Jordan Peterson & Matthew McConaughey REVEAL The 5 Steps To CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

We live in a time where if you make a mistake, you can be shredded. And I would say to some degree, the more visible you are, the more...

So never fully lost my identity, but have calibrated and had to recalibrate and had many, many walkabouts to go check back in with myself, let memory catch up, and have a Socratic dialogue with McConaughey and end up forgiving stuff and.

Then saying, you,'re not as motivated as you could be, 'cause you don't yet have your thing to run away from. Because if you really want to be motivated, you want to be going somewhere and you want to be not going.

What's the thing in your life that was the hardest to do to deconstruct after the event so that it didn't consume you emotionally from the initial terror?

Health trouble. that has hit my family and me, it's been so devastating that I haven't managed that either. Like, you know, that's the thing. I suggest to people, no, that isn't even that. It's that, what have I found that you do about terrible things? Generally, you don't run from them, especially if they're not avoidable in the future. Generally, you stand, confront, decompose, understand, adapt. But just because you generally do that and it's the best bet doesn't mean it's definitely going to work. It's just the best shot you have at it. You know, it'd be lovely if something always worked, but if something always worked, people would never get sick and die. Right, and we do all the time.

So.

We do our best, but that doesn't mean that that always works, but it's still the best that can be done. It's still better than all the alternatives.

So how do you cultivate your own personal inner peace amongst the different changes that have come up? Whether the fame, the health challenges, personally, maybe challenges with family or friends, how do you personally keep a level of inner peace amongst the chaos?

I walk a lot, I exercise a lot, a lot. Like I'm walking about seven miles a day now and working out as well and that's necessary.

I take solace.

If you didn't walk and work out, where do you think you would be? Really?

Definitely. Yes. Yes, definitely.

Is that physically because you wouldn't be physically taking care of your body or because mentally and emotionally your peace would be chaotic and it would drive you to die?

That.

Wow.

Yeah.

So that you were saying, sorry, I was interrupting you.

Peace that comes to you if you're fortunate, and sometimes it doesn't come. I try to do things that I think are worthwhile, that seem worthwhile.

And that.

Gives me solace, I suppose. So I'm writing, I'm talking to people who I find interesting about things that I think are crucially important. I'm trying to learn and to communicate as a consequence of talking to these people. I'm trying to do what I can for my family and my friends and to do what I can beyond that as well in a variety of different ways. Those are all useful endeavors and they keep me going.

What have you found to be the best practices of managing mass attention, whether you want to call it fame, mass attention, mass audience, people, being fanatical about your message, your work, you as an individual.

Well, luckily that hasn't happened too much, the fanatical side of things. I've had the odd brush with people who were a little more persistent than was probably good. And, I could see lurking signs of mental health issues behind that, but fortunately very little of that has happened. that's certainly all for the good.

Because you're not living in LA, that's probably why.

Well, it could be, could be, but for whatever reason, I've been pretty fortunate about that. I talk over what I'm doing with the people around me all the time and try to keep it on the proper pathway to the degree that I'm able to do that. And to see if what I'm doing is justifiable and ethical. And we're all terrified of this, you know, to a degree that is very difficult to communicate. You know, we live in a time where if you make a mistake, you can be shredded. And I would say to some degree, the more visible you are, the more thorough the shredding.

Oh, right.

Yeah.

And so the cost of an error, an ethical error, is unbelievably high. The cost of the appearance of an ethical error is extremely high, much less the cost of an actual ethical error. And so we're very careful.

To act.

Ethically in every manner possible, appearance and reality.

Because everything's being watched.

Yeah.

Well, and I I mean, I have no idea how any of this looks from the outside, but my reputation has been on the line publicly many, many times. And partly sometimes outright accusations, sometimes.

As.

A consequence of things I hypothetically said, Sometimes there's a consequence of newspaper articles that have taken a particular twist. And God only knows how many times a consequence of my own inadequacies and errors. But every time that rises up as an issue, there's a two-week period where no one in my family knows if this is the time that it's just.

Going to go to hell.

Really?

Where it's all- oh, absolutely. Sure. Well, look at how many people it happens to and look how people respond, Ben. You know, it doesn't take a very big Twitter mob to chase anyone back into their hole. How do we chase a company for that matter back into its, on its heels? I mean, isn't that, doesn't, does that, is that how it looks to you? I mean, what do you think about this?

Yeah, I'm just curious, you know, as People, individuals, whether it be me, you or anyone, wants to build something, wants to have a goal and aim, as you talk about, and go after this thing that they care about and share their opinion, share their voice, have good intentions. Maybe someone doesn't like those intentions, but have good intentions. Is how do we, as human beings, think about reputation? And does reputation even matter anymore? If anyone can try to tear your reputation down, should we be focused on having a good reputation?

Yes.

But you should be more focused on deserving a good reputation.

What does that mean?

Don't do things you know to be wrong.

And even if you- Don't lie.

Don't be careless. I mean, especially if you're- See, I'm fortunate, I suppose. I put all my lectures online. So virtually everything I've ever said to a student is, I mean, obviously not, but a non-biased sample of everything that I've ever said to students is available. Well, it hasn't come back to bite me.

Right.

And that's hundreds of hours. Why? Well, because I've been fortunate enough not.

To have said anything fatal.

And, you know, maybe that's because I'm careful with my words. I don't want to attribute too much virtue to myself in relationship to that.

I know.

That good fortune plays an immense role in how things turn out for people and that you can get unlucky.

But.

You know, one rule I didn't write down is act so that you can speak of what you do. So there's two domains of lying, right? So one lie is A statement, the other lie is in action.

You know it's wrong.

You do it anyway. It looks to me like that's becoming riskier and riskier.

Right, people aren't doing that anymore because they're getting caught.

Yes, and the consequences are dire. Well, but then you think about this, you tell me what you think about this. One of the things that Carl Jung taught me again was that As we become more technologically powerful, the quality of our individual morality becomes an increasingly pressing social concern because if each of us are far more powerful than we once were for good and for evil. And so with this technological prowess comes an associated ethical demand. And I don't see a flaw in that argument. I don't see how that can be anything other than true. If technology multiplies your power, then it multiplies the cataclysmic consequences of your own immorality.

Right.

And if you did one thing 10 years ago and someone finds it, it could haunt you, it seems like, is what's happening.

There's no doubt about that. Not only could it, it will.

It will.

In all likelihood. You know, and that's a problem too, because of course people do make mistakes. you know, and, and I'm, I'm perfectly pleased that my teenage years aren't stored on YouTube, for example.

It must be terrifying.

Gone a long time ago.

Well, it must be terrifying to be a teenager now, knowing that your drunken foolishness at a party could become the next viral YouTube video.

I mean, yeah, I was lucky enough never to, I've never been drunk in my life. And that was a conscious decision because my, my brother actually went to prison for drugs when I was a kid, and I was in prison visiting room many weekends for many years and witnessing the consequences of doing certain things. So for me, I was like, I don't want to touch any of this stuff. I don't even care if it's like, I'm not gonna sell it, but I'm never gonna take anything. And I. But it doesn't mean that I didn't do bad things. Like, you know, I cheated, I lied, I stole. You know, I did all these things that I'm not proud of when I was. 10 to 13 until I got caught and I was like, oh, my actions actually affect a lot of people. And I remember the shame.

Well, it's normative behavior. I mean, if you look at adolescents, imagine there are adolescents who break rules all the time, including criminal, including legal rules. Okay, well, they tend to become criminal. It's too much. But then at the opposite end of the distribution are adolescents who don't break any rules, and they tend to develop internalizing disorders, depression, anxiety disorders, that sort of thing. So they're two constraints. So there is a certain amount of exploration of rule breaking that's a normative part of healthy development. But now, you know, you could take a chunk of that, a video of it, a record of it, and it's permanent. Can you imagine Not being able to forget your past.

Painful. So painful. Not even you forgetting it, but the world knowing your past, seeing it or witnessing it.

Yes, and sort of un- what would unexpectedly end at any moment.

Yeah.

Right.

What's your greatest fear? with the fame and the acknowledgement that you have at the level of you have it, what's the greatest fear you have moving forward?

Oh, that all do something to.

You.

Know, that all betray the people that I've been speaking to with, you know, that all be insufficient to the challenge in some manner. Ethically, particularly. But more than that, even just physiologically, let's say. So that's definitely it.

Did you ever have a goal to impact as many people? Was that part of your life's mission, that I want to reach more people than outside of the classroom? And, sell five million copies of my books and be so well known that you are. Was that ever a mission or was it always just, I want to learn and teach and if 10 people watch, great. If 10 million people watch, great.

I probably knew. I knew when I was working on my Maps of Meaning book that I was, look, I tried to write about the most serious problem I could find in the most serious way I could manage. And I thought, well, if this is a serious problem and I'm addressing it seriously, it's probably a serious endeavor and will have the consequences of that, whatever those might be. And when I started to lecture about what I had been thinking about and learning about, the impact was obvious.

And.

Unique in some sense. I mean, there are my lectures, the most typical response I got from students in my classes was, especially in the class on my first book, Maps of Meaning, was this course changed how I looked at everything. And I would say- My life, the.

World, the universe, God.

Yeah, or they'd say, well, I've learned all these things. I don't know how to talk about with anyone else, which was the same sort of thing. And, and a lot of the public commentary on my work is, it's similar to that. But, you know, in some sense, that wasn't a surprise because what I learned changed the way I looked at things completely, too. Absolute, completely one hand, like, completely in a revolutionary way. And so, and I, I.

I had.

A sense of that from, I don't know how old, very young.

You had a sense of that?

Four, five, you were young.

You had a sense that your life would impact millions of people?

Yes.

It was kind of like an inner dialogue or an inner calling or something.

That was- It was like a dream.

Yeah.

Sort of. Or the memory of a dream.

That's crazy.

Look, I talked to Jocko Willink the other day. I'm looking forward to releasing that. It was such a good conversation. I had such a good conversation with him. He made such this immensely tough person, tough guy.

Very.

He knew he wanted to be a soldier from the time he was like three.

Wow.

And he said, and don't be thinking that it was for any high noble reasons. I like, I mean, he's quite funny.

And, but I just want to destroy.

He states, it's like, this is my character. This is who I am. It's me. And, you know, with my kids, I could see who they were. They were the same person right from the time they were born. They developed and unfolded and all of that, but it was the unfolding of something that was there. It was the bringing of something there to light. It's shocking and surprising to me constantly and exactly what I expected at the same time. And that seems completely paradoxical. It's sort of like one part of me knew and accepts it, and the other part is too old and too much the way that I was to adapt to it.

Why do you feel like values are so important for you? And what did that lesson at that moment kind of standing up for your values against authority of a place that had you welcomed in, feeding you, housing you? How did you learn on that?

Well, let me answer that. I'll come back to what I think values overall mean and how they've helped me to get to where I am and go where I think we all hopefully need to go. But that story was, I was in Australia for a year, two weeks out of high school, I went over there. And for the first time, I was all alone. I was in a foreign place. I was forced into great introspection, existential questions of, you know, who, what, where, when, why, and how. I didn't have a crutch. I didn't have a car. I didn't have a girlfriend. I didn't have a job. I didn't have money. I didn't have my parents. I didn't have and I was lost in trying to find a bit of a compass and an anchor. And some odd things were going on for me and my relationships with some people there, where I was questioning my own sanity. And I was kind of going along with everything. And that moment where I was asked to call someone mom and pop was a seminal moment because in my chaotic life, in my anarchic brain that I was living in at the time, That was the first bit of real clarity that I was like, no. That is not open for discussion. All these other odd things that have been happening to me, I've been tallying up to, oh, it must be a cultural difference. It must be a cultural difference. This was something that I went, culture my backside, man. I don't care. Place, time, whatever, that's not negotiable for me. So I said, no. And it was very clear. And it gave me clarity. It gave me some identity. And it was just an obvious, thing to deny or that I could never call someone. So I mean, look, the values are inherent in that, but that helped me, that really helped with my sanity to have that sort of, that sort of something that was so clear to me that was black and white. I needed that at that time in my life. It's hard to find those things in life in general, you know, and how many times do we call, you know, the compromise a shade of gray when actually the right kind of compromise is the eye of great light and truth. At the same time, we feel like we need as humans, something to grab a hold of, something to grasp hold of. It can be very good for us, it can also be very dangerous for us. Look at what's happening now in our nation. The divide is people running to the extremes because they need something to hold on to, to have an identity, to feel like they have a purpose, to have a foot on the ground in these chaotic times we're in. But the values of family, what that means, the values of loyalty, the values of accountability, responsibility, the responsibility of of freedom, the freedom of responsibility, fairness, those are things that I was raised on that I've found that are never going to go out of style. And I actually think we could all double down on them personally and as a society now.

For sure.

You talked about identity. Is there ever a moment in your life after that moment where you lost your identity, where you felt like I'm losing the grasp of who I am? I know you talk about in the book of like looking yourself in the mirror a lot and asking that question of are you happy with what you see in the mirror when you're looking was there ever points where you lost it fully and you had to kind of reach?

I've never lost it fully. I've never lost it fully. I have a pretty good threshold and a pretty good quick trigger for if I'm not feeling fully myself, I need to go remedy it, which may be taking a walk about myself with the backpack for 22 days to Peru or Africa or meditating or praying or going and sitting still for a while. or going back to what I know I can rely on, family, and sitting there and clearing my head about all this other ambitions that I may have in my head. I've never lost it fully. And if anything, it's been a nice, I would say a good trait of mine, that my trigger is very quick for if I'm starting to feel imbalanced or lack of identity, not understanding exactly who I am, my feet are maybe not on the ground, maybe my head and my heart and my spirit and my loins are not aligned. you know, I always like to say, let's have an auto bond. When we're really rocking, we have an auto bond between our head and our heart and our spirit. Just boom.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Sometimes that gets blocked and you start going, wait, it feels like a two-lane highway or main, and that's now down to a one-lane blacktop. I need to take a minute. I gotta step back and clean it out and widen up the lanes here and get aligned again. So thankfully, I've had a pretty good short trigger and threshold for realizing when I'm feeling like, oh, I'm headed that way and I need to, do something about it. So never fully lost my identity, but have calibrated and had to recalibrate and had many, many walkabouts to go check back in with myself, let memory catch up and have a Socratic dialogue with McConaughey and end up forgiving stuff and then saying, enough's enough with this other stuff. And you're the only person that I'm stuck with McConaughey, so we better figure out how to get along.

You got to have good company with yourself. What's the thing that's been the hardest for you to forgive?

That's a good one. I can forgive others much easier than I forgive myself.

So the thing with you that's been the hardest to let go of?

Thing for me. You know, there's no deep, dark crimes in my closet. There's no, real violence or whatever really hurts someone. I've been, I've been, I've got times where I've been ugly. And I did not know or realize at the time, especially the life that I live now in the last 25 years, that my words coming from me with my platform and somebody's perception of me can come out to you in bold print. and from a large megaphone and can mean more things that I'll, things that may tickle me, I've noticed can bruise others. And I bruised some people along the way and didn't notice it until after and didn't notice the impact it had on them. I'm like, what? Really? Oh, I thought that was, oh, so I've had, I've done that and I've tried to, I haven't, swept everything up and made full amends yet. And I'm happy to say, I think it's a pretty short list. It's not a long list, but I've done that and I have some guilt.

Over that and I still have some amends to make with that.

Really?

So you feel like you haven't fully.

Forgive, let go or... I need to make amends. I think I've let go, but I don't think I can fully let go.

Until I make amends with them. You've forgiven yourself for what you did or how you communicated, but you haven't... Yeah, that wasn't cool.

But my intent, you know, we have to watch this, I think, a lot in life is what we mean to say and what's actually being received can be, there can be a gap between that.

Absolutely.

I mean, I'm all for intent. I think I write about this in the book, the words are momentary, the intent is what's momentous. And I think we could have some more amnesty and forgiveness on this, the way we're attacking words and the value of giving words these days. and. But there's times that my intent's been misconstrued. There's times. Look at it. It happens all the time in a doggone email. If someone puts an exclamation mark, if you're having a special morning, you think they're yelling at you, but.

Right.

If you're not a special morning, you think that, oh, yeah, they're really happy. So you don't get that. Do you need the Emoji, you know, to let you know how I'm feeling or what I really mean by it? And that gets. It gets. It can. Some of it can. You can. You can miss the intent or. Or get someone at a bad time and they don't receive it how you meant to. And so I've got some amends to make with some people in my past. And I procrastinated some of that because I know they're going to be, I feel they're going to be long, long, drawn out conversations. I may be wrong. They may be like three minutes. The person may go, oh dude, I forgave you that long time ago.

I forgave you that. We're good. Isn't there a chapter in your book about taking hills? Yeah.

Climbing hills?

Yeah.

Would that be a hill for you to climb, which is like, doing the hard thing and addressing the thing that's going to take a long time or it's not going to be uncomfortable?

Well, there's climbing hills and there's also it's about handling the no's or the crisis is in life. If we handle the no's, they're actually more important than even handling the yeses sometimes. Meaning, I've always tried to practice if I get offered Script, say, for a movie. And I form a relationship with so said director or producer. And then it comes a time, you know, I'm got five scripts maybe I'm working on. I formed a relationship walking down the line forward with, say, three, four, five different directors and gotten to know them, had a drink with them, had a meal with them, talk to them on the phone, know about the family. And there comes a time where I'm gonna have to say no to two out of those three or four of those five.

Wow.

Well, it's very easy to tell my agent to go, just let them know. But I've tried to practice. I'll let them know either in person or by a phone call. And those calls are hard because each one of those directors thought I was going to be a yes. Right? And so while those calls were hard, when I hung up the phone with them, I gained more respect. They respected me more for making the hard no call. And I noticed that more and more we realized that like that people are big boys and girls. They kind of understand when they're told no or when someone's turned down. It's part of it. And if we realize that even if we ask the question, 50% of the answer could be a no, no matter how well this is going. And that comes and that's inherent in the request. The answer could be yes or no. And when we hand our nos personally, by making that personal call or doing it in person, I found that that's been an additive. and compounding assets in my future.

I think we also gain confidence and belief in ourselves that we can take on challenging things in the future and we have more pride in like, hey, I did the hard thing. It's kind of like this self-reward of like, wow, okay, I believe in myself. I can do this. I don't need to always pass everything off to someone else.

No, no. I mean, that chapter about taking the hill, or, you know, it's also about not creating false drama when it's not needed. And I see a lot of people do that and I've fallen into susceptible to do it as well. The drama is going to come. Real drama is going to come. Someone's going to get sick.

All right?

Someone's going to get hurt. We're going to really screw up and then have to handle it. Something's going to happen or the world's COVID is going to come. Something's going to come. That's real. And so don't look for the false drama. when it's not there. And people have a habit of it. I've done it before myself. And that's sort of the inverse of take the hill and climb the hill is there's an art to running downhill, which I write about in the book. When things are going well, don't trip yourself in face plant because it's going too good. Don't get nervous, oh my gosh, this is going so good. No, embrace it and stay in stride because the uphill will be there in a minute. and you'll have to break a sweat and it'll be hard again. Yeah.

How did you not self-sabotage when you were just getting hit after hit and opportunity after opportunity and you were going downhill? How did you not do that? Were you self-sabotage? And what do you recommend for other people so they don't do it when the opportunities are great?

Great, great, great, great topic because I have tripped myself running downhill before. I have face planted, you know, broke my nose to proverbially make sure I was felt. It's like you don't need to feel that hard. You know what I mean? We don't need to draw blood, McConaughey, just to make sure we can feel. So there's been times I've not been graceful when I was running downhill. But I shook hands with the fact that, okay, obviously it means you give a damn, McConaughey. Obviously it means you're trying to read through the mendacities of life. You're trying to get down to the common denominator about what really matters to you. you, you're trying to understand all this affluence and things coming to you that you never had yesterday that now you have and you want 80 hours in a day, but they're still only giving 24. I gotta get some discernment in here. And for me, I've had to, I've been, had the ability and I have taken what I call Fuga Mundi, a walkabout. I have taken those solo trips with myself. I have, what we talked about early in the conversation. gone to a place where I could hear myself think, where I could get my head and my heart aligned. In those times of great affluence, sometimes it's all heady. And I have a piece in the book about when you can, ask yourself if you want to before you do. Well, in times of great influence, we have a lot of I can in front of us.

Lots of opportunity.

And too many options can make a tyrant out of anybody. Yeah. So, it's a very heady thing and sometimes that's times when it's like, okay, this all makes sense in my head, but I don't really feel it inside my spirit. I don't know if it's really me, if it's really good for me, if this is going to turn me on and help me be and feed me. But geez, I mean, I've never had the option before. It sounds awesome. I mean, yes. Well, that's not a bad thing to do, but we got to check in on that because you can look up and the tank can be on reserve.

Yeah.

When you look in the rearview mirror and go, whoa, I over-leverage myself with things that did not feed me and pay me back. And so how do we need to take that time to go check in? And it can be a hairy, hairy time, man, because the answers don't come quickly sometimes.

Yeah.

And when they don't come and you're shaking monkeys off your back and you're not doing your own company and none of it makes sense and it's all confusing and you're looking over there and you want to go, whoa, you want to go to, entertainment or communication or you want to pick up the phone or you want to drink earlier or one of those things that come up to mask that, you gotta try to hold back and say, no, I'm going to sit in this discomfort. This is a prudent, a penance I am taking to get to know myself and listen to myself. And there's prudence in it.

Why do you think so many people try to resist discomfort when so many great things come from being in discomfort? Why do we resist it?

I mean, Look, we all like pleasure over pain. But I think what we forget sometimes is that there's a greater pleasure that can come with going through a pain. I mean, you can have little pleasures if you don't. I mean, it's admirable to see some people that are like, just glide through life forever. Woohoo. Those people are not really ambitious though, I find. They don't really, they're not really on the chasing down a better self or chasing down a higher existence or chasing down a different truth. And it's admirable. It's fine, it's fine. If you can be the kingdom of your own castle and that's the world you live in and that's just how you walk and go, bravo, as long as you're not harming other people. But if you go through resistance and you choose resistance at the right times and you go through it, You have greater, more evolved pleasure on the other side of it.

So true.

Responsibility and freedom, that relationship is really at the core of a lot of this.

That's true.

There's a responsibility to freedom and freedom in the responsibility. And the responsibility is the hard work. You know, the freedom's the Saturday. The freedom's what we want. The responsibility is what we need. You go through what you need. When what we want actually is what we need and what we need is actually what we want. that's the honey hole where, hey, I look as good as I feel and I feel as good as I look. Ta-da! you! know, where we're selfish and selfless at the same time. That's, I know what I'm chasing.

When we take responsibility and we have structure, which you've talked about also, and kind of have those, not limits, but you have some structure and some boundaries, you can really be flexible and free within those boundaries. which I think is powerful. But if we have no responsibility and no boundaries, it's hard to really create that.

There's no form. The anarchy. I mean, let's go all the way down to the basics. Gravity. Without gravity, there's no form. And with that gravity, there'd just be chaos and anarchy. Some people do it the other way. I call this version what you were talking about, conservative early liberal late, meaning what are the rules of situation? Let me get my structure. Let me check my sandbox and make sure there's no glass and sharp objects in it. So I can, once I've checked all that, now I can blow in the wind and do back flips naked in the sand in my sandbox. Or now I get on my 16 lane highway that I've checked out, I've seen it's clean, and I can swerve all through those lanes. Some people go the other way. They jump off the cliff and say, I'll figure it out on the way down. That's also You well, it's not how I choose how I've found it works.

For me, but it sounds like values are really important to you identity and responsibility are important to you. Why do you think why do you think it's so hard for the younger generation the millennials? Why is it so hard for them to find their identity? Take responsibility and develop values and what advice would you have for the youth on how to find all three?

Yeah Look, I'm going to go back to a version of saying, too many options can make a tyrant of any of us. This, look at the world that a lot of our young people are living in. We're all connected, but nobody's with each other. Their world is massive. They have more outreach. than any of us ever have. But they're more isolated than ever before. So it's inevitable human nature. Me, I'm betting you, I've got, I feel sound with myself. My spirit feels good. I've got three children and a wife. But even I'll have a different reaction if you give me a thumbs up on my comment or a thumbs down.

Even you, the great Matthew McConaughey.

Even if it's just, well, wait, what was that about? Is that, you know, was that a constructive criticism or do you just not like me? Were you gonna put a thumbs down anyway? Or what was the thumbs up about?

It can affect you.

And so a lot of our youth is living in that world where their emotional feelings about themselves and their own identity is based off your reaction, strangers' reactions, some of them which may not have even read or cared about what you were actually putting out and didn't care about the entire And that can affect you. I'm not saying, and so I think we got it, there's a responsibility to that world that we, to whatever extent the millennials live in it, there needs to be, they need to edit and govern back themselves with what they allow themselves to be out there, how proverbial and naked they are, to like, I'm sharing it all with the world. I'm sending it out. to a bunch of strangers, and they're gonna come back to me and let me know who I am. Wow. Uh-. No. Check in. And remember this, you millennials, that like, dislike comment that you put today, that's gonna outlive you. It's immortal, it's permanent. You and I are not permanent. That comment is. Think about before you click and what you put out. Are you putting out something today that you're gonna look forward to looking back at? Are you putting out something today in your resume of life that is going to write your eulogy after you're gone, which is gonna introduce you forever when you're gone?

Why is there so much conflict in the world? Is it because there's so many different perceptions that people have? Well, what they think should be right or what should be wrong?

Sure. Well, part of it is part of it, of course, there's conflict because we have real problems. And so life is actually difficult, independent of psychological foolishness, let's say. Independent of the obstacles that we put in our own path.

It's already challenging.

It's already fatally challenging.

Right.

Life is the ultimate challenge.

We will die.

Yes, yes.

So there is a challenge.

Yes.

Well, uncertainty, fear, pain, all those things.

Yes, everything that goes along with suffering is a challenge. And it's the full challenge because it takes everything you have. And so part of the reason we disagree is because there are complex problems to solve. And then we also disagree because we're willfully blind and because we're more ignorant than than we should be, and we're not everything we should be. And we tilt towards malevolence from time to time, and we betray each other and ourselves. And so we take a bad lot in many ways and make it worse. Now, not always, obviously, and we don't have to, but that's sort of the baseline that we're working against. I think people are most disappointed in life when they're disappointed in themselves. You know, they see that they've made things worse than they had to be, even though the baseline can be pretty brutal. So, yeah, and so the book and all my lectures, I suppose, are put forward in an attempt to take the high-level philosophical abstractions and to make them into something that's actionable.

And to take the next best action in your life to improve your life. So we don't have to suffer as much.

Well, and hopefully also so that people around you don't have to either. So one of the things I've been talking to my audiences about is the relationship between responsibility and meaning, which is, what would you say? It's a constant refrain in the book. It's one of its underlying messages, let's say, or themes is a better way of thinking about it. If you start with the presumption that there's a baseline of suffering in life and that that can be exaggerated as a consequence of human and failing as a consequence of malevolence and betrayal and self-betrayal and deceit and all those things that we do to each other and ourselves that we know that aren't good, that amplifies the suffering. That's sort of the baseline against which you have to work. And it's contemplation of that often that makes people hopeless and depressed and anxious and overwhelmed and all of that. And they have the reasons. But you need something to put up against that. and what you put up against that is meaning. Meaning is actually the instinct that helps you guide yourself through that catastrophe. And most of that meaning is to be found in the adoption of responsibility. So if you think, for example, if you think about the people that you admire, well, you think about when you have a clear conscience first, because that's a good thing to aim at, which is something different than happiness.

Right.

A clear conscience is different than happiness.

Yeah.

Better.

Yeah. That's not better.

Guilt in yourself, you're not feeling bad about yourself.

That's right. You feel that you've justified your existence. Right. And so you're not waking up at three in the morning in a cold sweat thinking about all the terrible things that you've involved yourself in.

What you said to someone that you shouldn't have said or how you acted.

Or what opportunity you lost or yeah, or the things that you've let go that you should have capitalized on all of that. And so if you think about the times when you're at peace with yourself with regards to how you're conducting yourself in the world, it's almost always conditions under which you've adopted responsibility. At least the most guilt, I think, that you can experience perhaps is the sure knowledge that you're not even taking care of yourself, so that you're leaving that responsibility to other people, because that's pretty pathetic. Unless you're psychopathic and you're living a parasitical life, and that characterizes a very small minority of people, and an even smaller minority think that's justifiable. But most of the time you're in guilt and shame because not only are you not taking care of yourself, let's say, so someone else has to, but you're not living up to your full potential. And so there's an existential weight that goes along with that.

So, you suffer even more when you don't take care of yourself or take the best actions or do the work that you know you can do and you rely on someone else to support you financially, emotionally, physically, whatever it may be.

Yeah, well, because you're not only not being what you could be, you're interfering with someone else being what they could be, right? So, you're not only a void, you're a drain. Jesus, that's a because it's a catastrophe.

We usually don't even know it when we're in that situation because we're in.

A depressed state or we're... Or we don't want to see it. You wake up at 3:00 in the morning and you know. And then you think of the people that you... So you admire yourself or perhaps you can at least live with yourself when you're taking responsibility, at least for yourself. And so that settles your conscience. But then if you look at the people that you spontaneously admire, And so the act of spontaneously admiring someone is the manifestation of the instinct for meaning. Right? So this is partly why people are so enamored of sports figures, because the sports figures are playing out the drama of attaining the goal, of attaining a certain kind of, let's say, psychological and physical perfection in pursuit of the goal. That's the drama. And to spontaneously admire that is to have that instinct for meaning latch on to something that can be used as a model. And then that model should be transcribed into something that's applicable in life. You know, and you really like to see in an athletic performance, you really like to see someone who's extremely disciplined and in shape do something physically remarkable, but, and to stretch themselves even beyond their previous exploits because you really like to see a brilliant move in an athletic match. But you also like to see that person ensconced in a broader moral framework so that not only are they trying to win and disciplining themselves in pursuit of that victory and then stretching themselves so they're continually getting better, but they're doing it in a way that helps develop their whole team and that's good for the sport in general and that reflects well on the broader culture.

They're a great leader on their team, they're positive, they're good sportsmen against the competitors, not negative towards the other people they're lifting them up to, like the ultimate human.

That's right. So that they can work for their own improvement in a way that simultaneously works for the improvement of their team and for the sport. And then to the degree that that spills over into the broader culture so much the better. So that's all being dramatized in an athletic event. And it's really, it's not philosophical, it's concrete, right? It's dramatized in the world. that's what the games represent. And so, well, and it's partly because, well, in some sense, life is a game.

It is.

It is in that you're always, the analogy is that in life, like in sports, you're setting forth a name and then arranging your perceptions and your actions in pursuit of that name. And that you also generally do it while cooperating and competing with other people. right. That's also the game-like element as well. All of that's dramatized in athletics. Yeah. That's like philosophy for people who aren't philosophical. And I'm not being smart about that. It's like it really is philosophy for people who aren't being philosophical because it's played out, you know, and you can see it, too. You can see the spontaneous appreciation for the human spirit manifest itself when you see people rise to their feet spontaneously in a sports arena when they see someone do something particularly remarkable. See an athlete who's extremely trained stretch themselves beyond what you think is a normative human limit. And everyone celebrates that like spontaneously. So it's quite something to behold.

So taking back to responsibility and meaning when we're watching sports or someone do this act, what does this do for us in terms of responsibility and meaning?

Well, it helps us figure out what we can imitate. Gives us a model. Yes, it's a model.

It gives us a model of something that I respect.

Well, even what philosophy is, or even theology for that matter, is an abstract model. It's laid out in words. Now, the problem often is that it becomes so abstract that people don't know how to bring it back down to embodiment. Yes. Whereas something like the drama of a sports event is sort of midway between philosophy and action. it's not entirely abstracted because it's not only coded in words, it's acted out.

It's visual. You can see an example of what just happened. And you can try to reverse engineer.

How they did that. Well, yes, exactly. Well, at least you, the fact that you admire the person means that you might start to try to act like them. Now, it's not easy, and maybe that would mean, maybe that would mean that you start to discipline yourself with regards to a particular sport. But it might also be that you start to mimic or are at least affected in some way by their sportsman-like behavior, which is the ground of a certain kind of ethic. Because if you can play well with others, which is sort of the hallmark of a good sport, then that actually means that you're a reasonably sophisticated and civilized person. It's really important to learn to play well with others. That's the ground of ethics.

If you can do it there in that setting, then hopefully you could translate splitting into light setting.

Well, right. That's exactly right. That's what the goal. Well, that's what you hope for. Yeah. That's the goal of this. So if the, if the goal of the game is to put the ball through the ball into the net, then the goal of having games is to produce people who can take proper aim no matter where they are.

Right.

That's exactly what we're trying to do with, with, with, with Athletics. So, so I've been talking to my audiences a lot about that, about And well, there's more to it too, because if the background of life is there's an ineradicable component of suffering and that's complicated by, let's say, malevolence and the proclivity of people to betray themselves and others, which complicates it and makes it worse, then if you don't have a noble aim and if that isn't imbuing your life with sustainable meaning, then you fall prey to all the catastrophe, the pain and the anxiety and the anger that that suffering generates and that makes you bitter.

Because what I'm hearing you say is that, and correct me if I'm wrong, we must have an aim in our life no matter what stage of life we're in. And if we don't have some type of aim, even if for a few months of an aim of going somewhere or direction, we're gonna, the suffering is gonna be even more suffering.

Pointless.

Because we're already gonna face the greatest challenges in life. That's right.

You're stuck.

We're already struggling.

That's right.

There's no way out. Diversity is coming no matter what.

That's right.

If we have big goals or small little goal or whatever it may be, but it's gonna be less suffering if we have an aim.

Yeah, well, and not only that, it's worse than that even because the suffering is pain. There's zero meaning. Well, the suffering is pain and the suffering is anxiety. uncertainty, and the suffering is hopelessness. But the consequence of all that is that you get bitter. And when you get bitter, you get mean, and you get cruel, and you start to hurt yourself and other people. So it's not only that if you don't have a goal, you suffer. It's that if you don't have a goal, you suffer, and then you get cruel and bitter and resentful, and then you start to actively try to make the world a worse place. Because you can't suffer pointlessly without becoming and you can't become bitter without becoming cruel. So you need an aim. The question is, then the question of course, what you should aim.

Yeah, better aim.

Yeah, better aim. That's for sure. So then the question is, what should your aim be? Now we have a program. It's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today. I have this website called selfauthoring.com, and that program helps people write about their life. And so there's a past authoring program. To establish your aim, you have to know where you are. It's like you're trying to orient yourself on a map. You can't orient yourself on a map unless you know where you are. You also have to know where you're going. So those are the two relevant things. The past authoring program helps people write about their lives. So it's a guided autobiography. We ask people to break their life up into six epochs, six sections, and then to write about the emotionally important events in those in those epochs and to detail out why the positive things happened and why more of that could conceivably happen in the future and to detail out why the negative things happened and to try to understand why with an aim to not replicating them in the future. Because the purpose of memory isn't to remember the past. The purpose of memory is so that you figure out what went wrong when something went wrong so you don't duplicate it in the future. So that's the purpose of memory. And the past authoring program can help people catch up. And you know you have to catch up if you have memories that are older than about a year and a half that still cause you emotional pain when you think about them. Or if you dwell on them, they come spontaneously back to mind. Means you haven't. It means that there's part of your life that you haven't mapped out properly, and it still has emotional valence that's gripping you. You're still holding on to that story, or it's still holding on. to you. Right.

You haven't let it go.

Yeah, well you haven't been able to navigate your way through it. There's a pitfall there that you fell in and you don't know how to avoid similar pitfalls in the future and that's why your brain won't let it go. Because it's saying that's what the anxiety systems do. It's like this happened to you, it wasn't good. This happened to you, it wasn't good. This happened to you, it wasn't good. Fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it. That will never go away unless you fix it. How do you fix it? Well you have to figure out why it happened. right? That's the first thing is like how did you how was it that that situation arose to pull you down? And that's not simple. That's why well that's why we have the writing program because it's complicated to think it through. But you but if you face it and you and you meditate on it let's say and you do this voluntarily there's a pretty high probability that you'll be able to decrease the probability that will be repeated in the future.

So and this Go ahead, I don't.

Want to cut you off. Oh, well, the second part of the program helps people do an analysis of their virtues and their faults, same sort of idea. What's good about you that you could capitalize on? What's weak about you that you need to fix so that it doesn't bring you down? That's the present authoring, but the future authoring program is probably most relevant to you and your listeners because you're interested in helping people establish aims. We already talked about the fact that you need a name in life or that's where you derive your meaning and without that things go to hell and as literally as that can be taken. But it's not easy to ask people to say, well it's easy to ask them, what do you want in your life? It's a very hard question to answer because it's too vague and grand. So we help in the future authoring program, we help people break that down. so here's the situation. So you put yourself in the right frame of mind. So what's the right frame of mind? It's like rule two in this book. Treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping. You're someone that you are responsible for helping. So what that means is you have to start from the presupposition that despite all your flaws and insufficiencies that it's worth having you around and that it would be okay if things were better for you. So you need to take care of yourself yourself, like you're taking care of someone you care for. So there's a bit of a detachment in that. And then the next thing is, okay, so now look three to five years down the road. Okay, you get to have what you need and want, assuming you're being reasonable and that you actually want it, which means you're willing to make the sacrifices that would make it possible.

What do you mean by reasonable?

Well, that's the next thing. Well, within your grasp, that would be something.

What if something is out of your grasp? but you still push hard enough to get it. Well, then you need an incremental plan.

You need to break that goal down into steps. Not some crazy goal within a year.

That'S like, you haven't even done the work to master a skill yet. Yeah, I got it.

Yeah, well that's it. And you can have a high-end goal and more power to you if you do. Well, you need a pathway to it. You know, if it's 10 stories up above you, you need a staircase to get there, right? And so you have to build the staircase too. And so in the future authoring program, so you're asked first of all, okay, you get to have what you want and need. That's the proposition. But you have to aim at it. You have to define it and aim at it. So then the first thing is, okay, if you could put your family together the way you wanted it to be, what would that look like? And so that might be your siblings and your parents, but that also might be your wife or your husband and your kids, assuming that you're at that point in your life. you could have the family you wanted, what would that look like? Career, same thing. You get to have the career or the job that is within your grasp, necessary and suitable for you if you were taking care of yourself. How are you going to educate yourself? Because you're not as smart as you should be. There's a lot more things you need to know. So you've got to keep learning and moving forward. So you need to plan for that. How are you going to take care of yourself mentally and physically? right? So how are you going to avoid the catastrophic temptations, for example, of drugs and alcohol, because that pulls a lot of people down. You need a plan for that. You're going to be a social drinker? How much are you going to drink? How much is too much? What about your drug use? You've got to regulate that so it isn't a pitfall. How are you going to use your time meaningful and productively outside of work? Because you need to plan for that. So that's, and there's one other that's, Six in the morning, right? Yeah, I think there's seven. initial questions and I don't remember the last one. Oh intimate relationship of course. So you have, do you want a long-term stable intimate relationship? And if you do then how would you like that to lay itself out? You've got to have a vision for that because if you don't have a vision you're not going to aim at it and if you don't aim at it then you won't even see the opportunities when they arise. That's the thing that's so cool. I wrote about this in chapter 10 which is be precise in your speech. It's a chapter about the fact that aims structure your perceptions. So, for example, once you aim at something, your brain, literally, the perceptual structures in your brain, in your visual cortex, reorient themselves to calculate a pathway to the aim. And then what they show you in the world is obstacles to that path and, and open pathways to the path. That's actually how the world reveals itself. Just like, just like when you're driving in a car and you have a map, and you aim at a particular place, then all the things that are related to that place show up in the world. It's exactly the same thing because you are traveling through time and space, right? And you need a map. And so after you answer these seven questions and you're encouraged to do it badly because you don't have to get perfectionistic, just complete it. Right? Because a bad plan is better than no plan. It gives you something to improve. So even if you're a Aim is vague, and even if it's off target, if you start aiming and you see you're off target, then you can shift.

And you can make it more precise. You start to recognize what you don't want in that aim.

Yes, exactly.

Say, oh, I thought I wanted this, but I don't.

So let me re-navigate and figure out what I do want. Exactly. And you might have to try a bunch of things. Well, you will have to. That's why you shouldn't get perfectionistic about it. You will absolutely be wrong, but you won't be as wrong as you would have been if you were aimless.

Right. Right.

So it's a, so there's a bit of skepticism.

No man's land.

No man's land is not worse than going through. No man's room is worse than a bad path. That's exactly right. Ooh, I like that. That's a good one. That's a good one. And it's right. It's right.

You don't want to be in no man's land. Why did you use that phrase? Because that's right. That's exactly right. I think, for me, the idea of walking around aimlessly is like the worst idea in the world. It's like zero purpose, zero mission, zero certainty at all.

It's like walking around in no man's land aimlessly. But it's funny too, because in no man's land everybody's shooting at you, because that's a military term. No man's land is the space between everyone's positions. You bet. So if you're aimless, you're also at a place where everything is shooting at you. So it's a very good metaphor that came to mind. Yeah, well that's why we worked on it. That's very, very cool. So then we say, say to people, okay, look, now you've thought about this for a while. It's nice to do this over a couple of days too, because then you get to sleep on it, and that helps reorient yourself. So then, okay, now you write for 20 minutes. Don't worry about grammar, spelling. This isn't a composition exercise, right? You get to have what you want three to five years down the road. What does your life look like hypothetically? Write it out. Write it out. Okay, so then that's the first part. The second part of the exercise So now you've got your thing to aim at. You think, well, I'm motivated because I got my thing to aim at. It's like you're not as motivated as you could be, because you don't yet have your thing to run away from. Because if you really want to be motivated, you want to be going somewhere, and you want to be not going somewhere else.

Which typically is a pain, right?

Yes, a pain or anxiety.

Some domain of suffering and guilt.

I don't want to feel this anymore. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So, the other thing we ask people is, okay, now take stock of your weaknesses and imagine that you let them multiply. You got hopeless and you augured in and things were as bad for you as they could be in three to five years.

What are some examples of weaknesses that people might have?

They lie, they procrastinate, they avoid, they're grandiose, they're narcissistic, they're undisciplined, they're nihilistic, they're aimless, all of those things. Right? Victim mentality. They take the quick way out. They pursue impulsive pleasures. They sacrifice meaning for expediency. They don't take care of their basic responsibilities. They fight stupidly with their parents. They don't negotiate properly with their spouse. They are bitter at work because they haven't said what they have to say. They haven't thought through what they're doing tomorrow. They drink too much. They smoke too much. They take too many drugs. They don't regulate their workout.

Yeah.

And everyone knows, man. Everyone knows. And everyone's got a set of weaknesses that they know about. And so we say, all right.

What are some of your weaknesses? Like three weaknesses that you know right now you can still work on, and then three things that you think are really.

Well, a lot of things. A lot of things are things that I've taken care of in my life. Like I used to smoke when I was a kid. I smoked a pack a day. I used to drink a lot. I didn't work out. Like there I wasn't nearly as disciplined as I should have been. I wasn't as careful with what I was saying. And I said, my words were loose. My most likely negative outcome probably would have been I really liked to drink. Alcohol was a really good drug for me, obviously.

Is that why you did a thesis on that?

Well, partly. It was mostly because the opportunity came up for me to investigate drug and alcohol use. But I came from a little town in northern Alberta. that was a heavy drinking town. And that could have been a real trap for me. So anyway, so we have these people who say, okay, now you know your weaknesses and you know what particular hell you would descend to if you allowed yourself to descend into it because you've probably had a taste of it. It's like you really let that go and you're in a terrible place in three to five years because you haven't done what you should do. What does that look like? It's like everybody writes that down. Write it down. So you know. One of the things you want to have behind you, let's say you have to do something difficult, like go confront your boss. It's like, well, maybe hope isn't enough to encourage you to do that. You think, well, no, if I don't encourage, if I don't go confront my boss carefully and intelligently, then I'm gonna hate my job and then I'm gonna drink more, then I'm gonna end up in that little hell place that I designed for myself. It's like, oh, I'm not going there. I don't want to talk to my boss or I don't want to confront my wife or my husband. whatever it is, or my father, or my children for that matter. But if I don't... Then I'll resent.

Myself or resent the situation.

And I'm going to end up going down this terrible pathway. It's like... Because sometimes when you're moving forward, you have to do something difficult. You might think, well, why bother? And the answer is, well, so I don't end up in hell.

How about that?

Oh yeah! Oh yeah, there's that.

So, if you don't experience the pain now or the difficulty now, you're gonna have a deeper pain later.

Yeah, yeah, that's life.

Much deeper pain later. And that's why I think that you mentioned at one point is like putting ourselves in structured pain, like structured sense of feeling pain throughout the day, whether it be the tough conversation. I don't wanna do that. It's painful, but I'm going to because I know afterwards it's gonna probably feel better.

It's a bit of a sacrifice, right? So you sacrifice stability in the present for a gain in the future. That's the big discovery of human beings. And were you a big sacrifice works?

Exactly.

And were you a big athlete growing up?

No. No? No.

Well, I was a small kid and I skipped a grade. Although I skied and I went cross-country.

Skiing and that's individual sports things mostly with my dad. You'll understand then in order to improve.

As an athlete or in any sport.

You have to put yourself through daily pain. Yeah, right. If you want to achieve that model of excellence. that you watch someone playing basketball as a child and you see someone living this model, it's going to be 15 years of deliberate pain.

Yeah, that's a discipline. That's it. Yeah, well I worked out for a long time with weights, you know.

So, you know, you felt it every day. You didn't want to push through the pain, but you knew that it would.

Get you a greater result. Yeah, well and it's easier not to do it than to do it, but not in the long run. Yeah, exactly. You know, I really seen the benefits, for example, for weightlifting because I've watched people because I'm 58, 50, how old am I? 56.

Great.

No, I'm getting older and I really noticed the difference between people and when they age, between people who laid down a good physiological platform when they were young and those who didn't because by the, if you haven't worked out weights particularly, I would say you start to get pretty soft in your 30s and your cardiovascular system starts to go and really early. The whole other thing too is the best The best thing you can do to maintain cognitive ability isn't to do exercises like lumosity. It's not brain exercises that keep you sharp, it's exercise. So if you're 50, both cardiovascular and weight lifting, if you're 50 you can restore your cognitive function to the level.

Of a 30 year old through exercise.

Your mental function through physical activity. Yeah, well your brain is a very demanding organ and if your cardiovascular system is compromised then you get It's stupid. And so yeah, it's really...

The less you move and the bigger you get, the more stupid you become.

Yeah, well you compromise, you compromise its function because the brain is the organ that uses more... It's very metabolically demanding and so if you're not in good physical shape, then one of the things that suffers most greatly is your cognitive function. And so that's quite an interesting thing to see how tight that link is image is. So in the next part of the program, we have people. Now it's okay. Now you got your vision.

Yeah.

Even if it's a bad one, it's okay. That's right. Well, it's better than no vision at all.

Right.

It's something that you can improve. Well, think you're trying to get through a territory you don't understand. And here's your option. No map. A map that's not so good, but has some things about it. Or a great map. Well, obviously the great map is the thing you want, but the. The map that's something. is way better than the map that's nothing. Plus, as you explore, because of your map, you can start to fill in the details.

And you start to learn, you start to overcome stuff, and you start to.

Master skills on your journey, right? Yeah, well that's the other thing too, is like let's say you aim at something and you develop some skills along the way, and then you get like a third of the way there and you think, oh, that's not for me. It's like, well, yeah, fair enough, but now you've still got the skills you developed. you know exactly why it's not for you now instead of vaguely.

You don't have to keep going after that.

Exactly, exactly. Well, and you have a rationale. And then you can bring that wisdom back, even though it's not perfect, you can bring it back to your next plan.

And take responsibility for the next steps.

Yes, yes. And so as you plan, you get better at planning, which is the crucial thing. So then we say to people, take your positive vision and make it into eight stable goals, right? So, and then rank them in a hierarchy because you need to know what...

Like a top goal and then incremental goals.

Yeah, and that, well, that's the other thing is break the goals into incremental goals so that you have a reasonable probability of succeeding.

I remember watching the year you won, the Oscar, and I remember your speech was, has to be one of the most iconic speeches of all time from an award show. And you talk about chasing your heroes, your 10-year self in the future. I'm curious if you could put yourself 10 years from now, 60, because you just turned 50. What would your hero at 60 say about who you are today? Looking back.

Wow.

Yeah, it's a great question. And one I think we should all ask ourselves. have I had that great sit down with our future self? I think you'd say, make sure you trust yourself. Make sure you did a good job of trusting yourself, but you know what? You could have even trusted yourself more. You could even trust yourself more. You made some things, maybe you made some things a little too hard, maybe where you didn't need the resistance. Just sit back and trust yourself. So I made some things hard because you felt like you needed to feel it now. you've already done the work. You already laid the rails on the road just now. Right now, stay vital. Keep those rails greased. Keep yourself in shape mentally, spiritually, but overall, you've done it. You're doing good at trusting yourself. And I'm proud of how you, you know, my favorite thing about you, 50 year old Matthew, is that, Do give a damn and sometimes I wish you, what are you maybe giving yourself a break in places where you didn't. But you know what, that's who you've always been and shoot, now that I look in the mirror at 60, that's who I still am too. So anyway, thanks for getting me here to 60. It's great to see the kids all out of the house now and Me and our wife Camilla are having a great time, kind of like a honeymoon again. The kids are out of the house and we've got a new season in life. And you did a good job being a parent. You were a good father. And that was the thing you always wanted to be. It's the thing we've always known that we wanted to be, the only thing we ever knew we wanted to be. And you weren't perfect as a father, but you did a doggone damn good job as a father. Oh yeah, and let's keep rocking.

Let's keep living.

Yeah.

That's a beautiful reflection of your future hero.

I haven't had one of those before you. I had until just now. I haven't really thought about it that way. And thank you for asking that question.

Your father put a big impact in your life. He passed when you were, I think it was five days in shooting your first movie. Is that correct?

Shooting Days, Confused, First Movie Ever Made. yeah.

First movie August 17th 93. and you were.

20. so I'm 20. 92 22 I think so something we.

Have in common is when I was 22 my dad got into a near fatal car accident he was in New Zealand with his his girlfriend at the time my parents got divorced and his next girlfriend they were in New Zealand traveling I was 22 years old he got in a car accident was in a coma for three months and we didn't know if he was going to live or die. He's still alive today, but he's a completely different man. He's not there physically and emotionally like he was. It was almost like I lost my dad that day emotionally, mentally. We can have conversations, but there's a lot of amnesia. It's a lot of asking who I am and things like that of the past. But that moment for me made me, it was a rite of passage. You talk about rite of passages in your life as a man. and I would not be where I am today doing the things I'm doing today without that experience of essentially losing my father emotionally and mentally. And you lost him physically. He was gone physically from your life at the same age as I did. Where do you think your life would be if he was still here? Do you think you would be able to have the impact you have on humanity? Do you think you'd have the relationship, the children? that you have or would something, would things be different because you don't have what you call in the book that safety net?

It's a great question and I don't know the answer. I mean, you know, these existential questions are always fun to go over because it's all a mystery going forward. It's all a science looking back.

Yeah.

And we can connect the dots looking back. You know, I don't know what else I would be doing because this is just what I've done and I've only done it once and I've been doing it once. I do, maybe I would have, him passing on, and that year in Australia are two moments that I do often question, would I be sitting here right now talking to you with the life I have if that didn't happen? I'm very confident that I would have had some sort of enriched life that I felt satisfied and felt joy in living, if I'd have been doing something else. But at the same time, those moments, what I can really speak to is that I manned up when he moved on. I don't know how you felt when you didn't lose your dad physically, but emotionally, I, you know, a father for me, he was my safety net. Those values that he was teaching me, I still had in my hip pocket that, oh, if I only kind of, use them 85% of the time. I'm good because he's got my back. He's above law. He's above government. He's my safety net in case I really need him. So I'm not, I'm kind of half-assing these values he's teaching me. Or maybe I'm doing pretty good at him, but I'm not committed because I got him. And then he was gone. Basically. All of a sudden was like, whoa. Oh. And I remember this. I write about this in the book. I remember this was something that came to me. Just keep living came to me, which was about keeping his, his spirit and what taught me alive in life after he's gone, but also this four words, less impressed, more involved. I remember things after he moved on, things that were mortal in life that I had reverence for. Fame, money, success, people. And all of a sudden, while I still respected them, instead of looking up at all of them, they came down. to eye level. I looked them in the eye. They were mortal. I had full respect for them, that they were mortal. I could be involved with them. I'm looking them in the eye. Things that I looked down upon. I was condescending, patronizing, ah, geez, I don't like that. Look at her, look at that. All of a sudden, those things rose up to eye level. The world was flat. I could see further, I could see wider, I could see more clearly and I was standing taller and my head was higher, my heart was higher. And I was like, it's time to man up and become a man, Mccown, hey. And this is how you need to see the world. You need to have the courage to follow through. And that does not mean, you know, that is always not the most popular decisions. Quit, quit half-assing yourself, quit doing things just to get along or, or, or, or if you disagree with it. you know, we're not going to be that guy who makes the joke at the party that makes more people laugh, but everyone walks away disrespect anymore. You know, what are your, it was the beginning of understanding, Wendy, what are the choices you make? Again, the compounding assets that our choices, the choices we make, compounding assets for our future. How do we be more true and kind to our future selves? How do we start making some more choices, make choices that But look at my crook, they're gonna be brave, courageous choices that you can look in the mirror, if it works and go, Yep, I'm responsible. And if they don't work, you can go, Yep, that's on me. Quit living in limbo. You know, straddle in the fence here or there. Be smart, don't be foolish, don't dive in, courage to take more risks. Courage to get uncomfortable with that fame and be able to go, the world needs you here right now. The studio wants you to pick out a picture. You're as hot as can be, but I don't care. I gotta check out with, go spend some time with me to figure out this. The courage to do those things. I don't know if I'd have done those things. I had the courage to do them because maybe I would have still been stuck in, no, I'm so happy to be here. I'm so impressed to be here. I'm so thankful I have these options and these possibilities for success. Thank you. Well, if you're so impressed with something in your life, even our relationships, you.

Can'T really be involved in them.

If you're overly impressed with me or I'm overly impressed with you, you and I can't even have a real conversation.

Right.

Because one of us is holding the other on a pedestal. Look at our relationships.

Right.

Our girlfriends, our wives, our friends. If we hold them up on a pedestal, it's unfair. We don't really have a relationship with them. They're, they're, they're, we've, We've got them in this immortal bubble of being a superhuman or a superwoman. It's not fair to them. And then what happens in the reflection of their eyes? They see us the same way. Then we're both dealing with, we're both for rent. We're both not leveling. We're both too impressed with each other to be actually be involved.

I mean, it sounds like you learned a lot from his passing and you grew a lot and you you held true to that courage that you're talking about, which I think has made you the man you are today.

I've tried to, I mean, it's a constant, as you know, it's constant in process work. I've evolved my questions and eliminated a lot of things in my life that did not feed me, did not turn on my true self. I've tried to eliminate those and keep more things in front of me that are things that will feed me and feed my best wolf since we've got two wolves in us.

Yeah, we do.

I love that.

I love that story. What do you think of the five things we should all eliminate to live a better life?

First, we got to quit hanging out with those, those people that, that sort of only turn on our most banal selves. It sometimes are the easiest people to go to because they're the life of the party. I've been, I've been that guy before. Like I said, the life of the party. Tell a joke that's about someone that's not in the group. It's on them. We all snicker and it's great. You got the biggest laugh at Conan O'Brien, but everyone walks away going, I don't respect him as much. So again, one of those long-term choices. Think about long money, not short money, long money. Places. Hey man, geez, why do I have a nasty hangover every time I go to that bar? I don't know, is it the drink? Is it the people? Is it what? Whatever it is, I just don't, I don't, every time I wake up the next morning after going to that bar or that place, I feel, eliminate that, quit trying to make that place work. We got to eliminate this thing, this habit we all have in society right now, which is, I raise me up if I put you down. It's false. It does not have a return. There's no ROI in that. It appears to be, it goes back to that, what do we tell millennials about everyone living online and social media with comments? It's, there's this false sort of impetus that, oh, I'm taller, I win if I make sure you lose. That's not winning. You know, there's room for us both to win a blue ribbon, but we may do something different. And to covet or be jealous of your success, and if I don't like you and I can lose, man, I want to see that guy fall. That's, you're giving yourself a disease to think, oh, that's going to raise me up.

Mm-.

So again, it's short money. It's short money.

Yes.

It may be even counterfeit. There's a few things. You know, we have it, and we have a, we've had this tendency to, we put our finger and point out disease before we point out health. We rubberneck at the car wreck on the other side. Love to see a wreck. Wow. You know what I mean? Dissect. Here we go. We love to dissect problems. Well, start dissecting success. Start looking and deconstructing your life, your choices, those people you're hanging around with, those places. When things are going well, when you're like, I feel like I finally caught a groove here. Go put the pen to paper or look down or start dissecting. What am I doing? Because there's a habit. There's a science, there's some science to satisfaction. and we don't just get there by dissecting our failures and when we're in a rut, we need to be confident enough to go, well, things are going well and I can't take this for granted. What is it I'm doing? Oh, I prepared more. I didn't have stress. I mean, it goes down to the, I always call this delayed gratification, tee yourself up for a green light. Starts with the simplest thing and this is what I mean. Enjoy putting the coffee in the coffee filter the night before so the next morning you can get up and just go, Press the button. Aha, look at me. I teed myself up for a Saturday. I got a green light. Instead of the next morning going, oh gee, where is it? Because sometimes it's hard to make your coffee when you hadn't had your coffee. Like it's hard to find your glasses when you don't have your glasses on. I mean, tee yourself up for some little pleasures, some Saturdays, tee yourself up for some green lights. Kiddos, work. You gotta, you know, it's Friday, you got that morning meeting you're gonna lead on Monday morning. Well, you got that homework you got to turn in and you just finished on Friday and you want to go kick back and head out and relax. Cause you're going to wait till I'll do it Sunday night. Sometimes it's pretty cool to go, you know what? I'm going to get it done right now. Because Sunday, dude, I'm going to watch football. I may be hanging out with my friends. Sunday night game may be a good one too. I may want to go late and I don't want to have to think, I go like, oh, I got to get home and do that. So I'm going to tee up myself for some freedom on Sunday night. by handling the stuff right now. So Sunday night I can be like, I'm ready for tomorrow. I'm ready for Monday. And look, that doesn't mean don't be a hedonist. That doesn't mean unless the responsibility and the freedom. That doesn't mean you're not free. It's actually giving yourself more freedom. It's actually giving yourself more pleasure later on. I love delayed gratification. It's one of the things you'll see when you have, if you have children, it's one of the great things I think to try and get them to understand When I won the Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club, I had a really cool teaching lesson. My kids were like, what's the trophy for? And I said, well, it was given to me because my people in my industry deemed my work really excellent. They go, yeah, but what's it for? And I went, you, remember a year and a half ago when Popeye was really skinny and you said his neck looked like a giraffe? And they're like, yeah. And I go, remember how you wake up and Popeye was already gone to work and then Popeye would get home and we'd have a dinner and then he'd have to go study and go to sleep. And he did that for like two months and he was gone all day. They're like, yeah, I go, what I was doing that was on every day then. Someone gave me a trophy for today, a year and a half later.

Wow.

So what you do today, what I was trying to get across to him is like, what you do today can matter tomorrow. You can be rewarded for it. If you do something really well today, you can be rewarded. you can get a green light for that later on in life.

You may not get the reward today.

You may not get it today. So trust that you can be rewarded. At the same time, let's look at the inversion of that. Go ahead, lie cheat steal. All right, now what? Lie cheat steal, broke up on the tax, cheated on so and so, whatever, whatever. I'm not buying green lights to the future. Why? Because now everywhere I go, I gotta look over my shoulder and see if someone's there that I owe money to. money or someone there that I cheated. And all of a sudden now I'm not present and I'm stressing because someone goes, oh yes, so and so is here. That's not a green light. It's yellow light. It's stress, unnecessary stress because I left crumbs then, yesterday. Don't leave the crumbs to yourself up for some freedom. The responsibility of not picking up your crumbs to handling stuff buys you your green light's freedom in the future. We're going like, I'm fine. I can walk in anywhere. I don't have to look over my shoulder. I'm living and do my best to live a life where I don't have.

To live over my shoulder.

It's a good thing for us each to do with ourselves. And it's selfish. That's the other thing. It's selfish. And I have a full redefinition of selfish. I'm for what is selfish. It's also selfless. But it's teeing yourself up. It's being cool to and kind to your future self. And it's also what's best for the most amount of people.

Absolutely.

Got that, egotistical utilitarian.

You mentioned how a lot of people are trying to tear other people's buildings down. When I interviewed Kevin Hart, he said that greatness was about helping other people succeed as well, not just you succeeding and tearing other people down, but also making winners around you and building other people up around you as someone who's great. I love this quote. by Jim Carrey. I don't know if I'm going to say it correctly, but he said, I hope everyone becomes rich and famous so they can realize that's not the answer to life. Something like that he said in a speech one time. It seems like so many people on social media want to become rich and famous. What have you learned about both of those things? And what advice would you have to someone who is working so hard for fame and money Based on the lessons that we've learned.

Look, first off, what have we all learned about rich and famous? If you are rich and famous, you can be president.

Ta-da.

Right.

Now, look at the definition of success. If you go back in the original Webster's dictionary and read the definition of success, it is vastly different from the definition of success today. We have put, especially in America, fame and money at the top of the ladder for what you need to get to succeed, to be successful. And if you're successful, you have respect of peers because you're famous, because you've got more money. Or the order of what we're telling our children and ourselves to aspire to, it's out of order. It's not in order. It's part of the reason we have distrust in leadership today. There's nothing wrong with pursuing. Money. I love money.

There's nothing wrong with fame.

It's fickle. Fame is a mistress. It's not a wife. And you have a little tryst with fame.

But.

It'S not an end-all stay. It's not a real destination. I don't think it should be. There's nothing wrong with pursuing it. But then let me get into this question. Okay, so we all want relevance. We want this money, we all want relevance. Yes, I agree with that. I do too. Relevance for what? That's the question we ought to ask ourselves. What do we want to be relevant for? I want to be fame us because I made a sex tape? I'm pretty sure I can get famous if I do that. Pretty sure you can get famous if you do that. What's that you want to be famous for? I don't know, I'll pass on that one, don't we? It's a bit out of order and we need to ask ourselves that question. If I want to be relevant, which everyone does, what I want to be relevant for? I think that's a good question to ask ourselves. And again, coming off what you said, Kevin Hart said, yeah, we want it for us, but can we be famous for, for doing something that we enjoy, but also other people, it builds up other people's wealth. We don't have to. Again, I'm going to go to Barkley.

Here for a second.

You get rich and famous, that's not your, I don't believe it's your responsibility to be charitable. No, it's your choice. It's a choice for anybody. Is it your choice to make or not? It's not responsibility, because I'm in a position to. No, I have to make the choice. Now, that may be a more responsible choice by me, that gives me more freedom, because I feel better helping other people out and it makes me feel good selfishly when I see them receive something, go, wow, thank you, which is a selfish good feeling. So it has payback that I would say is again right there, responsibility and freedom, that it's paying me back and it's paying some other people back. I would stick with that. I would just end it on that. We want to be relevant. Ask ourselves for them. Money and success. Look at the definition of success today and the definition in the original Webster's dictionary. dictionary. And it is out of order, especially in America, what we are telling each other to aspire to be, to be deemed successful, to get respect. Yeah. With Donald Trump became president. I had so many people friends that were so surprised. I'm like, what are you talking about? At the very base of it, just the lowest common denominator. What do we tell people to be in this country? Rich and famous. He was that. He was on TV and he's rich. that's what we tell everyone is successful. So it's not surprising he became president. Wasn't to me. That's what we've been telling you. We're telling everyone you need to be to succeed in life again. If that's your only Pursuit and you disregard certain integrity and you disregard being true, true, being as true as you can to yourself, that's short money.

Before we continue this video, make sure to subscribe below and turn on notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day. How does that play into the self-authoring program if you have this vision for yourself and you're mapping out a year, two, three, five years ahead?

Yeah, well sometimes you know... You have to re-navigate. Yeah, that's right. You have to re-navigate. You have to say no.

Fit it into that timeline.

Yeah, because even the best best laid plans of mice and men go astray. That's part of being alive. And so you have your map, but if you get a flat tire along the way, you still have to stop and fix your car. Maybe the bloody thing bursts into flames and you have to get a new car. So your ascent towards your goals can be punctuated by unexpected catastrophe, and then hopefully you've made yourself into a resilient person at that point, and the catastrophe is no worse than it has to to be, and you're not making it worse. I mean, one of the things we were fortunate about is that by the time she got really ill, my relationship with my wife was pretty well put together, and my relationship with my son, who's younger than her, was also well put together. And so he was an absolute trooper man, because for a lot of his teenage life in particular, there was a huge amount of focus on the suffering of his And we were right up to here with that. It was enough. And he conducted himself admirably. If he caused trouble, we didn't know about it. He kept it to himself. And I don't mean he was hiding. I mean he dealt with it. And he spent a lot of time at home, and he didn't do any unnecessarily stupid things. And he put up with his sister and his parents, who were on edge a lot, without adding additional catastrophe and misery and grief to it. when she was a little bit crazy and was leaning on him too hard or bothering him, he was there to support her and it was massively helpful. And you know, I wasn't any more, my wife and I weren't any more crazy towards each other than we had to be. And so there wasn't like any additional stress during those periods of time.

-Stressful enough. -Any extra would have been like, yeah, that's right.

That's right.

How were you able to compartmentalize or just focus on your career at that time, you know, lecturing or writing or whatever it may be at that time.

-Well, that's also part of the vision of hell. It's like, well, what's the alternative? You let things go and you make them worse. It's like... -Not showing up and yeah.

Just... -No, no, there's no excuse for that. It's like you just... -How did you say, was it a compartmentalizing of like.

Okay, it's nine o'clock or eight o'clock in the morning, I'm going to work. -Yeah. -And then... -Yeah, well we made rules. And we talked about some of them, like some of the rules were, we didn't talk about my daughter's illness after 8 o'clock at night. That was the rule. It's like insanity. Well, it's a war. You wear yourself out in a week, you're dead, and everyone suffers a lot. So you've got to keep going through however long this is going to be. And so what do you have to do? Well, you have to sleep. You have to sleep or things are going to go bad. Yeah, that's right. It's time to stop talking and go to sleep.

So you have time cut off.

Yeah, well, and I had learned some of that because I've been a clinical psychologist for a long time, and so I've been dealing with people's problems, and you learn how to, you know, you think, well, how can you go home when you have all those problems to contend with? It's like, well, A, they're not your problems.

They're not going away right now.

No, and they're not going away, and having them bring you down is not helping the person who has the problem. It's the same with my daughter. like have my wife and I deteriorated as a consequence of her condition. A, that would have been horrible for her because then she would have had to bear the weight of watching her illness destroy her family. Right. Which is... You have that guilt. Oh, Christ, yes. I mean, that's one of the terrible things about having a very bad illness is that not only does it do you in, but you can see it taking its toll on the people around you. I think that might even be worse. I mean, this is gradations of hell, but still that's so you also can't allow that to happen. If you have a love person around you and they're ill, you have a moral obligation not to let it tear you down because then it's on them. That's no good. And you think, well, how can you remain healthy and strong in the face of the terrible suffering of someone who's close to you? It's like, well, you want to suffer?

Well, that's it.

The alternative is worse.

You want me to get sick and get overweight and not be able to take care of you or me?

Right. then we both drown faster, right? Not helpful.

What about, did she ever go through a place of, I guess some people do this where kids who have some type of autoimmune or some type of disease or whatever it may be, they didn't necessarily, they were born with it or it happened somehow. It's not like they ate something themselves. They weren't necessarily responsible, you should say, right? I mean, was she responsible for causing all these all the pain in her body? Or was it just something that happened?

Well, that's what we told her. It's just, well, this life, Kit.

It's not you.

We also told her very, very many, many times, and we were very careful about this. Do not use your illness as an excuse. As soon as you do that, you can't tell the difference between the illness and your character. So don't let it turn you into a victim, even though it's obviously a catastrophe, like we were very clear about that and that wasn't her fault, you know, but that she still had to bear up under it as well as possible and to do everything she could and not use it as an excuse. And we talked to her about that a lot and we're clear about it because, and I've seen this, it's one of the things I really dislike about what the universities are doing with disability. It's like everybody gets a disability. It's like, well, and no wonder because people have hard lives, you know, it's like, it's very rare to find someone who isn't suffering under an undue load of some sort. There's something wrong with family. Anxiety, whatever.

It's like, or there's something wrong in.

Their family that's serious, or they have terrible economic pressure, like there's something wrong. It's like, okay, we should make allowances for you. It's like, oh, yeah. What allowances? What exactly does that entitle me to? Well, I tell you, man, that's a murky place you do not want to go, because then you don't know anymore. It's like, well, what's my responsibility? I mean, I have this undue burden to bear. Well, how does that mitigate my responsibility? Well, the answer is, as little as possible. You don't go there because you get confused. And as soon as you get confused, well, then the illness has not only got you physiologically, it's got you psychologically, and then you're in deep trouble. And so we were also very, very careful. And to her great credit, as far as I can tell, Like, I wouldn't say she never used her illness as an excuse, because never is a lot, you know, or never is an extreme. But she certainly withstood the temptation to do it habitually and to warp her character as a consequence. And she did figure out what was wrong with her and fixed it. And so now she doesn't have any of these. She's healthy now while she still has some residual damage from everything that happened. I just found out yesterday she went to Chicago to have her ankle checked out because it isn't working very well. And they told her that she had to have the old replacement taken out and a new one put in. So.

But.

But in her realm of catastrophe, that actually constitutes not news that's not as bad as it could be. Right. So strangely enough, so it's not like she's out of the woods.

But so you taught her from an early age, then it started to cut you off.

Yeah.

No, no, no problem. That even though she had say, you know, let's just for the state of the conversation, a physical disability, right? She wasn't as able-bodied physically as a majority of people. Is that clear to say? That you told her, like, never allow that to give you special privileges.

Well, never allow that to be never. No, it wasn't that exactly. It was never use that as an excuse to not do something you could do. That's the thing. Yes, because there's a deception element there. It's like, well, I don't want to do that. And I have this illness. And then you can get away with it. That's right. Don't use your illness as a means of getting away with something because you'll blur the line.

Then you'll constantly use that for the.

Rest of your life. Right. And if you do that a hundred times, you'll be so confused about what's illness and what's not that you'll not know. You won't know anymore. And maybe you won't be able to figure it out again. And then you're in a very bad place. You know, there were some things that she had to have done that were allowances, like when she was doing exams, she had to type because she couldn't write. I was writing it, you know, and she couldn't sit on the floor cross-legged so she had to sit in a chair, like things that she actually couldn't do.

But she still did the work.

Yes, she did the work.

She said, oh, I can't take the test.

Yeah.

I can't do the exam at all.

Yeah.

But she was able to do it with different circumstances.

Yes, right. Right, right. And so, and the consequence of that was that once she figured out that most of what was causing her, what was bothering her, all of it by the looks of it, was a consequence of a set of extreme sensitivities to almost every sort of food. So she hardly eats anything now. The only thing she eats is beef. That's it. Beef, salt, water. That's it. Nothing else.

That's it.

Yeah, that's it. And she's been eating that way for, well, mostly for about three years. but almost completely for a year.

And she feels fine.

She's 100%. She has no symptoms.

No vegetables, no supplements.

That's it. Beef, salt. I'm serious.

She never cheats.

Wow.

Never. Because she doesn't want to feel pain in some way. Yes. Well, it takes if she eats the wrong thing, she has a terrible, a.

Catastrophic emotional and physical reaction for a month. Wow. She essentially eliminate all food and try.

One thing at a time until okay, that didn't work. Let's try this. It took about three years to figure it out. So yes, wow is right. It's absolutely beyond comprehension. It's a diet that I follow almost entirely now.

Just beef, salt and water.

Yes. I've been eating that way for about three months and I've been on an extremely low carb diet for about two and a half years, something like that. Wow. So because both my wife and I have autoimmune symptoms. Yeah.

And she got all of them.

You're done.

Yes. So she got all of the worst.

Magnified by A thousand? Yes, that's right. But when she sorted out what was wrong, she convinced me to also try what she was doing, and it's been extraordinarily helpful for me, too. So, you know, who would have guessed it? So, anyway, so what you do when things are too much for you is you narrow your time frame. I also, in chapter 12, you know what? There's a fair bit of discussion in there about fragility and vulnerability, which really what you confront when you have a sick kid. It's like, oh my god, how can the world be constituted so that a child can unfairly suffer in this manner? It's like, okay, here's a way of thinking about it. All right, take away everything from your child that makes them vulnerable. Let's say I have a three-year-old. It's like, well, three-year-olds, they're kind of cute. They run around, they're little and they're vulnerable, obviously. But that makes them cute and attractive and lovable. all of the vulnerability that's built into that. So you think, well, you move, remove that one by one. Well, they're eight foot tall now, and they're made out of steel, and their parts are replaceable, and they have artificially intelligent brain. Like, you replace them. Obviously, this is hypothetical with a, with a superhuman robot that doesn't die. It's like, you're fine, but where's the three-year-old? Right. So one of the things I thought about when I was writing this was, you know, when you love someone, especially. especially when you love someone, you love them not only despite their fragility, but also because of it. And so then that's the price you pay for it. It's like, well, they wouldn't be who they were if they weren't, they wouldn't be who they were if they weren't fragile and limited in their particular way. And the fact you like to have them around, you think, oh, well, I mean, I guess you think that that fragility and vulnerability is justifiable. It's like, well then you can't allow its existence to make you bitter, because you can't have it both ways. You can't have them being vulnerable and cute and interesting and small and needing care, but striving to develop and grow. You can't have that without them also being prone to pain and destruction and vulnerability. choice. And then what do you do? You teach them to be strong. That's what you do. You don't get rid of the vulnerability.

You teach them to be strong.

Yeah.

So, and that's, that, that's also a theme that runs through the book and in many, many ways is that's, you don't protect your children. In fact, you do, you do the opposite. You expose them to the world as much as you possibly can and you make them strong. That's the best antidote to their vulnerability, not to protect them. There's no protecting people. We already established that life's a fatal game. There's no protecting people. But you can definitely make them strong and maybe you can make them strong enough to transcend that. That's the goal, man.

Is there anything that you wish you would have done differently with your daughter or your son that you didn't do?

Not of any great not of any great significance. I mean, I have wishes, I suppose, from time to time that things could have been different. I spent less time on the positive aspects of my son and my daughter because we were contending with catastrophe so frequently. And so, you know, both my kids have a variety of interesting talents and it would have been better, perhaps, to have had the time to develop those more thoroughly. But, you know, and my son, well, he, I wouldn't say he didn't get as much attention as he needed. He didn't get as much attention as I would have liked to have paid him. But by the same token, it isn't obvious that it's been bad for him because it required him from a very early age to grow the hell up. and we relied on him right from the time he was a young kid to make intelligent decisions. We assumed he would make intelligent decisions. He was consulted with regards to decisions. And so, and it also made him into someone who is very self-sufficient and capable of taking care of himself. So it might have been nicer for me, I suppose, to have spent more time with him. But he lives down the street from me now and I spend time with him and we have a great relationship. relationship. And so it's just, it's, you know, and as he has a very good relationship with his sister.

And.

So it turned out as well as it could have.

Right. So.

But that didn't mean that those years in there, they were brutal. There were some brutal times, man. One night in particular, like, she was in absolutely, absolute Agony, and I couldn't get it under control. And I could see. Well, because I am a clinician, I see. I thought, God damn it, I'm gonna end up taking her to Cam H. That's the psychiatric hospital, because it looks like it's gonna break her. God damn it. I couldn't see a way to resolve it. But it pushed her right to the brink, but not over. And there was another episode after she had her hip replaced, she was put in a rehab home hospital for a while, and she was the youngest person in it by 60 years and they treated her terribly. It was a terrible place, mean, mean, blind nurses and very, very badly run and they traumatized her. The hospital was a worse experience than the damn surgery. And so that that was that took her quite a while to recover from, but she did recover from it.

Do you ever think now, you know, since you're a clinical, clinical psychologist, and you've done all this research and work and studies, do you believe that your daughter was meant to experience this for you to kind of test your ability to be with her? And do you think she would have been able to grow in the way she is now with someone who didn't have the practice that you had?

Well, I think it was fortunate for all of us that, well, my wife, too. Like, my wife had worked in palliative care as a volunteer, and she was a massage therapist for a long time. She's very good at, and my wife has a real, she's a really tough person. And if you don't need help and you want it, she'll cut you into ribbons. But if you need help, she will really help you. Yeah. So she's really good at differentiating between people who actually need help, in which case she is right there and people who could stand up on their own. And if you can't stand up on your own and you could, if you could stand on your own and you aren't, you don't want to be around her because she will put you in your place. And it was so funny because our kids used to bring their friends over all the time when they were teenagers, which we actually quite liked. But we had a rule for the teenagers, which was, We're really happy you're here. But if you do something stupid and you never get to come back, that's actually okay with us. And so they knew that and it was no joke because we were happy they were there and they were welcome. But we were perfectly happy to dispense with them if they misbehaved.

Forever.

But what was really funny was that the kids would come over, the teenagers would come over, and they were pretty afraid of me to begin with. But after being around for a couple of weeks, they were way more afraid of my wife. So yes, that was very funny. Yeah, because she's quite a pleasant person and she's only five foot two. But although she's imposing enough, because she's also in good physical shape. But it was because I'm actually kind of soft-hearted and she's not soft-hearted although she can really take care of people who need to be taken care of. Yeah. So, no. So I think, you know, Michaela had a fortunate, fortunate circumstance in that sense because both of us had a lot of experience dealing with catastrophe. And so when it came along, we weren't. We were overwhelmed by it.

What?

But it wasn't because we didn't know what we were doing. We what we were doing. It was just even though we did know what we were doing as much as might be possible, that doesn't mean that we could deal with it because it was, well, it took us, it took us what, must have been seven or eight months to arrange the ankle surgery. And there was a waiting list in Canada at that point of, I think, three years. Actually, they wanted to fuse her foot, which is a really bad thing for someone young. And so we looked in India. we looked in, oh Christ, we looked all over the world for ankle surgery, like really everywhere. And finally, the government in Canada was actually quite helpful. We found a private clinic in Vancouver that did the surgery and the Ministry of Health in Ontario was quite helpful to us at that point. But we were scrambling to, well, what should we do? Should we have an ankle replacement? What sort of replacement? Who do we talk to? What about this waiting list? Three years? Like, no. Well, she can't live, man. She can't live.

You're talking a week out. Yeah, your time frame is a week.

Oh, yeah, that's three years. That was just beyond.

Did you ever doubt yourself in terms of your ability and your research and your studies? Did you ever say to yourself, like, man, if I can't, you know, figure this out, then all of my work is for nothing?

Well, no, I never thought it was for nothing, but I certainly doubted whether or not we were going to be able to figure this out.

Yeah, well, if you thought, and at that time you were extremely educated, researched.

You'D seen a lot.

Did that give you a fear of like, well, if I can't figure this out, then knowing that?

Of course. Well, her prognosis was multiple early joint replacements, and that was the good news because the bad news is, well, how many? and how many can you stand? And when does that kill you? Like, you know, so her real prognosis was plenty of pain with an early death, you know, because, well, even now, even now, you know, like, the surgeon who talked to her yesterday said, well, because he talked to her about the risk of amputation in the future, it's like, well, this is the second joint revision. It's like, maybe this will last 15 years. We don't know what the hell's going to happen then. Well, so our Her response to that is that's 15 years from now. It's like, who knows?

Deal with it then.

Well, things are better now for how people understand how to replace an ankle than they were, I think it was 10 years ago that she had this one replaced. And it helped. It wasn't perfect. Her hip is perfect. The ankle has always been trouble, but way less trouble than it was. And so, well, you struggle forward the best you can. and so I suppose she could adapt to an amputation if that was necessary, but at the moment it isn't necessary. But multiple amputations is not something to really be looking forward to when you're 16. You know, and they were going to put her on corticosteroids to control her inflammation, and that would have produced Cushing's disease, and so that makes your face all puffy and it makes you gain weight, and so it's very physically disfiguring, so we decided not to go down that route. And... Wow. Yeah, well, But, you know, it's worked out. Thank God. It's quite the miracle. And she had a baby a year ago, and we were never sure that was going to happen. So, congrats. Thank you. Congrats to you. Yes, that's for sure. So now we have this respite where she's healthy, and the last time I saw her, she was looking great. Like she's just glowing. She's so healthy. I can't believe it.

It's just beyond belief. Congrats on all the hard work you've done to make it a possibility. You know, you spent a whole time.

We avoided the worst excesses of hell during the catastrophe. So that's something. And it did allow her the space to figure out. And my wife had always thought that diet had a relationship to it. And we investigated that. Like, there's a good literature that shows if you have arthritic symptoms and you stop eating, if you fast, they go away. So that's interesting. It's like, well, food must be causing it. yeah, but once you start to eat again, to serve the body, what you eat comes back. It turns out, no, not no matter what, almost no matter what, because she's sensitive to virtually everything, but she isn't sensitive to meat. And so it turns out that if you eat meat, you can live. So that's a big difference between being sensitive to everything and not being sensitive to one thing. And so it's a It's a harsh diet. It's made traveling difficult, although I can eat in restaurants because most restaurants can cook a steak with nothing on it and that's made things much easier while I'm traveling. But whatever, whatever, it's working. And so thank God for that.

Amazing. Do you think, hypothetically, if your daughter was healthy and never had any of these complications, that you would be the man you are impacting people, that the success, the, you know, the attention you'd be getting, do you think you'd have.

As much... Well, I wouldn't have written the 12th chapter, that's for sure.

Do you think in general you would still be able to have the ideals, the belief, the fortitude that you have to reach people and really impact people's lives?

Yeah, I think so. But I know what you're saying, you know, your question is, To what degree is adversity character building? And the answer to that is plenty. But I was already, like I said, and it was the same with my wife, we weren't naive people. Because I had an extensive clinical practice, I was dealing with heavy level adversity always.

It wasn't your daughter.

No, no. But there were other problems in my family and so forth that I dealt with as well. And so we were already We'd already, I think, garnered most of what we could from confronting adverse situations. Now, did that add a different level to it? It probably fire-tested our relationship, our familial It probably brought our family closer together, all things considered. I saw the same thing happen when my wife's mother died. She died of prefrontal dementia and she developed it quite young. It started to really manifest itself in her early 50s and she died when she was 70. She fell apart over 18 years and she was very physically healthy. And her husband, who was quite the man about town when he was a young guy, real extrovert, she was a real character in our hometown. He took care of her so well, it was absolutely jaw-dropping every time she slipped, he'd step up to the plate. And he took care of her until he couldn't lift her out of her chair anymore. And he was getting old, too. And so she wasn't in an old age home for very long. And then we were around when she died, you know, over the couple of days just before her death. And her family, her sister is a palliative care nurse, her other her sister's a pharmacist and Tammy's had the experiences that I already described. And then her father really stepped up to the plate. So the whole family gathered around for that and they acted impeccably throughout it, I would say. They took care of their mother very carefully while she was dying and they pulled together. And one of the consequences of that, which was so interesting, is that although their mother died and that was a terrible loss, their bonds that connected them all of them strengthened to the point where I would say that was almost compensation for the loss of their mother. So that was really interesting to see what happens even in a dire circumstance if people do what they can. Now, I'm not saying that that's going to work for every situation because I know people get cut off at the knees and sometimes you hit a tragedy that while it's fatal, you know, that you cannot rectify. It's a real catastrophe. But it was very interesting watching that because they were alert and awake around the deathbed and they weren't fighting with each other at all. There was no familial squabbling because you can imagine that that would happen because everyone's stressed and then you can just imagine how terrible that would make something that's already awful. There was none of that. They focused their attention on her, you know, they gave her water when she needed it and they watched her and they made this terrible thing, the least amount of awful it could be. And it definitely pulled them together. Like that whole family, including me, is closer because of what they went through and also how they went through it. And it's probably the case, well, I would say it definitely advanced the maturity of my son because he was called, and I told him, Look, kid, like, you can't add anything to this. We're up to here. You have to conduct yourself properly because otherwise everything's going to shake and fall. We can't have more of this. You can't bring anything unnecessary into this.

And it was an all-star.

It was remarkable. And he was only in grade 10 when most of this happened. And your friends are pretty damn important when you're in grade 10. And he stuck around a lot to be helpful. So yeah, it was really good for him, man. Yeah, well he's a good character. He's quite something. And he was very helpful. He was very helpful to his sister. They had their fights obviously, while she was often unreasonable and no bloody wonder. Well, when you're strung out and... You.

Can'T feel anything but pain.

Yeah, God, she went through so much. Like even watching her withdraw from the opiates because she was on them for about a year and a half. She just quit. Well, as soon as she was done her surgery, she was like, I'm not taking these anymore. And she had formication, which is the sensation of ants crawling under your skin. She had that for like a month. And, oh, God, unbelievable. She was. She just. Just sailed through it. It's like, I'm done with these.

Yeah. Yeah.

You guys have been through a lot.

Yeah. A lot.

What's your. What's your biggest fear now? Moving forward in your own life.

Oh, making a mistake at the moment. Because I've been the subject of so much public attention in the last two years. And I've been in a situation where even things I didn't say have also almost been fatal because people take them out of context. But my biggest fear has been that I do something careless. and that there are serious cascading consequences to it.

You feel like you've done something careless.

Or... Well, everyone's done something careless. Right. You know, but I've been pretty careful. I mean, I was fortunate. So when this political scandal blew up around me in Canada, when I opposed some legislation that I thought was reprehensibly constructed, you know, the radicals on the left in particular came after me hard. and. But I was fortunate because, you know, they called me every name under the book and went after my character. And, you know, I suppose there was some degree of.

Of.

That was understandable to some degree, because if you stand up against something, if you stand up against the radical right, well, maybe you're a communist. Might not. Probably not, because you don't have to be a communist to not like the radical right. But if you stand up against the radical radical left, well maybe you're a Nazi. Well, probably not, but you might be. And so it's certainly in the interest of the people who are proponents of the philosophy of the radical left to assume that you're a Nazi, because then they don't have to deal with you. And so that's what happens. You throw yourself into the fray, people try to localize you, and they do that by saying, well, maybe you're this, maybe you're this, maybe you're this, maybe you're this. It's like, well, yeah, maybe not, too. And, but I already had 200 hours of lectures up on YouTube at that point so people could actually go and see what I had said because virtually every word I'd ever said to students in a professional capacity, not every word, because I didn't tape every lecture. But I taped multiple years of lectures and so people went over those with a fine tooth comb trying to find out if there's anything I'd ever said that was, and they couldn't find anything. And that was because I've been very careful with what I say. Ever since I was about 25, I started paying attention to what I was saying and trying very hard not to say things that I would trying very hard not to say things that something in me objected to. So, and well, that seems to have provided me with a buffer. And so people came to my website because they were interested in, well, before the political stuff blew up, I had a million views on YouTube, which is nothing. A million of anything is a lot. But then when the political scandal started to break, yeah, then people came for them but stayed for the content. And so, and that's been very useful. Yeah, well, it's not that surprising. Well, you know, because of what you do, it's like, there's a great hunger for information that is practical and useful and that helps people find meaning in their lives and orient themselves. There's a great hunger for that. And most of my lectures were derived from solid psychology, some of it experimental, some of it biological, some of it from the domains of neuroscience, a lot of it from great clinicians. It's not surprising that people find it helpful because, well, great clinicians were great because they were really helpful. And so to distill that and to offer it to people in a digestible form, to have that have a good effect on them, well, that's what you'd expect. That's what the whole discipline is about. And so that's been great. These public lectures that I've been doing, so I think I've done 50 of them in about 45 different cities now in about three months. And the average theater size is between 2,500 and 3,000 people. And they're unbelievably positive events because people come there and we talk mostly about the political spectrum and why there's room for voices on the left and why there's room for voices on the right and where the parameters of that should be, because both of those can descend into extremism and that's not good. And the role of individual responsibility and individual sovereignty and the necessity for people to develop a vision, the sorts of things that we already talked about. And virtually everyone that's coming there, they're not coming for political reasons, even though that's the story you hear from the more ideologically possessed journalist types because they see the world that way. They can't imagine anything else could possibly be happening. But the people who are coming to these lectures are coming because they are doing everything they possibly can to make their lives better.

You have to be willing to accept that what you think you you should get might not be right. Where did it come from that idea? Where did that idea that, you know, because if you are meant to be a world-class athlete, if you get on and do the work, don't let anything stand in your way, believe in it, be willing to.