Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is dr. Jordan Pederson, he's professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. A clinical psychologist and an author letting go of the good for the great is a terrifying Prospect. And most people fear risking what they have for, what they want. I flirt to Texas to sit down with Jordan and discuss his principles for how to get past the things which keep us stuck in life, expect to learn how to deal with feelings of loneliness, from thinking in a different.
Different way, which skin color Emoji, Jordan uses what he meant by and forced monogamy, how to deal with impostor syndrome, how to become more dangerous in life. Jordan's thoughts. After meeting Elon Musk, whether there's a value in having an enemy and much more. I really enjoyed this episode, flying out to Texas to do this in person with Jordan for two hours. Talking about all of my favorite topics that he discusses, like personal responsibility and sovereignty and taking control of your life.
They seized him at his best, as far as I'm concerned. And I really hope that you find this as enjoyable as I did. Also, the modern wisdom reading list is available right now for free. Head to Chris will x.com / books. It is a list of 100 of the most interesting, and impactful books that you should definitely read before you die. Chris will x.com / books to go and get your copy. In other news. This episode is brought to you by athletic greens. You are not eating
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Dr. Jordan Pederson, welcome to the show. All right,
Chris. Good to see you. How's the tour going?
It's going great. It's the Crowds Are well-dressed extremely positive there for good reasons.
A political in, in the most, in the best sense of the word welcoming. The theaters are packed. The lectures are going well to extremely well, the time I spend afterwards meeting people is like being in a wedding celebration. I would say. That's the closest thing I could. What do you mean?
Well, you know, you go to a wedding and you meet all sorts of people. You don't know, generally and everyone's happy to be there. And they're all looking good because they dressed up for the occasion and it's a positive event. And, and that's the closest analogy that I that that I can think of that would describe what's happening. And so and people that are there are there because they're trying to put their lives together and they are putting them together and it's
King. And so everything about it is, as positive as it can be fundamentally. So you had scone
great. A so you took a trip to the Tesla Factory. What were your thoughts after meeting? Elon Musk. Did you get to speak to him
much? I wouldn't say much. We spoke probably for 20 minutes in total, not purely privately because there's other people around. But you know, I just that just barely gets you to know the surface of someone like mosque, because he's an amazing person and God only knows what's
What's up with him? All things considered. We saw his new truck. He was taking people out for a ride. I didn't I didn't go out for a ride, the trucks, an amazing piece of engineering, the factory is massive. You know, what do you say about someone who built a functional electric car, then shot it into space, on a rocket. He's a singular person, but I thought it went very well. It was a very interesting evening. So I was pleased to be there and
You know, we sort of walked around each other bitten.
It was just fine
you guys interactive habit on Twitter?
We seem to. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think? That is? Why you
converging?
I don't know. I don't know, exactly. We're both well-known. And I supposed to some degree that, that increases the probability of that kind of convergence, but maybe he's aiming up me too.
Seems to be he's heading up. Literally, he's having a very literally. Yeah, at least let me put a wasn't there, a Spaceman and model of a Spaceman in the driver's seat of the car that he put
out in the schools? That that's certainly possible. He's got a theatrical.
Twist, there's no doubt about that and a great sense of humor, because that's really funny to shoot your own car into space on a rocket. That's needlessly, some pretty, damn good joke. What is it?
What is it? That's a why is it that someone like Elon
has got himself to the stage where he can say things that almost every other seeing. He's the richest man. I don't think he's got himself
to that stage. I think he's always done that. And so now he still knows how to do it. I mean, you know, people think all say what I have to say when I get to the point where I'm protected and secure, it's like first of all being protected and secure does not give you the courage to say what you have to say. That's that's a completely that theory, couldn't be more.
Backwards. You think you're going to get braver and braver as you get more and more protected. You think that's how the world works. I mean, I've watched University, professors think that at some point, they're going to say what they think, as they develop their career. But by the time they're protected and secure, they spent so much time. Not saying what they think that they aren't even who they were and they don't know what they think. So no, he says what he says, because he's always done that and people who are like him are like that.
And so Steve Jobs, I presume was exactly the same way. I mean, I know people who knew him. He always said what he thought and and he was pretty damn cut-and-dried about it, which is why the Apple products are such miracles of technological Mastery. He had a unbelievably canny design I and was very
Be careful projects without a second thought, in some sense when they were working.
He did that when he came back to Apple. The second time, refined the entire product line, got rid of a ton of different things instead of working on this. Yeah,
right, right. So that was proof. I mean, maybe it was fluke the first time which it wasn't, but, coming back and doing it again. The second time showed pretty clearly. It wasn't say me. Say me they'll on right. He's
refined down what he does to a couple of very, very tight parameters.
He seems to have all do.
Hit the Enterprise. He's put together as unbelievably.
High functioning mean to produce a an automobile. Sub-industry that's actually competitive and to bring down the cost of space exploration by a factor of 10 and to invent reusable rockets and to have developed this boring technology. It's it's a miraculous. He's probably an alien. Yeah, probably probably. There's only two. Probably a reptilian isn't
American car companies. I think that haven't gone. Bust Ford and Tesla.
And Tesla came very close a number of times.
Yeah, it's an amazing accomplishment. So, go Elon as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, he's remarkable person. What color
skin Emoji? Do you use?
If I used one? It would be black. Why? Why not?
It's so Preposterous all of that.
You know, everything that's happened to Rogan all this idiocy around race, this insistence that we can be reduced to our race, our ethnicity, our sexual identity.
It's so appalling and it's so destructive in one of the reasons that I had. A lot of reasons for making my political stance in relationship to Canada's compelled, speech laws had a lot of reasons for making My Views about that known. One of them was.
the fact that my government had introduced,
A bill that required me to say things a certain way, which was an unparalleled move in the history of Western democracies and something. The Americans had made strictly unconstitutional believe in 1942. So that was part of it. Part of it was I knew that this
Top-down mandated.
Belief that.
Confusion around. Gender identity was a positive occurrence to provide that freedom. Let's say, I knew that for every person that saved that would Doom, 1,000 people, primarily girls to a kind of psychological contagion as confusion about sex and gender identity ramped up.
I knew the literature on psychological contagion. It was, it's quite as that but psychological Contagion.
You can think about them as psychological epidemics. So the last one, the last one of any real size, was the satanic daycare scares in the 1980s, but you're probably not old enough to remember that, but the largest longest sense is in u.s.
Criminal justice history were handed out often to women who were accused of late onset, female sexual, predation of children, in daycare centers, the the I invented, the whole new category of perpetrator category that didn't exist because there are no late onset, female sexual child sexual predators, they don't exist, but there were women who obtained prison sentences of several hundred years for hypothetically.
Being involved in these satanic daycare abuse. Rituals. And there was a just swept across the whole country like the Salem Witch Trials, except at a much larger scale. There's a book called Satan silence that was written by a lawyer and social worker that documents. It is just unbelievable. There were stories about underground. Tunnels were children, were being taken down and being well, every possible thing. You could think of was happening to them all in the name of satanic.
Ritual.
It was a contagion and those things happen. It happened with cutting behaviors happened with eating disorders. This is almost all among girls because they're teenage girls are most prone to this. They called it hysteria back in Freud's time, but there's a book by a man named Henry Ellenberger called discovery of the unconscious that traces back psychogenic, epidemics to about 300 years, and I knew that you know, people
In adolescence is especially people of a certain personality, configuration have some trouble settling into a stable identity and for a variety of reasons, it can be high negative emotion, which is associated with low self-esteem. Those are more or less the same thing. And then in all likelihood High trait openness, which is the creativity Dimension and the high trade openness people. They're the ones that are more likely to have green hair and red hair and lots of piercings and lots of tattoos and dress in a
Somewhat. And in a non standard manner, let's say that's all associated with Creative Behavior and they have trouble catalyzing a single identity. And then, if you throw in categorical confusion, which is exactly what you're doing. When you declare that there's, you know, an endless number of gender identities, then people who are prone to Identity dissociation and to psychogenic.
Contagion there. You're going to demolish them. There isn't a faggio schreier, has documented that quite nicely and in her book, irreversible damage and it's way more girls than boys and it's thousands and thousands and thousands of them. So, you think well, perhaps a few people who are transgender benefited from this new reality, but for everyone who's benefited and, you know, I'd like to see
The data, just showing how much they actually benefited that will take a long time to accrue. There is a thousand people who have been just demolished by this. So, and then what else on
Well, that that's basically that on the political front. I could see all that coming. I talked the Canadian Senate about it when they put in the legislation. They didn't listen. They just thought racism bigotry. Sexism. It's like, yeah. Have it your way. But, you know, so what all these girls that have rapid onset, gender dysphoria, and a disfiguring themselves and taking hormones and, you know, wreaking havoc with themselves and their families and the broader culture.
These people that were so woken. So permissive, you think they're going to have that on their conscience. They're onto something some other Noble Venture. So
give me your thoughts on the modern dating Market.
Well, I'm too old to
really have any thoughts on it in some sense, not from a personal perspective. Well, I don't understand that level of detail, you know, I do know some things that are happening perhaps at universities where there are far more girls than boys are women than men, what happens in those institutions. This is what it looks like anyways, possibly.
So females are high pergamus, which means they'll mate across and up hierarchies socio-economic hierarchy, but competence hierarchy is really at the bottom of it. And so when you set up a situation where there's far more women than there are men in a given domain, say we're mate, selection can take place. Most of the men still don't do very well because most of them are still rejected by women, but a small minority of men do extraordinarily. Well, if you think well means,
Unlimited sexual access. And so, what's happening in the University's? Is that a small? Minority of men have sexual card, blaz, in some sense. And most men are in the same position that most young men are always in, which is there in this state, where they're not particularly desirable to women. And then the women of course are terribly frustrated because the minority of men that they would really like to have long-term relationships with
It's it's a, it's a
seller's market for the settling down. That's the sex ratio hypothesis. Yeah, and the reverse happens. Right? That you see, whoever the more scarce X's gets to determine the rules of the game. So the men if they are in high demand because the short supply you get more short-term mating. Yeah, you get an increase in relationship to satisfaction from women and when the reverse happens you get
Dates before sex, you get more long-term mating. You also get more sexual violence in that situation as well. When there is a surplus of men and a scarcity of women. I think there's something
far more unstable societies, you know, I was pilloried a few years back for my comments about enforced monogamy because they were taken out of context and twisted in exactly the way that things like that. Get twisted now, but every, what did you mean by that? I mean that one of the one human
Versal is the construction of societies to both mandate and reward monogamy, and there's all sorts of reasons for that. It's because it's the best long-term solution fundamentally, but one of the reasons for that is that when women are scarce men, get violent. Now, you know, that was written say, well, I thought that the society should be Distributing women to undeserving men, which is, of course, absolutely. It's an utterly preposterous and bears. No,
Ship whatsoever to anything I ever said or thought, or anything anyone sane would ever think or say, or has ever thought or said? Because, I don't know, anyone politically ever who was insane enough to think that the state should distribute women to men, like that's just never happened. So to be accused of that belief. And then for that to, you know, be put forward as a credible representation of what I thought was just one of the Preposterous things that has happened to me.
It's an unfortunate.
Name and fullest monogamy because it's a term from anthropology. Right? But what you mean is culturally celebrated, monogamy, culturally and Norms that are supporting people and raising that up institution,
supporting and punishing both. But mostly supporting, I mean, the punishing is that there's there's a moral disapproval applied to say cheating, right, to adultery to especially running around behind your back.
Partners back if you're married, particularly that, but even if you're even, if you're in a long-term stable relationship, it's like well, that's all enforcement. It's not police with jackboots, but that's not the only type of enforcement. It's not the only type of sanction or threat or punishment or disapprobation, or disgust or contempt, or shame, or frustration, or disappointment, all of those things. And
All of that because monogamy is a good long-term solution. But in some sense, a Troublesome short-term solution, if you have other options, then all of those elements of social support. Let's say need to be put into place and that is it as far as I've been able to determine by looking at the anthropological literature.
Norm surrounding monogamy are a human Universal. There are exceptions, but they're very there are very specific situation reasons for those exceptions. So
you see the ons data that came out. A couple of weeks ago, that said, for the first time ever since records began, 50.1 percent of women are childless by 30. So there are more women without children at 30. Then there are women with children. The first time I went
so this is somebody clipped.
A part of one of my podcast. I believe it was where I was talking about. What what our society does to 19 year old women or 18 year old women, 19 year old women would just lie to them all the time, you know, the first lie has, there's nothing more important than your career more or less by definition. So that's the first lie. The second eye is there will be nothing more important to you in your life than your career. So that's the second lie. And then the third layer is there should be nothing more important in your life.
Life than the career career. So that's the third lie and then
Implicit in that is the idea that children are burden and that the idea that women should have children is part of the oppressive, patriarchy and should be resisted, and who are men to tell me what I can do with my body. Hey, fair enough and etc. Etc. Now, I've worked in female-dominated occupations my entire life. I work. For example, I worked as a day care.
Worker way back when that was like 19, probably 80, something like that. And there were no man doing that, but I really like kids. And so that was fun. And I worked for social services and Alberta in they in that child care department. And then I've been working as a psychologist either training or as a psychologist, since then, and that's being a female-dominated Enterprise increasingly as the years went by. But even when I was first, when I first entered it,
So I I'm in the post female in the workplace generation firmly. I never experienced the world except as that. And so I've watched women progress through their professional careers at every level of attainment from the lowest to the highest and observed what happened. And relatively I would say bias-free because I didn't know and what I've seen is that as women progress towards their
Late 30s. Now late 20s.
They?
There's a psychological transformation. And what happens is that they Place less emphasis on their career and way more emphasis particularly on having a child and that really reaches a crisis Point around 29 or 30 for the vast majority of women and their attitude flips. And I've seen it flat, very dramatically with many women and I suppose the most signal single
Most convincing evidence of that. I worked with high-end lawyers in Toronto for about 10 years. I was part of an organization. We went to law, firms, high-end law, firms and said, send us your most productive people and will help them iron out, whatever wrinkles there might still be in their life. And the advantage to them is that things will go better for them. And the advantage to you is they'll be even more productive.
And there's a good management dictum which is pay the most attention to your most productive people because they're bringing in the bulk of your revenue, disproportionately. And so I worked with men and women who were at the peak of their careers in a very difficult Enterprise. And so, these were women who were generally very attractive. Well, put together physically, pretty stable psychologically. Extremely conscientious very, very smart and high-achieving from
Junior High all the way through High School University law school onto the top, firms rocketing up through the ranks. Full partnership by the time, they were 29 or 30 and all the law firms. All the women bailed out all of them. The law firms, couldn't keep them. And I was really, and I talked to the women, a lot about a lot about this, because I was very interested in it, because I knew the law firms were bending themselves over.
Backwards and tying themselves into knots trying to retain these women. Because why wouldn't they, you know, just just being greedy. Capitalists is enough, you know, we don't want to lose their high-performing women because they're performing at the highest level and they couldn't keep them. The women wanted to have nine to five jobs. They wanted to bind the job so they could have a life and that was especially true. Once they got interested in having a child or had one. And what, what they really came to was a very interesting realization. So
Because they were highly conscientious women. They sort of did their Duty and and worked hard and diligently and didn't pop their head up to ask questions. They're in junior high. They got the best grades. They were in high school. They got the best grades and so on all the way through, right? Till they reach partnership, but that's sort of an apogee, right? You hit partnership in a senior Law Firm. It's like you're at. You're at the top of your profession. Well, then, what?
Well, so then they looked around and they thought, hmm.
here I am with all these like
Hyper-competitive men perfectly willing to work 80 hours a week, non-stop to stay at the top.
What the hell? Are they doing? Because that's the real question. What is it? What is it that characterizes this small percentage of hyper-competitive men, it's not.
You can assume that that's how everyone should be, but first of all, that isn't how everyone is or you can flip that and say well there's only a small minority of human beings that are willing to do this to work flat out eight hours a week. I mean, they're getting their certainly being paid for it. That's make no mistake about that. But what about the rest of life? Well, that's what the women asked. Why am I doing this? And that's a great question. Well for men, there's a different answer than for women. It's a really different answer. And it isn't like the men are exactly.
King this through it's more like this is an integral part of male motivation. The more successful you are as a man the more women like you.
Well, the problem that you have now is that as women are getting better educated with more employment, most state is more Prestige. They compete themselves out of their ability to find an attractive mate as women raise up through the dominance hierarchy, and this is
competence, hire,
competent hierarchy. Sorry, who's going to tell women
The equal access to opportunity that you have recently. Just acquired actually, what that's doing is it's making it more difficult for you to find a mate that you're fundamentally
attracted. Yeah. Well, it does a lot of things. I mean, it does provide women with a lot more opportunity on the economic front. It does decrease their dependency on their mate in relationship, to Economic Security and educating educating women countries that are willing.
To educate women. That's the best predictor of their future economic success. So if you look at developing countries and you want to find out what about a developing country is most likely to predict the fact that they will continue to thrive economically. It's their attitude towards the education of women and but a couple more things
Women's educational status predicts, their children's educational status, but men's educational status doesn't. So that's also an important multi generational effect. I released a video. I was going to conclude that other story. I released a video or someone released a clip of me talking about some of the things we just talked about and it went out on YouTube shorts and it's got like 5 million views in a month or something like that. And the comment section is unbelievably vitriolic. It's
Every single comment is vitriolic and it's all from women. It's like who is this old white bastard? Telling us what we should do with our bodies. You know, what? I wasn't being judgmental. I was just saying exactly what I said to you which is while I've watched women over the entire course of my life. With I would say an affection that I, you know, I love my sister. I love my wife. I have a daughter. I love my mother. I'm pretty happy about women. All things considered. I don't have an ax to grind in relationship to how they should conduct their lives. I don't even know how they should conduct.
Their lives, I've watched what happens. And I've also watched what happens to women who hit 29 or 30 and then can't conceive.
And that is not a fate. I would wish on anyone. It's awful and 30 percent of couples fall into that, 30 percent of couples have difficulty conceiving. It's a lot and the probability that you'll have difficulty conceiving increases with age. And so, you know, C'est La Vie and, but it's very interesting to me to see how vitriolic those comments have been and how uniform that is. Because usually on my YouTube channel and particular,
The comments are positive and this is completely the opposite of that. So and then, so you brought this up at the beginning. You said, 50 percent of women. Now at
30 50.1, the childless by
30. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, that's
That's not good. That's a sign of something. Profoundly wrong with the entire culture at an extremely deep level. I don't think that
women need to take it as us trying to tell women, what they should or shouldn't do. But I think that it would be very fair to say that you need to be an incredibly unique woman to make it to 50 without a family and look back and think. Yeah, I did this, right? That's not to say that those women aren't out there. They absolutely are. I know some of them.
But I think overall that it's, it's
the same with everyone for everyone. I mean, this is another example of how our culture is just lost its Moorings. It's like, well, what's life? Well,
You have a job or a career and hopefully you're productive and you contribute something to the community and you provide yourself and your family with the necessities of life. That's a quarter of your life or third of it, something like that.
You have an intimate relationship. You have a family, that's life.
And if you don't have one of those, that's one third of your life, you don't have. Now some people maybe they're doing so well on the other two fronts that they can cope with not having that or maybe they're doing so well. On one front they can cope with not having two of the compensates. Yeah, maybe.
It's pretty hard because if you want to have a great career, it's hard to do that if you're alone and without a family, right, I mean, the people that I've seen who've been best situated in their life, all things considered, as even in relationship to their career, have a pretty solid monogamous relationship that stabilizes them and then they have a family that also stabilizes them and broadens out their life. And, you know, exceptional people do exceptional things and good for them, but they're
Definition given that their exceptional, there are tiny, minority. This is always the argument between conservatives and liberals, right? Because the liberal types. They're more tilted, sometimes towards what would you call it Compassion or appreciation for the exceptional and fair enough? The exceptional is necessary, but
On average, what everyone does on average is the thing to do? And so you just look. You see? Well, what do people do? Well, if they have a job or career? They have an intimate relationship. They have a family. And if you don't have
Any one of those things? Well, then you're treading water harder, doesn't mean you can't do it. And it doesn't even mean possibly that you shouldn't try, but
As a default presumption, it's just utterly foolish. What else you going to do with your life? Well, maybe you're wildly creative, fair enough, you know, that's extraordinarily rare as well. Subject to the power law problem. In any case which is even if you're hyper creative, the probability that you're going to be successful at that, economically is extremely, extremely tiny to the point where it's almost non-existent. It's so difficult. How does happen and some
You can have spectacular success if you become successful, but wasn't it easy. Did you say last
night of the 100,000 most recently printed books only 1000 have sold more than a million
yet? Something like that. It's
something that allows all the way down. Yeah. Everywhere everywhere,
power law. That's, you know, a tiny minority of people do all the work, a tiny minority of people. Get all the benefit, tiny minority of athletes score. All the goals. A tiny minority of men. Get all the women Etc. Tiny minority of stars have all the mass, a tiny minority of
Rivers have all the water, a tiny minority of cities have all the people, etc. Etc. Etc. Everywhere always, you know, and we're so clueless in our culture that we blame that on capitalism. It's like, how does that account for the massive stars people. So poor the, you know, the volume of rivers or the population. Density of cities are
rolling the clock forward, une. Langue tweeted recently about population, collapse. Do you thinks gonna happen though?
Oh, well, I thought for at least 10 years that the biggest problem in 50 years will be that there's just not enough
people. I remember hearing you say a few years ago that you thought we'd peek about 9 billion.
Yeah, we probably won't hit nine. Yeah, and I knew about stats because think about how crazy it
is to think that we might be living on Earth right now at a time with the most number of humans that are ever going to exist at one time ever.
Yeah, that's highly probable. Hey, you know, in the population, my mind, the population.
Collapse in developed countries is precipitous. Right? It's like it fault. We fall off a cliff because it is the same as the
everyone knows this from the pandemic. The are not number if fewer people are reproducing Next Generation, you have fewer people to reproduce as fewer. People are reproducing and yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, I worked on un committee. It's got to be 10 years ago now to helped draft. The UN secretary General's report.
Unsustainable Economic Development. And so I looked at all sorts of things like that. I was very curious for example about because people have been beating the overpopulation drum since well, it really kicked in in the 1960s, you know, because there were dire predictions by the year 2000, the club of Rome came out said. Well, there'll be riots and mass starvation and mass movement of migrants and all the things you hear about climate change because there's too many people on the planet and that just didn't happen at all. That was just that
it wasn't just wrong. It was anti true. It was absolutely wrong. What happened? Instead was that everyone got way richer and the bottom section of the population in terms of economic distribution, got lifted out of poverty inequality still exists, but that's that power law phenomena. We already talked about, not that that's trivial. It's just unbelievably difficult to determine what to do with there are solutions, but certainly getting rid of capitalism isn't the solution. And so I looked at population Trends and
First of all found not that this is an act of Genius or anything that Susie educate women, at the the size of family, shrinks precipitously, like below replacement. And that's partly because women have other options. That that's a he was seeing this play out. Oh, yes. I mean all the all the countries in the west are way below replacement. Korea's way, below replacement, South Korea. Japan way below replacement. Yeah. I
think the number one, not a good number one on the planet. It might be Chad.
Add Chad the country, in terms of growth, eight children on
average. Yeah, I think Nigeria will have more people in it than China by the end of the century.
So yeah, yeah. And musk, you know, he's a far looking man. And, and so he's looking around the apocalyptic Corner. Let's say, well, we're running out of people. And what that means. Of course, is that you run out of young people, right? You don't run out of old people first because everyone who is here, now, is going to be 30 years older in 30 years, and it'll be young people. We don't have enough of, and, of course, young people are the ones who do the Innovation and
And are going to do most of the heavy lifting Etc. And so there's going to be a terrible shortage of young people. Will you see this with some of the things
that I posted the ons data? The 50.1 percent of women childless by 30 and both men and women are replying to that tweet saying well good. There's too many people on the planet in any
case. I know you know how this
NPC Midwifery is so dangerous because it makes people believe that they actually have something grounded back.
Up their
claims. Yeah. Yeah. Well in this idea that the planet has too many people on it. This is there is no sentiment more, implicitly Jenna Seidel than that statement. So what do you mean too? Many people?
Exactly. And what do you mean the planet? And what do you propose to do about that? Exactly? Mass abortion? Is that your answer or should? We do something a little more dramatic? Maybe, we'll just shame people out of having children and I've seen people do that. Literally, I saw a professor, when I was at a tad. Think it was, it doesn't matter. It was a number of professors talking to a couple hundred students, and one of the professors who was an environmentalist activist type, and
He got up on stage and shook his finger, to the whole young crowd saying, that him, and his wife had only decided to have one child, which was in my opinion. One child, too many for him. And told, all the young people there, if they had a shred of ethical decency that they would limb severely limit their reproductive potential. And I stood up and said, and I thought that was the most one of the most appalling things. I'd ever heard anyone in Academia, say to young people, which is really saying something, because they say, plenty of appalling things and it was a very uncomfortable moment and he huffed.
Off the stage but, you know, in a frenzy talking about how you couldn't talk about such things without being pilloried on, ethical grounds. And yeah, that's for sure. You come out as a war Emissary of the academic establishment. You tell young people that humanity is so corrupt that they should seriously consider not propagating because that violates the deepest of ethical norms and you think that's a good thing and that that's your right and it was just beyond comprehension. It's beyond comprehension, but it's associated.
With like a deeply rooted existential, self hatred. And I mean, hatred at the level of humanity is like a virus on the planet that we're a cancerous
growing sets. Dying calls this human races. Mm-hmm.
Right? Right, right. It's that. Yeah. Well, we're a cancer on the planet, you know? Unchecked growth. Just like a cancer. It's like, that's how I say it, cancer. It's okay. We know where your heart is located because what's the
Implications for Doctrine like that. What do you do with the cancer? Cut it out? Yeah, that's for sure. Poison it or whatever. Whatever. There's nothing you don't do to a cancer. So you're going to use a metaphor like that. There's too many people on the planet. You can use a metaphor like that, you know, and then you're going to, you're going to also decide that you're virtuous. Well, you're using it because you're on the side of the planet, whatever the hell that means. So yeah, it's it's unbelievable and huge part of its rooted in this existential.
Shame. And and and horror at the condition of Being Human and the fact that life is Rife with suffering. And a lot of it's unjustified. And, you know, it's a Methodist aphelion position. So Mephistopheles was laid out portrayed in goethe's Faust. That's the story of a man who sold his soul to the devil for knowledge. It's a story of intellectual pride and Goethe stands in relationship to German literature in the same manner.
That Shakespeare stands in relationship to English. Literature Gareth is Mephistopheles.
Says straight out twice in the play. Once in the first, his two books and once in the first book and once in the second gear that has him restate, it twice.
Existence is such a foul thing because of all its suffering. Essentially that it would be better if it was merely enough annihilated and that's the mefist aphelion stance. This whole show should just come to a halt, look at how corrupt people are evil Reigns everywhere. It's nothing but Wilt power. We're destroying the planet with our unchecked ambition, all the rooted in greed and and machiavellianism, and jockeying for position. And we're so contemptible that we should just roll up and die.
And we should shame women into not having children and we should shame men. So they never manifest any Planet destroying ambition. And
It's, it's unbelievably appalling. It goes all the way down to the bottom. The bottom of things. That's what stare in our culture. Apart this dispute about the nature of existence at the most fundamental level.
So and the universities have come out on the wrong side. So
talking about the individual. One of the things that I see holding people back is comfort. So it's easy to get life to a stage where it's not that bad. It's not that good either. At least when you have a full-on breakdown. There's only one way to go, right? You're only going to go up from there. But I think it's possible to wallow for years in a just about possible life, right? Sedated by comfort. And I see this temptation in myself, is
To give up the good for the great. What would you say to people who are trying to escape this curse of mediocrity?
Well, if you're
satisfied with it, in some fundamental sense, I mean, there's something to be said, I suppose for Walling off a private space for yourself. If you can, maintain it, and detaching yourself, to some degree, from the Troubles of the world and maintaining your own little private Garden. The problem with that is the snakes tend to seep in from the outside, right? It's pretty difficult to wall yourself off in any real sense from the concerns of the world. So, it isn't clear to me that, that's a viable solution. It also means that
You might justify to yourself lack of Civic engagement. You know, I shouldn't go to church. I shouldn't take part in the political process because it's also corrupt. I should hide myself from all the annoying noise that's generated constantly on the media fronting. I have some sympathy for that viewpoint, but I don't believe it's really possible because you can't have, you can't have a Walled Garden. Independent of independently of the health of the broader Society. It's just not possible.
Maybe you can have it for a very short period of time, but so, but if you're, if you're comfortable with what you have and that it's genuine. It's genuine comfort. And I think, hey, but generally, it's
not. I think, for the most part, it's people that have become sedated, you know, they're forgotten their dreams, but they've forgotten that they forgotten them. Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb because about this, right? They've become comfortably numb. Hmm. I think most people sad, I have this friend and this story really hit me. So, during the pandemic running a podcast, I was able
All to have the thing that I feel I'm good at my out artistic Pursuit and outlet that was available for me to continue. It was actually increased because I didn't have other stuff to do. Now, the friend that's a barber and he got a job at a supermarket. Bob has shut down for a long period of time. And I got the job at supermarket stacking shelves over night and asked him. I was like man, how are you? How are you finding the new job? He was a big big change is I could, you know, it is I actually don't mind the work and the people that I work
with. Hmm. But
man, I'm
I miss being good at
something. Right? Right, right. Well
dude, that hear me. Yeah, so hard, right? I missed being good at something.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, people need the opportunity to be good at something it so then you might ask yourself for what's the best antidote to the discomfort of life. And you might say, well, it's comfort and
I suppose that's what you act out when you swaddle a baby.
But a better antidote is something like Adventure to Excellence and that's far better antidote to suffering than the mere absence of suffering. So not to say that the mere absence of suffering. That's not nothing, you know stepping out with that
sedation from Comforts difficult, especially if you've become routine eyes
to it. Yeah. Well, that's the difficult difficulty of maturity. You know, the Freudian said, very wisely that
Good. Mother. Necessarily fails with only it means she stops providing the comfort that insulates people against the need for adventure. I heard you say, recently,
that a mother's ability to let her child. Go out into the world knowing that they're still vulnerable and it's now down to them and the world to look after them. That's one of the bravest things that they've said, female
crucifixion. So and that's exemplified best in while the best.
Portrayal of that I've seen is Michelangelo's pieta. Now, it's a statue of Mary and she has Christ's body on her as an adult on her lap and Young's broken and destroyed. And, you know, she's displaying that.
That's, that's The Bravery of a mother to allow that to happen, but not only that to to facilitate it, silat ate it. So what about you? Go kid, where you go? We go. Well why it's dangerous out there. It's like yeah, no kidding.
It's more dangerous here. If you stay with me by a lot.
So you might lose your body out there in the world. But if you stay here, you'll lose your
soul.
How do you see that as an individual? That say that there isn't the mother there, that's pushing
you along.
Well, you know, one of the things young girl you was very interested in the oedipal complex. And that's basically that overprotective maternal.
and he,
He criticized Freud for presuming that it was really something the mother did. He says, it's more relational than that. First of all, would be something the father would allow to happen. Assuming there was a father around. So let's not forget about the paternal contribution to allowing that to occur.
Because in some sense, it's the father's role to serve as the antithesis of that maternal over protection. So woman is extremely bonded with her infant say between 0 and 9 months and the infant is utterly helpless, and so complete compassion. And the provision of comfort is the only job that matters. And that's really the case. And then the woman has to switch gears to some degree. The mother has to switch gears as the child starts to become more more mobile.
Clay and more independent. She has to let go of the infant, which is a real grieving process. And she has to start to facilitate this movement towards independence, but that's a hard shift. And so partly the role of the father in that is to be an advocate for the child's Independence and to comfort the mother to let her know that that degree of security provision is no longer necessary, but also to act as an advocate for the child's outgoing,
Outgoing desire. And so. So it's the eatable situation is not only the mother. It's also say the weak father, but then it's also the child so you can imagine because you believe that these negotiated agreements were we're relational. So, you know your six you're in grade 1.
Maybe you're feeling a little ill. Maybe you're not, maybe you're playing with being a little ill. Maybe you're playing with exaggerating how he'll you are. And your mom comes downstairs and says, you know, you've got a test today at school. Maybe. You haven't quite prepared for it. Maybe, you know, you should have and she says but you know, you seem to have a tummy ache. Maybe you're too sick to go to school and the kid thinks.
Maybe, I could just stay home and, you know, Mom could tuck me in and I wouldn't have to take that test. And I wouldn't have to confront the world and he says, yeah. Yeah, my stomach really hurts and and away we go.
And the child has made a choice and you think, well, that's and that's a catastrophic choice. And you think well, children shouldn't be held accountable for choices. They make that age. It's like
A child soon. Going to be an adult that's going to make very similar decisions.
The the choice has consequences and to be held accountable for that is to recognize purely that the choice has consequences and that it is a choice. Now, you know, you could say well 95% of the blame is to be put on the mother and maybe that's an over estimate. I think it probably is. But the child could say, mom. You don't have to worry about me. I'm going to get up and go do this.
and,
That's choice.
And that's the right choice. So these are always chicken-and-egg problem. So obviously but that that flesh is out the complexity of the situation, you know, if you're if you're being enticed down a pathological road, you can accept or reject the invitation. Now some people are better at enticing and some people enforce it more harshly and you know, there's all sorts of individual variability in situations like this, but
Just because you're offered the bait, doesn't necessarily mean that you have to take it. So and I'm not a determinist. I do believe that people have free will, whatever that means. That's a murky subject and it gets complicated, the more you look at it. But whatever, it's still a good shorthand way of describing. The fact that we seem to be cursed with responsibility for our own destiny, at least to some degree.
How do you advise people to dealing with imposter
syndrome?
Oh, everyone deals with that, every time you make a status shift as you move upwards, of course, you have imposter syndrome because when you first make a transition into a new role, you are an imposter because you're a beginner. You don't know what you're doing. And that doesn't mean you're a liar or a fake and it doesn't mean you should presume more knowledge than you have it. So what it needs to say, every great man is an actor of his own ideal and that's that's that's that feeds into the Imposter syndrome in some sense. If you
To move to the next stage at some point. You have to act like you're already there when you're just barely started. And that's not a lie, you know, it's, it's the willingness it can be and it can degenerate into a lie, especially if you presume more than, you know, but if you move, you know, let's say you move from being an undergraduate to a graduate student. Well, every all the other graduate students and the professor's know that you're just a beginning, graduate student there. They're not going.
Expect as much from you as they would from a more seasoned graduate student. So you have some leeway that's genuine. But you are, you know, the low rung occupier of that role and of course you're going to feel like you're an imposter. If you have any sense because you're just barely there. You just made the transition. That's okay. You know, that's not a problem. First of all, you have to understand that everyone with any sense who isn't narcissistic fields that and it's actually an indication of your
mental health and your competence as long as that doesn't become crippling. It shouldn't knock you out. I'm such a phony while don't be a phony. That's the first thing it. If you're dealing with competent people.
And you admit your ignorance, the competent people never judge you harshly for that as long as you've been paying attention. So in my classes, for example, people were often afraid to ask questions. And so sometimes I would point to people and ask them if they had a question, especially the quieter types and they be afraid to ask the question because other revealing their ignorance and they would assume they're the only person in the room that's that ignorant, but they're not, because if they were paying attention and they had a question, the
See that half the class. Had that question was really high. It's different if you're not paying attention and so you can be ignorant. You can be an ignorant newbie and you can even ask the questions that are necessary to ask in that position and sort of Reveal Your inadequacy. And as long as you're dealing with competent people and you've been paying attention, they're just going to answer your questions and then you only have to be ignorant once that's the thing about asking a stupid question. You only have to ask it once.
And
you know, talk your stupid to well-balanced. People that intellectual humbleness is endearing, right, really endearing. Yes.
So one of the things that I want, just because they're always asking questions to, they always have imposter syndrome to. They have any sense. Like what do you, what are you more? What, you know, or what you don't know. Well, if you're competent, you know, you're more what you don't know. And so you're always asking questions. You've see someone else, you asking questions? You think, oh, you're asking questions. You probably are competent.
So,
and there's the trajectory, that's the trajectory of the person that will become competent or more Concrete in the future to. So that what I would hope with impostor syndrome, and this is something that I noticed first off in myself, but then in other people as well, I've bro scientist my way into something called imposter adaptation. So, hedonic adaptation is the phenomenon where your happiness level tends to reset after a change in circumstances, so you buy a new car or get a new house,
Got the job promotion and it feels good for a while. But then it resets imposter syndrome being that you never feel fully worthy of any achievements that you get in your life. And you don't feel like you are worthy of being that imposter adaptation is a real nefarious version of this, where no matter how many times you disprove, your lack of self belief, it continues to persist in the real world. And this there is a kernel of Truth in this. Because what you said, if your trailblazing, if you haven't done this thing before, but you also have to think well how many
Any times have I done something? Analogous to this? How many times have I done something? That's kind of like this, but not quite.
Yeah, well, people who are high in trait neuroticism or more likely to feel that way. Because so neuroticism is the negative, emotion personality trait, and it's a index of sensitivity to threat and Punishment essentially. So imagine that. It's very difficult to calibrate. How many units of physiological preparedness, you should manifest per unit of threat.
Right. Just how big is the threat? The answer is, you don't know. You wake up in the morning and you have an ache in your side.
Is that nothing? Or is that the cancer that's going to kill you in six months and it's pretty low probability that it's the latter, but the probability is not zero. So why shouldn't you be panicked out of your mind? And the answer is some people are and sometimes they're right. So the calibration of threat, especially when its associated with novelty is virtue. And if an impossibly difficult computational problem, we have like 10 different mechanisms to try to solve that. And one of the mechanisms is, well, there's tremendous variability.
Already in response. And if you're higher in trait neuroticism, you're going to have the problem. You're described all the time. You're going to be doubtful about your competence and the validity of your position. And the only treatment we really know for that is to expose yourself to things that you're afraid of voluntarily and to become braver as a consequence of doing that. But some people have to live with that more than other people.
The thing I realized was that after a while, if you
continue to disprove your imposter syndrome in the real world. Yeah, you have a challenge. You're adamant that you probably won't or might not or don't deserve to get past it, and then you do after a while. You have to admit to yourself that your imposter Syndrome has nothing to do with your capacity and everything to do with your addiction about feeling and like an imposter. Yeah,
and while in that does change as people age, generally speaking, they become more agreeable, more.
Two inches and lower in negative emotion, and some of that is that adaptation. You see that you've survived through various challenges, and then you can review that evidence to yourself. But also the people around you, bolster you, because they have confidence in you, and so, their anxiety doesn't trigger your anxiety. And they'll remind you to, you know, you got this, you've done things in the past,
such a wealth of data, you know, you've done it so many times. Yeah, and yeah, I
think, and that, and that does help.
Help. I mean it does help people get more confident as they get older and they accrue experience because of that. But it's subject to that underlying trait, variability and sensitivity to negative, emotion mean, there's been good psychometric analysis of self-esteem, scales and neuroticism scales and they're that pretty much the same thing reversed.
And so, are you confident in yourself self esteem? Do you lack confidence, trait neuroticism. And so it is harder for some people because it takes more evidence for them to dampen down there their response to threat. So and and it's partly because we're all adapted to some degree to the failure of induction. Right? Just because something happened, multiple times in the past, does not mean necessarily that it will happen the next time. And that's a big breasts. The farmer and
Can problem right? Farmers, always feeding the chicken, chicken things for Farmers is best friend, but one day, the chicken is dinner and that's induction. There was a stable pattern in the past. You come to rely on it. But at any time that Axiom can be disproved. And so the fact that we have variability and trait neuroticism is a consequence of
The, the probability of the failure of induction and it's a very difficult problem to solve how to regulate negative emotion, you know, and but I would say that the best way we know is to keep facing challenges. Voluntarily, pay attention at a rate that works for you, develop your competence that actually stabilizes the environment around you. So it's a it actually is less predictable and less threatening plus you accrue that evidence and you get the social support for
Doing. So that's your best pathway forward.
You said that a harmless mind
is not a good man. A Good Man is a very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control? How should people become more
dangerous?
Oh, becoming more articulate is definitely. I would say.
That's the primary.
Array of weapons. So mean physical prowess is something and it's not nothing that physical confidence that comes along with that as well. But
The same thing replicated at the level of the ability to communicate and think that's way broader field of of battle and opportunity. So this is one thing that isn't taught. Well, especially to boys, it's more important to teach it to boys. I would say because they're more skeptical of such of the educational Enterprise in general generally speaking partly, because they're less obedient partly. Because there
Less agreeable. That's particularly true for disagreeable, boys and agreeable, boys, get higher grades independent, of their IQ and their, and their academic achievement because they're easier to deal with. So, what do you tell disagreeable, boys?
There's nothing that makes you more formidable than verbal competence, and being able to articulate, be able to think to Marshal your arguments. Right? It's I'm Battlefield metaphor to get everything in order. Get all your information straight to Marshal your forces. And so, I mean, that's part of the reason that rap artists are so popular, especially among disaffected young men, black and white alike because
Are unbelievably articulate that they have this incredible verbal prowess. It's unbelievably attractive, you know, when it's associated with genuine artistic and Redemptive activity often, focusing on something. That's approximately the voice of the underclass. Let's say about a powerful voice, right? And it's interesting to see how many young white guys identify with that
was the Aldous Huxley that wrote doors of perception. Yeah. Yeah.
This is kind of an equivalent of that, right? That you have a experience, which many people struggle to articulate, you take the best of us. The one that has the most precise, most articulate, erudite language, you drop them in and you say, Okay, show us what you've learned. This is the equivalent book for just a different Community. A different sort of life that maybe you don't have the ability to describe what it feels like to live on a council estate in Manchester or in, you know, the one of the
The neighborhoods of Brooklyn or whatever it might be. And then this person can and it feels like it's your
voice. Yeah. Well, you still, if you're young man, you still feel alienated from your place as rightful heir of the proper kingdom. Mean that's an existential truisms for everyone for every, particularly for every young man, because he is an outsider in many ways. He's young and juvenile, and not very highly valued. And
And then is, it is in some sense hurt by the inadequacies of the current King, the current culture and, and is easily turned against it because of that. And that's the imaginations of the evil. Uncle. That's the King, Arthur story. That's the story of Horus. Horus, and no serious. It's an Ancient Ancient story. It's the story of Sauron, and it's there all the time. And you see in that in rap, music and Hip-Hop.
The all of that alienation being given an articulated voice in an artistic sense and that's a good example of the power of verbal facility. And that's the route to let's say marketing education to young man. It's like you want to you want to take your rightful place in the Kingdom. It's like get your tongue straight man, get it under control in the highest possible sense. We went to a comedy club Tammy and I on.
In the New York Comedy Cellar, it's a great comedy club. And the last Comic was an English guy, and he was not particularly physically, prepossessing and he made a lot of jokes about that, and it was quite funny. And then he divided the audience into five sections and he asked each section to toss up a topic just yellow to topic and they were like random topics, like the Kennedy assassination and electric lighting before 1890 those.
R2 of the topics and the other three were just as diverse and then he put on some beats and he did about an eight minute rap with every verse rhymed and he tied the whole thing together at the end and ended at the end of the music, all spontaneously was unbelievable. And that's logos, man. That's the Redemptive power of the logos. Right there. The magic word, sacred word is just manifesting itself on stage.
There's some very impressive
something about that that does feel dangerous as well in not in a I need to be concerned and this should be contaminated and walled off but in a way that you think that person has so much competence that it it's flowing out of them and you almost feel competent by being around
them. So we will certainly feel confident by appreciating it. Yeah, right. Because it speaks to the part of you that is capable of appreciating such things, you think? Wow. That's really something. That's really, that's an amazing display. That's an amazing thing to see, amazing, right?
It's a very interesting word, amazing. And you're trapped, and you're trapped by the Charisma of that. And that Charisma. That's not nothing. That's, that's a signal of something. Redemptive occurring. That, that accounts for
Virtually all of the attraction of hip-hop and rap. It's the articulate articulated voice of the struggling. But worthy underclass, I suppose. That's a good way of putting it but those who are alienated from their rightful place. And so that verbal prowess is one of the ways they
Struggle up towards the light in there. And, and that's a good example of that. I've having that danger under control because it's a dark genre in many ways. Right? It's a, there's a, there's a, there's a real undercurrent and are of violence that surrounds that and its culture like the punk movement in the, in the UK, back in the late 70s, same same sort of thing, but that
That capacity to express that in a poetic Manner and it compelling manner, sit or Johnny Rotten was great at that. He was so intense. His, he worked with pil afterwards. Public Image, Public Image Limited is that, as Public Image? I think so, he has a song called rise, which I used to show my my clients all the time. When I was starting assertiveness training with them. I'd put on Joanie rottens rise, and the line in there is anger is an energy.
And he's got these unbelievably intense eyes. Anger is an energy, you bet and John Lydon, man, he could channel that like almost no one I've ever seen. He get that anger built up inside him and then it was completely under control and he expressed it in his music and he's absolutely captivating, unbelievably charismatic, and I really liked his music that raw anger in the music that but it was, it was in the bloody music, wasn't it?
wasn't some random Riot, you know, he transmuted that into something, you know, you can argue about the poetic merits of
punk rock, although I don't think you should. I mean, I Did It My Way. Sid Vicious is version of did it my way? My God, that's a work of Genius that. It's so it's so brilliantly satirical.
What someone's doing is that refining it the distilling it down and then the directing it. So I went to a powerlifting competition. A couple of years ago. There was this one guy that lifting holds a bunch of Records in the squat and he's a normal working-class guy from normal, working-class town on the outskirts of Newcastle and watching.
Man, warm-up is something else. He's got a sacred playlist. Never listened to the songs apart from when he's about to step onto the lifting platform. He's got his headphones on and he's just walking up and down in the same way that you'd see a bull ready ready to go out, ready to go and Chase something, and he steps out on stage and the hair stand up on the back of your neck. You watching this guy
Channel. Ray Fury. That's the God of War. That's Mars. Yeah.
He's in touch with that. Hmm, unbelief and words menu. Go to war with words.
I think that's what young men should be taught. There we go. But if you re I want to talk about your
recovery, can you explain how it felt in the first few days? When you realize that it might be over when the clouds were lifting
know what happened? Very incrementally, over a period of months.
Well, things were slightly less catastrophic in the morning. Like it was taking me three and a half hours. Just stand up.
And then it was only taking like three hours.
So that looked like, maybe something had improved was very slow.
Like the question about when did you get
old? Yeah, exactly one day at a time. Exactly. So, you know, and I still have a lot of pain by mostly feel like I have a bad flu all the time, but that's way better than it was. So
what's changed on the other side of that. Do you view the way that you should be in the world different? Do you feel like you have a
New purpose after being ill for
so long.
Hopefully I'm more grateful for the mere absence of catastrophe, you know, and I'm I guess I'm possibly more pleased to be out say doing this lecture to her. I mean, I was really pleased about it. In 2018. I was already pretty damn happy about happy isn't the right word overwhelmed grateful in a state of constant disbelief.
Thrilled about the fact that people were responding. So, positively amazed about the fact that this had like, a religious Dimension. Overjoyed to see people come and tell me that they had got their lives together. And that, they were very happy about that. I had all that already. Maybe I feel that more now.
I wouldn't say that.
I've learned so much that all the pain was worth it.
But that's, that's, I suppose in some sense, putting a happy ending on something in a way. That's just too trite. It's like, it was most of that time. I would far rather been dead for all sorts of reasons. So, now, I'm perfectly happy that I'm not but I haven't forgotten what that was like,
This is a lot of people that are very glad that you're not.
Yeah. Well, that's that. That's great. Really. That's great, you know, and I'm thrilled that I'm about being able to be not terrifying to my family. Let's say, and I'm really happy to be back out in public and to be to be doing what we're doing my, you know, along with my daughter, and my wife and with the support of my family, it's great. I love this to her.
So nice to meet all these people. It's so positive. It's ridiculously positive and in a world where so much is - and ridiculously - that's, that's a lovely thing to see. And to see these thout. I'm going to see 150,000 people in the United States, you know, between when the tour started, which was about two weeks ago, and the end of think it's the end of April, before we go to Canada, and then to the UK and then to Europe and then to Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia and Russia.
All of, that's on the table and to see, 150,000 people who are committed enough to trying to make their lives, better to come to the lectures, and to listen to them, even though they're essentially philosophical Treatise. He's or at least the best I can manage and an hour. And to watch people be committed to this and hear their stories. It's you can't imagine anything could be more positive than that.
So that's wonderful. If there's something to come back
to, you have to having that. Yes, not much better that you could have arrived back into a world to
find. No. No, I mean the the downside of it is that there's such a need for it, you know, because part of what I think I have to offer perhaps is encouraged and because I don't think the planet would be better off with fewer people on it. And I don't think that the ambitious motivations of young men are nothing but the manifestation of the
Corrupt, Will To Power, etc, etc. And the fact that so many people are pining away nihilistic lie, in some sense in no small part because of such accusations because they're being taken out by their own conscience. I think that's absolutely appalling and seeing how positive people are in relationship to what I'm doing has that as its shadow, which is well, isn't it? So awful that that's necessary. Yep.
But it is necessary by all appearances, at least the people that seem to be listening to me. And so C'est La Vie and, you know, I do believe and I think my family is firmly behind me in this belief that, you know, this
The idea that the planet has too many people on it, the sort of a group idea, you know.
There's too many people is like the mass of people and the mass is too big. I don't think of people as a mass. I think of people as individuals, and so there are not, there's not a massive people. It's the wrong level of analysis. As far as I'm concerned, right? Level of analysis is each person and, and I think that that's a core tenant of
Of Western Civilization to the degree. That the West is actually, civilized. Let's say the more it's civilized the more the emphasis is on the individual and
The idea that the individual is Sovereign is the core Axiom of Western Civilization democracy itself.
And I believe that that statement is as true as any statement. We've managed to collectively. Formulate. And so if it's true then it is the real battle is at the level of the individual or even within the individual and that's fine with me. And so mostly what I'm doing is attempting to make connections with individuals, even though I'm talking to thousands and thousands of people, I'm never talking to them as a group.
Ever, I don't even look at them as a group. I never look at the crowd when I'm talking to that my audiences. I always look at one person. You know, it's not always the same person because that makes them uncomfortable. They're happy to be singled out for a second or two but gets
weird if it's administering. Yes. Yeah,
so I'm always looking at, you know, one person or another, but I'm always talking to one person. I learned that in part from Kierkegaard, you know, it's Kierkegaard, believed firmly that. As soon as the truth was embodied.
By the mob. It was no longer a truth that truth was in and of itself. Something that was always manifested at the level of the individual
people notice a measure the know this in their own lives that you have wisdom on your own, you go into a group and you compromise that wisdom for some reason social norms, or the way you've dealt with past traumas or the things that you think other people want to hear from you.
Yeah, that's diffusion of responsibility, right? Because when you're when you're buried in the mob, you can do and say things that
that the mob hides from you and the world. Whereas, if you're just operating on your own, the consequences of your actions are manifested pretty quickly. No place to high. So we have to keep, you know, every group of people isn't a mall by either. I mean, there are groups of people that are decentralized, highly functioning Aggregates hierarchies, composed of individuals and that's working at every level of analysis. And that's a properly functioning Society. That's not a mob at at that.
There's a dynamic.
That permeates the entire hierarchy. That keeps the individuals. Let's say at the bottom of the hierarchy, completely in touch with those smaller, that smaller number of people who are at the top and a good, how well functioning Democratic political state has that nature, is that there's constant communication upward and downward. Just like, the way, the brain is organized, the brains of hierarchy, but
Information doesn't just propagate from the bottom up or from the top down even with your visual system. So, for example, when information first, enters your brain from your eyes at the full veal level each foveal. So that's the center part of your vision. That's high resolution every cell in your fovea is represented by 10,000 cells at the first level of visual processing. And so there's a tremendous amount of input from your eyes to your brain bottom up. But even at the very bottom of visual perception, there's more top-down connections from your brain.
So, the visual system is hierarchical, but each level of the hierarchy communicates, all the way down the hierarchy and a good political system is structured that way. And so you can have a group of people that's not a mom, and it's a different way. It's a different organization and a democratic Democratic polity is not a mob, not if it's functioning properly, you know, as something that was really brought home to me, when I went to England, because I went into the lobby of the house of parliament. This great domed building. That's more or less at the center of the
Re-cross. And that's where citizens of Great Britain can come and Lobby to do to speak to their representative. So, that's where the voice of the people meets, the voice of the representatives, and that's how it should work. Is in some sense. There are emotions and concerns that are stirring in an inarticulate manner at the bottom of the hierarchy where the problems first manifest themselves. Because they always first manifest themselves at
All of a hierarchy in those problems aren't necessarily easy to articulate. And so people stumble forward with their concerns and they job of their representatives is to take those stumbling concerns and aggregate them and to give them voice and to transmit Them Up structures of power to transform the laws into the new body of laws, which is what we act out to to reconcile the bottom with the top and that has to just happen continually because it's a living, it's like a living organism.
Well, it is in a sense. It is a living organism that it's a meta organism that consists of living organisms. So, you know, for all intents and purposes. It's something that's alive. I really, really hit me in the lobby. That's where the word lobbying comes from, by the way, so, to happen, the hmm. And and people are cynical about lobbying but people are cynical, but lots of things and it's not that
helpful.
Is it possible to have too much responsibility to take too much responsibility for yourself? Like one thing I've been thinking is that
the victim mindset where you want to, you believe that you have no control over the outcomes in your life. I wonder whether there's an opposite. Where you believe that you have an infinite amount of control over them and you lose faith in your innate ability to just carry you through. I've been thinking a lot about releasing the tiller, which is Jed McKenna. Quote. He's talking about the fact that the best way to ride a boat through a storm is to actually release the tiller and it allows the boat to maneuver best through the
Miles. And I think that a lot of the time going back to the Imposter syndrome thing that we were talking about as you start to accumulate more and more competence.
The.
Higher level of overthinking, the high level of neuroticism, the more of an attention to detail that got you from nought to 50 isn't necessarily the thing that's going to get you from 50 to 100. You know, you had to get across a river and it was it was bad in difficult. You don't need to carry that boat across ground to then get you across the next one. And I wonder whether
the opposite of a victim mentality where you take responsibility for the things that occur in life, I wonder whether you can overshoot that
can, for sure. Yeah, definitely mean.
No, Dostoyevsky said that every man was responsible for everything. He did and for and for everything that everyone else does just kind of an insane statement. But also somewhat, it's true in in a certain sense.
You do have an indefinite responsibilities and you do have an indefinite capacity to bear that responsibility, but that doesn't mean it can't be crushing. And then I would say the antidote to that is that you're not in this alone.
As your responsibilities mount.
And your opportunities increase, you have to delegate more and more. There's enough for everyone. There's a it's important that you do everything you can, but there's enough for everyone to do.
And so you might say, well the heroic path is one that leads to Universal Redemption and that's true. And you might say well that's all on you. It's like it is in a sense. But then the problem that you just described
come children too much
better. Well, I can Crush you it can be unsustainable right? You can torture yourself for not doing it well enough and it is up to you, but it's not up to you alone. It's not up to you alone.
So you delegate new and you, you build, you helped build people around you so that they're all working in the same direction. Your it's an effort. It's an effort multiplier in any case and you make sure that they get credit and they get they get credit isn't exact credits good enough. It's not exactly right. The rewards are.
Are in accordance with their efforts and you can distribute that, you know, because there's also a narcissism that can come along with that which is well, it's all up to me and even if you're working in a very competent manner, it can seem that way. But there's plenty of work to go around and there's plenty of credit where credit is due. And so what you do as you attain more responsibility and opportunity as you delegate more of that, and you do that continually mean, what are the roles of a good manager is to make him?
Herself, irrelevant obsolete. Yeah, right. So if you're not a good manager, if your company would collapse, if you disappeared,
That should all be delegated out. And it's not because you're abdicating responsibility. Because also what happens is that if you can routinized, someone something, and parse it off to someone else. Here's a little kingdom for you and it doesn't have to be little and it's something that can grow, but here's a kingdom for you. Well, then you can go off and do the next thing you need to do, which is extremely important, you know, when you might think there's there's a kingdom and then it's broken into little kingdoms. And so the farther you are down the hierarchy, the smaller, the kingdom you get, but that's only true. If you think the world,
Zero Sum game because you could also think of it as a place of indefinite, a place with an indefinite number of the largest kingdoms possible. And I think what, why do we think this is exhaustible in some sense? What we're doing. Doesn't look exhaustible. You know, that's the limits to growth mentality. It's like economists don't believe in that because they think, well, no, we can just get more efficient, which we certainly are. We're way more efficient and we once were and those grains in the
Efficiency when they're not being interfered with our increasing, at more than an arithmetic rate. Why do you think people
have a tendency toward that zero-sum mentality? I've, when I find myself thinking that it's one of the first things that I check myself on that is
That is cancer.
Yeah. Well, I mean there are elements of life that have a zero-sum element. I mean, if you're competing with another man, for example, to marry a particular woman, that's a zero-sum game. If you only think of the game as including you two in that woman. So you can set up circumstances that are zero. Some
bottom pull them across into situations, which
aren't yeah. Well then, but to take take that metaphor of zero-sum game where there has to be winners and losers because there's a finite number of resources.
Is to assume that the rules of that game are the rules that govern all game the set of all games and that's just not true. There's games, are infinitely, multipliable. I mean, you can invent a new game. People do that all the time. The man who invented Katana which is a game. I really like to play. It's very popular board game that didn't exist until he invented it. Now, you know, thousands and thousands of people play it and he made a fortune from. It's like that game, never existed. So there doesn't seem to be any limit to the number of games we can.
Invent, and it's complicated problem because we are on a single planet and and some resources are more zero some than others, but we haven't really run into any actual 0, some limits in terms of our, you know, the probability of us, living an abundant life on the planet. We've stewarded some resources, very stupidly. We've done a very bad job of of managing Oceanic.
Action, for example, although Fish Farms have alleviated that on the production, side to some degree, but it's a tragedy of the commons that we could address and should address as far as I'm concerned. One of the good things that you do government has done. I think to give the devil his due. Let's say is to put a lot of the coast of Canada into Marine protected areas. And that's smart. We have to be smart about a resources, but that doesn't mean they're zero-sum and certainly doesn't mean the world is
Oh, some game. And that's a malthusian idea. You know, that population will grow till it consumes all available, resources and precipitously collapse. And then, why do we think apocalyptically it's well? Because things do come to sudden ends people die, people get fatal illnesses, like the world, use or carefully. Constructed can be blown apart at any moment. By a random occurrence genetic mutation that causes the cancer. That kills you like life has a like life has a fundamentally apocalyptic aspect.
And we do understand that because we're self-conscious and then it's very difficult not to apply that kind of apocalyptic reasoning to things as such the world's going to burn up. The climate's too hot. What about runaway positive feedback loops? Because that's what the climate types are afraid of. Hey, they happen. How do we bind our apocalyptic thinking?
That's a good question, man. That's a good question. We do that through true. We do that with the truth. That's how we do it through dialogue, through investigation, through exploration, through discipline. All of that. The logos is the antidote to the apocalypse horse. That's Central. Christian dogma. Isn't that the logos? Is the Apollo is the antidote to the apocalypse met fancy that
And so what does that mean? No, love and truth is the antidote to the apocalypse. Not the planet has too many people
on it.
You said to me, when we went out for dinner, a couple of months ago.
I asked you what I should be doing with my life. And you said what you're doing right now, I think is pretty good. And then you
said,
Truth in the service of love. What do you mean by that? You've brought it up
again?
What's a hierarchy of virtue? I would say, you know, there's an old idea that God is the sum of all, that's good. I don't think some is exactly the right metaphor. It's more like imagine. There are Eternal verities. Truth beauty Justice. Love courage.
Fortitude compassion, think of all those things as virtues.
So virtue is what all virtues have in common virtue is what all virtues have in common. That's the relationship of God to the good. God is the essence of the good. So well, we put that aside for a moment.
Or you may think how would that manifest itself in your life? Well, that might be pursuit of the good. And that's the pursuit of the good that unites all proximal goods and
What, what is that? Exactly? Well, it's something like the belief that it would be for the best that all things flourish to the degree that that's possible. When I was a clinician. I thought of that as the good in me, serving the best in my clients and I think the desire for that to happen. That's love.
So that's the desire for you say. Well, you take a human bent, broken miserable, malevolent hurt corrupt, weak, pathetic, contemptible, frustrating, disappointing. All of those things that we can lay on ourselves because of our inadequacies is like,
What's easy to dismiss that and part of that dismissal is what drives the notion that the planet has too many people on it, and that were a cancer on the face of the Earth.
Psych, it's not easy to love that.
But what do you want? You want the broken people to rise up out of their Brokenness rather than despise them for it. And then you Orient yourself towards that and try to pull that out of people and yourself. And and that you have to have that frame first. That's what you're aiming for and maybe that would be the opposite of hell. This is one thing I would say that unites M Harris and I despite our differences in in belief in some sense at the level of detail. Sam is very
Acutely aware of the reality of malevolence and he'll now he wouldn't frame that metaphysically or religiously but doesn't really matter that he is doing his best to aim away from that as hard as he possibly can. See, I didn't realize the last time I talked to him, that Sam identified, the religious tradition, the dogmatic religious tradition with the totalitarianism that produces atrocity. Now, I think that's a misidentification the same way the marxists blame inequality on capitalism.
Inequalities really a problem, but it's not the fault of capitalism and totalitarian atrocity is really a problem. But to identify that reflexively with religion or even with religious Dogma. That's a mistake Dogma maybe. But even that tricky. Because what's the difference between Dogma knowledge, you know, today's knowledge is tomorrow's dogma and drawing the line between those two is extremely difficult. You can't just abandon everything. You think even though it's arbitrary.
You need it to guide you and it can transform into totalitarian dogma and promote atrocity in the Servants of in the service of it's no longer valid maintenance, but that's a very complicated problem. So if that's the law of love, Yeah, truth.
Truth in the service of Love.
Hmm.
Well, truth to begin with is well, okay, we can take that apart a bit.
What you talked about letting the tiller of the boat go. Well, imagine that you treat.
So we're having this conversation. Let's say I want this conversation to go the best way it can possibly go. Okay. Well, I don't know what that way is but I have to want that to begin with. So I come to the conversation. I think I'm going to try to have the most engaging.
Conversation that I can have. I'm going to say what I believe to be the case during the conversation. I there isn't something I want from you, except that. Hopefully we can meet in that endeavor. I'm not trying to craft outcome. I don't know what we're going to talk about in. We talked a little bit about possible broad themes. Although I think we touched on any of the things we actually discussed. That doesn't mean we didn't need to do the preparation know. And then you think well,
Whatever we accomplish in the course of a genuine dialogue is for the best and that's to let go of the of the tiller and Truth does that. It's like because you can't craft outcome. And so what you're doing by engaging in truthful dialogue, is letting the wind blow where it's going to blow and you do that. If you've decided at some fundamental level, even if you don't know you've decided that that the truth will set you free and the truth is what it is.
Is in the final analysis Redemptive and we tend to think of Truth. We tend to think that truth resides in a set of accurate facts. That's actually the weakness. I would say of the materialistic atheist.
Position that axiomatic.
Presumption about the nature of the truth, but the truth is a process. It's and it's often a dialogical process. So the truth is the thing that emerges in the course of the search for the truth. It's something like that. And true truth is to be found in the search, for the truth. That's the process that continually revitalizes things. And so and then if your orientation is towards the good,
To the degree that your orientation is towards the good and your belief that the good can Prevail, which is a, which is a an Article of Faith, right? The good can Prevail like what's your evidence for that? There's evidence for whatever position you want to, hold on that. So it's a decision and you let go and the truth takes you away, and you think that it's going to go where it should go. You put, you commit yourself to that idea. And then that's your
Your adventure. That's the thing. That's one of the things that's so cool about that. It's like you need this adventure to buttress. You against tragedy. There's nothing more adventurous than the truth. And in fact, it's the only true adventure. Obviously. You just have to think that through for 20 minutes.
How could it be a true adventure if it wasn't true?
And then, why isn't Adventure if it's true because you're not crafting outcome.
And so, what does that mean? It means you've decided that the truth is what will set you free. And and that's independent in some sense of the evidence. One of the things my family has learned. This has taken a lot of learning, is that
There's been at least, I would say, 50 times in the last five years, where we thought, we'd be taken out by what was happening around us. Sometimes those were big things, there was probably 10 of them, like they were public and famous. And then there was like 40 things that weren't so big, but we're still plenty big and was always the same thing. It was hot as hell for weeks, but
Flipped them always, always, but that doesn't mean it was pleasant to live through the part when it wasn't flipping, it was horrible. But so far so far, we've been able to let go of the tiller and let the waves take us where they'll take us and not flip the boat.
Do you
think that there's a usefulness in having a nemesis to motivate e, talking about some of the situations that you've been through? Not particularly those ones. Exactly. But I try to avoid making enemies of people or groups or ideas or whatever.
It's don't make unnecessary enemies, but
there is an extra level of fire that gets lit underneath you. When you're going up against someone and I miss it. Sometimes there's a price that you pay for.
Peace.
Yeah, well, then you just have to look at yourself harder and find the nemesis.
Because it's there all the time, right? I mean, there's always parts of yourself that you can overcome. And so that's William James moral equivalent to war. Essentially know if you need something to Grapple with and you probably do you can find that you just look inside, you'll find something to Grapple with, you know, inadequacy weakness, susceptibility to Temptation, narcissism Pride, Envy Revenge resentment, frustration, lack of faith, all of that, that that'll keep you.
Fight if you really grapple with it. And yeah, I mean that's an ancient theological question. You know, what's up with the devil? Why is that Dwight has the possibility of evil exists? Why is there a Eternal adversary? See that reflected in Cain and Abel right at the beginning of the Genesis stories? Essentially the first two human beings are good set against an adversary and that's that's what opens history that story you think. Well, why would God construct such a why would go on God, construct a reality.
We're an adversary exists and maybe it's because all things considered a World with an adversary is a better world just like a garden with a snake and it is a better Garden. These things aren't easy to understand. No got no snake, no necessity to contend with snakes. So why be awake at all? No adversary no challenge, why be challenged because maybe you're better for the challenge.
And maybe that's the challenge to see if you can be better for the challenge, but that should be internal. Well, fundamentally. Well, if it isn't, you'll find it externally because you'll demonize someone to turn them into Satan so that you can find an adversary and then that's very unfortunate for you. And for them. That's the prettiest, not as big a battle. It's like you battle with someone external who's malevolent. Let's say, or you think they are, and usually you've got that mostly wrong, but not always, but if the battle is inside, which is where it's supposed to be.
Fun, most fundamentally then.
Well, then it's ultimate. It is the ultimate Challenge,
not the infinite game.
The external one battle between good and evil on a playing field of Chaos and Order. That's the Eternal game and, you know, you can play that out in the external world, but part of what the religious Enterprise is about, and the Christians have really contributed to. This is the notion that that sacred battle is fundamentally spiritual which is to say in some
It's fundamentally psychological. It's to be, it's to be fought on the battleground of the Soul internally. It's a subjective issue. How do you defeat evil?
You defeat the evil in your own heart. That's that is how you do it. And so if that's all being acted out for you in the world. Well, you've misplaced Satan. That's a good way of thinking about it as is another weakness. I think of the atheistic position because you can, it's pretty hard. It's an easy in some sense to dispense with belief in the highest. Goodbye. It's not so easy to dispense with belief in evil. So that's a big problem. So, then, where do you live?
Localize it and you can find evidence of it everywhere. Certainly, and institutions. I mean, that's the whole systemic racism, corrupt. Patriarchy narrative, is that Satan is to be found at the core of our institutions and to some degree. That's true because everything we do is corrupt to some degree. And so then do you fight it sociologically and you're the good person and the institution is Satan. You're so good. Are you?
You're so sure that how are you, you've got everything in order or do you. And you might say? Well, you have to have everything in order before you fight evil on the sociological front. And the answer is, well. No, because you're never going to have everything in order, but you still shouldn't put the cart before the horse.
It's really, it's a spiritual battle, and it's taken people thousands and thousands of years, to figure this out. Now. First of all, it was the snake. What's, what's evil? What's malevolent? The predatory reptile, fair enough. And I mean, we've been fighting with predatory reptiles for 60 million years as mammals 60 million years. So it's a good first pass approximation. It's the snake, the poisonous snake, the external enemy The Predator.
What about the predator and other people? Oh, yeah, that's even worse, man. It's like how predators predators are one thing, but predatory, people other tribes, man. They're brutal. They're brutal. Well, what about your predatory friend? That's pretty bad. To the friend, who stabs you in the back. The person who betrays you Judas, God, maybe that's the ultimate snake. It's like well, how about when you betray yourself?
Oh, yeah.
Do you want to see? There's this Association. That's very strange that occurred in the development of Christian thought between the snake in the Garden of Eden and Satan. There's no indication in the original story that the snake has anything to do with the Lord of all evil. It's a very weird conclusion that's been drawn. It's almost extra-biblical because there's almost no mention of Satan in the Bible at all much less any direct connection between the serpent and Satan. It's a very, very strange.
A idea, but it's part of this psychologize ation of evil. Like what's the ultimate Predator? What's the ultimate Predator? What's the enemy you Harbor in your own heart? Who hates you? That's the ultimate predator.
No one, when there's these images of Mary with her head, in the stars, and baby in her arms and her foot on a snake. It's like, well, if that's the Eternal feminine heads in the stars, because she's oriented towards the highest good and she's protecting her infant from predators. That could be
An actual Predator that's been the case throughout not just human history. But mammalian, history could be other people who are predators could be men, who are predators could be her.
Who's the Predator? The devouring mother? It's like, well, what's, what's the ultimate Locale of genuine evil while the highest religious answer is that's in you, that's the proper place to battle it out. And I think that's true. I think that's lit. It's literally and metaphorically true. And I was convinced of that in part because of solution, instance writings, because Soldier Nets and identified the totalitarian.
State with the willingness of the subjects of that state, the subjects and the perpetrators at the same time to live by lies.
No to know lat no totalitarian state, if people don't lie, every time you lie in support of the totalitarian state, then you're the perpetrator and that's a psychological issues. Like you're gonna lie to get along or not. Say well, what does it matter? I'll go along with it. So, okay. We'll see how it matters because it matters and that's all psychodrama as far as I'm concerned fundamentally when it's properly placed.
You got plenty of problems to take care of on your own front.
That's where you should concentrate your efforts.
What one of the things I've realized is that people that are self-reflective that rely on cerebral horse power. That pay attention that think in a detailed way, the more nuanced that you're thinking is the fewer people are going to be like you, which makes you feel more alone. How do you think people can overcome
this?
Well, I would say that hasn't been my experience exactly.
because as I started to make my thoughts more public,
They seem to appeal to more and more people. And so I don't know if that's a threshold phenomena because maybe it is, you know, as you start to become specialized as a scientist. In some sense, your vision Narrows and narrows, although it gets more high-resolution at the level that you're operating but you kind of pass through a needle. Let's say out the other side where the thing, you're studying starts to become everything again. And so maybe that's maybe that's that developmental.
Aggression further
more. Yeah. Specialization and then generalization
again. Yeah. Yeah. I think that you might be right that the deeper into the breach thing. The show that I went to go and see do in Manchester in 2017 or 18. Someone asked a question about the depth of my Consciousness causes me to suffer and you said you take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that girdles, the world around you and I think that this is something you see here as well. That when you start to think differently, when you start to consider the way that you're living your life.
In a more detailed, high-resolution, more unique more nuanced way. You will probably receive push back, especially, you know, speaking from personal experience, in a normal working-class townspeople born live die in these places.
It's insula. There isn't a huge culture of pests specially in the UK tall. Poppy syndrome is a huge problem. The biggest difference. I've noticed actually between American people in English, people is that American children are told that they can be anything that they want to
be.
They're told that they have blue sky Vision. They can achieve whatever they want, and that gives them a lot of confidence. When us Brits stuffy, stiff, upper lip, Brett to see Americans on TV. It sounds like everyone's had media training.
Because everybody's just so enthused about whatever it is. Even if it's a 18 car pile up. And then the equivalent in the UK is that deviating from the norm is very, very, very quickly mocked and
there's a lot of that Canada Too
Tall, poppy syndrome. It's a big deal. Now,
the Japanese have that saying to accept its the nail that sticks up above. All the rest is the first one to be struck down by the hammer.
And there's some truth in that to there's some truth in that but some and all are very different words
when you roll the clock forward, what you end up with is American children, that then become adults who look around at the world. And so, hang on, this wasn't what I was promised.
I was told that I could be anything that I want you to be. I was told that I could have anything I wanted to
has a difference between, you can earn everything. That is earnable and you deserve everything. There is
So that message can become what you say can become misinterpreted in a narcissistic Manner. And I think that has happened to some degree especially as people have had fewer and fewer children.
You know, Jonathan haidt and Luke enough, talk about the coddling of the American mind. And they think about that in large part as a consequence of an ideological transformation and some of that's true, but it's also useful to look at more fundamental phenomena.
People have children when they're a lot older. They have way fewer children. They have way more resources when they have children on average, you know, if you're one kid of eight you're pretty much battling it out for attention for a very finite amount of Parental attention with a lot of intense competition and the probability that you're going to come out of that entitled and narcissistic is pretty damn low because your siblings will definitely punish you for that. But if you're the only child, especially of older parents, who are also more conservative,
Because of their age and also less willing to take chances with you because there's only one of you and then you have a lot of resources at your disposal. Well, that's a whole different. That's a whole different developmental milieu and we have no idea what the consequences of that are. But the idea that children in that circumstance are more likely to be over protected and dependent and structured. It's like well, yeah, undoubtedly and you know, that that would even be an overabundance of parental.
Ah-choo in some sense, right? Well, we just did nothing but pay attention to our child. Okay, but too much, what did you
expect? It's so strange because I'm an only child, right? And all of the what maybe my friends might say differently, but a lot of the commonly held presumptions around only children. I just and I have a couple of friends who are as well. And I don't know whether it's where we're from the northeast of the UK is very spit, and
It's salt-of-the-earth people. It's you know, grab your bootstraps on your boots and start pulling and I just haven't, I haven't seen that. What is it through? Your clinical practice with a comment, you're
not be of primarily working class phenomena, you know, the carnal mind phenomena, that could easily be a middle class. And upper phenomena. Is this something, it was there a common Trend or from your reading? Have
you found that only children tend to be one way or
or
another? No. No,
I'm sorry. I just get huge variance in them as well.
I don't know the answer to that at the level of individual psychological data. There might be a literature. I'm not aware of it. That for me, that was more response to Heights book on the caudal mind. I thought. Okay, fair enough, the coddling of the American mind, what's driving this? It's not just ideas. It's a huge demographic switch. It's a huge transformation in the way. We raise children or 10 years older when we have our children. Now, that's a lot older. You know, when you're 18, you have a kid, you're still a kid. And
There's some wildness that's perhaps not so good about that. But there's also perhaps a higher proclivity to go off and live your own life. And then, you know, the how much children, how much should your children be left on their own? Answer is as much as they can. Tolerate.
And how much is that? Well?
You find out with each child, but it's certainly possible to not deprive your child enough.
so,
I've realized that it's scary when you find a thing that you're going to fully commit yourself to the pursuit of especially if it's excellent, that you're going after. Because there's no more room for your inadequacies to hide anymore. You can't decide to change direction and do something else. If things get tough, there's no more, ejector seat, right? I've committed to this. This is my thing. This is one of your rules, you know, commit to something is
committed to, at least one thing as
hard as you can and see what happens. Yeah.
Precisely, aim yourself in One Direction. And I had a rule with my clients because, you know, you might say, well, I've gone halfway down this path and I found out it's wrong. So, how do you distinguish that from just giving up? Well, that's a really hard question. Right? It's a moral hazard because it's inappropriate to continue in a direction. You now realize to be wrong, but it's also inappropriate to give up and use that rationalization as an excuse. And how do you distinguish
especially seeing as we're not transparent to
us? Well, right.
Actually, so that is genuinely a moral hazard. So one of the principles that I tried to abide by, in my therapeutic discussions was you can change course as long as the next thing you do is equally or more difficult because that's a check against just giving up.
So you want to discipline yourself so you can get yourself organized so that you can go in a particular direction. So that when you find the right direction, you can really go in that direction and that does require an apprenticeship of sorts, and it might not matter in some sense. Exactly what the apprenticeship is as long as it is rigorous, right? And so that's sort of a bridge between moral relativism and moral absolutism.
There's lots of games. You can play. It's not that obvious a priori, which is the best game. So that's kind of a morally relative stance. There's multiple playable games, but then the absolute is. Yeah, but you have to play one of them. You have to learn to play one of them. Have become an expert, at least one of them, and then that's not a relative proposition and I believe that's true. That seems to me to be the case. So you want to commit to something.
Thing. And then you, when you commit to something, you require yourself to bring all of your disparate, disparate components.
Moving in a single Direction United in a single Direction. So it's a unifying to unifying act and then once having been unified well, then you can bring that Unity to bear on a variety of different tasks, but you have to bring it together first. So and that that makes sense developmentally. You see children start out.
As a disparate bundle of motivations and emotions, sort of Warring with one another. And then they can integrate that into single games that they can play with themselves. And then they integrate that with games, they start to play with other people and all of that is integration. It's not subjugation. It's not repression, not if it's a good game, it's integration. You want to get integrated because then you have all the horses that are pulling your chariot pulling in the same direction and you're much more likely to get to where you want to.
Do that and also much more likely to specify a good place to go. So, that's another reason. That's something else. Conservatives have to teach young people, which is, well, get yourself disciplined. Well, why? Well, not, so you're a slave but so that you could be a master.
To use a terminology that you're not supposed to use anymore. But, you know, this is in relationship to yourself, not to others.
So yeah, and to begin with, you have to accept an external Master because you just don't have the wisdom to do that for yourself or the ability or the opportunity often. Everybody knows this, you know, they feel bad when they decide they're going to put get themselves in good shape and go to the gym and lasts like three days amps. Yeah, and then no one's happy about the fact that they've quit.
And they braced themselves for it, and we know that we need to go through a disciplinary process. We need to subjugate ourselves to a disciplinary process. That's part of the problem with the constant harping about the, you know, oppressive patriarchy. So what you need a disciplinary process.
So well, that's just oppression and slavery. It's like no, it's not.
No more than a game. Is not a good game. Good game isn't oppression and slavery. We
saw was it being on time. Being punctual was laid at the feet of some oppressive superstructure. See if Gap
obviously. Yeah, it's utterly imbecilic. I mean, even at a scientific level, there's no that straight conscientiousness, by the way, to be punctual part of orderliness, and dutifulness industriousness. There's no evidence whatsoever that that varies by ethnicity or race.
Supremacy. Yeah, or Supremacy and it there is evidence that if you are like that
you are because I'm praying you are more
likely to succeed. It's one. It is the most determinating. It's the most, it's the most potent personality predictor of success in algorithmic. Domains managerial, administrative domains. So hard work works. And in fact the degree to which hard works is actually the one metric.
Of the health of a society.
But the higher the correlation between conscientiousness and outcome the healthier the society. Well, obviously why? Well, you want the bulk of the credit to go to the people who are the most productive? I mean not because not even in some sense because they deserve it because what does deserve mean exactly? It is because they deserve it. But that's a black box that word. It's because if you want them to keep making stuff, you have to do that and you want
Eat them too, because well or what you don't want food. You don't want shelter. Why would you not reward? The people who provide it differentially?
It's just your own, even your own narrow self-interest would require that. So
talking about committing to one thing and the inevitable pain of there, not being an easy, get out anymore. I've decided that this is my thing. I'm going after it. Yeah, it's a bit
useful to stick, a temporal parameter or an accomplishment parameter on it.
That's one of the reasons why I use of having 16
months. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm going to get this degree, no matter.
What? Well, it's a time limit. It's not your whole life, but you're committed to that. And then you do box yourself in. It's like, well, I'm in this box. I have to make the best of it. That's right. You're in this box and you have to make the best of it and you might say, well, I don't want to be in a box. It's like, are you so sure you don't want to be in a box? A box is a fortress, the walls, keep the dragons away. You want to be in a box. Paradise is a Walled Garden.
It's not a garden Without Walls. It's got walls, right? You have a house. It has walls. You have a room. It has walls.
You don't want to be outside of a box, pick your damn box and then figure out how to make it into a garden. Well, I want a box Without Walls. It's know you don't it's nothing but snakes. Yeah, he
spoke about this last night in relation to relationships and he said that when you commit to somebody there is the inevitable pain that any future catastrophe is going to need to be worked out in a difficult way between you and the person that you've committed to as opposed to you being able to go. Oh well.
I'm out of here. The side chicks a warm on tender in any case I'm off.
Yeah, right, right, right. Well, that was something I really learned from Reading Carl, Jung. He thought about marriage as he used alchemical symbolism as
Purification requires Heat.
Heat and pressure.
And so you have a container and it gets hot and that's when you want to leave. That's when the changes can take place and sometimes they have to be radical to maintain the relationship, very radical. But hopefully those radical changes are positive. But what makes you think you'd make them if there wasn't a fire lit under you and one of the fires is I can't escape from you. Here. We are locked in combat right here. We are in this adversarial relationship and official this are exactly beneficial adversary. Yeah. There's no out except
Through and there's no evidence that through will work.
but,
And so that's part of the utility of The Vow is turn the temperature up.
And you know, you could say well I'll Escape but the problem with that is
Escape to where you're not going to have another relationship. And if to the degree that you brought the catastrophe to the previous relationship, which is at least a 50/50 probability. Right? What makes you think? You're not going to bring it to the next
relationship? Do the common denominator between all of the
extractive have you? I've had many bad relationships, like really. I've never met anyone. I can trust. Okay.
Everyone is motivated by power. So what's the common denominator here? Exactly. So, you know, It's tricky because I've seen lots of people in my family have been divorced which is the case in virtually every family. And I don't feel like I'm in a position to shake my finger at people and say, you know, you failed and with more effort you could have succeeded that's not up to me to decide and many of those people.
I have gone on to have more successful relationships, the second time around, but that doesn't belie the initial point. And besides, even the people who went through a divorce wanted to get married again. They still see utility in The Vow and the container. So, you know, you can't make these things into inviolable absolutes 0 divorce 0 drug 0, climate change.
That's that isn't how the world Works partly. Because there's always a snake in the garden, right? There's no zero.
not without the application of
increasingly totalitarian Force has to be some leeway, but you don't blow the whole system's apart just to provide some leeway. It's a very difficult thing to negotiate.
You know, I've had clients who had partners that really couldn't be negotiated with the whole idea of negotiation wasn't negotiable, and I didn't see, they really had any choice to either maintain the millstone around their neck and drown or to leave.
It's an awful choice, but that doesn't mean that marriage is a prison that no one should ever enter.
It just means that things are complicated.
Optimizing for absolutes, always ends up in Cal Newport says this about email really interesting Insight. You say is that one of the problems that you have with anything is when you drive the cost down to literally zero you end up with a ton of very weird externalities that you didn't think of right. And he made some argument that every email should cost five pence. Right? Right. If every male cost five pence you would receive 90%
Fury, right? Right, right. Yeah the proverb it's very
We've wrestled with that very frequently building these programs to help people. So, with my colleagues, both of whom are psychologists one and clinical psychologist, want to research psychologist, we built personality test to help people understand their personalities, which also produces a couple's report so that you can understand the differences between you and your partner at a mental level. And we produce this Suite of writing programs that help people write an autobiography and an
Jesus of their virtues and faults and a plan for the future. And you know, one question is well, why not give it away? And the answer is because zero is not the right cost. Now what the right cost is that's really tricky. Well, that's why you have markets is to determine what the right cost is zero. It's like we've sold way more of these than we would have ever given away partly because people presume that if it costs nothing it's worth nothing.
And partly because it isn't free. We actually worked. Well, one of my partners were pretty much full time for 15 years on this, at subpar wages, making a tenth of perhaps, of what he could have made in the private domain. Like if he would have gone out and marketed his skills because he's a brilliant programmer. He has a PhD in Psychology. Extraordinarily educated unbelievably accomplished. He could have made a fortune.
In the private and other private Endeavors, he worked at subpar wages for 15 years before we had any success on this front at all. So it wasn't free by any stretch of the imagination. It was unbelievably expensive for us to do this. And so, then to, and then to say pillory, because somebody might say, well, if you were really interested in the welfare of the human race, you wouldn't be making money off your Redemptive Endeavors. It's like
What do you know about it? Exactly. If you ever tried to build something and Market it, do you have any idea what that entails get like a first of all, have you built something that works that scalable that would help you've demonstrated that? It worked, you've done all that and that's like your 5% of the way their body because you think now you've got a good thing that people will line up to use it. 95% of the problem is marketing and communication. Have you ever tried to communicate about a product that you've built?
No, and you're telling me that somehow I'm malevolent because I'm trying to make enough money off this to justify its existence, to make sure that I've designed it in a way that people actually want. You can tell that because they'll pay for it in a way that will sustain it and allow it to grow, while simultaneously trying to reward the people that developed it. That's all wrong. Is it? And you know that
So, no, I'm I'm, I have a set of empty-headed axioms about inequality and I'm judging you morally because of their what, in judicious application because that's easier than thinking. That's where that argument goes. It's
just a rational people price is an indicator of quality and it's a commitment device.
It's a rough indicator, but it's better than any other indicator we have. Yeah, you know, generally if you want to buy a suit, a more expensive suit is better, but not
always people hack this, right? This. Yeah.
That's right. In the online space. They decide to ratchet up the price of something that should have been 1/10 or 1/100. I thought this about James clears Atomic habits. It was the best-selling non-fiction book in the world last year, 2021 and it's great. And he's sold this book for whatever eight pounds on Kindle and 12 pounds for a paperback. If he decided to release an online course of atomic habits, 60 days to a new, you something, it would have been
Pants or 1,000, right? Right, you know, so there's this odd tension. Now that's happening between people who have the capacity to improve other people's lives where I know a lot of authors who are coming into the writing space from the online course space. That they're thinking, right? Okay. Well, I've I've made the money. Yeah. Now because there is so much disproportionate fee that people are prepared to pay for an online. Course. The reason that I think this is the case is because people are looking
four outcomes with a lot of personal development books and they feel that they are closer to the outcome by doing a course because it's going to be more applied as is our reading of us.
Well, it's also the case that hardly anyone reads and listening and watching is way more accessible to people way more like 10 times more and this is actually going to start in his already affecting the, the author Market, I would say, I mean, I talked to Sam Harris about this a while back, but whether he was writing something and he told me, I hope I get this right, and certainly not a criticism.
Salmon, any case that the opportunity cost is too high. I mean, look with a video, the video we're making right now is probably going to be watched by a million people. If I wanted to write another book that reached a million people, it would take me two years of writing and then a year of marketing and the probability that will happen. Even though I'm already a successful author is still extremely low, whereas we can do this in two hours and reach a million people. Was it
some studies perpetually perpetually finding more urgent things.
Things to do. Write something like
the right. Right, right. And and I mean the degree and the rapidity of Communication online is insane. Think
about your, who was the guy that you did that? I won't watch you do the lecture series on in Nashville. Who was the
Piaget Piaget. Yeah, right. How
long does it take to two half days,
plus prep? Three, something like
that, but three hot days plus a week of prep or something like that.
Right? Right.
How will those man? Yes,
absolutely. Well, and
There's no leg to publication, right? And it's an Ever growing platform and it's accessible to 10 times as many people and it's just as permanent as a book. Now, you might say why ever write a book that's actually a real question. It's a question. I've asked myself because some of the themes that I'm exploring in my next book, I've already talked about in YouTube videos. Let's say, and they've had quite a explosive reaction to some of the ideas. I talked about the nature of the
Fiction. And and this snake, the relationship between the image of the crucifixion and the image of the snake. I talked about that on Rogan and that was like two weeks ago and I think probably five hundred thousand people have seen that clip. Like that's more than a best selling book instantly. So why am I writing the book? And the answer is there's nothing that requires you to think more deeply than to write a book. And so there's still an intellectual advantage to that and a lot of the things that I'm able to say. So
Let's say like I did on Rogan, you know, it took 30 years to think
because he's wrote those who yeah, exactly why I find this my newsletter. I do it once a week and it synthesizes, whatever. I've learned of the last seven days, right? Takes me, you know, a couple of hours to write or whatever and it's less than a thousand words. It, you can read it in 3 minutes, 3 minutes Monday. Hmm, and so much of the stuff that I value. Now that I talked about with friends or on podcasts is something that imposter adaptation, you know, that was something I've been thinking about. I wonder if I can
In write this right. In 500 Words. I wonder if I can get it down in casual language, but does it concretize is what you do? This is why I say people that don't have an outlet where definitely if they don't have conversations, but also potentially if they don't have the right Unity to write about what they think about. What they think is that you just your thoughts are just Notions that just this. It's like a
low-resolution
ephemeral very difficult to grasp wishy-washy thing, put it into words, outside of your brain, put it into words. Say it to someone a writer to summarize.
One. See what happens. Then it concretize has things.
Well, it also added sit because so when you're writing part of it is revelatory you write down what you think but you select what you think from the multitude of Revelation. So you don't write down everything, you think because you can't. So you have to select right away and that's editing and then when you actually technically added what you've written, the same thing. Happens, you shrink it. You you organize it you make it coherent, you, get rid of what's irrelevant. And so, that's tightens up your thinking. And then if you're speaking with someone,
About what you're thinking. It's the same thing because they'll object or they'll reward some of it. And so that's all that dialogue is some of it to the generation of new ideas. But a tremendous amount of it is editing. What's already? You've already revealed to yourself in this very vague sort of dreamlike wait, so
anything you want to say before we finish
up.
I'd like to thank everybody who's watching and listening and to thank you and your crew for making this possible. Mean you guys, you know, you put a lot of effort into this. Come over from the UK with your crew and you set this up professionally and and it's a straightforward interview with no tricks. And so that's not an easy thing to manage and I appreciate the opportunity and that's about that.
John Peterson. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. Good to see you.
Chris.
Thank you very much for tuning in. I really hope that you enjoyed that episode as much as I did flying out to Texas to do that in person was a real adventure and a total trip. So yes, if you did enjoy it, make sure that you've hit the Subscribe button. It's the only way that you can ensure, you will never miss an episode and it supports the show and it makes me very happy indeed. So just go and go and press the Subscribe button for me. Don't forget you can receive a yours.
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