The 4 Steps To FIX YOUR LIFE (Ben Shapiro & Jordan Peterson)| Lewis Howes

Deep down, we all know that when somebody says that they can fix all your problems, it's just garbage.

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.

Go do it now. Like, stop talking. Just go do it right now. If you don't have an excuse, then you shouldn't be wasting time.

Do not use your illness as an excuse. As soon as you do that, you can't tell the difference between the illness and your character.

If you want to get your life in order, then make sure to follow these four steps from Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.

Deep down, we all know that when somebody says that they can fix all your problems, it's just garbage. Which is also one of the other messages that I think my dad and my parents inculcated, which is, if you've got a problem, the proper order is that you first look within and see if you can solve it yourself. Right. That accepting that my parents weren't the type of people where if we had a problem at school, they blame the teacher. Their first question was, okay, did you do it?

How can you change it? How can you respond differently to it?

Yeah, and this is my pet peeve with people I deal with in family, friends, society is if a good piece of advice is given to you, do you ignore the advice? Do you fight against reality? Are you more angry at reality than you are willing to change yourself? Because if that's the case, you're doomed to lead a pretty miserable life because reality is not changing. That doesn't mean there are certain social circumstances that we can't all work together to change. But if you're running smack into certain baseline realities, such as some people are smarter and some people are not as smart, and some people earn more money and some people earn less money, and you're living in a free society and you're running into reality. Like, I made a bunch of bad decisions in my life and now I'm poorer than I otherwise would be. Or I made a bunch of.

Because of those decisions, because of those.

Decisions that ain't society's fault, Maybe you ought to get.

It's not the government's fault.

That's right. Maybe you ought to get your stuff together. I mean, there was a joke going around that if I were to run for president, my slogan would have been solve your own problems. Because for every Politician, It's, I'm gonna solve your problems. And this is something I despise on all sides of the aisle. Right? I think that President Trump's, taken example, campaigned on the basis that you have a dying factory town. It's been dying because technology is ripping away those jobs and because the market doesn't help create new jobs in this particular area. Well, we're not going to say that you should leave your town and go to a different town where the jobs are and treat your life as an adventure and go forth. Instead, we're going to say, no, we're going to bring those jobs back because it's the Mexican and the Chinese who stole those jobs. That's nonsense. Okay? And when you hear the same thing from politicians like Elizabeth Warren, who recently spoke at a historically black college and she said to a group of black students that America is inevitably stacked against you. And I'm thinking, these are people going to a top level college who majored in probably useful things and will get a job after that major. No, I mean, it's one thing to say that I can cite a specific example of somebody who has discriminated against me, done something bad. Here's a specific law that disadvantages me. If your solution's focused, then you should be asking, okay, what is the problem and what is the solution? But I think that we, as a country and just generally human beings, we're oriented toward being problem focused, meaning that something bad happens. And we think, okay, how can we complain about this problem? How can we blame this problem on somebody who's not me? As opposed to, okay, how can we solve this problem? How can we take ownership? Yeah, right. How can we, how can we do something about it? And you know, my wife and I have a basic rule that this applies in relationships also. So my wife and I have a basic rule that came up very early in our marriage. So my wife was a lovely person. And as my listeners know, a doctor she is. She does a thing that I think many women do, and she will want to talk to me about a problem. And as a man, my first instinct is, okay, here's what we should do, let's fix it. Yeah. And she gets pissed, right? She doesn't actually want the problem solved. She just wants to talk to me about the problem because it makes her feel better. Why can't you listen more? Why can't. And so I said to her, that's fine, but I need to know up front in the conversation, is this a problem solving conversation or is this a me hearing you conversation, tell me so you understand, right? So this is an actual rule in our house that when we start addressing a problem, I'll say to her, and she doesn't get offended because she's awesome. I'll say to her, is this a you want me to give you a solution problem or is this a you just want me to listen to you? And very often she'll say, I just want you to listen. It's like, okay, good, now I know. Because what's the worst for guys is you say, right, so here's the problem and here's three ways you can solve it. She's like, what are you talking about? Why are you so. I think that's true in politics also. We mix up what it is that we want out of our politicians. We pretend that what we want out of our politicians is solutions. What we actually want out of our politicians is sympathy. The problem is that sympathy does not create solutions. Sympathy is just a way for people to pander to you for votes and money. Sympathy. Like, you should be viewing your politicians like you view your plumbers. Do they solve the problem? You shouldn't be viewing them like, right, you shouldn't be viewing them like you do. Your psychotherapist. Do they hear me? Do they listen to me? Wow.

You know, it's interesting because about 10 years ago, I was playing professional football, kind of like minor league football. I was getting 250 bucks a week, so it wasn't like I was making a lot of money, but I was doing what I loved and I got injured and I was sleeping on my sister's couch for about a year and a half afterwards. I didn't have a college degree yet. This was in 2008 when the economy was pretty bad and people with degrees weren't even getting jobs. And I remember thinking at the time, I was like, how am I going to get out of this and can someone help me out? And this is going to be a struggle. You know, I was thinking like, there's got to be a better way for people like me who can get taken care of. And then I realized after my sister lovingly kicked me off her couch after a year and a half, she was like, you need to start paying rent, get a good job, do something. I remember saying, okay, what if I could solve this problem as opposed to being a victim to society what happened to me? Or whatever, what if I could solve this problem and be in complete ownership of every decision I've made up to here? I think one of the reasons I don't follow politics is, or watch the news or do any of that stuff is because I tried to instill what you talked about with people on this show, which is like, how do we overcome our own challenges? By not putting the blame on someone else, by not hoping for someone else to save us or rescue us or to give us a higher minimum wage or whatever it may be. But how can we develop skills with the society we're in? How can we develop new skills, be more valuable to society so that we can earn more? How can we take care of our health better so we're not sick and needing medicine or someone to supplement that through whatever it may be, some financial aid through medicine? How can we just take care of our lives better and improve the quality of our life? And I think when we can focus more on improving the quality of our lives, the political things don't really matter as much.

Well, this is right.

What's happening in the world doesn't matter.

What John Adams said, and I think this is right, is that the Constitution of the United States and what he meant by this is freedom is, is really only built for moral and religious people. What he meant by that really is that if you've got a group of people who are waiting around for somebody else to save them externally, you can't have a system where even we can take care of each other. Right. There are going to be situations in which the community needs to come together and take care of people who legitimately can't take care of themselves or are going through a rough stretch. Understood? All that's right. But if you don't have a group of people who are motivated not to take advantage of that or who are not being told by politicians that, you know, they should be taking advantage of it or that society has a duty, you know, why don't we focus on our own duties more than we focus on everybody else's duties to us? We focus a lot on rights in our society. We have a right to X, Y and Z. We focus very little on what are our duties to ourselves and to society. And that doesn't make us happier. It makes us more depressed.

What's the difference between rights and duties?

So rights are. So there are a couple different visions of rights. And I think that this is where we actually get political. So I think that there are two different visions of rights according to people on the right, on conservatives, what rights are, are things that you, you, you have a right to do X without government controlling you. So basically these are called negative rights. This is the the parliamence that's sort of used is that you have a right against the government. So, for example, I have a right to free speech. What that really means is the government does not have the ability to compel me to speak in a certain way.

Or no matter what I say.

Right.

Anything at all.

Right.

Even threats or.

Well, not, not threats because that. That's actual assault, but something. But anything that's not indicating violence, for example. Gotcha. I have a right to say, because the government does not have the power to encroach upon that.

If someone grabs you by the throat and says you're gonna be in an ambulance, if you keep speaking like that happens, that's illegal.

Yeah, that's actually a violation of the law. But me saying something that offended that person is not a violation of the law. And the government can't compel that. So the idea for people who believe in sort of traditional constitutional freedoms is that the Bill of Rights is an expression of a bunch of negative rights for the most part. Things where right to freedom of religion means the government can't impose upon you things that would exist in what John Locke would call a state of nature, that if there were no government, you just lived in a community with your families or whatever, that the government wouldn't be there to impose things on you. So what would you have without the government imposing anything on you? So right to bear arms is. The government does not have the right to take away your arms. Now what people on the left have said is that those rights are not sufficient. You need actual material goods to provide you with a sense of well being, sufficient that you can lead a happy life. So for example, a right to health care, that's something that we have to force somebody to provide for you, whether it's through taxation or forcing a doctor to take care of you. A right to health care is an affirmative duty on someone else. A right to free speech is an affirmative duty. If I'm just sitting here, I have a right to free speech. Have I forced you to do anything? The answer is no. If I have a right to health care and I get hurt now I have to compel somebody to provide that health care for me. Right. Because I have a right to it, which means that it doesn't match. If I'm just sitting here, healthcare doesn't just arrive. There has to be a doctor qualified to take care of me. And if that doctor doesn't want to take care of me, he has to be forced to take care of me. Or she has to be forced to take care of me. So that's true for rights to health care, right to education, right to any of the right to housing, many of the rights that folks on the left cite. So when I say rights versus duties, this applies broadly to virtually all rights, but particularly it's important for people who believe in a positive version of rights. So the right to free speech comes along with the duty if you want to have a functioning society, is what I'm talking about. The right to free speech comes along with a duty not to be a generalized jackass, because if you do that, it wrecks the social fabric. Right. So if you're just going around like I believe that you have a right to call somebody an ethnic slur, you do, you have a right. It's not illegal if you do it.

It's a right, but it's not a.

It's a bad thing to do. Right? It's a wrong. It's a right, but it's a wrong. Like it can be wrong in your use of rights. People do it all the time. People do stuff I don't approve of all the time. That's legal. That's good. I'm glad it's legal. But if the. But if they act, if people act like jackasses within the bounds of their rights all the time, there's no social fabric. We can't live together. Right.

If you're just offending people all day long, then what's the point of being here?

Right? Exactly. And if the offense comes with a point, as in we actually have to have a substantive conversation, that's one thing. This is a conversation I had a lot during 2016 about President Trump, and also a conversation I had about a couple of folks who are kind of alt right in Milo Yiannopoulos, for example, is they would say things that were deliberately taboo just to say I want to say something that's taboo because we have to bring break political correctness. And what I said was, political correctness is only bad if it's trying to bar speech that is valuable. Meaning that if there's a politically correct taboo against using the N word, agree. Very bad to use the N word. No one should use the N word. I'm not going to say the N word just to violate the politically correct taboo because it's bad to say the N word. But if you're going to tell me that it's political, that political correctness says that I am no longer allowed to say that male and female are biological categories, that's a valuable thing. That has ramifications for society there. I'm anti political correctness. So that's an example of you have a right to say bad things, but you shouldn't do them just to be a jerk. The same thing holds true when it comes to positive rights. And I think the left has failed to recognize this, particularly when they cite, for example, the Nordic countries. They'll say, well, there's a right to health care. Okay, let's assume that you're right. I disagree. I don't think there's a right to health care. I don't think you can compel somebody else to provide your health care. I think that's wrong. But let's take your point of view for a second that there's a right to health care. Well, this should come along with a continent duty to take care of yourself. So if you are. So if you are, if you're smoking.

And drinking and never move your body and you're eating junk food all day, then you're not taking care of yourself.

Right. And then you are throwing the obligations, the externalities onto this entire other group of people to save you. Right. And the reason that one of the reasons that you've been able to support, practically speaking, a larger social welfare state in places like the Nordic countries that Bernie Sanders likes, you know, I'm not a Sanders fan, but places like Sweden or Norway or Denmark is because they have a very strong social fabric where everybody is. Everybody. Yeah. People know their neighbors. They feel an obligation, like, to take.

An example, they help each other.

Right. You saw Cinderella Man. So the movie with Russell Crowe.

I didn't see it.

Oh, you didn't see it.

Okay.

With James J. Braddock. Okay, so James J. Braddock is this champion boxer who rises from being welfare. Right. Okay, so you remember there's a scene in it where he's been on the welfare rolls and now he's the champion of the world.

Right.

And he goes back into the welfare office with a roll of cash and he hands it back to the welfare agent. Well. And they say, well, you don't have to do that. He says, no, I do have to do that because that's a duty that I owe to you. Right. I no longer need the welfare. Right.

It wasn't his right duty.

Right. It's a duty for me to bring that cash back to you. That's something that I think Americans have lost. And it's something that also happens in the context of government taking care of us. Because the government is by nature faceless. The government is a barrier between you and your fellow citizen. When you get a check from the government, you tend to think, ah, the government. It's what's giving me the check. The government doesn't have any cash providing auspices of its own. The government is taking money from another human. Well, if the. We don't think about that way in our churches or synagogues, right? Like I belong to a synagogue. When somebody in our community has a financial problem, we all get together and we contribute to the person via the rabbi. He'll go to the rabbi. The rabbi will come to us and say, this person is having a rough month, we need to pay his rent. And can we all get together and do that? Well, that's good in the sense that this person knows who exactly is giving him the money, and he feels an obligation to all those people not to mooch off of them, because we all share a community together. Well, that sort of social fabric has to exist, that feeling of obligation has to exist if we are to have functioning rights in the first place. And that includes people who believe that you have a right to other people's stuff.

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, 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. They're not negative towards the other people. They're lifting them up too.

Yeah.

Like the ultimate.

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

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

Well, it helps us figure out what we can imitate.

Gives us a model.

Yes, it's a model.

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 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. 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 the fact that you admire the person means that you might start to try to act like them. Now, it's not easy. And maybe that would mean. Maybe that would mean that you start to discipline yourself with regards to a particular sport, but it might also be that you start to mimic or are at least affected in some way by their sportsmanlike 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. There isn't. That's the ground of ethics.

And if you can do it there in that setting, then hopefully you could translate it into.

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 athletics. So I've been talking to my audiences a lot about that, about the. And, well, and 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, makes it worse, then if you don't have a noble aim, and if that isn't imbuing your life with sustainable meaning, then you fall prey to all the catastrophe, the pain and the anxiety and the anger that that suffering generates. And that makes you bitter, because what.

I'm hearing you say is that. And correct me if I'm wrong, we must have an aim in our life no matter what stage of life we're in. And if we don't have some type of aim, even if for a few months of an aim of going somewhere, a direction, we're gonna. The suffering is gonna be even more suffering, pointless, because we're already going to face the greatest challenges in life. We're already struggling.

That's right. There's no way out of it.

Adversity is coming no matter what.

That's right.

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

Yeah, well, not Only it's worse than that even, because the suffering is 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 the. 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 you, 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. And so, so 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 is what you should aim. Yeah, better aim, that's for sure. So then the question is, what should your aim be? Now we have a program. It's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today. I, I have this website called self authoring.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, 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, why the positive things happened and why more of that could conceivably happen in the future. And to detail out why the negative things happen and to try to understand why with an aim to not replicating them in the future. Because the purpose of memory isn't to remember the past. The purpose of memory is so that you, you figure out what went wrong, when something went wrong, so you don't duplicate it in the future. So that's the purpose of memory. And the past authoring program can help people catch up. And you know, you have to catch up. If you have memories that are older than about a year and a half that still cause you emotional pain when you think about them or if you dwell on them, they come spontaneously back to mind, means you haven't. It means that there's part of your life that you haven't mapped out properly, and it still has emotional valence that's gripping you.

You're still holding onto that story or.

It'S still holding on to you. Right?

You haven't let it go.

Yeah, 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 was. Wasn't good. Fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it. That will never go away unless you fix it.

How do you fix it?

Well, you have to figure out why it happened. Right? That's the first thing is like, how did you. How was it that that situation arose to pull you down? And that's not simple. That's why. Well, that's why we have the writing program, because it's complicated to think it through. But you. But if you face it and you. And you meditate on it, let's say, and you do this voluntarily, there's a pretty high probability that you'll be able to decrease the probability that will be repeated in the future.

So go ahead. I don't want to cut you.

Oh, well. Well, we. 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. Right? 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.

And.

And so 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, okay, 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 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, 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 actually get it? Well, then you need an incremental plan. You need to break that goal down into steps.

Not some crazy goal within a year. That's like you haven't even done the work to master a skill yet.

Yeah, yeah, well, that's it. And you can have a high end goal and more power to you if you do well. You need a pathway to it. You know, if it's 10 stories up above you, you need a staircase to get there, right? And so you have to build the staircase too. And so in the future authoring program, so you're asked, first of all, okay, here's, 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 here. 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, you know, your wife or your husband and your kids. Assuming that you're at that point in your life, if 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, 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 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 got to regulate that so it isn't a pitfall. How are you going to use your time meaningful and productively outside of work? You need to plan for that. So that's, there's one other. That's the moment. Yeah, I think there's seven initial questions and I don't, I don't remember the last one. Oh, intimate relationship, of course. So you have, do you want to, do you want a long term, stable, intimate relationship? And if you do, then how would you like that to lay itself out? You got to have a vision for that. Because if you don't have a vision, you're not going to aim at it. And if you don't aim at it, then you won't even see the opportunities when they arise. That's the thing. That's so cool. I wrote about this in chapter 10, which is be precise in your speech. It's a chapter about the fact that aims structure your perceptions. So, for example, once you aim at something, your brain, literally the perceptual structures in your brain, in your visual cortex, reorient themselves to calculate a pathway to the aim. And then what they show you in the world is obstacles to that path and, and open pathways to the path. That's actually how the world reveals itself. Just like, just like when you're driving in a car and you have a map and you or 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 gives you something to improve. So even if your 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.

Yes, exactly.

I thought I wanted this, but I don't. So let me re navigate and figure out what I do.

Exactly.

And you might have to try a bunch of things.

Well, you will have to. You can be. 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. So it's a. So there's a bit of no man's land. No man's land is not worse than no man's room is worse than a bad path. That's exactly right.

Oh, I like that.

That's. 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.

Right.

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 in the middle of positions. You bet. So if you're aimless, you're also at a place where everything is shooting at you. Yeah. So it's a very good metaphor that came to mind. Yeah, well, that's why we worked on it. That's very, very cool. So then we say to people, okay, look, now. Okay, 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. This isn't a composition exercise. Right. You get to have what you want three to five years down the road. What does your life look like, hypothetically? Write it out. Write it out. Okay, so then that's the first part, the second part of the exercise. So now you've got your thing to aim at. You think, well, I'm motivated because I got my thing to aim at. It's like you're not as motivated as you could be because you don't yet have your thing to run away from. Because if you really want to be motivated, you want to be going somewhere, and you want to be not going.

Somewhere else, which typically is a pain.

Yes, pain or anxiety. Some. Some domain of suffering and guilt.

I don't want to this anymore.

Yes, exactly, exactly. So. So the other thing we ask people is, okay, now take stock of your weaknesses and Imagine that you let them multiply. You got hopeless, and you augured in, and things were as bad for you as they could be in three to five years.

What are some examples of weaknesses that people might have?

They lie, they procrastinate, they avoid, they're grandiose, they're narcissistic, they're undisciplined, they're nihilistic, they're aimless. All of those things, right? Victim mentality. They take the quick way out. They pursue impulsive pleasures. They sacrifice meaning for expediency. They don't take care of their basic responsibilities. They fight stupidly with their parents. They don't negotiate properly with their spouse. They'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 many drugs. They don't regulate their workout. Yeah, yeah. And everyone knows, man, everyone knows. And everyone's got a set of weaknesses that they know about.

What was the biggest lesson that your mom taught you growing up?

So my mom is really different from my dad for a variety of reasons, and she is eminently practical. So. She is. She was.

Your dad's the artist.

Exactly, exactly. And visionary and likes to dream. And my mom was like, okay, yeah, but who's going to sign the check? And so that's where my mom comes in. And so, you know, I'm a little. I'm a lot less guerrillas than my dad. Even though I talk a lot, my dad talks even more than I do. And my mom is a lot more kind of to the point. The word in Yiddish is takhlis. She's like. She's very, like, down to the meat of it. And so from her, it's more a manner of, we're not gonna waste time. We're gonna get right to the point. We're gonna get things done. And so she's. Because she's very practical. And so I would say that the lesson that I. That I learned from her is just like, go do it now. Like, stop talking. Just. Just go do it right now. Like, if you don't have an excuse, then you shouldn't be wasting time doing that. And so my dad taught a lot of kind of life lessons about morality and decency. And my mom was much more about, like, you got to take action now. You need to. You need to go out, you need to move right? Make a plan. Like, this is always. Honestly, I've had, you know, depressed folks in my family, and I know I have friends who have been depressed before. And to me, you know, when you're not talking about clinical depression, obviously, where you need actual care, but if you're talking about just. You're down, the number one thing you should do is make a plan. Literally. Get a piece of paper and a pencil.

Yeah.

And write down a bunch of goals and then write concrete steps step by step. This is correct. And. And then when you're not.

It's Jordan Peterson's way.

Yeah, exactly. And I think, honestly, I don't think it's Jordan's way or my way or I think it's everybody's way. Right. The successful people in life make lists of things they want to do. And then if you really want to be successful, then what you do is you take the little things first, you cross those off. It gives you a feeling of momentum, and then you can tackle the big things. I think it's a big mistake for people to think, okay, well, my goal is to be president, and so here's a list of 100 things I'm going to do. How about take out the garbage first?

Break your bed.

Right. As Jordan says. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

I think the key is that's why routines and habits are such a big hot topic right now. It's just like when you have a routine where you do something every day, you build momentum, you start to feel better, you feel less depressed. And if we don't have something to aim at, then we are aimless. We feel like we're just wandering in no man's land and the worst comes to us. As opposed to us creating the best for ourselves.

Exactly. And I think that this does have some deep philosophical roots. So I have a book that's coming out in March, and it talks sort of about why suicide is up and why depression is up. And my basic thesis is that we're sort of living. So I talked at the very beginning about eternal values. I think there are certain eternal values that undergird our free and prosperous civilization. And we're living on the fumes of those values, having undermined a lot of those values.

Name me a few of the core values you're talking about.

Okay. So I think that there are four things that human beings need to be happy. You need individual purpose. So you're alone on a desert island. What do you do today? What gives you meaning? So you need individual purpose. You need individual capacity. So you need to feel like you have the capacity to do something. You live in a world where you have free will, where you can make a freely willed decision where your reason is capable of understanding things. You can think things through and make a good set of decisions on your own. You have to believe that the universe is predictable enough, that things aren't magically changing around you and harming you and victimizing you. So you need that on the individual level. And then you need the same on a communal level. You need to feel that we together have something to do, right? As Americans, we have something to do, or as a religious community, we have something to do, or as a group of friends, we have something to do. And then you need to feel like there's communal capacity. We as a group of people can do it without violating the rights of the individual. Now, my view is that Western civilization was really good at creating a system where people had all four of these things based on, historically speaking, a unique set of circumstances that springs from Jerusalem and Athens. So Judeo Christian values, these ideas that there is free will, that you can act within the world, that there is a creator who stands behind a rational universe, that you have the capacity to understand that universe. If you apply your thinking to that universe that you are made, you have an estimable value, right? You are made in God's image. These are things that come from the Judeo Christian value system. And that you have an obligation to your fellow man to treat your fellow man in certain ways. And these are things that come again from the Judeo Christian value system. And then on the other hand, you have Athens, which is the idea that reason and logic can allow you to delve into the depths of the universe and really understand the world around you and to apply that reason to even the biblical rules that you receive, where you can say, okay, well, new evidence has arisen that means that we may have gotten our original interpretation of this rule wrong. So let's reinterpret the rule in a way that meets the evidence. So, for example, the most obvious example is if you are a biblical believer, there are a lot of people now who are creationists. I'm not a creationist. So when I'm a creationist in the sense I believe God stands behind the creation of the universe, but there are people who believe literally that God created the universe in six 24 hour days in exactly the order described by the Bible. I don't believe that. I believe that the evidence shows that that's not the case. Which means that God was giving a document as a religious person, as a religious Jew, God is giving a document to human beings in language we could understand at the time. But that doesn't necessarily mean.

So it's not the literal word, it's the interpretation.

Well, right. The interpretation was always taken for granted because as human beings, that's what we do. Anytime I say something to you, you're interpreting. So if God says something to me, I'm also interpreting. And God knows that because he's omniscient. So the basic interplay, the tension between faith and reason is what created the west. Because without certain core assumptions, then you couldn't actually feel as though you have capacity to operate in the world. So I think we've ripped away a lot of these things. I think we've ripped away the Judeo Christian value system. We've said that you don't need to go to church. The Bible is worthless. Not only that, it's oppressive, it's repressive, it sets up all these standards. And you, you have the capacity to make your own meaning. People suck at making their own meaning, but you have the capacity to make your own meaning and you can make your own world, your own set of morals. Well, the problem is that the same book, right, the same set of values that created the set of morals and meaning also says that you are made in God's image, that you have inestimable value as a human being that separates you from the animals, that you are not just a series of firing synapses adapting evolutionarily to your environment. Okay, take all that stuff away too. Now explain to me how you are a freely willed creature who can make a difference in your world. And the answer is you can. Now you're a meatball wandering through space. So I think that what happened over the course of the last couple centuries is that Western civilization got rid of all the bases for why human beings are unique, which are religious assumptions, and then it substituted reason. But reason requires certain religious assumptions. And so what we ended up with is we are a bunch of emotional creatures who are manipulated by our environment. And so that being the case, you actually don't have the power to do anything in your life. You're just what you are, right? You may think you're willing things, but you're not willing things. You're here, you're doing stuff just because you're doing stuff. And life doesn't have any higher meaning. There's no purpose to serve. Even getting married and procreation and all this stuff, that's pleasure, but that's not actual meaning. That's not actual purpose. Well, pleasure can be a purpose, but it is not a purpose. High Enough to actually drive people to do the right thing. And it also doesn't explain why you should be altruistic, why you should should help out other people, why you should worry about what happens after you die, why you should. I'm not even preaching the afterlife here. I'm preaching that there are certain values inherent to being a human being that say that you should care about something beyond yourself. As a society, we focus very much inward. We're very subjective now. Meaning is made by us. Biology, apparently, is defined by us. We get to define the world around us in our own personal terms. And again, we suck at it. We are not good at it. People don't create their own meanings. You either feel that there is meaning that is discoverable out there in the universe and that it's your job to go find it. Is where Jordan and I are really on the same page, or you are sitting in a chair trying to convince yourself that the meaning was made by you and it wasn't. And if it was, then why is your meaning any better than anybody else's meaning? Right?

Is that why you think people are suffering and more depressed than ever right now?

I think that's the cause without them knowing it. I think that the question is, what gets you up in the morning? What's your mission today? And I think that we've been basically, as long as you don't look at it, you're okay. As long as you don't look too deeply at the problem, you're all right. So you just say, okay, well, my goal is to act morally today. And you say, okay, well, where do morals come from? And then we all get very uncomfortable. Right, well, I know what's right. I'm a nice person. Okay, define nice. Define person. I mean, define all these terms, but those having no roots. That's why if you strip three layers down, then none of it makes any sense. And so I think that you've seen this manifest in basically, well, I'll let everybody do what they want. I'll do what I want now. I'll be happy. And that's not right. I mean, happiness according to Judeo Christian values was in service of God. And in Greek thought, happiness was at least in large part living in coordination with reason. And so we've said we don't have to live in coordination with reason to be happy. And we've said we don't need to serve God or our fellow man in order to be happy. So what exactly is it that's supposed to make us happy? Food?

Tv?

Even if Those who are watching or listening are not religious or don't believe in God. I'm sure that you've done the research on just the studies of what brings people happiness.

Religion is one of these things, by the way. It is deeply tied in or a.

Core belief system, a belief something of something greater than yourself.

Well, and this is the thing. People are religious even if they don't want to be. So if you're not, you are going to be religious about a thing. The question is, what are you going to be religious about? And when people, I mean, communists were the most religious people on planet Earth, they religiously believed in an ideal of a new utopia that was going to be created and was going to take effect over time. And if we have to murder a few million people, do it, we'll do it. Every. People need. People need a vision of what life is supposed to be, and they need a vision of what meaning is supposed to constitute the number of people who are honest enough to just say, okay, well, you know what? I'm an nihilist. Eff. It's. That's five people, and their lives don't end up being very good. None of this is a suggestion that you have to be religious in order to be moral at all. I think that there are plenty of people I know who are atheists, which I understand, who are moral human beings. My contention is that you can.

There's a lot of religious people who.

Are deeply, deeply immoral. Yeah, for sure, for sure. The question is, what can you build a civilization on? I don't think you can build a civilization on mere matter. I don't think you can just say, like, the world's just made up of stuff, and then stuff happens.

We're just here to exist.

But somehow we end up at a system that directly mirrors the Judeo Christian value system built over 3,000 years. Like, I think this is. It's a question I asked Sam Harris. I'm friends with Sam, and we did a podcast together. And at one point I said to him, sam, you and I hold 95% of the same values, but you're an atheist and I'm a religious person. So why is that? Where did your values come from? And he said, well, you know, I've studied all these different philosophies and religions, and then I came up with. With this moral system that I think makes sense for me. And I said, right, that explains why you think that you think that these things are true. But why is it that we have such overlap here? Isn't it More plausible that the overlap exists because you and I grew up, like, 10 miles from each other in Los Angeles. After 3,500 years of common history that developed to this point. People living in the same environment, having grown up in the same civilization, do have certain commonalities. But I think what we're seeing right now is that even the most basic commonalities are being ripped away. And I think this does have political overtones, or at least undertones. One of the most devastating lines that I heard in modern politics came in 2012 when President Obama, during his second inaugural address, said, you know, we in the United States, we don't have to have the same definition of liberty. We can each define liberty in our own way. And I thought, well, then you can't have a society, because if we can't agree on what liberty is, I don't know how you can say that we have a free society together. I mean, your definition of liberty is inherently going to conflict with mine. So we at least have to have a very baseline definition of liberty constitutes. I mean, it's like liberty and justice for all.

What does that mean?

Right. If we don't share that definition, then what exactly?

It's our own interpretation of what it means.

Right. I mean, if we all decide that we're gonna go out to ice cream, then you tell me that by ice cream, you meant that you want to go to the salad bar. Then we don't actually all want to go out to ice cream, do we? This is a serious problem.

I want gelato, and you want regular ice cream.

It's different.

Yeah.

And even there, you can say, okay, well, gelato is within the giant category of ice cream. But if we're saying that that, like, polar opposites, my liberty involves me taking a thing from you because I'm not free unless I have that thing. And my liberty involves you not being able to take that thing from me. We now have directly conflicting visions of what liberty is.

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

Depression, anxiety, whatever.

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

So you taught her from an early age though, and started to cut you off.

Yep.

Even though she had a, you know, let's just for this state of the conversation, a physical disability.

Right.

She wasn't as able bodied physically as a majority of people. Is that clear to say that you told her, like, never allow that to give you special privileges.

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

Then you'll constantly use that for the rest of your life.

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

But she still did the work.

Yes, she did the work.

And she said, oh, I can't take the test. Yeah, I can't do the exam at all.

Yeah.

But she was able to do it with different circumstances.

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

That's it.

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

And she feels fine.

She's 100%.

She has no symptoms, no vegetables, no supplements.

That's it. Beef salt. I'm serious. She never cheats. Wow. Never.

Because she doesn't want to feel pain and suffering.

Yes, well, it takes, if she, if she eats the wrong thing, she has a terrible, catastrophic emotional and physical reaction for a month.

Wow.

She essentially eliminate all food and try one thing at a time.

And so.

Okay, that didn't work.

Let's try this. And took about three years to figure it out. So. Yes. Wow is right. I can't. It's absolutely beyond comprehension. It's a diet that I follow almost, almost entirely now just Beef, salt and water. Yes, I've been eating that way for about three months and I've been on an extremely low carb diet for about two, two and a half years, something like that.

Wow.

So because I. Both my wife and I have autoimmune symptoms.

Yeah.

And she got all of them.

Your daughter.

Yeah.

So she got all by a thousand. Yes, that's right. So and so. But when she sorted out what was wrong, she convinced me to also try what she was doing. And it's been extraordinarily helpful for me too. Yeah. So, you know, who would have guessed it? So anyway, so what you do when things are too much for you is you narrow your time frame. I Also, in chapter 12, you know, there's a fair bit of discussion in there about fragility and vulnerability, which is really what you confront when you have a sick kid. It's like, oh my God, how can the world be constituted so that a child can unfairly suffer in this manner? It's like, okay, here's a way of thinking about it, all right? Take away everything from your child that makes them vulnerable. Let's say I have a three year old. It's like, well, three year olds, they're kind of cute, they run around, they're, they're little and they're, and they're vulnerable, obviously, but that makes them cute and attractive and lovable. All of the vulnerability that's built into that. So you think, well, you move, remove that one by one. Well, they're eight foot tall now and they're made out of steel and their parts are replaceable and they have artificially intelligent brain. Like you replace them. Obviously this is hypothetical with a, with a superhuman robot that doesn't die. It's like, you're fine, but where's the three year old, right? So one of the things I thought about when I was writing this was, you know, when you love someone especially 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 round, you think, oh, well that, 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, 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? Teach them to be strong. That's what you do. You don't get rid of the vulnerability. You teach them to be strong. That's also a theme that runs through the book in many, many ways, is that's you don't protect your children. In fact, you do. You do the opposite. You expose them to the world as much as you possibly can and you make them strong. That's the best antidote to their vulnerability. Not to protect them. There's no protecting people. We already established that. Life's a fatal game. There's no protecting people. But you can definitely make them strong and maybe you can make them strong enough to transcend that. That's the goal, man.

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

Not of any great 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, my. 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 give 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, 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. 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.

Thank you so much for watching this video. And if you're looking for more great incentives in your life, then check out this next video right here.

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.