Jordan Peterson REVEALS His 12 Rules That Will CHANGE YOUR LIFE! | Lewis Howes
Jordan Peterson talks with Lewis Howes about his 12 rules for life, covering confidence, responsibility, meaning, and relationships. They discuss how to build trust, handle jealousy, and find personal growth through facing life's challenges.
Chapters
Well, if you have some faults and you feel insecure and inferior because of that, well, you should. Now, it shouldn't be so much that you're crippled by it and unable to take action. You shouldn't be beating yourself into the ground because you're not everything you could be because no one is. And if you beat yourself into the ground, then you can't.
When you feel insecure, afraid, or scared of being embarrassed, whether it be dating someone or a career or anything, what's the keys to building confidence so that you're attracting what you want?
Look, I read some of your biographical history before we talked today, and you tell a story about being picked last, and then you compensated for that.
Yes.
Now, Alfred Adler, by the way, the psychoanalyst, the associate of Freud, built his whole theory around compensation of that sort. Inferiority complex plus compensation. But it's adaptive, right? Like you got picked last, it embarrassed the hell out of you. So what did you do? You decided that is not going to be me.
Never again. Right.
Never again. Okay, now you did say, you know, that you adopted a maybe too, what, inflexible model of what it meant to be masculine as a consequence. But when I read that, I thought, Yeah, but still you, fair enough, it wasn't, the new you that you adopted wasn't optimal in all possible manners, but it was definitely improvement over the previous you.
Exactly, I wasn't big last again, that's for sure.
Right, well exactly, okay. So the first thing I would say is that if you feel insecure and less and ashamed and all of that, that you have to take stock. And look, I have an exercise online at selfauthoring.com, there's three exercises there, one helps you write about the past, one about the present and one about the future. The present authoring program helps you assess your faults and your virtues. Okay, well, if you have some faults and you feel insecure and inferior because of that, well, you should. Now, it shouldn't be so much that you're crippled by it and unable to take action. You shouldn't be beating yourself into the ground because you're not everything you could be because no one is. And If you beat yourself into the ground, then you can't get up and improve. But you have to differentiate. It's like, okay, to what degree am I being hard on myself? Counterproductively critical, hearing the voice of my too harsh and angry father in my head, adopting inappropriate stereotypical representations of masculine competence. How much of my self-criticism is ill-advised? Fair enough. And you want to deal with yourself with a certain amount of care. But then along with that, there's the, well, fix your weaknesses. You know, if you're ashamed of being ignorant, you're shown up at a party because, you know, you claim to knowledge that you don't have and someone exposes you. Well, you can be angry at them and you probably will, but they've actually done you a favor. They pointed out an inadequacy is a pathway that you can travel down, right? A recognized inadequacy is as soon it's such a gift in some sense, if it's accurate. I'm in it, because you think, well, what should I do? What should I do with my life? That's a real complicated question. Oh, here's an inadequacy. Excellent. You have a goal now. Rectify it. Now you still have to think strategically and figure out how to rectify it and do it step by step. But Carl Rogers, the psychotherapist, pointed out that the person for therapy to be successful, the person has to want to change. So they have to have recognized that they have a problem. If someone is mandated by the court to attend therapy, it's very difficult for the therapist to convince them that they have a problem. Once you're convinced you have a problem, it's like, Away you go. You know, I know it's still technically difficult. It requires discipline and all of that. There's no magic solution. But if you're plagued by feelings of inferiority, you should rectify the most obvious inferiorities.
Right.
Focus on those first, over optimizing strengths, would you say?
No, not necessarily. Not, not necessarily. I'm. And you don't have to redress every, like, I can't. I'm a terrible jazz musician.
It's not a thing where you hold.
Shame around or like- well, it's not an impediment.
Yeah, yeah.
I would say that you have to rectify an inadequacy when it's clearly an impediment to your goal. Or you have to shift goals. But if you're shifting goals because of an inadequacy related impediment, then you have to ask yourself, is your desire to shift the goal reliable? or are you just taking the easy way out? You can protect yourself by picking a different goal that's more difficult. That's a good mental hygiene practice because sometimes you should switch goals rather than rectifying inadequacies. But you can fool yourself then and that's not good.
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 by, as a consequence of human 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, it's better.
Yeah.
That's better. You're not guilting 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 lied.
Or what opportunity you lost or the things that you've let go that you should have capitalized on and 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, right?
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 you're not you're not, 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, you know, home, whatever it may be.
Yeah.
Well, because you're not only you're not only not being what you could be, you're interfering with someone else being what they could be. So you're not only a void, you're a drain. Jesus, that'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 three 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 onto 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.
Team.
They're positive. They're good Sportsman against the competitors. They're not negative towards the other people. They're lifting them up to. Yeah.
Like the ultimate.
That's right.
So that's right. So that they can, they can work for their own Improvement in a way that simultaneously works for the improvement of their team and that, and, and for the sport and, well, and then to the degree that that spills over into the broader culture so much the better.
Right.
So that's all being dramatized in a, in an athletic event. and it's really, it's not philosophical, it's concrete, right? It's dramatized in the world. And 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, the analogy is that in, in life, like in sports, you're, you're, you're setting forth a name and then arranging your perceptions and your actions in pursuit of that. and that you also generally do it while cooperating and competing with other people. So that's also the game-like element as well. All of that's dramatized in athletics. 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. 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. It gives us a model. Yes, it's a model.
It gives a model of something that I respect.
Well, even what philosophy is, or even theology for that matter, is an abstract model. Like it's laid out in words. Now, the problem often is, is 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, right? So 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 happens, and you can try to reverse engineer how they did that.
Well, yes, exactly. Well, at least 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 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, right? 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, you could translate it into life setting.
Well, right. That's exactly right. That's 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 athletics. So, so I've been talking to my audiences a lot about that, about the 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.
What is the thing you love most about your wife? That's my first question.
I think it's very difficult to say exactly why you're attracted to someone. It's there's lots of factors and many of them aren't known to you, really. She's very, she's provocative. She's witty and sharp. And so there's always an element of game playing. Like, it's not dishonest game playing, but there's a teasy, flirtatious provocativeness that characterizes her quite deeply. She's no pushover by any stretch of the imagination. And I find that constantly interesting and intriguing.
It.
Can be somewhat hard on me when I'm not feeling well, but when I'm up and functioning properly, then that works out extremely well.
What would you say would be the keys to your success of 50 years? of loving each other and being in a, what seems to be a healthy functional relationship when in society today, it doesn't seem like many of those.
Well, we really do our best not to lie to each other about anything. And we also have fights when they're necessary. We don't let things, we don't hide things in the fog. that's the title of chapter three of my new book, Don't Hide Things in the Fog. And we work through our issues. If we have a dispute, we do our level best to get to the bottom of it, to find out what in the world's causing it, whose needs to change and why and how and when, and then how we can progress forward into the future without having that issue dog us or drag behind us or interfere with us at all. And that means a fair bit of confrontation, I would say, but less so over the years as we've settled more and more things. But everything's out in the open. Everything that we can get is out in the open. You can't have a relationship without trust. and you trust your partner courageously if you're not naive, knowing that you can be hurt and that you can be deceived and that you can also do both of those things. So you offer your partner your trust as an invitation to them to be honest and forthcoming and, and well, and then issues come up and you delve into them and straighten them out. and we also attend to the relationship. I'm not going to refer back to this new book continually, but it's relevant in this context. It's chapter 10, plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship. And we do that as well. And it is effortful. I mean, we, we try to have throughout our relationship, we tried to have romantic dates one to three times a week. And they require preparation and cooperation and the will to do it and the will to put yourself on the line and the desire to make that a priority even when other things are more pressing. We both want it to work. That's another thing. We're committed to it. and not interested in finding another relationship. And so far we've been fortunate and that's worked. We have fun together. We love our kids. We have had joint projects of all sorts together, renovating houses, traveling, raising our children, now our grandchildren. But all of that is the most important thing as far as I'm concerned is to not to lie. To your partner.
You mentioned you don't have a relationship if you don't have trust or if there's not trust in the relationship. How does someone, if someone is not trusting the other partner, how do you cultivate trust? If you're 100% honest with that person, if you are transparent about every action you make in your life, if you're, you know, they have access to whatever they want to see and you're constantly creating trust, but for whatever reason, they still might be jealous or insecure or not believing you. How does someone get someone to trust them? Or is it not about them at that stage and it's about the other person and their insecurities?
Well, it depends very much on the particulars of the situation. You know, so I don't know if there's a generic answer to that. I think that you can establish the ground rules explicitly and have a discussion about it. Are we going to lie to each other or not? Are we going to tell each other the truth to the degree that we can to make that an actual goal and to talk through the consequences of doing that and not doing it? And then I would also say, whenever a hiccup occurs in the relationship, maybe don't call it out at each hiccup, because you have to have a certain amount of silent tolerance in any relationship to let small infractions go. But if they repeat, my rule is three times. And it's the rule that I share with my wife. If something happens three times that is causing emotional upset, anger, jealousy, disappointment, resentment, frustration, any of those things, anything that you don't want to experience and that you especially don't want to experience repeatedly, then you can call it out. And if you have three examples, your case is much better made than if you just have one. And I would also say that when you call it out, you could say, look, we were at a party the other night and you were, it looked to me, I felt as if you were paying too much intense attention to Dave. There was some flirting going on there. That's what it looked like to me. There was some flirting going on there. And, you know, that made me uncomfortable. Well, you don't say, well, you were flirting. Stop doing it. You say, well, this is how it looked. This is what it looked like to me. And here was my response. And then you want to think, and maybe I'm a damn fool and blind and jealous and stupid, and I'm misinterpreting, or maybe it was. a harmless flirtation of the sort that people will engage in because it adds a little bit of spice to a social interaction. You want to find out. Like it's really convenient if it's the other person's fault, except then you're laden with living with that person. So it really doesn't help you anyways. But it's convenient because then they have to change. But you've got to think about this over the long run. You're going to be interacting with this person on a minute by minute basis for decades. If you're the idiot and that's causing trouble, then you should find out. So you want to say, well, look, this is what I saw. What's your explanation of what's going on? And then they'll offer you their Viewpoint, and hopefully they'll do the same thing. They'll think, well, this is my intent, and maybe they have to go think about it, but. this is my intent and this is what I saw. And I think you're being oversensitive in that situation. And you peel back the explanations layer by layer until you both agree on what happened and more importantly, on what you're going to do about it in the future. And that's really hard. And especially if there is something going on that's not straight, because that will require quite a bit of digging, it'll probably result in anger and tears and a fight. And that's very unpleasant. It's easier in the short term to avoid that, but hopefully the consequence of that is you don't have to have that fight again. You have to come to a negotiated agreement about that situation. And you have to pay attention to your own uncomfortable negative emotions in order to manage that. and not pretend that everything's all right, or that you're nicer than you are, or that you're less jealous than you are, or less blind. See, one of the things I learned from Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst about marriage, was that there is a reason marriage was a vow. The vow is that you stick together. Okay, so now imagine that's a vow. Okay, you do not get to leave, period. Okay, so what does that mean? Well, on the upside, it means that you don't have to be alone. It means that your family will have continuity over decades. It means that the narrative of your life won't be fragmented and broken by divorce or sequential divorce. It means that your children can grow up and maybe have their children within a continuing family, It means that your children will be able to maintain relationships with the grandparents on both sides and the cousins. It's a big deal to maintain that. There's huge advantages in it. It means that you'll have someone there when you're not well and so will your partner. It'll means that you have someone to share all of the positive things of life with. So there's huge advantages to it. Okay, so why does it have to be a vow? Well, I don't think you can tell the truth to someone who can run away. Because if you tell the truth to someone and they can run away, then they'll run away.
Right.
Right? Because you're a mess, man. And not just because of your own inadequacies, but because human beings are so complicated and have such dark corners. and have had, you know, unresolved problems in their life sometimes that stem back generations and are twisted and bent in all sorts of ways. And you can't, it's very, very difficult to reveal that except to someone who can't run away. Now, that, you know, I'm not saying that people should never separate. I am saying though that it's better not to if you can manage it. But then the other thing too is if you can't run away, then you're motivated in a different way. It's like I'm stuck with this woman and she's stuck with me. And unless we want to have this same goddamn fight over and over and over for the next who knows how long, why don't we straighten it out? and then we can put it behind us. See, the vow gives you a kind of desperation that is another motivation to actually solve the problems. And if you've got a way out, you can always stay hidden. You can guard yourself, you can protect yourself and even protect that part of yourself that thinks that it can leave if things get too bad. Now, the problem with that in my estimation is that you're going to drag your stupidity into the next relationship.
Right, always do, right?
Well, generally speaking, right? And so now you can get very, you can, you can, under unfortunate circumstances, you can get tangled up with someone who's not playing a straight game with you and won't, and it's just impossible.
But.
I'm not talking about the limit cases, you know, I'm talking about the average case, the average amount of, unhappiness and trouble. It's still plenty. And then the other. Sorry, just one more thing. I'd add to that. You also have to, in some sense, Shake the illusion that the other person is somehow not you. You're so tied up with them that there's no difference between you and them in some sense, is that what's good for her. her is going to be good for you and vice versa. One of the things we try to do too, the two of us, is we try to say yes to each other. Now, there's rules that go along with that, which is, well, I'm going to say yes to you, but that sort of means that you shouldn't ask me unreasonable, you shouldn't make unreasonable demands. I'll say yes as much as I possibly can, and then you'll do that in return, and then we get yes out of the deal. instead of no, that's also a huge plus. So that's, that's. Is there anything else about you, you want, you wanna, you want, you have to want the best for the other person and you and for the relationship. And in, within that Confine, you want to. tell each other the truth.
Yeah, the truth is huge. And I heard you mentioned jealousy and insecurity at some point that message. Is there room for jealousy and insecurity in a relationship? Is there a healthy amount of jealousy that people should have in a relationship? Or does jealousy and insecurity only cause more suffering and pain in a relationship?
Well, I think there's a reasonable amount of proprietary interest, let's say. I mean, in a classic monogamous relationship, a marriage, there's sexual fidelity as a crucial element of that. And maybe you'll make an arrangement that differs from that, but it's not easy to chart uncharted territory like that. I mean, if you want to have an adventure like that with a partner, a monogamous adventure that also includes sexual exploration, well, maybe you can pull it off, but I doubt it. It's really complicated.
Let's say you're not having sexual exploration with other people and you're telling each other the truth and you're being honest. Is there room to be jealous or insecure in that relationship? Or does jealousy Typically cause more harm than it does, you know, spice and good, I guess.
I think jealousy probably causes more trouble than good, but that doesn't mean that there's something wrong with the proprietary interest. Should you care if your partner pays undue attention to someone of the opposite sex they find attractive? Well, probably you should care. You might even say something about it. They might even be happy about that, right? Because it indicates that you noticed and that it matters to you. Now, I think it shades into jealousy when it's harmless interactions. It's interactions that would be regarded as harmless by a third party observer, let's say. I know that's a very difficult line to draw that are being magnified. as a consequence of insecurity on the part of the observer, or there's envy where your partner is attracting attention, status, success, any of those things, and you're jealous of that. That's not helpful. You should be pleased. The optimal situation is for you to be pleased when your partner is successful. I don't think competitive couples I don't think competition between people who are in a monogamous relationship is useful, particularly. It's not zero-sum competition.
Yeah.
I mean, you can compete in a game-like sense, right?
Unplayful competition, but not.
Yeah, but not existential competition. You're on the same team. That's the point. Right. You know, and if one of you is feeling left behind for one reason or another, it's. It's time to throw that out on the table and say, look, I'm. I'm playing second fiddle here far too often. What can we do about that? Well, it looks like you need to, and like I've got an adventure, it looks like you need one too. Well, how can we rearrange the situation so I have my adventure? And then it's up to that person too to figure out what obstacles they might be putting up in their own pathway, right? That's stopping them. And then they have, you know, they're angry at you for getting in the way, but It's actually a consequence of them using you as a convenient excuse for not doing something difficult. Those things all have to be sorted through. It's very hard. These conversations are extremely difficult. It's no wonder people avoid them. I also think people are not taught to negotiate at all. And that's a real shame. First of all, you figure out what you want. This is what I want. Then you tell the person, then you strategize with them so that you can get what you want and they can get what they want and you both know what that is and a way you go together. And that usually comes out, it's usually obscured and hidden and comes out awkwardly and with difficulty if it comes out at all. And people fool themselves into thinking that it's okay what they're doing. I'm sacrificing myself for the children and that's okay. I'm sacrificing myself for my husband's career and that's okay. I'm working at a job I can't stand because I need to support my wife and children and that's okay. I mean, sometimes that is okay, but it has to be out clear in the open, talked about, negotiated, discussed. You know, I think there's, you can be a slave or a tyrant or you can negotiate. Those are your options. And we default to slavery and tyranny because that doesn't require any cognitive effort. And then we pretend that everything's all right, and then it blows up in our faces and we end up divorced. Right.
What would be a few key steps to get started to turn their life around or to find the motivation for something greater than where they're at?
Well, I think a fair bit of that's probably to be found in you can find it in shame, you can find it in guilt, you can find it in conscience, you can find it in anger, you can find it in.
Interest.
And engagement and beauty. There's lots of pathways. If you're angry about something in the world, well, you know, that's an indication that that's in some sense your problem, right? It's speaking to you in a moral sense. This shouldn't be that way. Well, maybe you're the person who should do something about it in some manner. Maybe it'll take your whole life to figure out how to do that. But it's bothering you for a reason.
So.
The negative emotions can be a pathway to transformation. I'm not trying to romanticize them. They can crush you completely and leave you with nothing. Yeah, right. For sure. And they can go badly astray, but shame, that's a good one. What am I ashamed of? Well, can you fix any of that? Because you might ask yourself, let's say you're so ashamed and so crushed that you're nihilistic and you can't see any hope for life, you're just done. You might think, well, what if I was less ashamed? Like, I'm not going to jump off the bridge today. I'm going to wait a year. I'm going to not I'm going to work on these things that I'm ashamed of and just see, like, does my life improve enough so that I'm not so bitter about it now or I'm not so hopeless about it now? And my experience has generally been that that works. It works. And then some of it's practical knowledge too. It's like you can get a really long way with very small changes, incremental changes, micro habit changes. So aim low.
Don't have big goals or big transformation.
Well, you can, but the problem with a big goal is that it's daunting enough so that it might paralyze you and there's a high probability of failure. And so imagine that you're your own child. Okay, now imagine you love this child and you would like him, we'll say him because it's you and I talking, to succeed. Now, you have an ideal for this child. You would like him to grow up to be the best he can be, better than you, the best man he can be. That's what you want for your son. If the good part of you is talking.
Yeah.
You definitely want him to be better than you are, but you want him to be the best he could be if your vision is unclouded. Okay, but then you offer him a goal. It's like, well, do this. Well, can he do it? Well, if he can do it without a second's thought, there's no challenge in it. There's no developmental impetus. It's not in the zone of proximal development. You want a goal that you can do, but that requires some improvement on your part. Because you want to attain the goal. That's satisfying. But then you want to make yourself into the thing that can attain goals. And so you want to push yourself.
Yeah.
You want to push yourself a bit far?
Yeah, yeah. Yes.
And there's an ample psychological literature that suggests that that's where maximal motivation is to be found.
Interesting.
So you're pursuing a goal, but you're also pursuing the goal of transforming yourself at the same time. You're doing both of those at the same time.
Do you need to know that you're transforming yourself in order to attain the goal, or do most people just think, I got to take these steps to make it happen, but they don't realize they're becoming better human beings.
It depends on what you mean by realize. They have the sense of satisfaction and confidence that would indicate that, although they might not be able to make what that means explicit. But I would say it would be better to make it explicit. It adds one other dimension of possible motivation.
How do you think people lose confidence? We've talked about gaining it, but how could someone like yourself, who's accomplished so much, who's got millions of followers, who is financially successful, has a great marriage, how could someone lose confidence once they've built it?
Illness.
That'll do it.
That's one way. Death of someone, loss. I mean, there's lots of ways of having the rug pulled out from underneath you. Moral error. As the stakes get higher, as we already discussed, the consequences get larger. Ingratitude, that's a big one. you can succumb to the temptation to believe your own egotism. That's a big mistake. There's lots of ways that things can go sideways, that's for sure.
So it sounds like, you know, we start off with a lack of confidence when we're pointed at, you're inadequate in this thing. And we go down a journey of, you know, building ourselves and overcoming the challenges and diving into the fear to, to have these small wins to build confidence. And then the more successful we become, the more we succumb to losing that confidence again when a lot.
No, no, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say necessarily that you become more susceptible to that. But you asked, how can that happen? How can that loss occur? I think, I think I still believe that you know, genuine accomplishment, but it's ethical. It's always ethical accomplishment. I believe that to be the case. Genuine ethical accomplishment is the best source of security, but it's not un- unerring.
When you mean ethical accomplishment, do you.
Mean doing something good, right?
Whether people know about it or not, just. Good and right for yourself? Is that what I'm hearing you say? Or does someone else need to acknowledge that this was good and right?
I think if you've done it for yourself, that's good. But if you do it and other people are in on it and along for the ride, that's also good. And sometimes that's better to bring people along. If it's just a matter of them acknowledging it, well, there's value in that, too. I mean, you know, you, people say, well, you shouldn't care what people think of you. It's like, well, of course you should. Psychopaths don't care what people think of them. Now, you shouldn't care so much what people think about you that you're willing to lie to maintain whatever it is that you think they value. Like, there are places beyond which that becomes counterproductive, clearly, but. Of course, well, I mean, I read the comments in YouTube particularly, and I pay attention to them. And if, you know, 30 people say something like, here's something I do, and I probably did it to you. When I'm interviewing, I interrupt more than a certain percentage of my audience would like.
That's my comments is like, just let them speak, you interrupt too much. So I just try to shut up more now.
Do you know the joke?
What's the joke?
Knock knock.
Who's there?
The interrupting cow. Sorry, that's a stupid joke. But it's a stupid joke. Anyhow, so, you know, I read those and that's what people think. And then I think, okay, I should probably try to interrupt less, but I get excited and, and then with Zoom, there's a lag and it's so, yeah, that makes it harder. But I do pay attention and you should pay attention.
I think.
When, you know, I hear a lot of people say, don't let the opinions of other people hold you back from taking action on your goals, because I think a lot of people will listen to other people's opinions and they feel scared to do something based on Someone saying, I told you so, or you couldn't do this, or you're not good enough. How do we overcome that? Those opinions that keep us playing small, that hold us from putting our creation into the world or going after our dreams?
Well, generally, someone else's comment is unlikely to bring you to a halt unless you value that comment. So imagine you're going to pursue a goal. But you're full of doubts. And so 40% of you is doubts and 60% of you is pursuing the goal. And then five or six people object and they object using the doubts. Well, you're, you're, it's, that's going to be really hard on you.
So how do we overcome self-doubt?
Well, partly what that means is you, you probably haven't thought it through completely. like, what are you doing and why? And if you have a bunch of doubts and they haven't been addressed, then you're vulnerable at that point. And it may be that your goal is not everything it could be. And it may be that your strategy isn't fully fleshed out. And so you have to have a conversation with your doubts and Take them seriously and see if you can construct a goal that you're on board with. And then a doubt pops up because someone criticizes you and triggers a doubt and you look at the doubt and you think, okay, here's the doubt and this is why what I'm doing maybe won't work. But then you think, but this, I've thought this through and I've thought this through and I've thought this through and that all works. And so, no, that isn't going to stop me. I've seen many, many women protect their children from the father. They don't trust him. And so every time he interacts with the child, they'll do something disapproving. A look, they'll. They'll put him down. Now, it's not like men don't do that to their wives. There's all sorts of tricks that men have for their wives. Men are very good at turning their wives. into drudges, for example, for a variety of reasons which we can go into.
But.
If you don't trust men, you won't let them have a hand in the children, the discipline of the children. You know, when you think of discipline, you think of punishment, threat, and dad saying, no, that isn't discipline. Discipline is discipline. If you discipline someone properly, they become disciplined. Right? That means they're competent.
They're organized, they have structure, they have, yeah.
They can control themselves. So I'll give you an example. My son is quite a disagreeable person by nature. So he's very masculine. He's very high in emotional stability. So he doesn't have much negative emotion. And he's relatively low in agreeableness. And that's typical masculine pattern. The two big personality differences between men and women are agreeableness women are higher and neuroticism tendency to feel negative emotion, women are higher. So what that meant was that when he was a kid, he was a stubborn little pup. It was hard to get him to do what he didn't want to do. And you know, that's the mark of a character that is hard to stop. So there's real advantages to it. But kids who are disagreeable are a handful because they think, I'm not doing that and you can't make me.
Right.
He was really quite good at that.
And is it one of your rules from the first book, like don't let your kids do anything that would make you dislike them?
Yes, and we should talk about that because that's such a good rule, I think. But then I used to, the rule for him was, you know, he'd push the limits in a variety of ways and he was really good at that and quite persistent at it. And I'd talk to my wife and say, look, Julian's getting a little too pushy here. We have to crack down on them and stop them. And this is what I see. And she'd say, this is what I see. And we'd think, well, this is what we're going for a week. He isn't going to get away with anything. Like the line, man. It's like, kid, he'd be three or three and a half at this time. Sit on the steps. Sit on the steps. And if he wouldn't, because he was stubborn, well, I'd bring him over and put him on the steps. Like it was, you're going, if I say you're going to sit on the steps, you are absolutely going to sit on the steps. So it was so interesting to watch him because he'd be angry, you know, because he got interfered with, he didn't get to do what he wanted to do. And he'd be, and he would go and sit on the steps, but he'd be like mad as hell on the way there, arms pumping up and down and just, he'd go sit on the steps like, you know, like this, just overcome with anger. And the rule was, as soon as you get yourself under control and you can act like a civilized human being and you want to have a good day, Then you come and tell me and all that's it, you're done. But it had to be real and look, my criteria for accepting his statement was whether or not I liked him when he said it. You know, if he was still being a, if he was still misbehaving and and bending the rules. He wouldn't be genuine when he talked to me. But if he came and said, okay, dad, like I've had enough, I've got myself under control, I'd rather have a good day. And as soon as he said that, I liked him. It was like, Hey, man, you're back in the party.
Do what you wanna do, yeah.
Well, I didn't want him to sit on the steps anymore.
I liked having him around.
Sure, sure. So, but our, you know, we were on board with that. And so the discipline, so the thing is, see what was the discipline aspect, which is what I was talking about, is he learned how to integrate it, into his personality. And I could see him doing that, sitting on the steps. He was. It was just this aggression circuit, which is unbelievably powerful, was just dominating him. And he just force it. Get it under control. Get it under control. Calm down. Bring yourself back into the social world. And it was a victory for his developing ego, you see, because he wasn't defeated by his own impulses, and that's discipline, you see, then you're not. defeated by your own impulses. And so discipline has the wrong connotation. I was encouraging him, you can master this, man. And it worked. And it was so useful to us later because when Michaela got so sick, he was together. We could rely on him. So it was necessary. And it hasn't stopped being necessary. And he's a very reliable person.
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 already struggling.
That's right. There's no way out.
Diversity is coming no matter what.
That's right.
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...
There's zero meaning.
Well, the suffering is pain and the suffering is anxiety and 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 bitter. 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.
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, right? 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 a name 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. 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 onto that story.
Or it's still holding onto 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. happened, right? That's the first thing is like how did you, how was it that that situation rose 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 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 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? And 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. And so, 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. 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.
Time to get it. 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?
Right?
Okay. 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-- the six in my head, right? Yeah, I think there's seven initial questions. and I don't remember the last one. Oh, intimate relationship, of course. So 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 open pathways to the path. That's actually how the world reveals itself. 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 change. No man's land.
No man's land is worse than going through.
No man's room is a bit worse than a bad path. That's exactly right. 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 two enemy 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 remarked on it. That's very, very cool. So then we 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 is 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, 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, they take the, 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, they don't negotiate properly with their spouse. They're 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 drugs. They don't regulate their work out.
Yeah.
So, there's like, 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 could 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, 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 most likely negative outcome probably would have been I really like to drink. Like alcohol was a really good drug for me.
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. was a heavy drinking town and that could have been a real trap for me. So anyway, so we have these people 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 going to hate my job and then I'm going to drink more. Then I'm going to 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 deep, if you don't experience the pain now or the difficulty now, you're going to have a deeper pain later.
Yeah, yeah, that's like... 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 want to do that. It's painful, but I'm going to because I know afterwards it's going to 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 sacrifice works.
Exactly. And were you a big athlete growing up?
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. -So, you know. -Yeah.
-You felt it every day. -Yeah. -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 come because I'm 58, 50, how old am I? 56.
You look great.
No, I'm getting older and I really noticed the difference between people when they age, between people who laid down a good physiological platform when they were young and those who didn't. Because 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 thing you 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 weightlifting, 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 stupid. It's really... Because the less you move.
And the bigger you get, the more stupid you become. The smaller your brain gets.
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. 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 still 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. Something is way better than the map that's nothing. Plus, as you explore because of your map, you could 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 so... 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 Stateable 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's the other thing is break the goals into incremental goals so that you have a reasonable probability of succeeding. So because what you want to do, this is also what you want to do with the kid. You don't tell your kid, Here's an impossible thing. Why don't you go out and fail? You say, Here's something worth going after. Here's a step you could take that would push you beyond where you are, but that you also have a reasonably high probability of succeeding at. Right, they call that- Within a time frame.
Within some time frame.
That's the other thing. You have to parameterize it with regards to time frame. That's right. And that puts you in the zone of proximal development. And that's a concept that was generated by a guy named Vygotsky. He was a Russian developmental psychologist and a smart one. It's where the idea of the zone comes from. be in the zone. And when you're in the zone, you're expanding your skills in a manner that's intrinsically rewarding because you're succeeding. And so you want to set if you're good to yourself, you think, okay, I need to set a goal, but I need to set a goal that.
Someone as stupid and useless as me.
Could probably attain if they put some effort into it. And then you've got it perfectly because it's not so high that it's grandiose or or impossible, that you fail necessarily and then justify your bitterness. It's like, well, I could do.
Well, because that happens to people.
It happens all the time.
Yeah, it's like this all the time. You know, it's like, it's. Yes, exactly. Well, I set a goal and I didn't attain it, so I'm not going to set any more goals.
Right.
It's like, no, you set a goal that was inappropriate for the time frame. That's right.
You didn't calibrate it properly.
Yeah.
And.
And you're playing a trick on yourself because you wanted to fail so that you could justify not having to try.
And being a victim.
Yeah.
Which isn't helpful. You're still going to be a victim. There's no way out of that, man. So, you know, because life is this. Life is a challenge that in some sense can't be surmounted. So there's no way out of your problem, but there are certainly proper ways of dealing with it.
Yeah.
And so you lay out those eight steps. Yeah.
Right.
Lay them out. And then the next thing is, okay, you need a rationale for them because you're going to have doubts and other people are going to put up obstacles.
Is that a meaning you mean? Is that a meaning?
A rationale means a meaning. Yeah, yeah, justification. It's like, okay, so here, what sort of justification is a good justification for your goals? It's easy. Why would it be good for you? Okay. Why would it be good for your family if you attained that goal? Why would it be good for the broader community? Because if it's a good goal, it.
Should be good for you.
That's fine. But if it's a really good goal, it should be good for you in a way that's good for other people. When, when, when. Yes, exactly. And if you're going to decide what your goals are, why not set up the ones that benefit the largest number of people simultaneously?
Yes.
If you can do that, you should start with your own concerns because you have to take care of yourself. Yes, put your own oxygen mask on, then put your child's oxygen mask on. Yeah, right. And then you can, as you build up the basis of competence locally, you might develop enough skills so that you can expand that outward. And it also gives your goal a certain amount of nobility. And so if someone challenges you and says, well, why are you doing that? That seems stupid. You could say, I'm doing that because it helps me take care of myself, but it benefits my family. And here's the reasons why. And this is the repercussions out into the broader community. And like people aren't, people who are putting up objections and doubts aren't, aren't armed to deal with that kind of response. And then when you have those doubts and your mind that plague you, which.
They... And you go back to your reason.
You go back to your reasons. You see why? That's right. Say, why am I doing this? Oh yeah, it's because, well, I have to take care of myself because otherwise I'm pathetic and useless and bitter and cruel and then I'm going somewhere terrible, so that's a bad idea and here's how it would help my family and here's how it would help the community and that's good enough set of reasons for...
Unless I can think of better ones.
Right.
Right.
Without better ones, that's good enough. Because I think the question comes back to after, you know, someone could go down the rabbit hole and say, why, why am I doing this? And why is this, you know, meaningful for me? And I think a lot of people go back to, well, why am I here in the first place?
Yes. Yes.
Why am I here? What is the meaning of my life? And is this real or is this just some dream world?
Well, and then that, then people do go back to that.
And then they get stuck on that.
Yeah.
None of this even matters because why am I even here? Well, the thing is, is that that's.
A self-defeating set of propositions in some sense because the consequence of being stuck there... The reason you're stuck there to begin with is because you're not very happy about the fact that life is intrinsically tied up with suffering because you wouldn't be asking that question to begin with. Okay, so if you let that pull you in and take you down, all it does is make the suffering worse.
It's not helpful.
And then the cascade that we talked about happens. You suffer stupidly and pointlessly. You get better, you get cruel, you make everything worse. It's like, that's your answer, is it? You're going to make everything worse. It's bad enough you're going to make it worse. Mostly people won't do that consciously. You want to bridge that gap from the highest abstraction down to the lowest level of behavior so that it becomes implementable. That's how philosophical concepts take on their meaning, right? Because they have to have some impact on the way you see the world and the way you act in the world, or they're not fully realized, they're not understood. Because partly what we mean, I would say, when we say that we understand something, it's kind of a strange phrase to understand something, but it means to be able to embody it in a shift of view and a shift of action. And then you've got it. graspable. It's in your hand.
Embody something in a shift of view.
Well, they're the same thing, because your perceptions are very tightly linked to your actions. Because, of course, when you're acting, you're aiming at something, you have to be devoted towards some, some, some aim, some Target. We play that out in sports all the time.
Yeah.
That's why sports are so entertaining for people, is because they dramatize the idea of aim.
Right.
And then, and not only of aim, but of the pursuit of excellence in pursuit of that aim. That's the game. And the reason it's a spectacle and the reason that people participate in it is because it dramatizes something absolutely essential about life. And so you want to take philosophical abstractions and you want to use them to structure your aim. And then your perceptions organize around that aim. And then you act it out. And then you've got it. Then it's become part of your life. it's not just a philosophical abstraction that floats free in space.
Why is there so much conflict in the world? Is it because there's so many different perceptions that people have of what they think should be right or what they should do?
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 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. Yeah.
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 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 audience is 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. You know, if you start with the presumption that there's a baseline of suffering in life and that that can be exaggerated by as a consequence of human 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 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. happiness.
-Yeah, it's better.
Yeah.
-You'Re not guilting 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 lied. -What opportunity you lost or yeah or the things that you've let go that you should have capitalized on and 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.
Right?
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 be pathetic. And I, unless you're Psychopathic and, you know, and you're living a parasitical life, and that, 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 you're not, you're, you're not, 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, you know, home, whatever it may be.
Yeah, well, because you're not only, 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, you're, you're not only a void, you're a drain. Jesus, that's a catastrophe.
And 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 know, you wake up at 3:00 in the morning and you know. And so, 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 admit. 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 onto 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 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, negative towards 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, it's dramatized in the world and 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. And that you also generally do it while cooperating and competing with with other people. That's also the game-like element as well. All of that's dramatized in athletics. 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. 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 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.
It 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, like it's laid out in words. Now, the problem often is, is 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, right? So it's not entirely abstracted because it's not only coded in words, it's acted out.
Visual, you can see an example of what just happens 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 that you start to discipline yourself with regards to a particular sport, but it might also will be that you start to mimic or are at least affected in some way by their sportsman-like behavior, right? 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, and then hopefully you could translate it into life setting.
Well, right, that's exactly right. That's the goal. Well, that's what you hope for. Yeah, that's the goal of this. So 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 athletics. 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.
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.
Everything's being watched, yeah.
Well, 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 as a consequence of newspaper articles that, you know, 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 opinions, 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.
And how do we...
Yes, but you should, you should, you should be more focused on deserving a good reputation.
What does that mean?
Don't. Don't do things you know to be wrong.
And even if you.
Don't lie.
Yep.
Don't lie. Don't be careless.
You.
I mean, especially if you're. See, I'm fortunate, I 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, in, 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 an 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, you know, 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.
It's been 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 brother actually went to prison for drugs when I was a kid. and I was in a 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 unexpectedly and 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.
Yeah.
Ethically, particularly. But more than that, even just physiologically, let's say. So that's, that's definitely it.
Did you ever have a, 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, and, 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. them with anyone else, which was the same sort of thing. And a lot of the public commentary on my work is similar to that. But in some sense that wasn't a surprise because what I learned changed the way I looked at things completely too. Absolutely, completely one hand, like completely in a revolutionary way. And so, and I.
I had a.
Sense of that from, I don't know how old, very young. People wonder why I engage in conflict. I hate conflict. And I find it very stressful, but conflict delayed is conflict multiplied.
That's so true. It's worse to have lingering conflict for months, years, decades than the pain of direct conflict that can hopefully resolve and move on.
Yes, absolutely. Well, and as the conflict is delayed, it's the reasons multiply. And the persons who are involved because they're avoiding, demean themselves and get weaker and less confident. And so it's a, Vicious circle. It's better to notice. There's a line in the New Testament, Christ talks about prayer. And so you imagine that as communion with God. So you could imagine that as an attempt to confer with the ideal or maybe to even occupy that space for a while. well, he says, Christ says, if you have a problem with your brother, fix that first. Go pray later. Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that's it. That, that's, that's, that's wise. And, and that's a good thing. You know, if you're, if you're angry with your, the people who are close to you, if you're resentful. I read a lot about that in chapter 11. Resentment is so useful. It's so useful. It's so horrible, so toxic, it's so destructive, but. It's so informative. If you're resentful, you're either being oppressed and not standing up for yourself or you're whiny and should grow up. And both of those things are really useful to realize. And all you have to do is notice that you're resentful and want to do something about it. Okay, I'm resentful. Okay, am I immature? You know, are people picking on me or I am immature? If people are picking on me, do I have something to say or something to do? I should do it. It's a gateway to improvement, resentment. Or you can let it foster it and let it devour you and take you places that no one with a clear mind would ever want to go. Hell, that's resentment, man. That's the pathway to hell. And if you don't believe in hell, you don't have any imagination. That's my sense of things.
You mentioned paradise being a safe space where we can play and have fun and feel protected. But a lot of times, at least in the last year, I'm seeing more and more in the world that the anxiety, stress, depression, challenges of the mind or the heart and the body have seemed to come to the surface for a lot of people even more. And it sounds to me, and it looks to me like when I'm connecting with people that a lot of things from the past, past memories, past pains, hurts, traumas are being brought to the forefront for a lot of people with the chaos of the now. How do we start to heal the memories of the past, the traumas of the past, so that they don't keep hurting us in the presence.
Well, the first thing I would say.
Is.
You know, sometimes there's a crisis in well-meaning mental health professionals rush in to discuss the trauma while it's still happening. That's a really bad idea. People are generally traumatized because something actually horrible happened and dwelling on it in the moment just makes it worse. It's not like anybody has a solution. Here's how you should understand this. You know, someone's just shot up your kid's school. Here's how you should understand this. That'll make it all better. It's like, no, it won't. If you have old baggage. That often comes up if you're having an argument with someone, doesn't it? You know how it is. This is partly why people don't like to have a dispute within a relationship because it's a thread and you pull on that thread and just God. Oh, that we had another rule. Do not agree with something you don't agree with. Ooh, like if we're gonna If we decide, you and me, that we're doing this, we don't go back and say, well, I didn't really mean it. We don't get to play revisionist with our history. So if you don't agree, don't agree. Fight, object, or hold your peace. Because you see what happens with couples is there's a little fight, And then one says to the other, yeah, but you did this. And then that person says, yeah, I know I did that, but then that was because you did this and each this gets bigger until what's on the table is why the hell should we stay together at all? Right. And so every fight becomes why the hell should we stay together at all? So that's another thing you want to do is you want to have the fight about this thing.
Not about everything.
Not everything. It's like, okay, you were flirting. I think you were flirting more than you should have been. Okay, so I go away and I think, well, okay, maybe I was. Okay, well, then we have to have a discussion about why.
And maybe we can solve that.
But mostly what we have to do is figure out how to not have that happen again. Okay, so we're gonna go see the same couple again. What is it that you want me to do? So I'm the flirtatious one, let's say. What do you want me to do? Well, you have to figure that out. It's like, no, I'm stupid. Like you, we're equally stupid. I need to know what would satisfy you and you need to figure out what would satisfy you so I know. And that's also extremely useful is let your establish your conditions of satisfaction, make them explicit, let the other person know.
Yeah, you can't read someone's mind.
We're very bad at that. We're bad at reading our own minds, for that matter.
Yeah. So.
If I have a fight with Tammy, let's say, sometimes I remember to say, okay, what do you want me.
To do right now?
What can I do? What should I say and mean? And you think, well, you shouldn't let the other person put words in your mouth. Well, fair enough. I'm not asking for something false. I'm saying, I'd like to not have this happen. Can you see a way out? Is there something I could do to increase the probability that that's the route we could take? And, you know, sometimes that works.
But.
The other person has to let you know what they would find satisfying.
What's your biggest fear now moving forward in your in your own life.
Oh, making a mistake at the moment. Because, like, I've been. I've been the subject of so much public attention in the last two years. And, like, I've been in a situation where, well, even things I didn't say have also almost been fatal because people take them out of context.
Right.
You know, but I'm. My biggest fear has been that I do something careless and, and. that there are, like, 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, in Canada, when I opposed some legislation that I thought was reprehensibly constructed, you know, the.
The.
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 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, and, but I already had 200 150 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 was 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 people, 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. That's it. And so, and it's lovely to talk to people like that. It's amazing. It is. One of the things I thought about when I was writing this was, you know, when you love someone, especially, well, 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, then I mean, I guess you think that that fragility and vulnerability is justifiable. It's like, well, then you can't allow that, it's 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. And so take your 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. And that's also a theme that runs through the book in many, many ways, is that you don't protect your children. In fact, 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.
So 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 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 and so it's just, it's you know and 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 absolute agony. and I couldn't get it under control. And I could see, well, because I am a clinician, I could 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 removed. replaced. She was put in a rehab home hospital for a while, and she was the youngest person in it by like 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, since you're a 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 up 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. Right? 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.
And so, 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.
When do you feel the most loved, Jordan? When what's happening around you or when you're creating something or when you're with people? When do you feel personally the most loved?
It's when I'm with my family, when I'm with my kids, when I'm with my family, friends too. And that's even been more the case over the last couple of years because my family and friends have been so unbelievably loyal and helpful to me and my family as we've had our troubles. Terrible, terrible troubles over the last couple of years. They've been so unbelievably reliable and helpful, amazing. Certainly people have gone out of my way for me in a way that I don't believe I would have done for them.
Really?
Well, Look, I saw my father-in-law and I write about this in Beyond Order. I don't know, I read about it in 12 Rules More, I think, but it doesn't matter. He's a really extroverted guy, disagreeable guy too, masculine guy, extroverted, assertive, everybody in the little town I grew up in knew who he was. He was a performer, you know, the life of the party, and a good businessman, but a real character. and he did his own thing. But then his wife got prefrontal dementia when she was quite young, 55. And man, he took care of her for 15 years. It was unbelievable. And it was so interesting too, because if we offered to help him, he would accept it right away. And anything that we could do that would like, I suggested one time, for example, that he buy a digital readout sign so that if he went out, he could type in where he was going on the sign and it would just repeat over and over.
Oh, that's cool.
And some recordings in the bathroom to help his wife remember what to do. And he would just implement those, accept and implement them right away. But he, this guy who was, who lived his own life, who was a very extroverted social person, not someone who you would have regarded as soft and caring. and I don't mean that in a negative way. It's just that that wasn't him. It wasn't Mother Teresa, you know, he just. He cared for her in a way that was absolutely astonishing. And I saw that also in my friends and my family, in the care that they've offered to Tammy and I over the last two years. Mind-boggling mind-boggling But I would say the place I like to be the most.
Is.
In a family situation. When there's no elephants under the rug and everyone's playing If you ever have that, you should consider yourself fortunate beyond belief because it's unlikely and you can lose it at any moment.
Yeah.
I've been in. I was in the hospital more or less for a year and then another year with Tammy, and I thought I'd lost all of that. Never get it back. It was very Dreadful. And so now when it happens, I mean, I've always been grateful for it. When it happens, strive for that. You know, the animal experimentalists have demonstrated that. And the ones who study play, this is Jaak Panksepp in particular, but there's a variety of them who study play. Brilliant scientists play as a circuit. It's a mammalian circuit. It's a specialized circuit. And it's very important developmentally for that circuit to be given free reign to play. It's how children play out roles in the world that they're eventually going to adopt. They play mother, they play father, they play all these different roles and that's how they learn to be those things. The role of the father is to put up security so that play can occur. So the security is there, that's the walls, they fortify the walls, man the walls, guard the walls, but within the walls then that's where play can take place and play is very easily disrupted hunger, thirst, any emotional state, any motivational state can supersede it, even though it's very, very important. So you have to have the walled garden in place before play can occur.
Remove the fears.
Yeah. To make it safe so that experimentation can take place within. That's Paradise, right? That's right. It's a walled garden. That's what Paradise means, is a walled garden where structure and nature, the walls and the garden are harmoniously interacting and where eternal play can occur. That's paradise.
Before we continue this video, make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day. What do you think of the skills that people should start to develop in their 20s in general to make them better human beings, more potentially open to success financially, relationship, health wise, what are two or three things that everyone should focus on in their 20s?
Well, it certainly doesn't hurt to be in physical, good physical condition so we can walk through it. Stop drinking too much. How do you know if you're drinking too much? You regret what you do when you're drinking. It's interfering with other important goals. It's causing you financial distress. It's getting you in trouble with your friends or your family. It's getting you in trouble with the police. Okay? So stop abusing substances if you can, right? If you see that they're hurting you. And alcohol is particularly pernicious in that regard.
So.
Physical health, are you in decent shape? Are you strong and coordinated? And if you're not, well, you'd be better if you were. You'd feel better, you'd be more effective, you'd live longer, you'd be less sick. and you really see that Mount up. Like, if someone's been in shape once in their life, they age way better. And it's also a really good way of maintaining your cognitive ability. Like, you know, you. You hear about those exercises that you can do online to make you smarter and keep your cognitive ability intact. Those don't work. There's no evidence that they work. People keep saying that they make you smarter, they maintain your cognitive function. psychologists have studied that for 50 years, hoping that one of those things will work, trying all sorts of creative tacks. They don't work. Exercise Works, cardiovascular and weight lifting. You start to decline in your fluid intelligence at about the age of 25, and it's a linear Trend downhill, and it can accelerate as you get older. It's just like this. Quite ugly. If you exercise, you stave that off. So that's really useful. Maintain your relationships and. And Foster them. They're un. So when I look at successful people, they're really good at something. They're reliable.
Right.
You can count on their word. They're generous, and they have a wide, wide connection Network which becomes more and more valuable as you get older.
Yeah.
So it's one advantage that older people really have over younger people. They have a connection network and a connection network is- Huge.
Well.
You could be connected to a thousand well connected people. Okay, that means you are connected to the entire world.
Right.
It's unbelievably valuable. And that's one of the things that's so absolutely remarkable about the situation that I'm in right now. As far as one of the great benefits is- I can contact pretty much anybody and they'll talk to me. It's like, really? That's so cool. I'm interested in infrastructure for reasons I won't get into, but I'm interested in infrastructure development. I think it's a good method of wealth transfer. It's a good solution to the problem of inequality and employment. I reached out to a leading expert on infrastructure last week. See if he'd talk to me. I thought, I don't know anything about infrastructure except that it's worn to a frazzle and we should do something about it. You know, he agreed to talk. Having a connection network is of an inestimable value.
It's huge.
Reliability, generosity, you can work on both of those. Philosophical sophistication, it's very useful because it orients you properly. you have a sophisticated sense of the world. You find, for example, that doing things for other people is actually more rewarding than virtually anything else you can do. You know, when you hear you should be of service to other people. Well, if you actually watch yourself.
You.
Pay attention to yourself and you do something that helps someone else and it genuinely helps them, I defy you to find another experience that is that satisfying. It's actually quite stunning how satisfying that is. And so that's a very useful thing to realize.
And why is helping another person the most satisfying thing for probably most people when they're, if they're, you know, out of their ego of, like, I want to buy more things to make me happy in this moment, why is that? Such a satisfying thing for human beings.
There's no better strategy for, there's no better life strategy. I mean, imagine, I could give you a quick sort of technical example. So imagine I take two people and I say, okay, I'm gonna give you $100 and you have to give some of it to the person right beside you. And they can either agree or disagree with the split, but if they disagree, you don't get anything. Okay, so a classical economist would say that the person should take the 100, offer the person next to them a dollar, and the person should accept it because why not? They get a dollar instead of nothing. And that's the solution. But what happens is that if you don't offer that other person something close to 50-50, They're likely to tell you to go to hell.
Ye.
Very and they think get nothing. You get nothing too. You think, Well, why would people do that? because they just reject fifty dollars and who cares? And the answer is, Well, we don't just play one game with other people, we play a repeating game. And so so imagine we did this imagine it's a crowd, and they're all watching you, and I offer you a hundred dollars, and you have to share it with the person next to you, and you say, Would you like to take $70? And the person says, well, I'm not sure that's fair to you, but if it's okay, yes. But then everyone else sees that and now they all have an opportunity to pick who they're going to play with next. Well, you're not going to get picked last, are you? Remember what you told me? You didn't want to get picked last, right?
I did not.
Okay, so what you did was you turned yourself into an athlete.
A machine.
Okay.
Okay, great. So, but imagine we expand that game.
Yes.
And we say, you want to be the person that everyone wants to play with.
Yep.
Well, then all you have in your whole life is invitations to play. Well, how, and how are you going to be that person? Be productive, straightforward, generous, make everyone else.
Better around you, and they're going to want to play with you.
Absolutely. So there you go, and then you get to play.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, how is that not the best possible deal? It's clearly, see, so, so the reason, if, if the ethical argument is put properly, it is by far the most compelling argument. It's like if you want to have everything you could possibly want and more, then be a good person. The better a person you are, the more likely that is to happen. That doesn't mean you that you're completely protected against getting cut off at the knees. But there's no better strategy.
When you start to build yourself up and start to have the one thing that we don't have is confidence.
Yeah.
Everything else goes away.
You no longer look to other people for your self-esteem. Foundation. That's right.
Yeah.
You now know. I walk in a room now and I know the hours and years and decades I put into David Goggins.
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