A Complete Guide To REINVENT Your Life in 2025 (listen everyday for 90 days) - Jordan Peterson

[Music] 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 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 your ideal 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 steps 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 1985 23 and I Think I weighed 135 lbs and I was F 6' one very very thin a TW I right 27 in 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 then I stopped drinking and I gained 40 lbs of muscle in like 3 And 1/2 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 cuz 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 Cuz I did a lot of that in 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 [Music] shame 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 head on with the presumption that you can manage it and this is the presumption we should bring to bear politically know these the people who are using fear to Garner Power point to the various apocalypses that might be

all 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 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 doubting 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's 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 what is the appropriate attitude to 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 what 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 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 no 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 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 just 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 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 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 sorry I I mangled that 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's 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 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 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 r barely think about that when they're thinking about you know the famous people they think they'd like to [Music] be in the future authoring program which Is the one we've done the most research on so it if people do this for 90 minutes badly before they go to college it'll decrease the probability they'll drop out in the first year by 50% that's amazing and it works particularly well for people who are most likely to drop

out so a lot of psychological interventions help the good performers do even better and don't help the bad performers that much and why do you think it helps them more well I think The good performers already have a bit of a vision and a plan whereas the bad performers they're really ambivalent about what they're doing because they don't have a plan and we'll talk more about why this is so important so if you don't have a reason to do something and then a reason not to do it comes up up well then you'll just not

do it cuz not doing things is real easy you can just sit there and not do things all day doing things takes effort and so any Resistance is likely to it pushes back against you and so going to college it's like well why is that difficult well you have to get up you have to go to your classes you have to do the assignments you have to do the reading you have to write the tests you have to believe that this path is somehow better than any other path you could be on and there's innumerable

other paths and that it's better in some fundamental sense than just doing nothing or playing games or Or or being purely hedonic so there's a lot of because it's difficult there's a lot of obstacles and if you don't have a reason well why would you overcome the obstacles and so what happens when you do the future authoring program is two things is first of all you construe yourself as the sort of person who who could have a reason right who could make a vision and impose it on the world and how do you do that

well and well and then second you Actually develop a vision okay so the first thing the program asks you to do and it's it's got a Biblical element to it in some fundamental sense although that wasn't so explicit when we first developed it but I came to realize that later there's a statement in the gospels Christ says to his followers um ask and you'll receive no and the door will open will open seek and you'll find and you listen to that You think no no way man it it can't be that easy well it's not

it's that easy cuz let's think about what wanting means you want something you want to you want to find so you'll seek how hard are you going to seek you know maybe you're after the Holy Grail right you're after the Gold and the Dragon Lair or the or the jewel in the Toad's head you're after something that's guarded by some monstrous figure you're going to seek How committed to that to that are you and there's a total commitment in that in a fundamental way is like you should be humble enough to be open to learning

to radical transformation to the probability that you're really wrong if you're not finding what you're seeking and the willingness to sacrifice virtually everything of lesser value for that goal otherwise you do not want it you did not ask you are not seeking you did not knock on the Door well this is the development of a vision now you can construe Consciousness as the implementor of of the vision in in the broadest sense so what we really confront as human beings isn't a deterministic world that runs like clockwork that the past pushes forward in an algorithmic

or deterministic manner that isn't how the world works the the way the world works is that we confront a horizon of Possibility that's not predictable it's somewhat predictable the way a musical piece is predictable so it's rule govern but it's not predictable in a deterministic way and it's full of possibility and potential that's actually its nature its potential and its nature and to maximize our the quality of our interaction with that potential we have to impose a vision on it and then pursue the vision and so when you do the future authoring program Well that's

what you're trying to do is develop a vision so here's the first exercise it's like okay here's the deal all right you get to have what you need and what you want maybe even better you get to have what you need and want if you were treating yourself properly so imagine first of all that you were treating yourself properly because you actually cared for yourself And that say say you don't yeah well you don't how do you help somebody well you at least ask them to open the door to the possibility that maybe they could

so just imagine that you did not that you are that you could but that that you tried think okay I'm a valuable person maybe and if I was treating myself like I had intrinsic value like if you were treating yourself like you were someone you loved so you could imagine doing this for someone you actually cared About cuz most people care about someone that isn't them so do you identify someone you care about well you can yes you can and say because it it does tell you it's like well if you if you're not so

good at caring for yourself imagine someone you love and then pretend that you're bringing that attitude to bear on you with all your faults and inadequacies I'm not being casual about this it's hard for people to do this right because we know our own flaws so Deeply it's hard for us to take care of ourselves but imagine that you should take care of yourself and that you could and that you did just imagine that so that's opening up at least the door right yeah and then you say well 5 years down the road you get

to have what you want to need what is it and so this is a deep question so because the question is this your life is going to be difficult and it's going to be marked by suffering and tragedy in all sorts of different Ways disappointment and and obstacle and betrayal and the whole panoply of human catastrophe that's absolutely 100% definitely coming your way okay so given that and given that you want to live a life free of resentment and bitterness and premature aging and excess suffering and that you don't want to be a burden to

everyone around you what would you have to have to make carrying that weight worthwhile and that's a hard question You know it's like what justifies your suffering that isn't how am I going to be happy it's what justifies your suffering well ask yourself you get to have what you want if you were taking care of yourself what would it be okay and so you write for 15 minutes about what your life might be like 5 years down the road if you got to have what you needed and wanted and then we concretize it you know

I had lots of clients and students Who said well I don't know what to do with my life what should I do with my life and the first answer to that question is that's not a very good question because it's like what do you want a oneline answer to what you should do with your life like life is everything and you want a oneline answer to everything no bad question you can imagine a desirable future but but it helps to particularize it so one of the things you might ask is Where do people find meaning

and the answer is well in multiple places here's some places people typically find meaning so if clients came to me and they were depressed first of all I'd try to find out are you depressed or do you just have a terrible life or some combination of those two and you might ask what's the difference that's a really good question if you're depressed you have a good life but you're suffering so and so What would it mean that you have a good life well it means somewhat different things to different people but you can kind of

triangulate on it probably you have an intimate relationship or at least you have the prospects of one so at least you want one and you and you believe that maybe you could have one if you you don't have one and probably if you have a good life you have one you have some friends they're real friends right you Have some family members children perhaps if not children parents and siblings or perhaps both grandchildren you're nested inside a family and your relationships with your family are desirable you have a job or a career and so if

it's a job well then it's hard and maybe you wouldn't have picked it as a vocation but at least maybe you have good relationships with your co-workers and you're doing something difficult but That's actually socially productive and useful and generates an income so that's not nothing you're educated to the level of your intellectual capability or you have plans to do so you're taking care of yourself mentally and physically and you have a strategy for dealing with the realm of of signal Temptation drug and alcohol abuse and sexual misbehavior and that sort of thing and then

we've added one more recently at least conceptually that you're you've adopted a certain Degree of civic responsibility right you're participating in the broader community in some Manner and if you're doing none of those my life is meaningless are you doing any of these no well that's why it's meaningless those are the domains of meaning and so if you're miserable and you have none of those things the first thing to do if you're a cognitive behavioral therapist with someone is to say well how about we work on like what One of these things to begin with

you know you need some friends you need to get out in the dating Market you need a job or a better job you need an educational plan like you don't have a life so you're of course you're misery miserable because without sustaining life without sustaining meaning life is just tragedy and so the lot your lot is misery and so anyways we ask people to go through these eight different domains and say okay you can have what you want But you have to aim at it sin means to miss the mark by the way it means

to miss the target that's what takes you away from God is to miss the target what Target yeah right what Target right you got to at least know there's a Target then you got to try to hit it you know and maybe you don't even know where the target is but your aim isn't good but at least you've set up a Target now and you can practice and so well if you had an intimate Relationship what would it look like if you had some friends how would you like the those friendships to be conducted if

you had a job or a career what could it be if you had what you wanted some people find it harder than other people to make a schedule you know one thing you might consider doing is doing the personality test at understandmyself.com and seeing what you're like you know maybe you're particularly low in conscientiousness in Which case making a schedule and sticking to a routine an orderly routine is going to be quite difficult for you um but that'll at least help you understand perhaps at least some of the problem maybe you're high in negative emotion

or neuroticism and so you worry too much about making the schedule and that just stops you from doing it um I would say well first thing to do is there's two things you could do first Of all the first thing you might want to do is figure out why you want to make a schedule to begin with so you talked about goals well what is it that you want to accomplish um the future authoring program at selfauthoring.com another one of our websites helps people make a detailed plan for the future and so you can't really

have a schedule without having a plan because the activities you schedule should be Intelligently related to goals you wish to achieve that are important to you and so you need to have goals that you wish to achieve that are important to you and you have to know what they are and that's complicated right that's like a plan for your life so it's very difficult and so that's why we produced this exercise which helps step you through the process of deciding what you want and need um there's a present authoring program There too that helps you

identify your virtues and your faults faults and part of your plan can involve capitalizing on those virtues and rectifying those faults and so that can be an interesting addition to this process but in any case you have to figure out what you want then you have to figure out how to decompose what you want into actionable steps right and those would be the sorts of things that you could put in schedule now that would mean that your schedule Would hypothetically consist of things that you maybe exactly want to do although that would be good but

at least you understand the importance of doing and are therefore somewhat motivated to do and then you need to break those steps down into small enough increments that you're highly likely to undertake them you know so for example this is a trivial example maybe you have to do a report on a given topic For school and you're not very good at that well you know maybe you could go to the library one day and just check out the library that might be enough and then maybe you could go to the library and take out a

book and then maybe you could open the book and look through it and those would be on different days and then maybe you could sit down and read the first page of the book and if you can't do that then the first paragraph you Know you have to negotiate with yourself and figure out what the largest step you would take towards your goal is that you would take and if you don't do it then you make the step smaller and smaller until you find something that you would do the next thing you need to do

potentially is to familiarize yourself with a schedule or like Google Calendar so the first thing to do is open it and then maybe to figure out how to put in A task and then a repeating task and might be a pretty simple one to begin with it's like well why don't you list waking up and specify a time or going to bed and specifying a Time an approximate time anyways or put in the schedule when you eat and those are things you do every day and so that's something you're pretty likely to do and so

that's a success for you and then well then you can start by putting in something small maybe you need to read Maybe you need to exercise maybe you need to uh have a social event with people um maybe you need to watch TV a movie whatever it doesn't matter what it is hopefully it's something you want to do put it in the schedule and you could start by scheduling the things that you would like to do so you can imagine well I like going out to movies I like going to the mall I like hanging

around with my friends I like watching TV I like Reading a book I like listening to music well then schedule those things and so then you think well that means I'm forcing myself to do them it's not that it's that now you're you're allowing yourself time to do them right so the schedule becomes a means of you getting what you want instead of an external Jailer who punishes you every time you deviate from requirement so you have to make friends with the schedule and the schedule has to be your friend Your ally I shouldn't use

that word but you know what I mean it should work for you and not against you it's not you're not generating an external Tyrant you know you are generating something that you could be um held to you know and and that's be responsible to and that's not necessarily A Bad Thing it can be somewhat burdensome but it's not necessarily a bad thing but generally You should approach it as if this is something that will help you get what you want and and it's also a pretty good way of controlling anxiety you know because one of

the most common sources of anxiety is just not knowing what to do and people often think about that as boredom and and it is boredom to some degree it can be but it can also be very anxiety-provoking it's like well what Should I do I don't know what to do well I have to do something there's all these things I could do and I don't want to make that decision every hour so a schedule ual that you design that you like can be an incredible relief and one thing we do know is that conscientious people

tend to be lower in negative emotion and it looks like that's a causal consequence is that orderly people for example because they're they order their environment and make it more Predictable then they're less likely to be anxious because we're often made anxious by what is unpredictable so generating a view of your life that consists of valued goals that you want to attain and then steps by which those might be attained and the future authoring program helps you figure all that out well then you can Ally that with a schedule and then you know not only

do you know what you're doing you Know that what you're doing is moving you towards something you want and that's rewarding and having your time structured like that and and attaining those goals is pleasure BL and anxiety reducing so you know that's pretty good deal All Things Considered and you can start stupid and slow like I said just throw some things in that you're pretty high pretty likely to do and fill in the schedule with broad strokes and then as you get familiar with it and comfortable With it and maybe even happy with it you

can fill in the details and start to use it in a more sophisticated way everyone I know who's accomplished almost everyone one I know who's accomplished does structure their time explicitly in that manner they've learned to do that over the years now not everyone does that really really entrepreneurial people might have a harder time with it especially if they're low in conscientiousness But um and then with regard to the personality test you know maybe you do a personality test the personality test I mentioned say and you find out that you're agreeable but low in conscientiousness

well so it's going to be harder for you to stick to a schedule but you do like to please other people so that's one of the things that you could schedule you'd be highly likely to do that if you're extroverted you could schedule time you know socializing with People if you're introverted you could schedule time by yourself walking in nature for example or doing whatever else it is that you might want to do by yourself um if you're open you could schedule in Creative time and then you'd be motivated to do those things [Music] so

you have a you're having a hard time disciplining yourself that's that's power for the course you know I mean like I said really conscientious people Are more inclined in that direction but it's hard to discipline yourself in relationship to a goal you know it's like it's it's like training a cart horse to pull a cart it's it's difficult and so you start with little things and maybe little things that you want to do and then you can proceed to harder things that you don't want to do so much you know forther extrinsic or intrin utility

but you have to do them because they're related to something important You get disciplined across time if you do that and incremental Improvement that's sustained is extremely powerful from the perspective of [Music] transformation one of the things you deal with very commonly if you're a clinical psychologist apart from depression and anxiety is well Behavior therapists offer assertiveness training and now the PE people who need assertiveness training are often people Who are too agreeable compassionate polite by temperament now the problem with that is that they let every other they let people walk all over them because

they don't they don't stand up enough for themselves and the consequence of that is they get resentful and then they get bitter and then they get conniving and then they get and then they'll mob and so because they're not they'll do anything for everyone else But they push themselves beyond their limits and they and then they won't even recognize the limits because they feel well if I'm not doing everything for you then then I'm not a good person it's like no a good person does a little for you like if I'm acting properly with you

say in this conversation there's something in it for you and there's something in it for me right and we want that to be reciprocal and so the cost of me bending too far in your direction is That all become bitter and resentful and conniving and and that and resentment is an unbelievably toxic state of being it starts out with the admission that life is brutally difficult and and sometimes unbearably brutally difficult and and you can see the progressives playing with that notion it it's it's it it's warped into this sense of victimization but it does

does reflect some understanding of the underlying tragic reality of life life and so it's Good to get that right out on the table to begin with say well you're miserable you have your reasons and they might be deep reasons but if you let the misery demoralize you and make you bitter and cynical and cowardly and make you withdraw then first of all that's a failure in the highest Sense on your part and all it's going to do is make everything worse and then you might think well what do you have to to to respond to

that how do you respond to That catastrophe and Challenge and the answer is and this is what Rocky is telling his son in no uncertain terms is like terrible as things are there's a lot more to you than you can possibly imagine and that if you face those things forthrightly and with some faith and courage then you can you can you can have the adventure of your life and Prevail even over catastrophe one of the advantages to having to to having the computational Power we have is that everything is a your fingertips and the disadvantage

is that everything's in your face and by everything it might be 40 million pornographic images like that's a lot or an endless array of tragic scenarios and really endless and so that's a problem and the problem the fundamental problem is how do you handle the fire hose of information and no one really knows the answer to that but we should also point out that it's no wonder that young People are demoralized and anxious because we're doing everything we can to demor ize them and make them anxious so on the masculine front we we tell young

boys that well the world's a terrible patriarchal tyranny and all of that patriarchal tyranny which is the whole explanation for history has done nothing but oppress and exploit people and destroy the planet and so that any manifestation of that masculine impulse on your part is equivalent to the world Destroying [Music] Force if you want to stand up for yourself you have to have your goals and your vision well laid out and well defined and then you have to have a strategy um that that is matched to those goals so that you can so that you

know what you want so that you know when you're not getting it otherwise you'll left with a vague sense of dissatisfaction and resentment and That's very very difficult thing to articulate and if you can't articulate it then you can't negotiate if you know what you want and you know why then you can make a case for yourself okay so let's assume now that you've laid out a vision and a counter Vision which the future authoring program also helps you do so you know what kind of hell you want to avoid that you might drift into

if you were too agreeable for the rest of your life that would be a hell that Consisted mostly of people taking advantage of you all the time and you feeling resentful and bitter about it not something I would recommend um see I think that women are agreeable because it helps them deal with infants but it's not a great temperamental strategy for dealing with complex um organizations in in the adult world so I think it's a price that women pay for also being adapted to have plenty of patience for very young children and then you have

to Overcome that to some degree to put yourself forward properly in more complex hierarchies of accomplishment so I would say once you have your vision established your vision for the future and your counter Vision so you're afraid of what will happen if you don't stand up for yourself then you need to insult your resentment because if you're resentful about something as far as I can tell there's generally only two reasons one Is you should grow the hell up and quit whining so you got to find out first if you're just feeling sorry for yourself and

you can think that through make a pro and con case and you can talk to somebody that you care about about that I'm not assuming that that's the reason but that's one potential reason if you're not merely feeling sorry for yourself then you probably have something to say and something that you need and you need to figure out what That is and and then you have to develop a strategy to to put that forward I've seen lots of people in my personal life and in my private practice not get what they want because well a

they don't specify it and B they don't ask for it and if you're negotiating say for a raise or for a promotion and so forth you have to put yourself forward you need to tell your the person you're working for why you should be treated with more consideration or respect or Have more resources devoted to you or more Authority um what shifted to you and you have to make a case for that a compelling case so that they have a reason to attend to you and that's not going they're not going to notice because most

managerial types are so overloaded with work that they never notice when anything's going right they just notice the things that are going wrong so you need to make a plan you have to have a strategy that Goes along with that plan you have to have articulated Arguments for why certain a certain form of treatment is appropriate to you and then you have to have the courage to put that forward and I guess you have to remember that you owe yourself as much as you owe other people you have to take care of yourself like you

take care of other people and and that's a moral duty and if you practice that you can do it and a lot of that a lot of that's also associated With telling the truth you know you don't have a better friend than the truth even though it can be very harsh in the short term and so if you're unhappy at work because you're being taken advantage of then then you have to strategize yourself out of that you have to learn to negotiate and a lot of that also means that you have to overcome your hesitancy

to engage in conflict and you got to think about it this way Negotiation and conflict are somewhat indistinguishable and it's easy moment to moment to avoid negotiation conflict but you pay a terrible price for it in the medium to long term it's better to face the conflict forthrightly in the present and make peace for the med medum to long term and there's there's courage in that so that's the other thing I would say is GD up your loins and and and and allow yourself to act Courageously I hope to encourage people other than that I

want to see what happens you know I want to say what I believe to be true as clearly and and carefully as I possibly can and I want to see what happens as a consequence and what people don't understand about that in some sense is you you're happiness the the purpose of your life is not going to be happiness sometimes it is sometimes that will come but there will be difficult periods in your life and Happiness won't suffice then but what you can have in your life is an adventure you can have an adventure and

the truth is the best adventure there's no doubt about that and there's a couple of reasons for that one is you don't know what's going to happen if you say say what you think now I don't mean incautiously and I don't mean provocatively or any more than necessary you don't know what's going to happen so that's very adventurous but also if it's You and your voice then it's your adventure and if it isn't like if you're crafting your speech or manipulating in any way or parting or abiding by the dictates of the crowd then I

don't know whose Adventure you're having but it's not yours so this is I think why people are so obsessed in some sense with the search for fundamental meaning it's because you want to be able to associate so imagine I I this is a good story so you can Imagine two people laying bricks they're building a gigantic wall and the one person thinks oh my God you know this wall is going to take 100,000 bricks and I'm laying one at a time and I'm wasting my life away trivially adding to this gigantic brick wall and what

am I doing this is absolutely miserable Brick by Brick and the other person thinks uh in 300 years this is going to be a cathedral and so the person in the second state is doing exactly the same Thing at a local level laying bricks but each brick is related to a very high goal and that means the reward that's attendant upon the laying of the brick is proportional to the goal to the what what to the aim of the of the entire behavioral process and so it seems to me so if you're aimless and and

goalless and I know you've done some work on goal setting if you're aimless and goals goalless then you can't elicit any positive emotion and if your goals Are fragmented which is also what happens if you're aimless or your goals lack Unity if your goals are fragmented then no given behavioral manifestation can elicit any dopam energic reward because it's not a step forward to anything desire terrible and so there's no positive emotion and so you can't learn well according to your according to your account I didn't know that see I didn't know that when you put

yourself in a State of apprehension in relationship to a valued goal that your neuroplasticity improves and you can learn better that's very very cool so cuz you know I just developed this app for writing called essay and one of the things we do is we tell PE we tell people that when they sit down to write an essay that's the F the most important thing you have to to do is you have to have a question in mind that you regard finding the answer to as worthwhile otherwise the whole Exercise is a lie so even

if you're assigned to topic you have to find something within the topic that grips you and prop provides you with the motivation that's appropriate to move forward with the essay with the attempt and it is a lie otherwise you're wasting your words you're you're you're engaging in futile activity and you're going to write something dull and terrible and it's going to frust frustrate you and bore you while you're doing it and That's because your own nervous system is telling you that you're participating in something that you have no belief in and so but if you

do if you're gripped by the question it's like God I really want to answer this question it's like well you're in a perfect condition to begin to write an intelligible essay because you actually want the answer and then the writing exercise is going to be gripping because you're grappling with a real mystery and that and that's so cool If if doing that also puts you in a state where you're much more likely to learn which makes sense right because if you're doing something important and you seem to be moving forward that's a really good time

to learn the dopaminergic system that we're talking about anticipation and then action and reward or in some cases no reward right and the the ability to persist toward a goal regardless is a generalizable system uh you know you had That chapter about you know get get your room in order right get your your belongings in order this is I think very relevant right now even though it's important to have higher goals and lofty goals the dopamine system is an incredible system because it is it is depletable and yet it's also renewable and it is self-amplifying

what I mean by that is let's say that I'm somebody who doesn't know what I'm working toward I don't have a specific goal or question By completing even what seem like menial tasks like making myself a cup of coffee drinking it cleaning up completely drying the cup and putting it back in the cupboard what happens is if even if you make that seemingly trivial goal the goal in addition to making the kitchen look nicer it completes a circuit it closes the dopaminergic circuit and when dopamine is released and it will be maybe not to the

same extent as publishing a novel but to some extent Dopamine amplifies our ability to think into the future to make additional plans that are unrelated to what you just did and it in literally increases confidence and energy why well for the following reason we all think about caloric energy but what most people are never taught you know and if I had 10 things I could teach people one of them would be adrenaline epinephrine is neural energy it's your ability to get up and go it's the thing that makes you jittery When you're a little nervous

but it's also what allows you to move forward to go out for a run to pursue any goal cognitive or physical Etc epinephrine which is also adrenaline those are the same thing is literally manufactur Ed from the molecule dopamine if you look at the biochemical Cascade it is dopamine is converted into adrenaline which is the basis of all energy all neural energy right and so including thinking and so if one is not In a place of being able to uh set their goal on a particular lofty goal a graduate degree a book Etc yet the

way one gets to that is by completing things in their immediate environment from start to finish and closing the dopaminergic loop you literally yeah well those are at least those are at least micro narratives that's right right so they're not integrated across a long span of time but they're not nothing and so one of the things well I Did write about this in my first book particularly about putting your life putting your house in perfect order it's like well if you if you're lost one of the things you can do is look around and see

what direction you could take locally is fix something and I used to tell my clients this is a very good thing to know find something that you could do that would make things better that you would do and there's a humility in that too because especially if you're In a low energy State it's like oh my God you know I don't have enough energy to make dinner it's like do you have enough energy to put a fork on the table and sometimes people are so depressed that that's really all they can do it's like can

you take can you take a small step forward no matter how small that is and so that's I didn't see I knew that adrenaline was a byproduct or a a uh down the biochemical chain from dopamine but I didn't get the significance of That fully so basically what you're saying is that if you implement a micro routine even something like washing a cup and putting it back in the shelf and you know that's a good thing because you have a shelf and there's cups on it you've already decided that's an appropriate way to live is

to have your coffee cups on a shelf if you go ahead with cleaning out the cup and putting it on the Shelf then you've taken steps towards a a valuable micro goal you get A dopamine kick from that that transforms itself into adrenaline and energizes you which then so that's partly the reason that it has an anti-depressant effect that's right and then you can lean into another Behavior I mean some of the the more successful classes of anti-depressants again not for everybody are the ones of the dopaminergic adrenalinic uh variety right things like pron as

opposed to you know there's a Lot of debate about ssris they tap into a different system you asked about gene expression changes um there's neuroplasticity which is on a short scale completion of a even trivial task like the putting away of the cup will give you more dopamine would gives you more adrenaline which in this analogy of either being back on one's heels flat footed or forward Center of mass regardless of where one is starting out let's say depressed is back on one's Heels it's going to tilt you forward a little bit and that's it's

a question of what you of what you do with it so the cognitive appraisal is critical because again with the prefrontal cortex being so critical in establishing which of these Loops gets repeated the cognitive appraisal is critical I'm somebody who can get things done even if they're small or you can you can take another cognitive appraisal there too which is it's small things are not small That's right precisely for the reason that we just described it's like you might have the cognitive appraisal that doing something local like cleaning up your room is small but it's

not obvious at all that that's the case it's not it's not that trivial to put your immediate surroundings in in order and it can easily be the stepping stone to putting things in order on a broader scale in fact it's probably the necessary stepping stone to do that and So they might seem small but they're they're a step ahead and ahead is a good direction absolutely and so they're not as small as you might think and so you can pat yourself on the back especially if you're depressed a little harder than you might otherwise by

say you know you say well this is Trivial but I did it it's like no if you're moving ahead tilting yourself forward in your in your metaphor that's not small you just keep doing that you're going to get out of This paralyzed or Retreat mode and then God only knows what you're going to be able to do you know if you don't know what you should do with your life you don't know who you should be sometimes you think about that as what career you should pursue but here's another way of thinking about it it's

kind of a Seal's ethos that congressman khaw detailed out here's some things you could be those are my words these are His you will be someone who's never late you will be someone who takes care of his men gets to know them and puts their needs before yours you will be someone who does not quit in the face of adversity you will be someone who takes charge and leads when no one else will you will be deep detail oriented which you discuss a lot in later sections of the book always Vigilant attentive you'll be aggressive

in your Actions but never lose your cool you will have a sense of humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the Darkest Hours you will work hard and perform even when no one is watching you'll be creative and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble you're a rebel but not a mutineer you are a jack of all trades and master of none and then you follow that a little Later with this paragraph these paragraphs be aggressive enough to kill the enemy but immediately calm enough not to scare

the little old lady you'll be that man who's mentally tough enough to operate in horrific chaos then immediately transition to Tranquility all without mentally breaking you will effectively transition from hyper masculine aggressor to Gentle caretaker you'll be both a warrior and a Gentleman the qualities that made seal leaders great were rarely physical in nature they listened they empowered their team to be successful carefully entrusting individuals with additional responsibility it's a real conservative ethos there they highlight good performance publicly and criticized bad performance privately and so well you know those are lists of Virtues and maybe

they're not The only list of possible virtues probably not but if you're lost and you don't know where to start practicing you know you also talk about this idea that uh this is an Aristotelian idea you know that we we are our habits we become what I what we practice and if imagine if you're lost you're listing you think well you find some things admirable well you could practice those things and you can practice them locally and minimally in your own relationships and you can Start to get good at them and as you get good

at them well you get better at them right and then you can you can broaden out the scope of Your Action into a wider purview so you said here too let let's go for another quote here throughout your life this is very practical advice too and I think it's very wise from a therapeutic perspective throughout your life you have people you look up to okay so let's think about that you look up What does that mean why up well up is something that beckons from a distance it's like a light on a hill and we

automatically assume that those who we admire are people we look up to so that specifies a a distance and a direction and it's uphill it's up toward a higher Vista let's say so they're automatically people who who elicit that spirit in you you have noticed the way might also imply might also imply that there's some sense of struggle required to get to That point because it's easier to go downhill than it is uphill yes definitely that's right it's an uphill it's an uphill track and it's also implies judgment because if someone's above you then they

also serve as a judge or you serve as a judge in relationship to them because you compare yourself unfavorably with them and that can also inspire you to tear them down that's really the story of Cain and Abel and that's that's a major story you have Noticed the way a teacher parent coworker Mentor or friend interacts with others and you come away thinking hm that behavior simply works better they are respected admired and successful and you find yourself wondering why that is you do if you're a little bit humble instead of being envious right cuz

otherwise you think well that damn crook he just stole his position and that's why he's got it but if you're a bit humble you might think Well no that guy looks successful maybe he knows something I don't you are noticing attributes and character traits that are good and worth aspiring to you are noticing attributes that make certain people more successful than others you are noticing what a hero looks like and in the process you are discovering a path made up of desirable personality traits that help helps you ascend in social hierarchies that's Jacob's Ladder by

the Way that that ladder that is the hierarchy to the good that's the vision Jacob has of the pathway to God is that it's a hierarchical structure with the thing that's ultimately good at the Pinnacle by definition right the best of all possible goods and then there are intermediary structures all the way up and beings inhabiting those structures and this isn't metaphysical it's like if you find something someone you admire the reason you admire them is cu they're Higher up in that Heavenly hierarchy so to speak than you are and your whole nervous system tells

you that you're compelled to listen you're compelled to pay attention by your own by the action of your own unconscious mind you know what's interesting about this point of identifying these heroes or at least Role Models you can call them either one I just thought Heroes was a more compelling word to use for for the sake of writing it but what's Interesting about it too is how pop culture actually plays a pretty important part of this because like there's plenty of people who simply don't have these good role models in their lives and you have

to acknowledge that and so where where are they supposed to turn and it's maybe one of the reasons that it's so important to fight these cultural Wars that that you and I engage in on a on a fairly regular basis that they' become a serious part Of our politics which at the at the same time is necessary but also deeply deeply unfortunate um I do think I do think the the attack on pop culture from this this Progressive victim put left has reached a reached a ceiling I think there's a there's a serious um backlash

uh I you know you look at movies like Top Gun the recent one Top Gun maybe like the highest grossing of all time absolutely phenomenal movie really fun to watch why because it just Had all of these classical virtues in in infused within it about relationships and about how you treat people and what the consequences are for treating people as such that these things speak to people in a deeper way they can't necessarily articulate them but they they understand it when they see it and there's there these sort of radical minorities that are very loud

that want that changed you know they they want something else uh to be on that hill but People react against it because it's not it's not true there's no truth to that yeah well yeah and something cries out from inside of them then and that's and that can be appealed to by a Storyteller I saw the same thing in the Marvel Avengers series is that there is a return to any any wide range of classical virtu certainly Brotherhood uh a kind of a military ethos sacrifice a striving upward certainly Masculine virtues the combination of the

Hulk and Iron Man for example that's a that's a that's a that's a there's a monstrous element to the Hulk but he's a hero in a strange sense and he's also the revitalizing force for Iron Man when he just about dies and and that's all the reason those movies were so necessary and so attractive is because they are in fact addressing a radical conceptual void in the culture and it's a void that while that you're addressing In your book especially with your appeal well trifold appeal let's say to duty responsibility and humor at the same

time right which is a kind of stoicism in the face of [Music] catastrophe you know so cuz this is a big problem in life imagine you're aiming for something and then something happens to make it impossible or you find out that it's the wrong thing cuz you were aiming in the wrong direction Well so then what do you have to rely on to set you right it's not your aim obviously but it might be your capacity to take new aim and that's bloody well dependent on your character that's for sure and so I don't think

there is a more fundamental aim than what you should be and there's no fundament no better way of characterizing what you should be then that you should fortify your [Music] character so now you're moving towards the promised land let's say so that's inspiring and that produces positive emotion because you experience positive emotion when you see yourself moving towards a valued goal no valued goal no positive emotion that's how your systems are set up psychophysiologically on the negative front well maybe anger and bitterness and fear stop you okay so what do you do With them take

good stock of your sinful nature let's say you know what Temptations you're prone to and what knock you off the Beaten Track and maybe you feel guilty about it you know where your weaknesses are and you probably have some idea of just what kind of hell you could inhabit if you let those weaknesses get the upper hand so why you just write about that for 15 minutes so let's say this isn't what you could have in 5 years it's the pit you could dig For yourself if you decided to you know just sit there or

dig everyone has a sense of that you know for some people my Temptation probably would have been alcohol it calmed me in social situations it made me feel a closer kinship to people and it was pretty good stimulant and so it was a really good drug for me and I enjoyed it quite a lot too much um but I learned that I had better things to do I wouldn't have stopped without better things to do and That's what did you mean by better things to do well I was writing my book maps of meaning um

when I was still carousing as a graduate student I'd started to put my life together by that point quite a bit but I was still a party animal and very social and uh but I found that I couldn't think hung over and not only that I couldn't handle the emotional tension of what I was dealing with intellectually it was too cuz you know if you're hung over your emotions Are more sensitive especially your anxiety and the work I was doing was way too demanding emotionally because I was dealing with historical atrocity and the motivations for

that was just too damn dark you know to be dealing with hung over plus once I had written a fair bit and was editing once you've edited your work to a substantial degree you have to use finer and finer gradations of judgment to continue to improve it and if you're Fuzzy minded at all if you've impaired your judgment when you edit you can make it worse not better and then I also realized that the only times I really regretted my actions was when I was drinking cuz it disinhibits you and that's fun that can be

really fun but I'd wake up the next day and think yeah I was a little too provocative I was a little too aggressive I was a little too mean-spirited in my wit a little too egotistical or maybe more than little on All of those fronts little careless in my choice of part [Music] um a little uncontrolled in my social behavior in places I shouldn't have been cuz you know I was starting to well I was a graduate student and a teacher by that point and I was interacting with professors saying the sociality grew yeah well

it wasn't time to be drunk that just wasn't good that worked in Northern Alberta to some degree in Some subcultures but in those situations it just made me look like a fool well it made me into a fool not just look like one and then when you and I got married um I didn't and we were going to have kids I thought well I'm not drinking when I have kids yeah I wanted I wanted children yeah and and you know you want to grow up at that point besides I was ready to dispense with all

of that by then in any case so you can imagine the Hell you could inhabit and then the advantage to that is see people are often afraid of moving forward and no wonder but you should be way more afraid of not moving forward and so if you get that hell behind you it's like well do I want to go there well I don't have the effort or the energy I'm not even sure that it's the right thing it's like well do I want to go back there it's like no definitely not that and if you

don't feel that if you don't feel that hell Then you're not nearly as motivated as you could be because if you have any sense of just exactly how Bloody dismal and dark things could get then and that's right there for you and that was one thing that I thought it was helpful I thought it was helpful when I did the future offing to uh think about where I would go if I went to the wrong place why well it's just good to know how you will fall apart yeah well well and you can Also ask

yourself and and studying historical atrocity also helped me with that it's like well do you want to be a uh what would you call a sist you're bitter and resentful you want to hurt other people is that where you want to end up you want to lie and deceive cuz that's where you end up if you lie and deceive you want to be resentful and bitter CU that's where you end up if you're resentful and bitter yeah but but sometimes you know people They just don't know what to do about it so your program helps

them to make a plan yeah well and the plan is really look we're Visionaries man human beings are Visionaries really well I found when I did the self authoring the 15 minutes of writing that I did the dreaming I did when I when I wrote about my future and just dreamed of what it could be like if it was just what I wanted yeah and then outlined the goals cuz you outline goals After that in the future those things that I had identified appeared in my life those yeah well and that was quite shocking to

me well the thing is you you look at your you look at the world through a goal directed framework and so when you switch your goals what appears to you when the world switches it's not it's mystical in a sense but in another sense it's just understandable it's like well if I look that way I see the TV and the couch and if I look this way I see You in the chair well that's not that m mysterious but what I've done is I've changed the reality that manifests itself to me just by changing the

direction of my orientation well we do that metaphysically as well and so for example if you decide that you're going to be courageously trusting towards people when they offer you an opportunity even though you're skeptical and timid but you decide no I'm going to have some faith in people so I'm going To be courageous and trusting then when they open a door to you that's an opportunity you'll think oh that's door I could walk through instead of thinking I'm moving into a trap and that's it's the same reality in some sense but the degree the

way that you're interacting with it changes well it can change it can invert it can change so radically that it barely looks like you're living in the same world there are a lot of potential Interpretations that you can validly lay on the world and some of them are extremely positive and they still work and wouldn't that be lovely if you could lay a incredibly positive Vision on the world in a calculating and strategic manner not an instrumental manner right cuz you're aiming at something genuinely good and that would work and that is how the world

works one of the things I loved about my clinical practice I loved this it was so good and I miss It we are always working always working the best parts of me and my client were working together to make everything about their lives better and it worked you know like I had lots of female clients who tripled their income in four years they didn't even think that was possible it's like well I don't make enough money I'm barely making ends meet single mothers I have no idea what to do I don't like my job it's

like well let's Make a plan here you know what do you want well I'd like to make this much money why don't we double that and just because you're going to aim at something some people do make more money than that so maybe it could be you well is that even that's not even possible it's like well let's just assume that maybe it's possible and see what you'd have to do well you got to get your CV together well it's full of holes okay well let's fix the holes okay Now you got to get a

plan well I'm not very good at interviews okay let's practice interviewing till you're not just good at it you're man you're looking forward to [Music] it you know I had clients who were in such dire situations that all I could do was really help buffer them against that but they were a minority I wouldn't say more than 5% of my practice fell into that category everyone else it was Like just rapid Improvement on all fronts you know and that's such fun and it's there isn't anything more practical this is the thing too there is nothing

more practical than developing a a vision it's not some pie in this guy exercise it's without a vision you're chaotic and fragmented and hopeless and dis disappointed and someone can stop you just by putting up a single obstacle You're A house divided amongst itself you have no forward movement you're You're not enthusiastic and that's to be filled with the spirit of God by the way and your life is a sequence of disappointments and frustrations and tragedies and you're a leaf blowing in the wind and that is not what you're called to be that's not what

you're called to be you're called to be a Visionary constructure of [Music] the paradisal vision M really really that's who you Are terrible as that is to apprehend and so what would we have to lose we already will lose everything we have to lose yeah right we're all in in this game man so there's whether you want it to be this way or not you are betting everything on your [Music] [Music] life you can think about this I think it's worth thinking about because I think this is how we think of each Other and I

think this is how we treat each other and I think this is what we uppr ourselves for when we fail you wake up in the morning and what is it that confronts you now you could say that it's the material reality of the circumstances around you and that you're driven Like Clockwork by that but that isn't how it appears phenomenologically I don't believe I I don't see see that that's how we see Ourselves when we awaken in the morning what we see in front of us is a a field of potential constrained to a large

degree for some of us and wider for others but still definitely present and that's the domain of what could be that day and I think the day is the right level of analysis and you wake up and you confront the world and you think well here's a variety of ways that things could play themselves out today That's that field of potential that's in front of you it could go this way or it could go this way or it could go that way and you know that maybe you have difficult decisions ahead of you and you

know that perhaps You're motivated to avoid some of them or maybe not to take the difficult decision but to take the easy way out and you have some inkling of how things would go if you did it properly or if you avoided it or if you took the easy way out you can you can Understand how the future would be likely to unfold if you took any of those patterns of action and then you get up and you decide to act or to not act in accordance with your decisions and as a consequence you turn

the potential that characterizes the future into the actuality of the present and the past and so to me what that means is that whatever your Consciousness is which in the oldest sense is the thing that has what would you say it's the It's that which dwells within you that's made in the image of the God who created things at the beginning of time that's the idea is that the Imp mation of that transforms the chaotic potential that confronts you in the form of the indeterminate future into the actual world and that's what we do and

we do that as a consequence of our moral choices and in Genesis it's the claim is that in so far as God used the logos to perform exactly the same function then The habitable order that was created was good and that's insisted upon repeatedly and so there's a deep ethic and it's a very deep ethical idea and the idea is that you have it's possible you have within your grasp the possibility to take the world despite its suffering and its malevolence and to confront it in a manner that as a consequence of applying truth will

transform what you produce out of that potential into what is Good and that's a call for a particular form of ethical being and it's on you is that you make decisions to go this way or that way and some of the decisions lead up to something that's positive and some of the decisions lead down to something that's negative and if enough of us make the decision to move down into what's negative then that's exactly what happens and we create situations around us that are so close to hell that the distinction is Merely semantic and so

you might say well you're no believer in heaven and perhaps you're no believer in God but you could easily be a believer in the ability of your own cowardly indecision and determination to use deceit instead of confronting things courageously and truthfully to produce something around you that's hell for all intents and purposes and I think that that was the lesson of the 20th century I think that's exactly what happened I think that the reason it happened is because individuals abandoned their moral responsibility and that moral responsibility is in some in some sense absolute enough to

be unbearable having said that so so then my conclusion because of all that and for other reasons as well was that well it was true that life is suffering tainted by malevolence But that there was a power of spirit that characterized the human being that enabled him or her to confront that forthrightly with nobility of purpose and to transcend the suffering and constrain the malevolence and that that was within our grasp and that what that meant fundamentally was that despite the undeniable structural reality of Finitude and evil that the spirit of the human being was

so powerful in its potential that that could be confronted and accepted as a fundamental responsibility and then transcended and repaired as a consequence and so that was an inversion of the most pessimistic possible view I suppose which is that life is ineradicably suffering and malevolence into the opposite view which is that if that is taken on Voluntarily then it's something that can be transcended and rectified and that that's the sacred responsibility of every single person and worse that the abdication of that responsibility which is in some sense virtually unbearable in its weight that the abandonment

of that or the avoidance of it produces a void in the structure of reality that's filled by something that's Hellish and so it's not only that you fail to make things better when you could by stopping doing the things that you know to be wrong but that if you don't take forthright action then the space you leave is filled by something that's Dreadful and so the conclusion of all that was that the collectivists were wrong and those who insisted that the individual was The Sovereign foundation Of the state and that each individual has a element

that's the rationale for that foundational sovereignty and the reason for our equality before God in the law that that's correct in the most fundamental of ways and so what I've been attempting to do since then and I guess that's part of the reason why you're all here I suppose is to suggest to individ idual that there's far more to you than you would Like to believe and that whether you manifest that in the world properly makes far more difference than you would like to imagine and the downside of that is the crushing weight of that

voluntary adoption of your moral burden but the upside is the discovery of the nobility that's within you that's of sufficient force and power to be aligned in some sense with the most fundamental realities of of the World and that constitutes a sufficient Wellspring of strength if drawn upon properly for you to Bear the suffering and malevolence that characterizes the world without becoming corrupted as a consequence [Music] I'm 40 but I feel like a child watching everyone around me get older and die so I'm homesick for the past instead of accepting the terrifying present how can

I stop mourning the past now you're suffering from what Freud described as uh reminiscences of the past you're possessed by reminiscences they won't get out of your mind and what that means to me is well it's one of two things one is that there's things in your past that you need to understand more deeply and that's why they're still calling to you and there are things in your past that you had perhaps that you need to have in the present and the future and so you Could do the past authoring program and write out your

past it it asks you to detail the most emotionally significant events that occurred during different epochs or stages of your life so you have to break your life into a number of stages I think we recommended six but you can break it into as many as you want or as few and then to deal out detail out the significant positive and negative occurrences you know that stand out in your memory from those times and That'll kind of help put the past to rest but also might highlight for you what it is that you're nostalgic for

and then that can help you figure out what to aim for in the future and so you know it sounds like you're rather hopeless about the present and by implication the future and and maybe that's because you don't have a richly enough developed conception of what it could be so you could go back to your past and find out what it is that you wanted and had and Then you need to make a plan for how you might obtain that in the future um now it's a bit more complicated than that because you talked about

death you know and and so you may be longing in some sense for a return to in a state of blissful ignorance where you weren't concerned about mortality and you know you know the only real medic medication for that I think that's real is to live as worthwhile a life as you can as full of life so you don't have regrets I'm Not sure so much that people are afraid of death they're they're may be afraid of not living enough and maybe if you lived enough you could let it go when it was time I

I think there's some truth in that and so if you're overly afraid of death it may be because you have a lot of unlived life in you and you can go back to the past and you can find out what you needed and perhaps had then and then you can strive to attain that in The present and the future and those exercises could at least in principle help you with that so what are you missing right what are you missing that the past had for you and maybe you write that down like well I had

this it was really important to me and I you know had a loving relationship with someone and I don't have that now I I had the security of a comfortable home life and I don't have that now so well those are things that now become Ambitions right because a lack is an ambition and a lack are mirror images of one another so if you can identify what you lack you can derive an ambition from that and you might say well that's impossible it's like well you decompose it into small steps and that's complicated but so

life is complicated so there's no way around that you're somewhere cuz you have to be somewhere now you might not know where that is Which means that the somewhere that you are is chaotic in which case you need to go over your past in great detail and figure out where you are it's like you're lost right you're you're lost and the problem with being lost is when you're lost you don't know where to go and the problem with not knowing where to go is there's a million places that you could go and a million places

is too many places for you to go without dying so being lost is not good so you need to Know where you are one of the things that we built online my partners and I is this program called past authoring that helps people lay out the The Narrative of their past to identify to break their life down into six stages EPO we call them and then to identify the emotionally significant moments in each Epoch and write them out what happened negatively what happened positively what the consequences were what you derived from it perhaps what You

could have done differently perhaps what you learned from it all of that so that you can narrow in zero in on determining precisely where it is that you are right now and people are often loathed to do that because they actually don't want to know because they'd rather be spread out in a sort of half blind manner in the fog hoping that the place that they're at is better than it really is and diluting themselves by remaining vague than to figure out I'm right here Right now with these specific problems but it's actually better to

to do that because if you have a set of specific problems and you've really narrowed them down and really specified them then you can probably start fixing them and you can start fixing them in mic micro ways bit by bit but there's no way you can do that without knowing where you are it's impossible and you can kind of tell if you don't know where you are it's quite straightforward if you are haunted by Reveries of the past for events that are older than approximately 18 months if they continue to come up in your mind

over and over in your dreams over and over you haven't extracted the world out from your past experiences the potential is still trapped in the past and to confront the potential means to confront the dragon of the past and of course that's terrifying and it can seriously be terrifying so for example maybe you're vague and Ill formed and IL Defined because you were abused very badly when you were a child 4 years old something like that and maybe you're abused by a family member because that's generally who does the abusing and so that just makes

it worse and then what that means is that you've got a implicit you've had an implicit encounter with malevolent evil that no you've had a direct encounter with malevolent evil but you have an implicit hypothesis of Malevolent evil that's plaguing you it's still there it's trapped in the memories right it's it's trapped in the representational structure and as an adult you're now faced with the necessity of articulating that fully before you have any chance whatsoever of freeing yourself from it and so that's no joke lots of times people have to go into the past that's

what the psychoanalysts do and and say look here something came along and just bloody Well knocked me over and it isn't even that I repressed it which which I think was well we won't talk about Freud's errors because Freud was a genius so we'll just leave leave him alone but but sometimes it's not repression it's just the terrible things happen to people at such a young age that there isn't a bloody chance in hell that they can figure out why they happened or what to do with them or what they mean and then you can

carry that with you and you Carry it with you it's like your your your body encounters the world in stages and it happens very rapidly well it can extend over years but the initial stages happen very rapidly so for example if you're walking down the road and you hear a large noise be loud noise behind you you'll go like this that's a predator defense response by the way you crouch down and that's to stop something from jumping on your back and getting at your neck too easily that's like few mil Few hundred milliseconds it's really

fast or even faster than that and it better be because something like a snake we'll say can nail you just right now so you better be fast but it's low resolution it's like danger snake something like that or danger predatory cat it's that fast and then you can unravel that and categorize it but that takes time you do that with emotion and then you do it with cognition and you can do that With long-term thinking you know because maybe you've encountered someone specifically malevolent and predatory at work that happens to people a lot who's operating

as a as a destructive bully and who seems to have no positive function whatsoever and is only living that out and then you you know you don't know what to do about it so you're you're in prey mode I don't mean this kind of mode although that would help too but I mean You're acting like a prey animal and then you have this terribly complex thing to decompose which is what the hell's up with this person why are they making my life miserable what is it about me that allows them to make my life miserable

that's a nasty little road to walk down and you're stuck with having to you're stuck with having to decompose it maybe you can't maybe formulating an explicit philosophy of Good and Evil to deal with something Malevolent in your environment actually just happens to be Beyond you and that could easily be it's certainly the case for people who are young and it's the case for plenty of adults as well it's no simple thing to M to manage it's something too that often soldiers who have post-traumatic stress disorder have to do because they've encountered Terrible Things they've

either done them or run into them and they need to update their moral model of the world or they End up in something close enough closely approximating hell you need to know where you are that's this what is where are you so you're navigating you're a navigator you're a sailor on an ocean man that's what that's what you are you're a mobile creature you're going from point A to point B all the time you know it's sitting there glued to a rock like some brainless you know sea creature there's a funny little creature called a

Hydra Very simple little creature in its juvenile stage it has a brain because it swims around but then when it turns into an adult it latches itself to a rock and promptly digests its brain cuz if you're just sitting on a rock and you're not moving you don't need a brain so but that's not our issue right we're we're zipping around in the world and so we're navigating agents and so to navigate there's two things you need to know the first is where the hell are you exactly Precisely right razor sharp what's good about you

and what's bad about you buy your own buy your own Reckoning you don't have to you can ask other people but this is a game you play yourself it's like as far as I'm concerned I'm taking stock what is it that's okay about me and What needs some work and you got to watch to not be too self-critical when you're doing that too cuz that can just be another kind of flaw people work to some degree so they Don't starve now that's a very negative way of looking at it but much work if not all

is also routine and socialization and commitment and meaning I talked with the psychologist yesterday from North Dakota State who wrote he studies meaning from an existential perspective and he wrote an article in Newsweek criticizing the idea of universal basic income mhm and the reason he criticized it was because well he noted for example that one of the Things that drives people to suicide is the idea that they're a functionless burden and so imagine that you identify a segment of the population and you essentially say to them we can't think of anything useful for you to

do but it would be annoying to watch you starve so here's some money I mean I'm being very cynical about that but it's it isn't obvious especially that conscientious people would respond to that with Anything but Despair and so obviously we need to take care of dispossessed people but but that's a complicated problem and M giving people money is not a sufficiently sophisticated solution and that does go to the Dignity of work right the need we're like pack animals we need to pull now some people more than others it's it's really tightly associated with trait

conscientiousness one of the Big Five personality traits but conscientious people who have Nothing to do they're they despair it's it's not it's not in their nature to to not work I think that's absolutely right I mean when we have constantly asked about veteran suicide and and what I say is the you know why aren't we talking about active duty military suicide why why is it when you become a veteran you're somehow more prone to Suicide now there's some in PTSD this is very interesting my intuition is that it's a loss of purpose And Mission well

you know one of the things I studied military people for a long time with the US Naval Academy that's a whole story in and of itself I'll tell you but we were looking at what predicts military success among uh among their their students we could predict it quite well and the most Salient predictor apart from General cognitive ability which predicts virtually anything complex and that's IQ essentially was trait Conscientiousness and the thing about conscientious people is that they live for Duty they are they are like sled dogs man if if they don't have a purpose

they're they'll become desperate and it's like the upside to conscientiousness is it makes you more successful because you're a harder worker let's say you put in more hours but the downside is if you lose your job for example you're made Su Superfluous for one reason or another you'll eat Yourself up with despair the radical leftists they they react to me this way they say well you hold a position of privilege and power and I think first you don't know a godamn thing about me and you have no idea how I got to my position of

privilege and power and it was no Birthright I can tell you that I was a small like thick glassed intellectual non what do you call that athletic child you I Was a year younger than my peers I suffered plenty of what would you say trouble for my loud mouth and my intellect when I was growing up you know I had my struggles I'm not complaining about it the point is is that you can't attribute privilege to a class of people you know and you can't attribute power to people who happen to occupy a position of

competence and Authority either there's some possibility that they occupy that Because they worked hard and we're fortunate let's not forget about that and had some good social support and didn't have some horrible disease thank God but you can't just make the case that the position is there as a reward it's not there as as a reward at all it's there as a consequence of the person offering something valuable to those who want to pay for it and the reason you pay for them isn't to reward them It Isn't So that you give them a Pat

on back and say well you're a good person and you know you deserve this position it's because you're saying to them produce we find what you're producing of value and so we're going to give you what you need in order to be motivated to keep doing it it's not because we like you it's not because we we respect your rights it has nothing to do with Equity it's we're trying to get every goddamn thing we can from you as fast as possible and we're going to pay You to do it and so people deserve their

damn pay and the reason they deserve it isn't because it's a reward it's because that's how you get productive people to do things that are difficult and time consuming and that perhaps they wouldn't do on their own accord to continue doing them so you can benefit from it so the whole notion that you know we're awarding positions of privilege to oppressive patriarchal types it's like we just have to get rid of that enough Of that that's that's nonsense citizens have the inalienable right to benefit from the results of their own honest labor that's a good

one yes that's a conservative truism you know why well it isn't because you because you're good-hearted and you want them to have money it's because they'll work if you let them benefit from the work and you want them to work because if they work then they do things that you need it's as simple as that it's Self-interest and it's the right kind of self-interest so if you work hard it's like great have your money you know and you you hear people all the time talking about how corrupt our Society is and how the 1% you

know occupies this Pinnacle position you know the 1% turns over pretty damn fast just so you know it so you have about a 10% chance of spending at least one year in the top 1% chance during your life I think that's right I think it's 10% it might be higher than That but it's fast it it's the 1% is stable as a phenomena but it turns over very rapidly in terms of who occupies it and it's the same in every society the wealth is always distributed inequitably it's a natural law you can look at up

it it was discovered by a guy named Wilfred Puro back in the late 1800s Goods tended them to distribute themselves inequitably it can be a problem but it doesn't mean that there's something fundamentally corrupt about the social Structure that's driving it in that direction and like you you don't want some Filthy Rich Geniuses lying around like maybe you do I mean look at what Elon Musk is doing for God's sake maybe he should have 10 times as much money as he has he's going to launch a rocket every 5 days to Mars in the next

10 years right he wants to wipe out fossil fuel cars and he might do it he wants to revolutionize the transportation system and he might do it he wants to put us on The damn solar grid with his new batteries and he might do it it's like oh no he has a couple of billion dollars well God only knows what he's going to produce with that it's like so obviously there's going to be some corrupt there's going to be some corrupt Rich plutocrats who do nothing but smoke cigars and snort cocaine they're not going to

live very long anyways but there's lots of people out there who have the money they have because they would really like to Do interesting and creative things with it not because they're interested in gathering more you know paper money to stuff in their mattress and and to like to feel the the smooth the smooth Delight of gold coins between their fingers before they go to bed like what kind of attitude is that towards people who've made their Fortune you know you think that about Steve Jobs you think that about Bill Gates I mean good God

I don't know how those people made a lot Of money but man thank God they were around you you know they've given us some tools that are just absolutely unbelievable so you know maybe we could leave the jealousy of the successful behind for a while and notice now and then that some of the people who got to where they are actually deserve to get to where they are and we should be thankful that they exist that would be nice A little gratitude there's a good literature Showing that conscientious people who lose their jobs are much

more likely to become depressed yeah because like they're you know these are these are fundamental subpersonalities that's part of the way that you might look at it so you're made of you you have a position in each of these traits and that gives you a personality if you're really really high in openness let's say if you don't Create you die like that's your life if you're high in extroversion if you're not with people you you you you you dry up and blow away so these are these are deeply rooted inside of you and conscientiousness is

a trait like that and so people who especially conscientious people they need purpose it's not optional it's it's it's the it can be their defining characteristic so and that's definitely true for military people I mean the Military is built for conscientious people that it has to be yeah well it's see one of the things the Navy the the Naval Academy wanted us to do was to uh see if we could select for creativity as well right because they wanted independent thinkers and so forth and it's really tough because most of the military regimen is is

suited primarily to to uh conscientious people now if you're open and creative that might work really well if you're in an advanced Leadership role but the question is how the hell do you get there because if you're not highly conscientious you're going to get in trouble as you rise through the ranks and lots of companies have this problem by the way because at the low end conscientiousness is vital and openness might be merely disruptive my dad was a school teacher he's still alive and he got disenchanted with School teaching in part because all of the

authority in his classroom was taken From him so if there were disciplinary issues in the class it had to be brought up the hierarchy to the to the the administrative echelons above him and so he he could feel his authority in the class slipping away and he was quite an authoritative teacher my dad was my teacher in grade six um for math I wasn't in his home room but I remember and by grade six this is about 12 years old kids are pretty pushy and fractious you know and 10 minutes before The class started the

first time my dad walked into the room everyone was silent cuz he had a reputation and the reputation was don't mess with him and it wasn't cuz he was mean you know he had a he had a hard spine and you didn't want to push him but he was is authoritative and he also got disenchanted with television so when he was young and even when I was young there were shows like my three sons and Father Knows Best can you imagine a show Called Father Knows Best now the closest I've seen to that recently is

is Ted lasso that's the only sitcom I've seen for like five gener five decades in some sense that has a genuinely positive male lead so kudos to Ted lasso you see that a little bit in The Simpsons hey cuz that's why it was such an interestingly subversive show because Homer is a bumbling fool and Marge in some sense has the moral upper hand but not entirely but Homer the thing about Homer is he's trying he's not very bright but he is trying and he would like to be a good father and he's faithful to his

wife and and his kids and so there is this underlying solidity of that male character but you know it's damning with faint praise and now young men they're on under assault for on two from two directions fundamentally one is all male Authority is nothing but patriarchal oppression and so imagine now you're an ambitious young man which Is the drive toward toward that Authority well all that is is a manifestation of the power dynamic in men that produced the patriarchal oppressive Colonial tyranny and so now you're a moral young man you think well my ambition is

to be not only to be questioned it's to be squatched entirely because it's nothing but a manifestation of power imagine that maybe you escape from that by some maneuvering but then there's another assault that's waiting Which is all human activity is nothing but part of the force that's devouring the planet and that's going to put us all in flames it's like oh good so not only am I part of the patriarchal oppressive Force but I'm also the despoiler of Mother Nature and so if you tell boys that constantly and you do and then you also

say all of the sexual advances that you make towards women on any front whatsoever are to be regarded with extreme Skepticism and then you feed them pornography on a Non-Stop basis so there's an easy way out and that's a unbelievably powerful oh it's a drug oh well you know no one really thinks this through in some sense but any 12-year-old boy 13-year-old boy can now see more beautiful naked women in 15 minutes than the richest king in history ever saw in his whole life you think well you know we don't have to worry about that

it's like yeah you have to Worry about that that's a that's a huge problem and it's a demoralizing problem because it offers an easy way out if all of your ambition is nothing but the junior manifestation of power and should be squatched out of you as early as possible and schools do this because they punish boys for playing so hyperactivity look looks like suppressed play Behavior so there's good animal models of that by the way and you can if you deprive animals of play especially Juvenile male animals a lot of this has been done with

rats because they're very playful by the way if you deprive them of play they'll play hyperactively when you give them the opportunity and you can suppress that with methylphenidate that's rellin it suppresses play Behavior now it focuses attention focuses attention attention deficit it's like no probably not the boys just need to be out in the playground running around playing like for more time than They're allowed with their boisterous competitive play Behavior you know and we don't need competition you know all all games should be cooperative which is complete rubbish it's not a game if it's

just cooperative and it's such a Dopey view of cooperation like if you and I you and I are playing one-on-one basketball then well are we cooperating or competing well did you did you bring a chess board no you you you came to play basketball Well how about that's cooperation we've decided what the rules are going to be that's cooperation obviously fundamental we're playing the same game that's cooperation think it through and so then are we competing well yes but what does that mean it means well we're we're getting in each other's way in some sense

while we're trying to hit the goal but we're doing that in a way that imp improves our skill at hitting the goal cuz if you set up an obstacle to me Which is what you do if we're playing one-on-one basketball you're making it difficult for me to hit the target and so that means you're making me better at hitting the Target and if we do that optimally then it's fun and you might say why well the word sin is derived from a Greek word hamartia and there's a there's a Jewish parallel semantic Track by the

way that has the same underlying structure hamar as an archery term it means to miss the Target and so what We're trying to do is hit the target well what's the target well that's the question it's a hard question but we're trying to hit the target and how do you know well what are people doing when they're playing sports like all sports virtually are circulate around hitting the target it might be crossing the Finish Line first so the target would be being the fastest among that group so that would be swimming let's say or it

might be football and all of of its i m Obviously that's a you're hitting the target that's what basketball is that's what shooting is that's what archery is it's all hitting the Target now we're hunting creatures we're based on a hunting platform and we're visual Hunters too and so we're looking at Targets all the time and trying to hit them and part of what we're doing when we're competing is we set a joint Target and then we set up an adversarial structure that impr improves our skill While we practice hitting the Target and so is

that competition it's like well no it's not comp competition in that the goal is to defeat you even though I'm going to try to win because otherwise the game's no fun the real game is can we make each other better in a sustainable way so that we can hit the target more effectively and Men especially on the sports pitch of course women do this too but it's it's more of a masculine Enterprise in some sense It's a masculine Enterprise not a male Enterprise not not for men only it's honing your ability to hit the target

when you deviate from the target deviation from the target that's sin that's what it means it's so useful to know that it's like well I missed the mark and then you're guilty about it well you should be you're supposed to hit the mark and what's the mark well the Mark is the line between Order and Chaos or the the Mark is the the playful Engagement in good conversation the Mark is a really intense game a an intense game is you're serious about it the P person is pushing you right to your bloody limit and vice

versa so Yung Carl Yung the psychoanalyst said the fool is the precursor to the Savior why because the fool will tell the truth right and and you can't redeem yourself without telling the truth and in the court so the court might be the place where the Evil King rules and that's one possibility that the king's court maybe the evil King is ruling well you need a fool why well the Fool's beneath contempt so the fool can say anything well so is the fool the fool or the king because if the fool is the only person

free enough to say anything it's not obvious that the king is in control it might be the Fool's in control that has the real power but he doesn't have the responsibility that goes with that well He has the responsibility to be funny right okay right well so that is a responsibility it's a responsibility to tell the truth now he's not he's not the administrator right but at least he's the person who's feeding truth into the culture and certainly do that like one marker of someone you can't trust is well I have no sense of humor

I don't see why that's funny it's like yeah you don't that's that's pretty sad we should there's some things comedians shouldn't Be allowed to make fun of it's like yeah and you're going to decide that are you you're going to decide what people get to think is funny this unconscious manifestation you're going to regulate that and you're going to claim pridefully that well yeah I'm going to regulate that and things will be a hell of a lot better because of it it's like yeah yeah if you're the sort of tyrant that can't stand the if

you're the sort of King that can't stand the fool then You're a tyrant I'd like to be remembered I suppose as someone who was encouraging because that's what I think primarily I'm doing is encouraging people it's like yeah yeah you're full of problems and you're massive snakes and all that and but fund not fundamentally you're the thing that can handle snakes fundamentally mhm so if you would be willing to and so and I really I not only only do I believe that In some sense I I know it's true I know it's true so I'm

trying to tell people that it's like yeah you're sad case but uh but there's a hell of a lot more to you than you think like way more enough to cope with the trouble of the world inside you there is enough to cope with the trouble of the world and you if you had enough courage you could let that out enough courage and Faith you could you could let that out and everything would be better because of it [Music] people have been after me for a long time by because I've been speaking to disaffected young

men you know what a terrible thing to do that [Music] is I thought the marginalized were supposed to have a voice it's making emotional talk about well God you know it's very difficult to understand how demoralized people are and certainly Many young men are in that category and you get these casual insults these these incels what does they mean it's like well these men they're they don't know how to make themselves attractive to women who are very picky and good for them women like be picky that's that's your gift man demand high standards from your

men fair enough but all these men who are alienated it's like they're Lonesome and and and they don't know what to do and Everyone piles abuse on them when she said that Olivia wild it stung you didn't it that's sold oh by that time you know that as far as as CR critiques go that was kind of low level I mean once I got painted as Red Skull you know magical super naazi that was kind of the end of the insults there's no place past that so when Olivia wild made those comments the first thing

I did was go look at the Preview for a movie which I quite liked I thought I would go see that movie probably and perhaps I will it didn't really bother me my my family and I talked about it right away and we were able to respond to it with some degree of humor which then people completely misunderstood I said I hope that you know that if I had to be played by someone I think it's Chris wild is that he's a very good-look man and so that seems all right you know and then I

said Something like I hope he gets my my uh fashion style choice right when he plays me and it was a joke all that was a joke I you've been so controlled today and yet in that brief moment you got very emotional why it's really something to see [Music] constantly how many people are dying for a lack of an encouraging [Music] Word and how easy it is to provide that if you're careful you know give credit where credit is due and to [Music] say you're a net force for good if you want to be do

you believe your net for so good net yes in all the details probably not you know no one's perfect so people make their mistakes as they stumble Uphill but I'll tell you something else that's really weird I don't understand this either so more than 90% of the people who watch my videos on YouTube are men now that's weird because about 80% of psychology students are women so that is not what you would expect right you'd expect that the majority of them would be women and you might say well it's because of the political stance I've

taken and I thought well that's possible so I went and looked at the Demographic data because I have that well before I did any of the political videos 85% of my viewers were men so it's actually increased a bit it's increased by 6% and that's not trivial but it was still overwhelmingly amen so that was interesting I thought what the hell why is that exactly and then now I've been watching crowds when I've been talking to them and the crowds that have come to see me in person this happened at the University of Toronto Free

Speech Debate and I actually noticed it and commented on it before the debate took place because I was talking about intrinsic differences between men and women and I looked around the room and I thought hm hey 80% of the people in this room are men so I had all the men St women women stand up and then all the men stand up I said look like here's a natural experiment for some reason 80% of the people who showed up to this are men now everybody thought I was kind of Cracked to to do that and

it was a risk you know and and I but I thought no there's something going on here and then what's interesting now is that every public appearance that I've made that's related to the sort of topics that we're discussing is overwhelmingly menant it's like it's like 85 to 90% And so I thought wow that's weird like what the hell's going on here exactly and then the other thing I've noticed is that I've been talking a lot to the crowds That I've been talking to not about rights but about responsibility right because you can't have the

bloody convers what are you doing you can't have the conversation about rights without the conversation about responsibility because your rights are my responsibility that's what they are technically so you just can't have only half of that discussion and we're only having half that discussion the question is well what the hell are you leaving Out if you only have that half of the discussion and the answer is well you're leaving out responsibility and then the question is well what are you leaving out if you're leaving out responsibility and the answer might be well maybe you're leaving

out the meaning of life that's what it looks like to me it's like here you are suffering away what makes it worthwhile rights you know you're completely out you're completely you have no idea what you're you it's Almost impossible to describe how bad an idea that is responsibility That's What Gives Life Meaning it's like lift a load then you can tolerate yourself right cuz look at you're useless easily hurt easily killed why should you have any self-respect that's the the story of the Fall pick something up and carry it pick make it heavy enough so

that you can think yeah well useless as I am at least I could move that from there to there well what's Really cool about that is that when I talk to these crowds about this the men's eyes light up but this responsibility thing that's a whole new order of this is that young men are so hungry for that it is unbelievable I was watching The Simpsons the other day I watched the first Simpsons episode and I deconstructed it and so it's really interesting so what happens in the first Simpson episode is that it's Christmas and

Homer and Marge Are going to buy some Christmas presents but Homer doesn't get his Christmas bonus and so he's absolutely crushed by that and that actually is a recurring theme in The Simpsons where Homer loses his job or something like that or can't make enough money he's completely crushed even though he's kind of useless bumbling laughing fool of a guy you know the thing that gives that show his soul is that he's still oriented towards his family that's what makes him honorable Is that foolish as he is he's decided to adopt responsibility for his family

and to try to bear that and so he's not he's a holy fool he's not a complete fool and it's so interesting watching the story because he suffers dreadfully as a consequence of not being able to fulfill his responsibility well that's for men women have their sets of responsibilities they're not the same right because they're complicated because women of course have to take Primary responsibility for for having infants at least but then also for caring for them they're they're structured differently than men for biological necessity even if it's not a psychological issue and it's also

partly a psychological issue women know what they have to do men have to figure out what they have to do and if they have nothing worth living for then they stay Peter Pan and why the hell not because the alternative to valued Responsibility is impulsive low class pleasure we've met some of your fans and uh we got the impression they were all meal fans that the ones that we talk to um and that they were struggling with their manhood and that you uh give them this message that it's okay to be a man it's not

okay it's necessary what the hell are we going to do without men you look around the city here you see all these buildings go up These men they're doing impossible things they're under the streets working on the sewers they're up on the power lines in the storms and the and the rain they're keeping this impossible infrastructure functioning this thing that works in a miraculous manner they work themselves to death and often literally and and the the um the gratitude for that is s sorely lacking especially among the people who should be most grateful you see

University professors especially of the social justice bent who are among the most protected and privileged people that the world has ever produced they take everything they have for granted failing to understand entirely that there's a massive infrastructure of unbelievably hardworking solidly laboring workingclass men breaking themselves in half on a regular basis making sure that everything that always breaks Works and so a little gratitude for that is in order and it's very useful to tell everyone not just men that they have an important role to play and necessary role and that if they act properly and

honestly and forthrightly that they can put their lives together and they can help their [Music] families it's not all about power and in fact if you try to govern your relationships based on power true Relationships you will fail so imagine that you you your wife let's say you're going to just use power to to interact with her well try it and see what happens you know you're going to be she's going to be miserable and she's going to be resentful for sure and maybe she's got more power than you when push comes to shove who

the hell knows women aren't that easy to oppress and so they have their own bag of tricks that's for sure and so but at minimum you're going To be setting yourself up for a Loveless relationship based on Mutual suspicion and then imagine you tried to use power on your kids well now and then you might have to use discipline you might have to lay out the game rules which isn't the same as like constraining them with oppression and but if your fundamental relationship with your kids is one of dominance you're just a tyrant and then

if you try using that on your friends well first of all you won't have any Friends the best you'll ever manages henchmen and they'll only be around you because they think they can get something out of your power so they're the worst kind of friend because they're not even confident enough bullies to be bullies on their own they have to hide behind another bully and be sub bullies and that's a dismal outcome and then if you use power in your business relationships it's like no one's going to be aligned with you and the first Time

you make a mistake and and you show any sign of weakness you're so-called business associates that you've just dominated cuz you have the power they're just going to stab you in the back and leave so it's a it's a Preposterous Theory it doesn't even work for chimpanzees so the the best work that's been done on chimp so far is being done by France DeWall DeWall has been studying chimpanzees for three decades and he's written a series of books about The emergence of protom Morality In chimpanzees now chimps have to live in a social group and

for decades and they have you might as well call them friendships um because that's the closest analog and they have to maintain those friendships and they can't maintain them by dominance because well then obviously it's not a friendship they have to maintain it by mutual grooming and caretaking and so what dewal has shown is that the alpha chimp So you think of the alpha chimp as the roughest toughest Chimp in the troop you know he's banging on sticks and threatening everybody and he clambers his way up the hierarchy just like the marxists would assume and

he establishes sexual Superior I ority and propagates his genes and the truth of the matter is that's better than being weak and useless and and dying but it's not nearly as good as being genuinely reciprocal and so what dewal has shown Is that sometimes the alpha chimp male is the smallest male in the troop so that's pretty damn interesting but more to the point the alpha chimp is the most reciprocal member of the entire troop so he's keeping track of his social relations he's grooming his friends they're interacting constantly like he's maintaining social relationships like

mad and there's two advantages to that aart from the fact that he attains a certain degree of reverence let's say an Authority and and some preferential sexual access so it's a good biological strategy the troop is of also more stable emotionally partly because it's not ruled by a tyrant let's say who's always disrupting things but the alpha who's reciprocal also can have a long Reign cuz if you're one of those chimps that use manipulation and power to climb up the hierarchy as soon as you show a sign of weakness two of the males that you've

oppressed will gang together Which chimps are very good at and tear you into bits and so dewal has written very frightening accounts very graphic accounts of these like re revolutions against tyranny and chimp groups and so the people who claim that power is the only motivation they don't have a leg to stand on it's just not true two more things one is if you think power is the only motivation that's your whole Theory then you're justified in using power at every at every step Because there's nothing but power so why not use power and so

it's a confession more than an accusation and second when systems deteriorate power emerges as a fundamental motivation and so part of the reason the marxists and the postmodernists can be so attractive in their critique is because power does corrupt and so whenever you look at any Enterprise social Enterprise any family structure even any relationship someone has with Themselves you can say well look to some degree you're corrupted by misuse of power and and sometimes that can go way out of control right and be the dominant uh the dominant phenomenon that happens in totalitarian States and

you say well it's all about power well it is when things get entirely corrupted but that's a whole different proposition than everything's based on power it's more like hold it everything corrupt is based on power but but not everything is Corrupt at some point we weren't linguistic creatures at all right we separated from the common ancestors between us and chimpanzees about six million years ago sometime during that six million year process we started to be able to imitate ourselves first and then represent ourselves in image and action and then only after that to start to

articulate ourselves and so a lot of the knowledge that we have is grounded in our embodiment but also in the Shaping of that embodiment across extraordinar long periods of time so like there's an implicit way of being in your form in your EMB form but more importantly there's an implicit way of being that's a consequence of the fact that we've existed within hierarchical social structures for far longer than we were even sharing a common ancestors say with great apes so that's for maybe hundreds of millions of years with regards to Being embedded in a hierarchy

so then the question is something like if we're embedded in a hierarchy and we have been forever that's about 350 Mill years by the way is there a set of attributes that tends reliably to move you up the hierarchy because if there is you see being going up the hierarchy increases the probability of reproductive success so there's actually nothing more important to determine over The course of 350 million years inside a hierarchy than how it is that you ratchet yourself up the hierarchy reliably and you could think about that in some sense as the source

of ideals Well here here's a kind of a a concrete way of thinking about that you know if you get 100 men together they're going to they're going to organize themselves into a hierarchical structure they have to or they're going to stay chaotic and fight that that's the other alternative And so but the the way that the that the people who are going to rise to the top they might rise to the top because of their sheer physical prowess and power but they also might rise to the top because they're very competent at certain things

and it's as if all the men are going to get together and vote and maybe that would actually happen to determine who best embodies the spirit of the group and who should be granted leadership and in an evolutionary Context by the way that would also help ensure that that person would propagate their genes into the Next Generation and it's not a trivial effect especially among men it's a big effect because roughly speaking half half of all men are are not reproductively successful so there's a wicked there's a wicked uh culling let's say among and well

you can see this among chimpanzees as well they have dominance hierarchies some sort of chimps rise to the top and you might Think well that's the like caveman chimp who's best at pounding out all the all the rivals but it turns out that that's not exactly the case and fr to allall has done a very good job of detailing this with his work on chimpanzees in particular and he's found that the power hungry Tyrant sort of chimp can rule for a while but he tends to have a very unstable Kingdom and the reason for that

is is is he's not very good at mutually grooming he's not good at socially Connecting with other males and he isn't popular among the females and doesn't attend to the to the young essentially and so what happens is even if he's like the meanest toughest guy on the Block two subordinate chimps team up they make friends they groom each other and they have each other's backs and you know one day he's having an off day cuz he ate too many fermented bananas the night before and like they just tear them into pieces Anyways what dewal

found was that it's actually chimps that are more um you might say Humane although chimpan I don't know what the equivalent is let's say Humane that managed to produce hierarchies that are more stable and actually manage to stay alive on top of them for much longer periods of time and he thinks about that as the emergence of an implicit morality right it's a morality that's acted out so then you think well there there are different Ways of climbing up a hierarchy there are worse and better ways the better ways allow you to live longer in

a more stable hierarchy and The evolutionary payoff for that is that you leave more more descendants and so the hierarchy itself becomes a very powerful shaping mechanism that determines how it is that people are going to adapt because it's the primary method of selection so there's an ethic in there there's an ethic that emerges from the social Interactions but that's rapidly transformed into a biological selection device and so were're selected and that's especially true among human beings because with chimps the females are indiscriminate maters which is to say that a female Chimp in heat will

mate with any male chimp now the the dominant males chase the subordinate males away so they're still more likely to leave Offspring than the subordinates but it's not Because of the females but human females are different human females exert choice and quite brutal choice you might put it that way they're very choosy and it's one of the things that seems to have distinguished us from chimpanzees and what roughly seems to happen is that the male dominance hierarchy elects men to the higher say rungs of the hierarchy and then the females peel from the top and

so that means that what you can say is that human beings are the consequence Of intense male dominance competition it's not necessarily dominance but it's competition for the upper rungs of the hierarchy mediated by female selection we should make a very clear uh distinction here that often when people are embittered and resentful and feel like they're victims it's because really awful things have happened to them now not always but often and so then the question is well if you're in a situation and something really awful is Happened to you or has happened to you then

well why shouldn't you feel like a victim and is there a better alternative and part of what you were trying to lay out in this part of the book is what those better alternatives are so part of looking for that hero is to find out from someone else's example in your case it was your mother but these other sources that you described of people who were in a sort of Hell in an undeniable sense but who chose in a very real way To make it as good as it could possibly be given the circumstances and

so they had to turn to sources of power let's say and strength and fortitude and resilience that weren't in some sense obviously associated with the catastrophe I mean in your mother's case it's pretty tragic situation she's young mother she has young kids now she has breast cancer and she fights a losing battle over a period of 5 years that's pretty bad And then you have to ask yourself given that that's obviously pretty bad how is it even possible that someone could handle that with not only Grace and courage but the kind of Grace and courage

that leaves their children with an un what would you call an an immovable sense of the ability to Prevail in the face of the deepest adversity I mean that's really something you said here thousands have come before you and They did just fine so quit your complaining and it's not because you have nothing to complain about that's not the case it's that that's not the right approach the fact is and this is such an optimistic fact as well as a judgment in some sense the fact is that if someone else can do it so can

you and that's something right if you're reading about the great heroes in history people who are in these terrible situations and you see someone Rise to the occasion and then you can say well that was a person who did that and I'm a person and so maybe I have that capacity too even though I don't know how to approach it and then some of the rest of your book much of the rest of your book I would say in some sense is a guide to help people figure out how they could approach that one of

the things you you point out first is well pick notice who you admire and then maybe try consciously Practicing becoming like that it's known from multiple Dimensions simultaneously that the system that produces happiness let's say in the founder sense produces that emotion in relationship to the observation of movement towards a valued goal and so so you can derive some conclusions from that the first is that without a goal there's no Happiness by definition because happiness marks Movement towards a value goal the next is well the higher the goal the more value there is in the

observation of movement towards it and so out of that you might ask well then what's the highest goal because why don't we go for that well then you could say well you should do your best for the best you might say well that's just to make me hedonically happy it's like well wait a second you know cocaine will work For that cidia actually even activates this system but what about tomorrow and next week and next month and so the problem with Hedonism as a goal is first of all it vanishes when you're suffering but even

failing that if you're serving yourself hedonically in the narrow sense it's just about me and my pleasure it's like okay which you today's you tomorrow's you next week's you next month's you What about next year 5 years from now 10 years from now you're going to lead a honic and dissolute life and what are you going to be a burnt out shell and a wreck a dismal wreck in 10 years cuz that's what'll happen and so if you don't construe yourself as a community stretched out across time then you're not even serving yourself and if

you do construe yourself as a community stretched across time then serving other people and serving yourself turn out to Be exactly the same thing I just did a course on The Sermon on the Mount and Christ in one of the uh one of the sections of that sermon he says to people that you shouldn't lose your saltiness you shouldn't lose your Savor and and you're the salt of the earth and without that salt everything loses its flavor and salt is a preservative and it's a spice and that's often uh conceptualize that phrase as referring to

the salt of the earth you Know the solid reliable types who Bear all burdens but that is not what it means I looked at a lot of different translations I talked to a lot of people about that verse and really what it means is well there should be some spiciness and unpredictability and humor about you and there should be some play in the system right because that's what stops you from just being the narrow dead past letter of the law with no Spirit there should be some snake inside The tree right there should be some

fire inside the bush those are all ways of of construing that that are symbolically equivalent there should be some dynamism in you and a fair bit of that's associated with well enthusiasm that's fun but enthusiasm means to be imbued with the spirit of God that's why people like comedian so much too because that's what they do and so you have to leave the duty with humor and you your book does a lovely job of that too because Your book which is very conservative book in in the best possible way and is a call to duty

and responsibility but you constantly return to themes of both stoicism and humor which are tied together in some sense you know I I was just in New Finland for the last week doing a documentary there and new finland's a rough Rock and it's beautiful and harsh and the people there are tough and resilient man cuz they had to be and nuffies have a great sense of Humor and they're always making fun and that that's a necessary Lev right that that that that ability to deal with serious matters in a light T in a light with

a light touch and it's something I'm trying to learn to do more and more even in the most serious of conversations you know to CU if you're a master you've got both you you've got that light touch and that sense of humor you really see that in military people who've been through rough Situations when you see some in the depths of genuine suffering hopefully what you're trying to do is to throw a lifeline and one possible Lifeline is compassion and that's probably the right right Lifeline to throw an infant you know who's suffering that sort

of overwhelming compassion but for someone who is an adult or or making progress towards being an adult the lifeline that might be thrown is there's something within you that would let you be more Than you are and much more and maybe enough more so that you could actually deal with this suffering so it didn't turn into hell and take everything along with it and that's there isn't anything more optimistic than that you say something here which I think is extremely I'm going to read something from your book here it is true that character is to

some extent innate I would say what that does is That it provides each of us with a range of talents and a range range of Temptations and it's something like that so it's the hand we're dealt and there's certainly genetic element to that our genetic makeup imbus in US certain proclivities but it is as true that character is mostly a consequence of choices strangely enough we all make them and we should make them deliberately with the knowledge that these choices are part of our Responsibility toward a purpose other than our own selfish aims that responsibility

is to your family friends community and country that's something that conserv put forward as uh a pathway to Virtue you know and what's so interesting about that as far as I'm concerned as an antidote to atomistic liberalism let's say that hyper privileges the individual is that it's definitely been my observation as a clinical psychologist That in the depths of Misery the capability that you have to be of service to other people your family your friends your community your country that's actually a Saving Grace under such circumstances you know and that people really find a deep

and abiding meaning in that service so it's not just finger wagging and the pointing towards Duty it's like no no you don't understand that if you're in Desperate Straits if your life is falling apart if You're nihilistic and miserable and maybe you have your bloody reasons because maybe you do that's still the case that if you step outside yourself and you try to make the lives of other people better that's the best possible thing that you can do for yourself so imagine that there's an emergency Dragon there's a dragon someone comes and says there's a

dragon I'm the guy to deal with it that's what the environmentalists say the radical types Who push limits to growth then I look at them and I think okay is that dragon real or not that's one question well I asked that question on myself every time when I spend time alone is the apocalypse looming on the environmental front yes or no I'll just leave that aside for the time being I think you can make a case both ways for a bunch of different reasons and it's not a trivial concern and we've overfished the oceans terribly

and there Are environmental issues that are looming large whether climate change is the Cardinal one or not is a whole different question but we won't get into that that's not the issue you're clamoring about a dragon okay why should I listen to you well let's see how you're reacting to the dragon first of all you're scared stiff and in a state of panic that might indicate you're not the man for the job Second you're willing to use compulsion to harness other people to fight the dragon for you so now not only are you terrified you're

a terrified Tyrant so then I would say well then you're not the Moses that we need to lead us out of this particular Exodus and maybe that's a neurological explanation it's like if you're so afraid of what you're facing that you're terrified into paralysis and nihilism and that you're willing to use Tyrannical compulsion to get your way you are not the right leader for the time so then I like someone like Bjorn lomberg or Matt Ridley or Maran tupy and they say well look we've got our environmental problems and uh maybe there's a there you

could make a case that there's a malus an element in some situations but fundamentally the track record of the human race is that we learn very fast and faster all the time to do more with less and we've got this And I think yes to that idea and I think about it in a in a fundamental way it's like I trust lomberg trust tupy trust Matt Ridley they' thought about these things deeply they're not just saying oh the environment doesn't matter whatever the environment is you know the environment I don't even know what that is

that's everything the environment I'm concerned about the Environment it's like which is how is that different than saying I'm worried about everything H how are those statements different semantically how do women select their mates now unlike female chimps female humans are choosy maters female chimps will mate with any chimp they go into heat they'll mate with any chimp the dominant males are more likely to mate with them but that's cuz they chase away the subordinates it's not because the Females exercise Choice human females exercise choice and that's one of the things that differentiated us from

chimpanzees but how do they do it well they look at the male dominance hierarchy and that's where the men are competing now you could say they're competing for power but that's pretty corrupt way of looking at it like they're competing for let's say influence they're competing for leadership and so in some sense the People at the top of the hierarchy if their men are elected by the other men now I know there's brutes and there's predators and all of that but I'm talking on average across time it's like the men organize themselves and there are

influential men that rise to the top and the women take them now you think about that what that means is that over the millions of years that a dominance hierarchy with those properties existed so let's say since we split from chimps Let's say that's 6 million years that means that the male dominance hierarchy is the environment that pushes The Mating male to the top so that means the male that's most likely to take precedence in the do in the male dominance hierarchy is the one most likely to leave a genetic contribution so that means that

the male dominance hierarchy is a selection mechanism mediated by the female so what that means is that as we've moved forward Through 6 million years of time men have become more and more well adapted not only to the presence of the male dominance hary but to the ability to move up it and that's the central Spirit you could say in some sense that's the central Spirit of the individual the individual is the thing that can move up dominance hierarchies it's the thing that's at the top it's the ey at the top of the pyramid and

it's been selected for and then what's happened is that We've watched so we get better and better and better for biological reasons culturally mediated at figuring out how to climb across a set of dominance hierarchies so we can leave a genetic contribution that's what's happened to human beings now imagine that that's happened for 6 million years so now imagine that we started to watch that because we're curious creatures we're always trying to figure out who we are and then as we watched that we started To tell stories about what the people who could climb the

hierarchies were like those were Heroes that's where hero mythology came from and the biggest hero is the person who go out and kill the snake well unsurprisingly because that was a big hero man and maybe when we were living in trees that was a hero so the the big hero is the person who goes out slays the Dragon Gets the gold brings it back to the community and distributes it he's Also the person most likely to go up the dominance hierarchy he's the person most likely to find the Virgin right cuz it's a virgin that

you free from the dragon and you get to claim her right and so the dominance hierarchy is a mechanism that selects Heroes and then breeds them and so then we watch that for 6 million years we start to understand what it means to be the hero we start to tell stories about that and so then not only are we genetically aiming at that with The dominance Hier is a selection mechanism mediated by female choice but our stories are trying to push us in that direction and so then we say well look that person's admirable tell

a story about him and we say this person is admirable tell story about him and this person is admirable and at the same time we talk about the people who aren't admirable and then we start having admirable and non admirable as categories and out of that you get Something like good and evil and then you can start to imagine the perfect person that would be not only so it would be you take 10 admirable people and you pull out someone who's meta admirable and that's a hero that becomes a religious figure across time that becomes

a savior or Messiah across time as we conceptualize what the ideal person is and we in the west here's how we figured it out we said the ideal person The ideal man is the person who tells the truth and what that means is that's the best way of climbing up any possible dominance hierarchy in in the way that's most stable and most lasting that's that's the conclusion of Western [Music] culture as far as I can tell if you want to maximize your chances for both success and and let's say well-being is you want to find

find a strata of occupation in which you would have an Intelligence that would put you in the upper cortile that's perfect then you're a big fish in a small pond and you don't want to be this you don't want to be the stupidest guy in the room it's a bloody rough place to be so and you probably don't want to be the smartest guy in the room either because what that probably means is you should be in a different room right you should look at a place where if you're right at the top it's you've

mastered it it's time to go Somewhere where you're a little lower so that you've got something to climb up for so and I and if you're not hyper conscientious for example you're probably not going to want a job that you have to work 70 hours a week at because you're just not wired up that way you'd rather have some Leisure and like more power to you if that's how you're wired up there's nothing wrong with having some Leisure but if you're someone who can't stand sitting around Doing nothing ever then maybe you can go into

a job that's going to require you to work 75 hours a week and almost all jobs that are at the top of complex dominance hierarchies require very high intelligence and insane levels of conscientiousness as well generally speaking as pretty damn high levels of stress tolerance you know cuz that can knock you out too because there's going to be sharp fluctuations in your career generally speaking at the higher levels Of a of a of a of a structure and you have to make very complicated decisions often with very short time Horizons so you have to decide

if that's what you want if you want to be the best at what you're doing Bar None than having an IQ of above 145 is a necessity and maybe you're pushing 160 in some situations and maybe that's make making you one person in 10,000 or even one person in 100,000 and then also to really be good at it you probably have to be reasonably Stress tolerant and also somewhat conscientious so you know people and you think well why is it that smart people are at the top of dominance hierarchies and the answer to that in

part is because they get there first right I mean everything's a race roughly speaking and the faster you are the more likely you are to be at the Forefront of the pth and intelligence in large part is speed that's not all of it is so if you're moving towards something Difficult rapidly the faster people are going to get there [Music] first first of all I think it's really worth thinking about what success means and I try to do that a lot in in both the books um it's really fun to make other people successful like

that's this is one of the the reasons capitalism I would say gets a really bad rap and an unfair WAP like the people I've known who have been successful in the capitalist Enterprise and a lot of them are entrepreneurs um rather than managers let's say just it's just that's the population I've been exposed to and this was the same among the professorate for that matter one of the great Pleasures the people that I've seen who I respect took was in mentoring and so don't underestimate the radical satisfaction that's associated With helping other people develop one

of the reasons that good professors well and good businessmen love to be in the position they're in is because they can identify young people who are promising and open up doors of opportunity to them it's really intrinsically motivating and so you know when you think of capitalism for example or success as only a competitive Enterprise that's a real mistake because there's that aspect of it that's there Everywhere in every Enterprise I've ever seen so success real success means you're successful in a way that makes other people around you successful you need both of those and

that's also really good for your conscience because then you're not working at the expense of anyone else quite the contrary right you're you're lifting the tide that lifts all boats maybe you're simultaneously elevating your own relative status but it's really it's not Um unreasonable to put that in as a constraining requirement it has to help other people while it helps you and I would say the way we're wired now some people are more selfish than others but I would still say human beings are unbelievably social and reciprocal that's built into us at an a incredibly

deep level and it can go wrong and we can get cynical and malevolent and bitter and and work at counter purposes to it But to be of service to your fellow man your family members your broader Community there are there are virtually no Pleasures that that compete with that so and and so that's partly why it is useful to do a critique of mere materialism and materialistic satisfactions are pretty fleeting they're not non-existent um but they're they don't have the deep and Lasting satisfaction of well of successful mentoring for example the Relationships that build out

of that so I think I don't think there is any success at all without moral success in fact I think that success without moral success is actually a form of torture you know if you don't let's say you don't feel you deserve anything um because you're you know that you're being you're not being a good person and that's your own judgment and let's assume that you're accurate you're not cuz some people will judge Themselves far too harshly but let's just say you know you have reasons to have your conscience bothering you and you're not successful

well at least you don't feel the continual Injustice of that you think well I'm a son of a but I don't have anything but then let's say you're successful well you know that's all ill gotten how can that do any and then maybe you have to rationalize constantly to live with it everything you collect Around you is nothing but a source of torment and a constant reminder that you're criminal in your fundamental orientation that you've ruined people on your mad scramble to the top Jesus you don't want that like you seriously don't want that and

no amount of relative material status is going to even come close to rectifying that you want your conscience to be clean clear you want your interpersonal relationships to be honest you want to Be reliable and dependable and if you can add exciting and adventurous to that so much the better but success means to be successful means to be good you really are your only comparison group especially as you get older because your life is so idiosyncratic and peculiar that any compare I mean look you have to care what other people think it's stupid to think

otherwise be be because you have to be social and you have to be aware of what other people Are doing and all of that so it's this isn't Psychopathic individual individuality but it is genuinely true that no one has your set of opportunities and limitations and so the the comparison just isn't real it can't be sufficiently multi-dimensional you know cuz maybe see someone who's I've dealt with I've I've met many people who are very very rich and you can look at their lives and they have these huge houses and material Plenty but and they're shielded

from many catastrophes that would hit someone without those resources harder but their lives are still full of exactly the same troubles that characterize human life in general and so you you compare yourself on one dimension you don't see while the person's worked 80 hours a week for 40 years and it's blowing all his relationships out of the water it's like yes he's rich but he's also old now you Know he's 60 and one of the best predictors of wealth is age you know really do you want to be young and poor or old and Rich

it's like I'd pick young and poor cuz you can't buy Youth and so and and that's something that's worth considering but you don't know what burdens the people you're jealous of are carrying so leave it be it's not it's not helpful to you to to to be Envious who knows what price you pay for hypers specialization you know and I learned that looking at you know power mad cite types first of all they're generally not power mad because power is actually an unbelievably unstable way of establishing Authority you you get you get slaughtered if you're

not re reciprocal in most reasonably functioning organizations and if you're in an Organization that only rewards the um exercise of power the probability that that organization is going to fail in totality is extraordinarily High because it's a tyrannical organization it'll lose touch with its customers so the SE Suite types um they're they're working non-stop corporate lawyers in New York you know they make $700 an hour but they work all the time all the time and there are people who are suited for that but it Isn't obvious that that's for everyone or that it should be

or that it's even desirable now it's a temperamental issue to a large degree you know many of those people are hyper conscientious and so if they they'll work whatever wherever you put them what they would do is work that's who they are and it's biological as well it's no it's not all biological because traits are affected by learning and by environment in complex ways but a Huge chunk of it is that you're born like that and that has advantages and disadvantages so conscientiousness is a good example um it's a good predictor of long-term life success

but people who are conscientious tend to tear tear themselves apart if they become unemployed for example you know sometimes you get laid off you worked hard but you get laid off well people who are conscientious will tear themselves into pieces with guilt In that situation because they tend to attribute so much responsibility to themselves and so there's a price to be paid for conscientiousness it it it opens you up to a certain set of vulnerabilities so you know and you might be somewhat unbearable to your family too because all you ever do is work you

know you think well you you you want to be a good you want your father maybe your husband perhaps your wife to be a good provider but you want them to Do that at the expense of everything else there's that imbalance where someone can be morally good and a fantastic person but in a materialistic Society seem to be a failure because they haven't acquired a great deal well that that definitely is a problem when you have productive people that that's a problem in how the mon it's a measurement problem in some sense you know economic

success is generally associated with intelligence and Conscientiousness so there is a rough correlation between ability let's say even moral ability and success now I'm not making too much of that but I do know look if you're going to be a successful businessman especially across business person across multiple Dimensions multiple Enterprises you bloody well better be honest cuz it's going to catch up with you man and the probability that you're going to be a suc uccessful crook Multiple times is very very low you can do that but you have to move constantly right so your reputation

doesn't keep up with you so there is some association between success and moral virtue thank God but it's it's it's a rough approximation and there's plenty of exceptions it's very hard for Creative people to monetize their productivity for example so you have unrewarded virtue and that's a flaw of the monetary system means we haven't Been able to and you might say the same thing applies to such things as um our inability to pay Homemakers now why don't we pay Homemakers well it's because what they produce isn't monetizable for 20 years and our economic system isn't

sophisticated enough to figure out how to pay people for returns that are that you know pushed off into the future that doesn't make it right but we don't know how to fix it technically right I Mean if you're a venture capitalist and you want to invest in something you want a tenfold return on your investment within a handful of years you can't afford to invest over a 20-year period And so that makes it really rough on Homemakers because we're not sophisticated enough to monetize it so it's a measurement problem but unless you can figure out

a better way of doing it you're stuck with what we've got imagine you ask something like what's The meaning of life I would say well you should reform at that question because it's not a good question because it implies that there's a meaning to life a meaning and perhaps there isn't a meaning you could ask well where do people derive the meanings in their life well you tell me but I'll make a little list and see if you can add to it or object to it you probably need a career or a job Well why

well because otherwise you'll starve and and freeze like it's a necessity you have to generate [Music] enough to protect you from the elements let's say to protect you from privation that's not a consequence of capitalism or anything foolish like that it's it's a consequence of hunger and and the need for shelter cap capitalism is an attempt to address that not to cause it and you could argue that another system might do It better but even if you did argue that you can't lay the necessity at the feet of capitalism you need a career and a

job partly out of necessity partly because we need to be of service to other people we we need to be of service to the community it's a deep need for people especially if they're conscientious and agreeable um you you need to be educated to to the limits of your intelligence you need an intimate relationship ship You need a family you need friends you need to take care of your mental and physical health you need to regulate your the effects that Temptations have on you and you need some sort of higher order spiritual or philosophical Pursuit

well those are all socially mandated roles to some degree and you don't want to demolish them because you're left with nothing having nothing is not a good place it's not Freedom that's Foolish to think that freedom is the ability to choose between jobs let's say not to choose whether not you have a job when I was younger when I was 10 or 12 I used to think that being an adult meant doing whatever you want it's only one I got when I got older that I realized being an adult actually means having responsibility uh you

know a sign of maturity isn't doing whatever you want whatever you feel like it it's having obligations and responsibilities toward Other people you just made a case for identity as as social responsibility and Duty that's a lot different than identity as felt sense I mean it's just not helpful to have your identity be your felt sense because it doesn't buy you anything and and you you pointed out that for you there's some piece in fulfilling your roles properly so you have a number of games which you chose to some degree voluntarily but which are Also

socially structured you find satisfaction and freedom from anxiety in playing out those roles properly and that that is what people are like and demolishing those roles criticizing them criticizing them as purely oppressive let's say is not helpful because it leaves nothing and that's a terrible that's a terrible state for people to find themselves in to have nothing you're you're you're you're you Have you're very fortunate if you're constrained by a number of functional roles it's what everybody needs I mean some people need less of that than others if you're highly open in your personality so

fundamentally creative and you're low in conscientiousness so you don't like order you don't need order well you know a little bit of structure goes a long way but there's many people who there aren't many people like that who are highly functional it's Also extraordinarily difficult to make your way in the world as a spontaneously creative person it's very difficult to monetize that it's I some people do it extraordinarily well they're Geniuses even they're they're very rarely economically successful though belief is what you stake your actions on well and there's choice in it too and that's

faith I suppose so for Example so Faith isn't the decision to believe things that are preposterous [Music] and there's a substantial amount of confusion about that I would say in the religious community and in the non-religious community so for example you can decide that it's better to tell the truth than not to and it's a decision because you're not Basing your action on your observations of the outcome of the action that stem from that decision you've decided to look at things in a certain way so I could say I've decided to do what I can

to say what I believe to be true because I have decided that to believe that to assume that to have faith in the proposition that there's no Better Way Forward than the truth no matter what it looks like and that's the thing that that's Why the that's why the the decision of faith is necessary because it gives you a particular angle on the evidence you know maybe I get say I say something I believe to be true and I get in trouble and then I might say well the fact that I got in trouble indicates

that saying what's true isn't it wasn't the right thing to do it's like No not necessarily it might be that saying what I believe to be true was the right thing to do despite the proximal outcome you have to make decisions about how you're going to interpret the facts you have to make decisions about that those are decisions of faith and so then you decide what you have faith in well here's some things that I would like to have faith in if I could manage it if I could be strong enough to manage it Let's

say I'd like to assume that existence is worthwhile and that we should all work for its furtherance and and its benefit and you say well is that true well there's a lot of suffering in life there's a lot of suffering associated with Consciousness you could make the case that there's so much suffering that the whole game is suspect and that's a valid claim but it's not a claim I want to Make so I'm not going to live out that claim I'm going to try to live out the alternate claim All Things Considered I think that

would be better you could say well you're justified in altering falsehoods if it's expedient that's why people lie and people do lie and so obviously they believe that to some degree because otherwise they wouldn't lie but you could decide that you're not going to do that because that's wrong well that's a that's that's Not so much an observation as a proposition I'm going to live my life as if that's wrong and I think I mean I've derived both of those principles let's say the wish for the furtherance of being and the idea that truth is

Redemptive those are fundamental judeo-christian propositions maybe the most fundamental judeo-christians Pro propositions they seem to me to be valid or valid enough to stake my life on and That's the decision of Faith what are you going to stake your life on that's manifested in action it's not manifested in your claims about the explicit contents of your descriptions of the world this ideal does lurk in our structure and you know you can say well it's the it's the it's the it's the internalization of a social ideal it is that it's more than that though it's Probably

the internalization of a biological ideal but it's more than that because the biologic why that biological ideal why did that manifest itself rather than some other ideal these are all ideas I'm trying to work out while I'm writing this next book you see well I can give you a bit of a PR droma of that men roughly speaking gathered together in groups to accomplish tasks they Regard as significant important and they vote among themselves so to speak as to who they'll Elevate to a position of status and Authority the men are constantly getting together deciding

amongst themselves who they're going to hoist up on their shoulders and carry cheering out of the stadium and women peel from the top of that and so the men may the men vote on the best men and the women select them and that's our evolutionary history that's sexual Selection we're participating in the joint creation of an ideal that's negotiated between the Sexes and I I think that's undeniable biologically one of the things that's very interesting about Exodus is that when God tells the fonic Tyrant to free the Israelites he always uses the same phrase and

you only ever hear half the phrase uh he has Moses say let my people go now you hear that phrase all the time but you don't hear the second half of The phrase which is repeated I think nine times one for each plague perhaps 10 times because there's actually 10 plagues if you count the devastation of the first borns that's the 10th plague God has Moses say Let My People Go that they may serve me in the wilderness and that's really interesting he because it's not and Miss Prager pointed out that the word Freedom isn't

used Once In The Exodus narrative and it's Because the free freedom from tyranny isn't Hedonism it's not the blind pursuit of passions it's the it's the servitude to a higher purpose proper freedom is servitude to a higher purpose voluntarily accepted servitude to a higher purpose perhaps the highest purpose which is what God calls the Israelites to and you say in your book here purpose is Meaning that's a hell of a thing if it's true purpose is meaning especially if you find purpose in Duty and responsibility and I think you genuinely do in sacrifice I think

that's true deeply true purpose is meaning and meaning is happiness we don't think about happiness enough and when we do we do not necessarily think about it properly happiness is neither Joy nor for entertainment it is an ontological Condition fundamental to our existence as humans it's notable that when the founders drafted the Declaration of Independence they listed upfront three things to which we are all entitled life liberty and the pursuit of happiness a little later you say you need to understand that your purpose may be great in the eyes of the world or it may

be commonplace and seemingly seemingly small your purpose might be Your family your children it might be tutoring a child and changing their life it might be the business you started it might be cleaning up your block it might be in the help you give others it might be in the example you set and then you say as John Adams said our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other and so I love the way that was that's all tied together you know [Music] that

happiness is to be found in the pursuit of meaning and purpose and that's tied up with Duty and responsibility responsibility to others I think that's fundamentally true and I do think that's the way out of the deepest suffering you want to be someone who can take a joke you want to be productive yeah the best definition I ever read of Christian charity maybe just of Charity In general generosity plus productivity and people like to stress the first especially when they aren't the second it's like I'm generous it's like yeah but you don't have anything so

that's uh you know now I'm not talking about the people who truly have nothing and are still willing to share I'm talking about the people who pull down the productive while hyping Their own generosity and forgetting that you'd be even better at being generous if you were also productive so I hear from socialists a lot that that that Jesus was a socialist this is a common refrain from from the progressive left and you know the idea being true that you should want to give charity and I said I jesus wasn't saying that you should take

from others and make them give charity that wasn't what is he said you need to be generous with your with Your belongings with your time with your labor that's what he was saying it was a was a generosity of the heart not a not a demand on others that's right well it was that's AB that's absolutely 100% correct it's an injunction towards the highest form of self-sacrifice period the end obviously that's what the crucifixion means the acceptance of that catastrophic death all of the what would you say the tragedy of life and then even a

further Radical acceptance of the of the necessity to confront hell that self-sacrifice that is not not calling for moral actions on the part of others on your behalf definitely 100% not and that self-sacrifice is called upon even if you're innocent right so it's even more than that you want to have the ability to delay gratification you know that that ties in with what we talked about earlier about being able to treat yourself as if you're a community across Time because to delay gratification means to sacrifice the Hedonism of the present to the security and iterability

of the future and so that is a Hallmark of maturity that's also the ability to make sacrifices that's why the sacrificial Motif is stressed so hard in the Old Testament you have to make sacrifices to what well to whatever you value well what's the highest value well by definition that's God so do you Sacrifice to God well if you sacrifice at all you sacrifice to a God maybe you don't sacrifice well then you're immature maybe you sacrifice to a lesser God then maybe you should get your act together that's all tied together integrally with the

notion of the ability to delay gratification that's why God tells Adam and Eve that they're condemned to work when they get thrown out of the Garden of Eden it's like well now you have to work cuz you're aware of The future well that's a call to sacrifice cuz work is a sacrificial act then the question is in service of what and there's another chapter in the book called do something hard it's very pretty direct and straightforward there but where we're getting that is that is that there there's there's a problem in our society where we

we do our best to alleviate any kind of suffering as if we as if we feel that there's this you that there's this Utopia available to us Where suffering can be completely removed from our lives but that's a false promise that's that's a false god it's it's impossible and and worse than that it prevents that sacrifice that you're talking about it prevents that uphill climb because people feel are told to feel that there's some sense of Injustice if you have to work harder than anyone else for something else for something and you know and and

and and they they're blinded as to why and look Maybe you do have to work harder than someone else to get to the same point not saying that's impossible but we all do that's that's you know that's true for all of us right because with our genetic inheritance let's say some things come relatively easy to us and some things are virtually impossible and have to be strived for mighty and I'm also not saying that some people aren't what would you say condemned in some fundamental way in multiple Dimensions simultaneously I mean I've had people in

my clinical practice and met people in my private life Who Who Are burdened by so many difficulties simultaneously that it's almost incomprehensible so I'm not saying there's something even-handed about this but all of us have to work very hard on certain fronts to be better and to do better and it's also not obvious to me that that's actually that's an unbearable price in Some sense but it's also the most fundamental disciplining Adventure right and we know I know I don't know what it's like for you I suspect it's the same but when I look back

in my life I think when I'm thinking in a positive way I think well that was really difficult but it was worth it and those two things are integrally associated right cuz you don't say well that was easy but it was worth it you Know and so what that seems to mean is that the difficulty is intrinsically bound up with the reward and then of course we know that right because how happy are you even for someone else when you see them overcome immense odds to attain something of value everyone stands up and cheers when

that happens you know if you're un certain about what you're doing and you don't know if you should change Course set yourself the obligation to choose something more difficult before you change course because there's a moral hazard right it's like well am I am I unhappy or am I just useless it's like well a little a column A and A little a column B well how do I fortify myself against my uselessness I don't allow myself to switch course unless the challenge increases and that works you know it's a it's a check against your own

laziness and inertia and envy and Resentment because you know then too you can say to yourself well I I moved from there I didn't fail I didn't quit I chose something more difficult and so I can have some faith in my choice maybe maybe I can have some faith in my choice cuz you accepted a bigger challenge Alfred North Whitehead said the reason we think is so that we can let our thoughts die instead of us so imagine you have a stupid idea which is highly probable right just imagine you might Have 50 of them

a day so then you think well let's go act out that stupid idea which is what you do if you're an impulsive and so you act out the stupid idea and you get just walloped by the world and maybe you die well so what's an alternative well why don't you throw your stupid idea out on the table to a bunch of other people and say I have this idea and I'm kind of thinking about acting it out is it stupid and you maybe you're prideful about your idea cuz you Know you're attracted by it and

you thought it up whatever that means and so now you're glued to it plus it tiles something for you so you're invested in it and you don't want it to be a stupid idea but then like well fine do you want to die or do you want you let your idea die and so a lot of what we do in dialogue is kill stupid ideas M and we do that so we don't act them out and we don't want to act them out cu then we die and this even works biologically so The part of

your brain that generates thought grew out of the part of your brain that you use to voluntarily control your actions so you could say a thought is a potential action people think a thought is a representation of the world it's like yeah not fundamentally fundamentally a thought is a potential action so then in your imagination you make avatars of yourself so that's you in your imag what if I did this it's a little Avatar of yourself You think what if I did this here's the world I W I act like this these good things happen

that's my vision then you throw your vision on the table and you say I have this vision and you say well that's a stupid Vision because you didn't take this into account and how are you going to do that and you think oh that sucks cuz I had this Vision but well thank you because I didn't see those snakes mhm you know right and then It's tricky because maybe you're mad cuz I had a vision and you don't have one and so you're pissed off about that and so you're just attacking my vision because you

know you don't have anything better to do I've had this conversation with someone before where a kid told me he wanted like a million followers on social media and I was like yeah but that's not going to happen though like not for you MH cuz I knew cuz I had the experience you know and then I had that moment where they basically freaked out Right in yeah well you you shatter a dream absolutely well so a dream is tile of the future mhm so you say what's the future well you don't know well here's a

vision so that's now it's a tile and then it covers the future and it also covers it in a pleasing way then you come along and say you know it's a little low res well you could say to someone who wants that are you sure you want a million followers you know cuz people say I'd be happy if I had $400 Million it's like you think you could handle that responsibility do you like you're so sure of that that all of a sudden you'd have all this money dumped on your you can't even control your

household budget mhm you live from paycheck to paycheck now you somebody's going to dump a treasure on your steps and that's going to fix your life it's like okay how much you going to give to your relatives like none oh that'll work out Real well too much so then you're going to take away their responsibility from them are you and you're going to get that balance exactly right and then what are you going to do with that money cuz as soon as you got the money the parasites are going to come in and take your

money while the average family fortune lasts three generations that's all there's a mythological Trope that's very useful in understanding this presume that most of the people watching And listening have watched The Lion King The Lion King has a very very solid narrative structure it's a very smart movie like many of the Disney movies and people criticize me because I'm so interested in Disney movies but I'm interested in anything that many many many many people watch for a long time because well what's going on there why is that so attractive and often a movie is attractive

because it gets the story right and the character is right Whatever that means well The Lion King was a very very successful animated movie one of the most successful movies of all time can I just for those who can't remember everything the light touches is our kingdom I can tell you exactly what that means that that's a brilliant line and that's also and notice I used the word brilliant brilliant is associated with the idea of the light okay so now the when the light touches something and You see it then you establish a relationship with

the thing that you see because now you start to understand it and the more lit up something is the more you're you can understand it and explore it and so when you shine a light into dark crevices then let's say then you start to see what's in the dark crevices and if you go around your apartment building let's say and you pay attention to every nook and cranny you start to it starts to become yours in a Very fundamental way and so you could say well light is equivalent to Consciousness that's a good way of

thinking about now why well we're very visual creatures human beings our brains are organized on Vision most animals are organized on smell by the way but not us we're organized on Vision a huge part of our cortical activity is devoted to to sight and so we think of sight as Enlightenment light we think of it as illumination right when we bring Something into the light we improve it and so we associate the day with Consciousness and illumination and Enlightenment and so if you attend to something by shining a light on it then it becomes yours

and so your kingdom is actually everything that the light of your Consciousness is sha on and all that's encapsulated in that statement and that's why it's stuck in your imagination yeah remember he's up he's up with his son on a on a mountain right On a cliff and so now think about that that means he can see a long way and then he sees this this circle of the world and the light shining on it and he says everything the light shines on is our kingdom and then that also implies that and he says that

next that outside the light there's another kingdom and that's the kingdom of darkness and that's the place that hasn't been explored and if you remember in the movie that's where that's where the Fascists are and the hyenas and the hyen is are predatory and so when Simba goes out past the domain of the light he enters the unknown and he enters this the Underworld the Demonic underworld and that scar now back to scar okay so so Simba has Mustafa as his father and Mustafa is the positive aspect of the of the patriarchy and he's wise

and he's tough he's got a set face he's no pushover but he has an evil brother and that's scar and Scar has been scarred And that's why he's resentful right he's a victim and and he feel he's a victim because his brother gets all the attention like Cain in Rel relationship to Abel and he's a victim because for some reason we don't quite understand small he's small but he's intellectual too right so he's got the he's got luciferian he's got the luciferian pride in intellect and Jeremy Irons who is that character played that extremely well

with that kind of unctuous voice That was kind of like a snakey s droning yeah well and also uh contemptuous and and presumptuous and narcissistic he did a lovely job of that and so now you might say why does the king have evil uncle or an evil brother well the the answer is this is the mythological answer is that well the king always has an evil brother always and the reason for that is if the king is the emblem of the state which or even of the stable state of being because you can think About

it psychologically or sociologically he always has a counterpart and the counterpart is the proclivity of that state to be overtaken by willful blindness so failure to shine a light on things right to turn your head away when you know you shouldn't and also by this corrupt will to resentful power and that's chronic now the Marxist would say and do in some real sense there's nothing but scar there's nothing but the evil Uncle it's Like that's a hell of a world view I can tell you in some real sense it's Akin on the Christian front to

making the statement that the true ruler of reality is the satanic spirit it's the same idea and that's a hell of a claim man to to to literally speaking and so but but it is the case that almost every institution and almost every person has a touch of the evil Uncle as part of their [Music] Structure pride is the opposite of humility and humility is the precondition for Learning and you know you might say that's partly why humility is something that was practiced Say by genuinely religious people as a virtue because the idea would be

to open yourself up like a child you know how open a child is to learning well the child doesn't assume he or she knows everything already they're just looking around all the time which is one of the Things so remarkable about children they're just looking around all the time at everything they don't know and with it with a like an infant that's just they're just like this all the time wondering what in the world's going on and trying to learn and so Pride stops learning [Music]