo’s PA right exactly that’s right that’s right and it’s that’s exactly right and the and the moral of that story is is that if you give up your children to the world you will keep them right that’s the sacrifice of Abraham is Abraham is called upon by God to sacrifice his son and he says yes so he doesn’t have to right you have to offer up your children to be broken by the world or or you lose them you undermine them you destroy them it’s very it’s a very paradoxical truth we were talking about patterns Cain is the pattern of inappropriate sacrifice he does everything second rate he lies he omits he prevaricates he pretends he doesn’t offer his best ables the opposite he offers his best which means he’s comp his light is shining on the hill right there’s no hiding he’s giving it everything he’s got the Covenant with God is that if you give it everything you’ve got you will prevail and that’s what God tells Cain which to go through some of the threads from today Instinct staying true to that instinct honesty saying what you mean not prioritizing avoiding uh someone else’s or your discomfort in the short term in order to believe that this is something which is going to make you feel better over the long term I have a well that’s a kind of sacrifice right there is that you’re willing to sacrifice your shortterm physiological and psychological comfort for a medium to long-term benefit it’s the essence of sacrifice to offer the this is this is something the atheists don’t understand about the biblical narrative is that the narrative insists that we live in a sacrificial relationship it’s the essence of humanity to live in a sacrificial relationship it’s like well is that true or not well as you m sure your relationships are more sacrificial it’s less about what you in your narrow sense want right now and it’s more about what’s good over the medium to long run including other people well that’s a sacrificial relationship now the Covenant you know and this is a matter of Faith it’s the matter of the deepest Faith do you are you willing to act out the proposition that the way to make the world reveal itself to you in its most positive guise is for you to adopt the most appropriate sacrificial relationship well it’s a big risk isn’t it because you have to give up everything that’s the that’s the deal you give up everything that’s low everything everything well that’s what the Christian passion is because the Christian passion is an archetypal story because Christ is the person who sacrifices everything thoroughly 100% And the biblical notion is that there’s no difference between that and the Descent of the god of the Old Testament into into into the space of human reality so God is elaborated as a spirit in the Old Testament that’s way of thinking about it fleshed out right into the law and the prophets and Christ presents himself as the embodiment of that so imagine here’s a way of thinking about it you can invite various spirits to possess you that’s what you do when you give way to Rage that’s what you do when you give way to lust let’s say you allow spirits to possess you well what would you be like if you did nothing but allow the highest of spirits to possess you well that’s the question that’s put forth in the New Testament and part of the answer to that is if you allowed the highest of all possible spirits to possess you you would be able to confront everything that life could possibly throw at you and that’s what happens in the Christian passion because the worst that life can throw at you is the worst tragedy and the worst tragedy is the worst death the worst and most painful death inflicted on the least deserving person right that’s the ultimate reach of tragedy okay that’s not enough Christ has to confront that and and he has to confront malevolence that’s the harrowing of hell so the idea is that to adapt fully to life you have to allow yourself to be possessed by the spirit that will enable you to voluntarily face unjust suffering and death and evil it’s like well you got an argument against that how could it be any other way one of the things that I think I see people respond to this degree of pressure when they think about what is going happen long term uh I have discomfort that is in front of me now that I need to face that I need to go through if I’m going to get to Something in the future that I think that I’m supposed to do and one of the solutions that they come up with which isn’t a solution but it kind of is to them is I’m not going to do anything yeah you know that uh no decision is kind of the same as a neutral a neutral Choice one of my friends Alex has got this quote which I love and he says the heaviest things in life aren’t iron and gold but unmade decisions the reason you are stressed is that you have decisions to make and you’re not making them yeah yeah that’s yeah yeah no doubt about it well there’s no indecision right there’s only because you age like you pay for your you pay for your indecision it’s a decision it’s a decision to avoid fundamentally no and part of the moral that’s embedded in the story of Job And in the Christian passion is that you can Master what you’ll face and maybe that’s true maybe that’s true I mean the clinical literature seems to indicate that it’s true because one of the things you do if you’re a competent clinician is you look at what people are attempting to accomplish and and maybe that needs some retooling but let’s assume that they have a goal in mind that would work right you’ve talked it through with them strategically they have a well-laid out Vision okay now they’re laying out the vision and they encounter impediments that stop them and maybe they’re impediments that make them afraid and paralyze them and so then what you do is you decompose the impediment just as we talked about earlier until you find a way they can advance that constitutes a genuine advance that they’ll actually do so what you do is you take the problem and you narrow it until they’ll face it okay then they face it then what happens they get more competent that’s what happens and then they get better at facing all problems so they don’t just learn how to deal with that specific problem they learn a lesson that generalizes across problems they get braver when you do when you use exposure therapy people don’t get less afraid they get braver that’s way better cuz braver braver moves from situation to situation okay so the question is here here’s the question if you faced everything that was put in front of you who would you be well the answer the biblical answer is you’d be a true Son of God that’s the biblical answer it’s like well do you believe that well it depends on what you mean by believe do you think that you do you have a better bet than facing what’s there well you just have to be sensible about it for a moment it’s like is your theory that you’re going to adapt better using falsehood and avoidance because that’s the contrary Theory you either face it and you do that predicated on the faith that something in you will respond if you do or you don’t face it those that’s it those are the options if you don’t face it that’s Faith too that’s faith in the notion that avoidance and deception will suffice I think that for a lot of people it’s it’s born out of fear it’s born out of being a people pleaser yeah and not wanting to hurt other people around you and not wanting to tell them things that they don’t want to hear or not doing or saying things that you know are going to upset the people that are around you right but in the short term again yeah in the short term again you know if if you look at a good mother a good mother upsets her kids a lot quit doing that why well why why not just let your children do exactly what they want when they answer to that is well first of all it terrifies them because kids actually want they want walls they don’t want to be in the desert doing anything they want they want a wall space in which they have the optimal amount of Freedom so a person who truly loves someone else doesn’t strive at all cost never to upset them that’s that’s the devouring mother if if you love someone well that’s the biblical quote you chastise them well what does it mean it’s like look if you love someone and they’re doing something stupid and self-destructive and you can see it it’s incumbent on you to say you know this is going to upset you but as far as I can tell you’re doing something stupid and self-destructive and then there’s going to be a tussle about that because they’re going to say well who are you to judge and that’s a perfectly good question is what makes you think you’re right and here’s the reasons I’m doing this and you know these are the Terrible experien that I’ve had that have led me to take this path and sometimes that can be really compelling you know you meet people who are bitter and resentful and then they tell you about their life and you think well yeah but but then you meet people who’ve had just as terrible a life who aren’t bitter and resentful right and they’re doing better and so even if it seems justifiable maybe even if it is justifiable it’s not justifiable one of the most common situations I think that this people pleasing tendency would show up is someone who maybe thinks that they should break up with a relationship but doesn’t do it and sticks about in order to protect their partner and I found a thread on Reddit that was five questions to ask yourself if you’re unsure about your relationship if someone told you you’re a lot like your partner would this be a compliment to you are you truly fulfilled or just less lonely are you able to be unapologetically yourself or do you feel the need to show up differently to police is your partner are you in love with who your partner is right now as a whole or are you only in love with their good side their potential or the idea of them and would you want your future or imagined child to date someone like your partner and this thread was just filled with people having existential crisis and it seemed to me to be a collection of people who had managed to believe that continuing to Manana Manana the short-term MH postponement of the discomfort of the decision that they wanted to have around their partner uh was somehow the noble thing to do or the good thing to do or The Virtuous thing to do or the thing that ultimately would result in the best outcome even though they knew that if they spread it out long enough and then it’s just hidden we just shov under the rug so yeah that uh list of five questions I think uh well in most relationships you can break up or you can have a thousand fights you know and if you have a thousand fights then you don’t have to fight you make peace that way you know because you’re different than your partner so there’s things to work out there and you might think about that as a compromise but it’s not it’s that you’re different than your partner and you have to find a game that you both want to play that’s not a compromise that’s a solution it’s like you bring your skills to the table and I bring my skills to the table and then we figure out some game we can play where we’re both optimally utilized and it’s a better game than we can play alone that’s not a compromise well but getting to that very difficult and people bring all sorts of baggage to a relationship and you have to it’s just like disciplining children really it’s the same thing your children are you note your children are annoying you you can note that oh there I’m being annoyed by my child okay so what questions do you ask am I a tyrannical son of a [ __ ] who’s touchy well that’s why you need your wife cuz you can go ask her my kids are annoying me am I a tyrannical son of a [ __ ] who’s touchy and she said said yeah you probably need something to eat or you’re a bit of a prick that way and you got to listen because maybe it’s you or maybe she says yeah that goddamn child’s been getting on my case too and then you ask each other are we mutually tyrants it’s like no that kid’s annoying okay do we want him to be annoying well if you love your child then the answer to that would be no because if he’s annoying you he’s going to annoy other people he’s going to annoy his potential friends he’s going to annoy other adults he’s going to go through the world being annoying and everyone’s going to frown at him that’s not helpful so then you could just fix it and you’re that’s going to cause some short-term upset you know you’re maybe you have a like a 13-month-old child who’s very extroverted and disagreeable who like rules the roost and every time the mother goes more than a foot away from her she has a squawk fit because she’s learned to control maybe the mother you know was still tied up with infant care and can’t put down a boundary and so now you have to do something about this emerging monster of a 14-month-old child and one of the things you do is every time the child is bossy first of all you note it and you note that you’re not very fond of yourself for being tyrannized by a 14-month-old that’s a bit of a status hit like it should be so you have to notice I’m annoyed by this child then I should do something about it well it’s going to cause short-term emotional distress the same thing UR when you’re dealing with your partner it’s like you’re annoying me okay now maybe that’s me so I should bloody well maybe we should have a talk about that you’re annoying me convince me that it’s me and I should listen because maybe it’s me and if I’m annoyed about you and I shouldn’t be I should fix that but maybe it’s you so let’s find out exactly what’s going on you know and that’ll usually man that’s that’ll there’s just constant thrust and counter thrust in the discuss discussion like that and usually you know the conversation will circle around whatever the hell the issue is till you get to the bottom of it and God only knows where that is but then maybe you can sort it out you know and if you sort out enough of those things you live in peace and that’s something worth attaining you know and I’ve thought forever in my marriage there’s nothing there’s nothing too small to fight about now you know I put in some rules that I used to have with my clients too it’s like if someone bugs you you should note that and you shouldn’t do anything about it probably if they bug you twice the same way then you think oh okay that’s twice but probably still you shouldn’t do anything about it but if they bug you three times then you can say here’s what you just did and they’ll say well no I didn’t do that and then you say yeah you did and you did exactly the same thing in this other situation and you did exactly the same thing in this other situation so don’t be telling me you didn’t do it cuz you did it three times and I watched okay now they come up with reasons they did it and maybe some of them have to do with what a stupid son of a [ __ ] you are and you should listen because maybe they’re right but that’s at least the beginnings of the process by which you unravel the problems you want to figure out well we don’t want to do this this isn’t the way we want to treat each other we want to get to a place where we want to get to a place where our whole life is like the best moments of the best dates we ever had that’s a good goal and that’s that’s that’s attainable it you got to work man there’s there’s a the scene in the in Genesis God throws Adam and Eve out of paradise because of their pride their sin of Pride they each have their own particular version of that sin Eve’s sin and Adam’s but they get thrown out of paradise anyways for pride and God puts cherubs at the gates of paradise and the cherubs they’re kind of these monstrous Angels terrifying figures and they hold swords that are on fire that turn Every Witch Way and burn and you might say well what does that mean and it means that well a sword is something that cuts away right a sharp blade and a and fire is something that burns and a sword that Burns Burns and cuts away and a sword that burns and turns every which way is a burning sword from which nothing can escape okay now you want to walk into Paradise everything that isn’t worthy in you has to be burned and cut away right well that’s what that conflict is in a relationship you know it’s like that’s not suitable for Paradise what does it have to do it has to be cast into the outer Darkness where there will will be nashing of teeth right it has to be cut away and destroyed and everything that isn’t worthy has to go well the Michelangelo effect is all about you and your partner becoming the idealized version of each other right you are going to do for me the things that I want within your parameters of control that you want to be the best partner for me and I want to do the same for you and we’re both going to communicate to each other and we’re going to stand our ground where we have boundaries and we’re going to Contin to compromise that’s what love should do that’s what love should do like if you love someone if it’s genuine love you see you see their hidden Soul that’s a good way of thinking about it you get a glimpse of the light that they could reveal to the world if they revealed it that’s what you see and then to act in love is to encourage that to come forward and to discourage anything that gets in its way that’s why I love the the Michelangelo effect heard of and I’d been using it okay so why the Michelangelo effect this is why Michelangelo sees this huge massive UNH block I see I see and inside of that he is able to see davidh and over time slowly he will chip away and he will chip away and he will chip away so you see something that isn’t there that’s inside of the thing which is rough and UNH and uncivilized and undomesticated and rambunctious and and sometimes terrible and you were able to from that Al that’s actually part of the daing the uncarved block so a child is an uncarved Block in in in the dowst view and and you remove everything that’s excess until what’s perfect remains right and that’s see the the logos in the Old and New Testament the logos that creates the world is the judging faculty that what would you say that separates the wheat from the chaff right and it’s not it’s compassion in a sense because if you’re compassionate towards someone you want what’s best for them all things considered but that compassion in the highest sense can’t exist without judgment because the judgment is this part of you isn’t worthy to continue and certainly that’s what you’re doing with your children when you see them misbehaving you think no that’s no not that not that something more sophisticated even with my little granddaughter the other day she’s very very playful and she’s a very nice little girl she’s very playful and very fun and funny and not neurotic and so she’s a pleasure to be around but she hasn’t seen me for a while and so she was poking me getting me to chase her around and poking me and she’d come up and give me a whack you know and at one point she whacked me too hard and she knew it and I said that’s not fun that’s not acceptable and then she stopped but she was playing with that edge trying to find out where fun is and you know can how hard can I hit Grandpa she doesn’t bloody well know she kind of knows but she needs to know exactly well I can’t let her get away with it because then she’s not fun to play with she has to learn to come and give her Grandpa a whack and exactly the way that elicits a playful response and that isn’t annoying and so there’s a very you know you might think well it’s pretty harsh judgment to lay on a 5-year-old it’s like no it’s not I would like her to be the most fun kid to play with that she could be right and so I’m not going to pretend that it’s okay when it’s not not setting that boundary is almost like a curse it is a curse yeah there you go away we would because then how’s she going to play with other with other kids if she doesn’t know the they’re not going to be as forgiving as Grandpa definitely not yeah we were talking before we got started I had this conversation with Robert spolski and it it was really really profound I mean I know that he’s a brilliant guy and this new book of his is about sort of Free Will and determinism which has got an upper bound on how interesting that is for me but he gave this quotee to Andrew hubman where he said dopamine is not about the pursuit of happiness it is about the happiness of pursuit right that’s definitely right and I I haven’t been able to stop seeing this everywhere so uh Morgan housel um a friend told me this great story uh he is an investor he’s got a fund he’s an author he’s got a family he’s got all of these things they plan to go away in holiday and they’ve been planning it for a long time and with the kids and the wife and him and all of his businesses it was a arduous thing to go through to get themselves out there and finally they get there after the journey and the plane and the children and the crying and all the rest of it and he walks out on the balcony on the first night of this holiday that they’ve planned for forever and his first thought to himself was wouldn’t it be great if we came back here next year it would be so great if we could come back here next year so literally during the supposed enjoyment of the destination he was already thinking about the journey and you know it’s not the journey it’s not the destination it’s the journey is kind of TR but it it puts a new perspective on it there is no destination each destination is simply the beginning of the next journey and I haven’t not been I haven’t not been able to see it I see it I see it everywhere I see it everywhere in my own life well there’s there’s technically two different forms of reward there’s consumatory reward and so that’s the reward that’s what an orgasm is it’s consumatory reward it’s it it brings the behavioral and perceptual sequence to a halt it ends it right at the climax it ends it but then it’s over that journey is over right then there’s the dopaminergic reward that spolski was talking about and dopaminergic reward is evidence of advancement towards a goal right okay so so there’s a corollary to that well how do you become optimally engaged because dopamine facilitates engagement and focus which is why drugs like amphetamines can be used for kids who are attention deficit disordered you T tap up the dopamine response they lock on right okay so they’re locking on to a goal directed Pursuit the problem with amphetamines is that they can lock you on so hard you can’t get out of the frame so like kids on amphetamines will obsess for example about cleaning up their closet they can’t switch to the next activity okay dopaminergic reward is reward that’s accured in relation ship to a goal okay so what what’s an implication of that well pursue the highest possible goal well why because the kick from advancement is higher now you have to balance that it can’t be you have to advance right because imagine the rewards got two components number one is you’re moving towards something valuable okay so you want it to be as valuable as possible okay but you have to be moving so it can’t be so valuable that it’s out of your reach to the Moon I’m not going to be able to see every single increment that I make yes you want to get to the moon that’s right you can’t walk there so it’s a bad plan you need something extremely valuable that you can move towards okay so part of the reason that you establish a relationship with God let’s say is because that’s what sets the upper bound to your vision it’s like I want things to be the best they could be that’s a vision of paradise well that has to be fractionated into you know your proximal decisions but lurking behind that should be this continual movement towards what would you say a heaven that Reeds as you approach it that’s a proper vision of Heaven A Heaven is a place that’s perfect and getting better both at the same time that’s what music shows you because a great piece of music is perfect but it’s just getting better as it unfolds and and you need that this is part of the problem with a static utopian Vision something dovi criticized if you gave people Nothing But consumatory reward he famously says so that they can do nothing but sit in tubs of hot water eat cake and busy themselves with the with the continuation of the species human beings would break that all to Hell in a moment just so they have something interesting to do what was that quote that you said on Rogan years ago if we were to make the world sufficiently perfect the only desired lack would be for the desire of lack itself what’s that kard what’s the what’s the proper can you remember the prop well kirkgard pointed out that if we if as we make the world easier and easier so this is perhaps part of the problem with the material plenty that’s at hand is that at some point what becomes lacking is lack itself yes right yes exactly exactly it’s optimal deprivation you know and if everything is delivered to you on a platter it’s like what the hell are you even doing there this happens in the the story of Abraham so Abraham who’s the father of Nations right so Abraham gets it right he has everything at the beginning of the story he has Rich parents he has he’s he’s got nothing that he has to do he’s like 70 when the story opens he’s been taken care of hand and foot his whole life and the voice of God comes to him and says I’m the god of your ancestors telling you get out of your zone of comfort get out into the world and Abraham’s pretty old by this point but for whatever reason he decides that he’s going to forgo the comfort for the adventure and then as Abraham progresses he makes the requisite sacrifices each becoming more difficult as he ascends and he adopts this pattern of relationship with the god that calls him to Adventure that literally makes him the father of Nations and so you can even think about that biologically if you want you might as well people like Dawkins think reproduction is sex and that’s why he can talk for example about the selfish Gene making itself manifest in sex reproduction isn’t sex sex is a necessary but insufficient precondition for reproduction Abraham adopts a motive being a sacrificial motive being that establishes the optimal environment for his sons who then establish the op optimal environment for their sons and their sons and their sons so you can imagine that what Abraham is doing this is what the story means is he’s adopting a mode of behavior that works best All Things Considered across multiple generations and he sacrifices everything to that it’s this incredibly expansive Vision given that we’re in a world which is comfortable and we we have created buildings in which there are heavy things that you pick up and put down in in the same place because it’s simply so rare that you have to pick up heavy things right bumps on our roads for the same reason proliferation of ice baths and sauner and and and and even reading to some extent you know difficult reading difficult things where should people go given that they are in a a world which is more comfortable than ever before where should they go to encourage them to find difficult things truth truth is what’s optimally difficult the truth is optimally difficult that’s a really wonderful thing to know the truth is Adventure there’s no there’s no distinction partly because if you’re going to just say what you believe to be true you have to let go of the consequences you can’t predict the consequences well there’s no difference between not being able to predict the consequences in having an adventure they’re the same thing right if you knew the consequences it would be an adventure it’s not an adventure if if the if the consequences are forgone the same as it’s no sacrifice or courage if there’s no risk right right right it’s exactly the same and so it’s a it’s a wonderful thing to know that optimized Adventure is to be had in the truth I think in every given situation so Christ says in The Sermon on the Mount that to orient yourself properly and it’s often viewed as this hippie pay on take no thought of the moral the moral will take care of itself you know God takes care of The Sparrows he’ll certainly take care of you it’s like a hippie wet dream it isn’t what that isn’t the that isn’t the core of the message the the core of the message is very straightforward Christ says aim up to the highest thing you can possibly imagine so that’s the relationship with God you put what’s at the Pinnacle properly at the Pinnacle and you aim at that and then you concentrate that and it’s that and treating other people like you would like to be treated yourself that sets the moral frame then you attend to the day and the cares of the day it’s like once you’ve established the proper moral frame you pay attention to the day and you live in truth and that moves you towards that destination you have to have the orientation right you have to be aiming up but then it’s just a matter of what would you say abiding by the truth that’s the logos that sets people free and that’s right doing it properly right there was one of the other rules that didn’t make it into your book uh nothing Well Done is insignificant right right right right yeah well you acrew so Christ tells his followers in the gospels to to store up treasure in heaven not in the places that MTH can eat and rust can destroy well what is that what is meant by that well it’s meant by the same it means the same thing that you just pointed to which is that if you run yourself through a disciplin disciplinary process so you accomplish something maybe it doesn’t you don’t attain the goal you were aiming at but you acrw a new way of looking at the world and a set of skills well if you just keep doing that you have multiple ways of looking at the world in more and more skill well that’s that’s your Storehouse of treasure you know the reason women use wealth as a proxy for attractiveness is because wealth is a proxy for competence it’s not competence because you can be rich and useless now it’s not that easy but it can at least happen temporarily but women use markers of wealth to assess competence and the competence is the treasure not the wealth because if you’re competent you could be thrown into the desert and you’ll make it Bloom I’ve said this about uh people that go to the gym so from the outside someone that goes to the gym and has got a good body or whatever there the body and it this is what you get to touch during sex when you’re into but they is more important I think than the way that it manifests physically it’s someone who is reliable who is able to overcome hard things who is self disiplined it’s just this whole big long laundry list of things that they’re able to uh deal with pain and discomfort which is kind of sexy in a way uh well it’s the perfect it’s the perfect materialist disciplinary strategy right because it’s very concrete well you change your body it’s like is that a spiritual Pursuit well it is in so far as it requires you know long-term discipline and and sacrifice and you might hope and I think this is likely the case that you know you can get stuck in the bodily self-improvement Niche and and focus on that too obsessively but you can also use it as a stepping stone to discipline Pursuit itself and lots of people do that I think I told you the last time that we chatted about Mano pause this thing that I’d come up with so I noticed toward the end of my 20s that lots of guys who had been training with a particular modality usually bodybuilding usually exclusively for the way that they looked realized as they approached their 30s that they were getting out of breath going up a set of stairs and that they maybe couldn’t touch their toes and they looked fantastic but I know they they just felt like they should maybe start to Value different things and they then changed their training and they would go and do Brazilian jiu-jitsu or yoga or CrossFit or you know some other form of whatever and that precipitated a change in everything else and I saw this in myself right I get toward the end of my 20s I’ve achieved success in many of the ways that Society tells a young man that he should value success there was a discordance something fell off and you then think okay well maybe I need to assess whether or not the things that I’ve been told I should want are things that I actually want to want and very quickly you realize and I don’t know it feels like a quarterlife crisis I think so many men go through this they go I either succeeded or didn’t succeed at a game that I was told that I was supposed to Value playing and upon reflection I really don’t care for it as much as I thought I did maybe there was some elements I was so proud of what i’ done with my business partners I was so proud of the things that we’d achieved but then there was other stuff where I was like why have I attach so much of my sense of self worth into this and this and this and then you start you have to assess and M the so this is what happens in the story of Exodus when Moses en encounters the burning bush so he’s just going about his business as a shepherd and he’s doing all right he’s got two wives he likes his father-in-law he’s well regarded in this new country that he’s in he’s left Egypt where there’s a price on his head essentially for killing a Egyptian who was Tor tormenting a uh one of the Hebrews anyways Moses is just going about his business as a Shepherd which was a very tough job in those days and this thing catches his eye this this glimmer this gleam and he goes to investigate okay so what what does that mean it means as you’re progressing through life something will capture your interest and in the story you just told it’s like somebody decides they’re going to start going to the gym there’s something about becoming physically fit that calls to them right which is an interesting thing right because it calls to them it’s not even necessarily a decision they make it’s more like a possibility that makes itself manifest that’s of Interest so they decide to pursue it so they look into it more deeply well so Moses approaches the burning bush and he gets closer and closer right and a bush is a symbol of life right like it’s a tree a tree of life and a tree of life that’s on fire is being that’s the life the tree and becoming that’s the fire the transformation so a burning bush is a symbol of being and becoming as such now it’s something that beckons okay so now you pursue your physical fitness cuz it’s called to you and you concentrate more and more on it you get more and more disciplined but as you get more and more disciplined you start to transform right and so your vision starts to change now what happens to Moses is that as he gets closer and closer to the burning bush he starts to realize that he’s on sacred ground so he’s going deeper the investigation is taking him deeper so he takes off his shoes and and continues to approach he’s still going down the same Trail right pursuing this thing and then the voice of God itself speaks to him from the midst of the burning bush and that’s what turns him into a leader and so what does the story mean it means that as you walk through life in your normal mode things will call to you and if you pursue them they will take you deep it doesn’t really matter what it is that calls what matters is that you pursue it and you you pursue it to the depths and as you pursue it to the depths you will become transformed and if you do that without reservation that will turn you into that will turn you into the person who frees the slaves and opposes the tyrants and that is how it works that’s the call and that can happen in any direction virtually any direction you just have to pursue it with sufficient Faith right one of the things that’s been I guess derogated a lot by pretty much everybody uh at the moment is University education and I had such an interesting time at University almost exclusively outside of my education right all of the good things that happened to me while I spent 5 years at Newcastle didn’t include what I was taught it was never inside of the lecture theater it was everything I was doing outside of that and lots of my friends it’s very trendy on the internet to mock higher education as useless pieces of paper uh it’s not you don’t need it in order to be able to be successful it’s certainly the thing that I’ve ended up doing this podcast didn’t require me to go to university maybe in some ways it did M but also from a definitely from a qualification perspective it didn’t but I I think I’m still relatively Pro University experience uh and yeah you know you’ve got Peterson Academy launching which is your new thing I wondered how you thought well basically are universities salvageable given that so much that’s good about the university experience has almost nothing to do with the education side of it H are they salvageable some are I imagine um Hillsdale does great it’s a conservative College in northeastern us run by Larry AR they have a 1% dropout rate as opposed to the typical 50% dropout rate and they they provide a classical what used to be a liberal education Arts education it’s a more conservative Enterprise given how the Overton window has shifted but Larry’s students concentrate on physical fitness his philosophy Department tends to meet in the weight room which is pretty interesting he has weight benches scattered all around the campus about a third of the students take music courses so the place is very musical um it’s a very disciplined place the quality of education is Extreme extremely high so there are institutes that are holding to their mandate I think that’s rare and I think overall the universities have become irretrievably corrupt as far as I can tell and so we had hoped that we could provide something approximating an alternative but you put your finger on one of the complexities in doing that it’s easy to think that a university is the transmission of Knowledge from experts to empty vessels the students let’s say so it’s lectures tests and accreditation but that’s not really what a university is it’s an apprenticeship if you’re fortunate when you go to university you find a professor or two that you can work with who really teach you how to think they’re usually those professors are gen generally quite rare and you’re fortunate if you do establish a relationship like that especially at a big university where the student to faculty ratio is absurdly high like 200 to one I was in lecture theaters that were 300 to one I didn’t I didn’t get a relationship like that with any of my right right and that’s that’s that’s really not good because you need you need an apprenticeship relationship to become educated fundamentally um we started this we’re formulating Peterson Academy we’re hoping that we can provide people with extremely high quality lectures I’m fortunate as you are to be able to reach out to people who are charismatic and well educated and we offer them a good Financial deal and we treat them very well and they come down to Miami and they record a relatively short lecture series eight hours and uh we’re implementing state-of-the-art testing procedures and we’re going to be giving out a certificate that you will have to earn to AC ire and so we’re hoping that the quality of our graduates will be such that the certificate will speak to for itself as a marker for conscientiousness and educated expertise we’ll see we’re also building out the social side of it because as you pointed out a huge part of what happens to you when you go to university is social and socialization you get to make a whole new group of friends it’s a big deal right it’s a huge it’s one of those times in your life where you can parcel off who you were and you can become something new you remember every single summer at least for me maybe this is because I was chronically so unpopular in school I would come back every summer uh imagining that I would be able to reinvent myself I’m going to be the cool kid this year I’m going to be the sporty kid this year or whatever whatever but the big one is a 18 because you’re not even in the same town no one even knows who you are no one even knows what to think about who you are right and uh that for me was the big inflection point of me going from the child that I was to the sort of young adult that I was going to end up right right well if you’re fortunate you have a number of times where that happens in your life where you can make a relatively clean break and you can Invent Yourself a new right this is just just to interject that like there’s an idea called monk mode uh which has kind of become a bit of a meme online but I first read about this years ago uh and it involves uh extended period of um isolation to work on yourself uh to reflect on your flaws to kind of do the inner work to introspect um it’s usually tied in with meditation with improving your diet with improving your F physical fitness your mental Fitness all of these different things and uh that I’ve almost seen it as if doing that and focusing on yourself for a short space of time that’s very very you know it’s maybe a couple of months really really focusing on you still going about and doing your work and doing the rest of the things but outside of that just really really trying to make yourself as good as possible periodizing that for me was one of the most powerful inflections aside from the lifestyle change well that’s what confession is supposed to be fundamentally I mean when you take stock of yourself you confess you confess to yourself and you make your sins a reality you assess yourself for your insufficiency and you Proclaim your insufficiencies and that well then you can start working on them it’s like it’s painful here’s all the things that I’m not here’s all the things that I’m not that I would like to be right that’s painful self-examination but the advantag is you get all your problems on the table and the advantage to that is that Problem by problem there’s likely some hope like for example you said you were unpopular when you were a teenager but that doesn’t mean that you had to carry that forward into University right there was a possibility that so how did you get out of that what did you do the main reason I think was that I didn’t really understand how to relate to other kids so I found myself obsessing over the way that other kids would wear their shirts or tie their ties or the sort of shoes that they would wear or the right so you were looking at external models or why that’s why they had friends and I didn’t right and I didn’t realize that it was just I wasn’t socially Adept I didn’t understand how to relate to other kids very well and I think I just got to the stage especially when I went to University that I’d spent enough time for me to have learned at least some rough HED social skills and now finally was able to sort of cast off some of the uh presuppositions that uh had maybe been following me uh because what were the opening points for you like do you remember the first friendship you made in University oh yeah the guys that I lived with so okay so these were these were roommates yeah yeah yeah okay so yeah that’s a good op see that’s a thing that’s hard to duplicate online right because it’s a having a group of Roommates is a formative experience it was crazy for me I didn’t know because again only child two parents living in a small house I didn’t know that he was supposed to knock on someone’s bedroom door before you were to go in I’d never done that I’d spent my did 18 years I’d never had to knock on anybody’s bedroom door CU like Mom and Dad are down like who else is there I’m going to knock on the dogs like the kitchen door to see if the dogs are mind me going into the kitchen uh and so many of those things looking back on it now are just so ridiculous not knowing that that was something that he was supposed to do yeah well not knowing those Elementary skills though that can be a huge impediment you know I had people in my clinical practice we spent hours practicing how to introduce them and to shake hands because you want to be expert at that because if you’re not good at that at all like if you’re really bad at it you’re screwed you can’t even tell someone your name and so how are you going to make a friend then you you you announce yourself as incompetent with your first move and then if you do if that happens to you 10 times you’re so terrified dis incentiv oh God terribly terribly and so you should become expert at that that’s something you can do with your kids is so they can become expert at introducing themselves you know shake hands do it with a bit of a firm grip look at the other person try smiling you know match your Tempo to the other person another Dynamic that I’ve been thinking about recently I was at a retreat in La a few months ago and one of the guys that was there had said he’d stopped talking and writing on the internet because he noticed that the story he was telling in public he began feeling the necessity to live up to in private and I think that whether you’re a a writer or just someone that’s got 500 followers on your Instagram and a Facebook from back in the day or whatever there is a there is an online Persona that people put forward that they then almost feel is more real than what they are and then they try and reverse engineer themselves to fit this new is this the problem with writing essays that contain what your professor wants to hear so you can’t do that without altering your soul you can’t do that you you cannot construct for yourself a false Persona designed to extract resources from the world without that becoming part of you like there’s no one is that sophisticated no one can have two selves like that it’s part of the reason why you have to be very careful about what you say and do is that you’re when you when you practice falsehood you become false it’s not like those are beliefs that are just in your head you rewire yourself so you start to literally see the world through the frame of your falsehoods that’s a very bad plan I’ve heard you say if you say things long enough you’re going to believe them you become them it’s even worse than believing them it’s deeper than that they they’re built into you as unquestioned implicit axioms and as we said earlier on this can go in either direction right you can fake it until you make it one small step at a time moving toward a vision which you know is positive and you continually reassess to ensure that you’re not getting hijacked and going in the wrong direction yes or or you generate a so look in the in the Pinocchio movie which I’ve analyzed to death in the Disney Pinocchio you’re Mr Pinocchio yeah world’s leading Pinocchio so Pinocchio exactly exactly part Pinocchio is trying to get rid of the strings that that that pull on him Every Which Way that aren’t under his control and to become something genuine okay so he has three basic tempations one is to lie right so that’s the nose the another is to be an actor and when I first came across that in the movie I thought what the hell’s going on here one of Pinocchio’s Temptations is to be an actor now why would the Hollywood people do that why would they denigrate the actor and then I thought oh it’s not an actor it’s a false Persona to be the actor instead of the real thing to be the appearance instead of the reality to take the credit instead of doing the work right to be false next temptation is to be neurotic it’s so interesting especially in in in the world that we have now how perspicacious these animators were Pinocchio is literally enticed onto the island of pleasure by a false Doctor Who diagnoses him with an illness he doesn’t have and the the story is look how sick you are you’re working too hard you need to go to Pleasure Island well Pleasure Island is run by slavers right so it’s perfect well be careful what you practice be careful what you practice right you can be the actor of your own ideal and that’s a way of stepping forward but when you make false claims to who you are to gain status in consequence you are you are perverting your soul what’s the soul the soul is something like the structure through which the world re reveals itself to you it’s something like that so you don’t see much of the world right you see it through narrow apertures you see what you allow in that’s another way of thinking about it you better make sure it’s the bright part of the world re revealing itself to you and that isn’t going to be the case if you lie one of the problems I think that a lot of the people listening to this podcast and certainly a lot of my friends who are smart and cerebral encounter they think themselves into problems and they struggle to use their intuition because they are able to come up with a reason about why they should or should not at any moment and you know talking about the soul or the inner voice or the conscience or you know you might refer to it as God that’s coming through the best version of yourself people that ruminate and introspect are very capable of talking themselves into or out of something that feels like they worship the intellect how would you advise somebody who enjoys thinking about things deeply to cast that off and be able to hear themselves a little bit more clearly there’s a difference between attention and intellect there there’s something to be said for paying attention it’s not the same thing like the intellect let’s say the intellect produces thoughts the attention gathers information right so if I’m well if I’m conducting a podcast let’s say I’m paying attention to what I don’t understand I’m not thinking it’s not the same thing I mean sometimes I think because the person will say something and it’ll set off a train of thoughts but often what I’m just doing is like well do I understand what you just said that’s a matter of attention I have to note my ignorance I’m attending to my ignorance well this is what Rogan’s great at this you’re great at this as well if you attend to your ignorance then you know what to do you just ask the question it’s like well I don’t understand this that’s a form of humility to attend to your ignorance that’s a good thing for those who worship the luciferian intellect to do is to attend to their own ignorance it’s not about what you know it’s about what you don’t know you already know what you know so why not investigate what you don’t know well how do you do that you attend to your ignorance what’s the definition of humility humility is attending to your ignorance and you can do that wherever you are is that not still uh an intellectual exercise here are the holes in what I know therefore I’m just going to continue ask to ask the questions until I fill them well it’s not something completely divorced from it’s the difference between questioning and answering like I would say this is let’s say definitional the luciferian intellect has an answer what’s when you say luciferian intellect what’s that the luciferian intellect is the intellect that wants to place itself in the highest position and there’s lots of people smart people tend to be luciferian because they think that their fundamental value is their intelligence and they think that intelligence is the fundamental value and then they’re often very annoyed if they’re very bright and the world doesn’t lay itself out at their feet because they think well I’m so smart everything should just be coming my way because they’ve prided themsel on that it’s like and intellectual Pride well that might be the cardinal sin the luciferian intellect is the intellect that wants to put itself in the highest position it’s challenges God that’s what Satan is that’s what Lucifer is literally in the miltonian story is Lucifer is the spirit who attempts to usurp God that’s what the Communists did that’s what the fascists did that’s what we do when we build towers of Babel and we can easily Elevate the intellect to the highest possible place especially smart people they do that all the time it’s better to attend to what you don’t know this is why Rogan’s a very good example of this because Rogan is not an intellectual he’s a Seeker those aren’t the same thing Rogan is always like a blood hound he’s on the path of what he doesn’t know and the consequence of that is he knows a lot you know 2,000 podcast 2500 podcasts he’s done like 2500 highlevel graduate seminars something like that it’s crazy and so his questions get better and better as he fills in the gaps is it intellectual no no it’s not it’s it’s it’s there’s a difference between an intellectual Pursuit and a spiritual Pursuit and the remediation of your own ignorance is a spiritual Pursuit it’s predicated on humility how am I stupid how can I fix that you know one of the things I really taught my kids tried to teach them was ask stupid questions right and that means you have to admit to your own insufficiency that’s what humility is and then you have to publicly announce it here’s how I’m stupid can you fix me and you know sometimes that is embarrassing although much less frequently than people think usually if you’re in a crowd and you have a stupid question and you’ve been paying attention 80% of the crowd has the same question and they’re relieved that you know you an you asked it in fact they’ll think you’re brave it’s so interesting e because you’re afraid when you ask a question if you’re in a university seminar you’re afraid that what you’re going to do is expose your stupidity and be what would you say shamed and what happens is exactly the opposite is everybody who’s too cowardly to ask that question now thinks that you’re courageous it’s exactly the opposite of what you think yeah that happens all the time always in my graduate Seminars the kids that asked the most ignorant questions assuming they were paying attention because you can ask a stupid question you know stupid question is you’re I don’t know you’re fiddling with your phone and you and the class has just covered something and you didn’t notice and you ask well you know clue in that that’s not a real question that’s just you’re just wasting people’s time but if you’re genuinely ignorant I never had a student who asked a genuine question that I thought was a stupid question never and I’d never treat a student that way it’s like no no if you’re if you it’s so cool too because sometimes the stupidest questions cut to the heart of the chase you know it’s the kids who would ask a really basic question that also forced me to really understand what I was teaching and that’s a reflection of their humility it’s that humility in the pursuit of humility in the pursuit of the ideal that’s not an intellectual exercise not not not in the strict sense it’s definitely what generates knowledge though that seems to be a good stepping block toward earned wisdom as well that’s earned wisdom y y earned wisdom through humility right what have you got coming up next what can people expect from you over the next few months well what I’m working on right now is I’m going to finish this book hopefully by the end of December it’ll be published in November but I’m going to go on tour weirdly enough about the book probably starting in January I’m going to do an American tour and then I think I’m going to go to Africa and to South America and to Southeast Asia that’s the plan and um I’m very excited about this new book um I’m hoping oping it’ll be the best book that I’ve ever written it’s it’s going to be more difficult book than the last two were but not as difficult as maps of meaning which my first book yeah it’s it’s it’s more it’s heavy it’s it’s deeper have you been fighting with trying to make it accessible no not really right i’ I’ve been I’ve been I’ve been just trying to lay the argument out as clearly as I can like and I think that’ll do the trick and I I I have to go over it again and edit it and make sure that it’s no more obscure than is absolutely necessary no I want to lay it out so that it’s comprehensible and I’ve had a lot of success with the biblical Ventures that I’ve already embarked on I did a series on Genesis in 2017 which turned out to be quite influential and then I just did a seminar on Exodus with a group of thinkers and I know there’s a hunger for analysis of deep stories and I also have good people around me that can help me grind my way through the stories and understand them and so I’m very much looking I’ve been having quite a good time writing this book actually it’s very difficult to write but it’s been extremely exciting and interesting and I’m hoping you asked me earlier what would I consider success with this book I don’t think that you’ll be able to read this book and understand it and be atheistic I think I can demolish the atheistic argument permanently and it’s partly it’s a weird thing because it’s not like all of a sudden people are going to throw themselves at the feet of God In Worship it’s like it requires a reconsideration of what we mean by belief and I walk through some of it it’s like do you believe in the good well there the difference between believing in good and beleving in God is it’s it’s a very narrow difference now there are important differences but it’s still a narrow difference and the thing is if you don’t believe in the in good you’re aimless and if you’re aimless you’re hopeless and if you’re aimless and hopeless you’re anxious and fractionated and people can’t unite in their beliefs like the the alternative is not good reversing the enlightenment is no small task well hopefully we can save the best of the Enlightenment as well it’s like uh the uh cheston’s fence of cheston’s fence like how many how many different fences are in the field so to speak and if we thrown this one out and we’re trying to plug it back in but which bit of going back one of the things that’s very interesting and I think I think people like Dawkins have started to realize this and I know that people like Douglas Murray and Ian hery Ali and Neil Ferguson have recognize this is that with the death of God many other things die things you don’t expect and one of the things that dies when God dies is science and no one expected that how so because science as a practice is a religious practice it it’s predicated on religious axioms is it well you have to believe that there’s such a thing as truth you have to believe that the truth is understandable you have to believe that understanding the truth is good you have to believe that there is such a thing as good right so imagine to be a scientist you have to imagine that first of all that the world is comprehensible to the human intellect but more that if you investigate the mysteries of the material world that that will be beneficial right those aren’t scientific claims those are metaphysical claims and that metaphysical claim is nested in a story you know and the the enlightenment types they’ve portrayed the Scientific Revolution as something contrary to the religious substr and that’s not accurate that’s a French Revolution that’s a luciferian intellect history it’s not true the universities grew out of the monasteries that’s where the universities came from and science as a widespread Enterprise got its start in the universities and they grew out of the monasteries that’s not questionable like if you go to Harvard or if you go to Oxford and Cambridge it’s just starkly evident the layout of the UN of the college ol is a monastic layout so the idea that there’s some fundamental contradiction between religious belief and the scientific Enterprise it’s it’s there’s nothing about that that’s true and part of the reason that we’re Lo part of the reason that we’re losing the scientific Enterprise right now is because we’ve unmowed it from its metaphysical substrate and it can’t survive if you’re going to be a scientist you have to put the truth Above All Else scientists are very rare you have to believe in the truth to be a scientist I think Dawkins believes in the truth by the way so he’s an atheist but a very he’s much less of an atheist than he thinks that’s my impression lying scientists are atheistic or just malevolent Dawkins is a truthful scientist and in so far as he’s pursuing the truth and in so far as he believes that pursuing the truth will set you free then he’s walking down a path that’s Christian to its core now I know he doesn’t like that idea but he also doesn’t like the fact that the scientific Enterprise seems to be collapsing in terms of its what would you call reliability and validity everywhere so I appreciate you mate I appreciate the time that we get to spend it always seems to be a very interesting inflection uh again this yeah the inflection this time is you’re out on tour eh I am what’s your advice for me how am I going to survive life on the road make sure that when you step on the stage that you understand how unlikely it is that you have the privilege to do this and make sure you remember that all those people who came to see you they’re hoping for something from you they put in some time and energy to come and see you it matters what you do you go out on that stage with gratitude right that’ll help a lot you got to remember that it keeps you on the ground too you should be grateful that they’re not throwing rocks at you right how ridiculous ous is it that you get to do this how unlikely is it right exactly so you keep that first and foremost in your mind you remember that you should be stunningly grateful for the miracle that you have the opportunity to do this because it’s ridiculously improbable yeah yeah trying to do that without getting overwhelmed is becoming an increasingly difficult task yeah well part of the way you handle that is that you parse off the jobs that other people can do you know when you’re out on tour the social element of that can be overwhelming so you have to protect yourself from that to some degree but the other thing you do is anything anyone else can do get someone to do es and get someone competent and reliable so that all you’re focusing on get to the next show on time in the right frame of mind that’s your job other people have their jobs make sure you’re surrounded by people who do their jobs like our tour so far they become increasingly well-run I don’t worry about travel hotels meals Transportation none of that I worry about getting to the venue 1 hour ahead of time getting my head in the right place which has to do with this attitude of gratefulness that I described and then trying to address a serious problem with all the people who are participating in the audience and then if it’s too much then distribute the responsibility some more how do you wind down after a show I watched the Trailer Park Boys of course you do yeah yeah well after being that good you have to not be so good for a while and the Trailer Park Boys is a very good way of doing that counteract a little bit Yeah I uh I texted Rogan about this yesterday and I thought that he would have you know God knows how many shows that guy’s done I thought he would have some wisdom for me I said every time that I do a show I um I’m so excited after I finished that I find it difficult to kind of wind down and I’ve got four shows back toback then we fly to Dubai then we’ve got all these shows around the US and Canada and uh I’m nervous that I’m not going to be able to sleep and then if I don’t sleep then I’m not going to be able to perform as well tomorrow and then it’ll spiral uh and I thought that he would just have some wisdom and he said that’s a tough one man to be honest I’ve never had any problem sleeping I well [ __ ] that I guess you know uh but no I’m excited I’m excited and I’ll check back in with you once uh once everything’s done we’re going to record one of them properly fully properly record it uh like a special um so that’ll be maybe we’ll put it up maybe it’ll just stay for posterity I don’t know but uh we’re GNA have it so yeah I’m excited yeah well good luck thank you man good luck should be a blast yeah yeah yeah I’m definitely going to learn a lot and as we’ve said today pushing through discomfort and doing different things uh and following something close to Instinct a lot of the things that I’m saying are uh like vulnerable in some regards I guess you know they things that are meaningful to me uh and yeah I hope that people take take a lot away from it and I hope they have done from today too so one of the things I do when I go on stage is like I spend the first 10 or 15 seconds looking at the audience like I don’t mean I would I’ve seen you do this a lot I would I would technically refer to it as stalking um but it’s not far from a stalk it’s it’s good I I look everywhere and this is a exposure technique you don’t want to be afraid of the audience and so at all and you don’t want to be talking to the audience so I look at people and I see you know I I look everywhere and as you know you can’t see in the back rows if it’s a big place but fundamentally I look everywhere I can and I look at individuals and I’m marking them out as people and then I’m remembering you know I’m talking to all these individual people who’ve come here and then that’s easy because you can talk to individuals and they’re your guests say that’s another that’s another thing for your staff to know too it’s like everyone who comes to one of your events has to be treated in the most positive possible way cuz they’re looking to you for something you know and it’s very hard on them if they’re treated inhospitably and so you know one of the things we’ve tried to do I travel with a fair number of people now but everyone knows that like rule number one is treat the audience members even the ones that are have some trouble and maybe even are Troublesome it’s like treat them like their guests because they’re guests and you’re bloody lucky that they’re here so don’t get all high and mighty about it CU they put in their time and effort to come here and they’re looking for something so that’s part of that gratitude that that and then it’s fun right that keeps it fun it’s like you’re so privileged to be there talking to them that’s you got to have that in mind what a privilege it is that what is these people they’re coming to listen to what you’re doing that’s a good deal man that’s as good as it gets so you want to have that firmly in the back of your mind and the front too yeah I’ll try my best Jordan Peterson ladies and gentlemen Jordan thank you so much for today I’m looking forward to the next time we get to catch up good to talk to you Chris thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode with Jordan you will love my conversation with Douglas Murray which is available right here go on tap it
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