In this episode, I sit down with author and keynote speaker Joel Sobel to talk about what it's like to travel the world and speak to people who are trying to get their lives back on track after a life of drugs and alcohol. Joel is a best-selling author, bestselling author, keynote speaker, speaker and public speaker. He's also the host of the award-winning TV show, and is one of the most impactful people I've ever met. He travels the world with his wife, Tammy, and they have three kids, and it's so inspiring to watch them grow up in such a loving and supportive environment. I hope you enjoy this episode and that it inspires you to keep going and keep pushing forward. I know that it did for me. I'll be back with a new episode next week with a much longer interview with my good friend, Dr. Michael Hyatt, who is also a keynote speaker and author. Stay tuned for that! -Joel Sobel is a good friend of mine, and I'm so grateful to have him on the show. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time and for sharing your story and your wisdom. I really appreciate it. -Jonah Sobel I hope that you enjoy the episode, and that you have a wonderful rest of the week! I'll see you next Tuesday! - Jonah Jonah's book, , is out on Amazon if you're looking for a good book recommendation, check it out! . Don't Tell me what you think of the book you've been reading or listening to this episode? or watching it on Amazon? I'm looking forward to hearing from someone else? - Thank you Jonah, Jonah is looking for some good advice? -- I'll send you a review! --Jonah's Book Recommendation: Jonathan Sobel's book: "Good Morning, Good Life, Good Morning, Bad Life, Bad Day, Good Day, Bad Night, Good Luck, Good Rest, Good Things, Good Vibes, Good Relationships, Good Times, Good Enough, Good Blessings, Good Thoughts, Good Sleep, Good Nights, and Good Things I've Been Through It's a Good Day by Jonathan Sobell Thank You Jonah Sobell's Book recommendation: -- -- Thank You, Jonathan Sobelman
00:00:12.000The schedule that you have and the amount of energy and enthusiasm you maintain with the schedule is very remarkable because you're not stopping.
00:00:54.000They make sure the theatres are smooth and we've had no problems at all.
00:01:00.000And then I have lots of people who are helping me with my scheduling and Tammy travels with me.
00:01:04.000And then the lectures themselves, well, I really like doing them, partly because I do a different lecture every night.
00:01:11.000And so that keeps me sharp and it makes sure that I'm thinking about new things all the time and trying to formulate my thoughts more precisely.
00:01:18.000And they're also unbelievably positive.
00:01:24.000That's also something that makes it a lot easier to do because, you know, I go to a city and there's 1,500 to 2,000 people waiting for me there which is like staggering in and of itself wherever I go and they're all there listening intently and it's a sophisticated discussion or at least as sophisticated as I can make it and I'm communicating directly with the audience and all the people are there to try to get their lives together.
00:01:49.000And so the feeling in the hall is really, really positive.
00:01:54.000And then I usually talk to about 150 people afterwards.
00:01:58.000And, you know, all of them, all of them, well, many of them, you know, they just say hi and they're polite and we have a photograph and all that.
00:02:06.000But lots of them have stories about how they've been putting their lives together and they're thrilled to death about it, you know, that they're out of the hole they were in.
00:02:13.000Or they've started a new business, or they've sold a new business, or they just decided to get married, or they're going to have some kids, or they've fixed up their relationship with their parents, or they quit drinking, and they're not addicted.
00:02:38.000his life is better and not only that that he had this additional positive effect on other people so and it's so fun because I have these conversations with people they're brief but they're very personal and they're very intense you know because they you think people have to trust you to tell you that their lives weren't going so well and then they have to trust you even more to tell you that they're going better now because of course what you want when you tell someone that things are going better is you want Real encouragement
00:03:08.000and real sense from the person you're talking to that they're happy for you.
00:03:12.000And I'm absolutely thrilled to hear these things.
00:03:14.000Like, I was in Whole Foods this morning.
00:03:31.000He was looking for ethical and moral guidance.
00:03:33.000And, you know, he found the books really helpful.
00:03:35.000And then it was helping him put his life together.
00:03:37.000And so a guy at the car rental place last night told me the same thing.
00:03:42.000And so it's so exciting, so ridiculously exciting to go everywhere around the world and to go into airports or to walk down the street and have people come up and say, I've been watching you on YouTube.
00:04:02.000And Jesus, like to be able to have that happen.
00:04:06.000You know, time after time, day after day, all over the place, that's just absolutely...
00:04:11.000It makes going to 100 cities, like, continually energizing, because it's so positive.
00:04:20.000And then there's all this weird crap in the press, you know, about my dangerous followers and all this alt-right nonsense, and it's so ridiculous, you know.
00:04:27.000I've talked to 250,000 people in seven months.
00:04:32.000We haven't had one incident that was negative in that entire time.
00:05:01.000I think it's really fantastic, and I think what's going on is, it makes me very optimistic, because I think that one of the things that new media has provided is these new avenues for information to get out there.
00:05:16.000And these new things like these lecture circuits.
00:05:19.000When was the last time you saw public lecture circuits that were popular to the tune of thousands and thousands of people?
00:05:26.000I saw the ones that you and Sam Harris did on YouTube.
00:05:29.000And, you know, Sam's doing them with a lot of other people as well.
00:05:31.000You're doing them with Dave Rubin as well.
00:05:38.000And also this desire to understand new paths of behavior and patterns of thinking.
00:05:44.000And that these are corrective paths and patterns that can lead you to a more fulfilled and happier life.
00:05:50.000And recognize the pitfalls of certain types of behavior that people just fall into.
00:05:55.000And I think oftentimes the difference between someone who lives a fulfilled life and someone who lives a life filled with disaster Is following incorrect patterns and not knowing what the correct ones are.
00:06:07.000So there's a lot of good people out there that live shitty lives.
00:06:10.000And they don't do it because they're just dumb or because they're bad.
00:06:14.000They do it because they've been influenced by certain patterns.
00:06:18.000They've fallen into patterns, whether it's because of the people that they surround themselves with or the neighborhood that grew up.
00:06:24.000The people that are around them have this way of being and they kind of fall into that.
00:06:27.000Or it's drugs or it's alcohol or whatever it is.
00:07:00.000You get pushed into this weird, what we were talking about before the podcast, by a small, select group of people.
00:07:08.000It's a very small but vocal minority that wants to misrepresent you, and then there's the periphery that listen to this small group, and then they sort of parrot those words out without any real thinking about what you've said.
00:07:23.000Well, you know, one of the things that I have made a mistake about in the past that I just realized in the last couple of weeks was that, you know, people often accuse me and they say, well, most of the people that listen to you are men.
00:08:06.000I mean, I didn't set out to do that specifically, but if that's the way it's working out, and there is a majority of men coming to my shows, say, then is that...
00:08:15.000Why is that all of a sudden supposed to be a bad thing?
00:08:18.000I'm asking men to, you know, to be more honest, especially in their speech and their thinking, and to be more responsible for themselves and for their family and for their community.
00:08:30.000And to grow up and to shoulder their burden and to live a responsible and meaningful life and putting those two things together conceptually.
00:08:37.000And then there's an accusation about that, as if there's something wrong.
00:08:40.000And I thought, why am I even playing into this?
00:08:48.000Like, every time someone comes up to me...
00:08:51.000And that's happening maybe a hundred times a week or something like that and tells me one of these stories about how they put their life together.
00:08:58.000It's like I'm absolutely thrilled about that.
00:09:44.000And that's part of that narrative that, well, if there's winners, there has to be losers.
00:09:49.000And the reason that there are losers is because there's winners.
00:09:52.000And that's complete bloody nonsense, because as far as I'm concerned, and I really believe this, is that every single person who sets out to put themselves together ethically...
00:10:02.000It's a net positive to everyone around them.
00:10:06.000My book has been criticized by people who've read it very poorly, especially chapter one when I talk about hierarchies, that I'm somehow supporting the idea that Power in a hierarchy is the right way to be.
00:10:19.000And there's absolutely nothing in what I've written that suggests that at all.
00:10:23.000I'm suggesting that human hierarchies are very complex and that the way that you win in a human hierarchy is by being competent and reciprocal.
00:10:33.000And so, I mean, for example, even if you're selfish, let's say, You've got to think very carefully about what that would mean if you were selfish and awake, because you have to work to take care of yourself and what you want, say, in this moment.
00:10:47.000But then there's you tomorrow, and there's you next week, and there's you next month, and next year, and ten years from now, and when you're old.
00:10:54.000So because you're self-conscious and because you're aware of the future, you're actually a community unto yourself.
00:11:01.000And if you're selfish and impulsive, all that means is that you're serving the person you are right now, you know, in that impulsive way, but not the person you're going to be.
00:11:09.000And so that's not a good grounds for any sort of ethical behavior.
00:11:12.000And I see that if you serve yourself properly, there's no difference between that and serving your family properly and serving your community properly.
00:11:20.000Those things all mesh in a kind of a harmonious manner.
00:11:23.000And one of the things that's really been effective in the lecture tour is a discussion about that idea And the relationship between that and meaning and responsibility, because one of the things that strikes the audience as silent constantly,
00:11:40.000because I'm always listening to them to see when the attention is maximally focused, is whenever I point out to people that The antidote to the meaninglessness of their life and the suffering and the malevolence that they might be displaying because they're resentful and bitter about how things have turned out,
00:11:56.000the antidote to that is to take on more responsibility for themselves and for other people, and that that's aspirational, which is kind of cool.
00:12:04.000You know, the conservative types, the duty types, and I'm not complaining about them, You know, they're always basically saying, well, this is how you should act, because in some sense, that's your duty, right?
00:12:18.000But the case that I've been making is more that, well, there is value distinctions between things.
00:12:25.000Some things are worth doing and some things aren't and you can kind of discover what that is for yourself and then you should aim at the things that are most worth doing and what you'll find if you watch carefully is that the things that you find worth doing are almost always associated with an increase in responsibility because if you think about the people you admire for example you spontaneously admire people and that's a manifestation of the instinct to imitate and Again,
00:13:34.000You should be responsible because you need to have a deep meaning in your life to offset the suffering so you don't get bitter.
00:13:40.000And the way you do that is to bear a heavy load, you know, to get yourself in check for...
00:13:46.000for you now and for you in the future and then to do the same for your family and your community and that there's real nobility in that and there's real meaning and more the other thing that I've been suggesting to people and I also believe this is that and I think that the guys that have come to talk to me especially the ones that have had real rough lives they really understand this If you don't get your act together and you let yourself slide,
00:14:06.000then what kind of moves in to take the place of what you could have been is something that's really not good at all.
00:14:13.000So it's not only that if you're living like a dissolute life that you're not aiming at anything positive and so you don't have any real meaning and you're subsumed by anxiety and all of that hopelessness.
00:14:25.000But something kind of hellish moves in there, too, to occupy that place.
00:14:29.000And so then you end up making things worse.
00:14:31.000And one of the things I learned about studying totalitarian systems, whether they were on the right or the left, was that part of the reason that the totalitarian horrors of the 20th century manifested themselves was because average people didn't take on the proper responsibility.
00:14:47.000They shut their eyes when their eyes should have been opened, even though they knew it.
00:14:50.000And they did and said things they knew they shouldn't have done and said.
00:14:53.000And that was what supported those horrible systems.
00:14:56.000So, you know, if you don't get your act together, then you leave a little space for hell.
00:15:03.000When things are happening, like something like Nazi Germany, I would imagine that during that time, the people that were not in support of it felt helpless.
00:15:12.000Whether you're in Germany, you're a part of this country, this country is turning towards this horrible situation where Jewish people are being put on trains.
00:15:24.000The people that didn't speak out, I don't necessarily know if it's a lack of discipline or just complete fear and paralysis.
00:16:42.000Bullying online has caused many people to commit suicide.
00:16:45.000Well, the thing is, you know, the weird thing about that online communication is that, like, I find that I tend to react to a negative Twitter comment as if it's someone sitting across from me talking to me that I know.
00:17:06.000But your emotional response is still, well, someone's gone out of their way to be harshly critical to you.
00:17:13.000And that doesn't happen that often in your day-to-day life.
00:17:16.000And so, if you're a reasonable person, You're very sensitive to criticism because it's rare and because you might be wrong, especially if there's a lot of people criticizing you, because you kind of have to be psychopathic in order just to brush that off.
00:17:30.000You know, it's like, well, a hundred people think I'm wrong.
00:17:33.000It's like, well, if it's a hundred people out of a hundred million, But you can't tell on Twitter, then it's irrelevant.
00:17:40.000But if it's a mob of 100 people that show up outside your house, which is kind of what Twitter feels like, then you think, well, God, you know, I must have done something wrong because otherwise why would all these people be here?
00:17:51.000And I think that's why so many people are driven to apologize.
00:17:55.000You know, when they do something on Twitter or do something and then the Twitter mobs go after them, they think, oh, God, I must have done something wrong.
00:18:03.000I should, you know, do some soul searching.
00:18:07.000So some of that's not even fear, it's more like, in a sense, it's a morality that's misplaced because of our inability to calibrate the social messaging.
00:18:17.000I mean, I've stopped, almost completely stopped reading Twitter comments in the last month, and I'm definitely better for it.
00:18:26.000Yeah, it makes you way happier, right?
00:18:57.000Perhaps because you're trying to get people to respond to you, but the alternative is Facebook, where you have these long posts that are just rambling first drafts that people put out.
00:19:10.000When they start ranting about politics or what have you, I just can't get involved.
00:19:54.000Yeah, and he wrote this long history of these people and what they've had to endure with being, you know, a few people going to them and doing some awful things and diseases and stuff like that.
00:20:05.000So I enjoy when someone will do that, like these long – like every now and then someone will use it in a novel way.
00:20:20.000Well, they also might be the ones that are most...
00:20:22.000We don't exactly know what motivates people to respond on Twitter.
00:20:26.000And it might be that the fundamental motivation for a Twitter response is anger.
00:20:31.000You know, rather than the desire to share something, because we don't know anything about how these new communication techniques function psychologically.
00:20:38.000Like, maybe Twitter is skewed 90% towards people who are impulsively angry at that moment.
00:21:01.000I mean, God only knows how much of our social media networks are set up to differentially reward impulsive behavior.
00:21:09.000And it's also not that easy to hold people accountable in some sense.
00:21:14.000Maybe there's some utility to that, but with anonymous accounts and all of that, the anonymity is also problematic, because it certainly enables people to allow their worst to manifest themselves, especially if they're resentful and angry.
00:21:28.000The only benefit that I can see to anonymity is it gives you the opportunity to explore controversial ideas without blowback.
00:22:08.000And I figured out why that is, I think.
00:22:11.000So, imagine that we already know from a clinical perspective that, you know, if you set out a path towards a goal, which you want to do because you need a goal and you need a path, because that provides you with positive emotion, right?
00:22:24.000So, you set up something as valuable, so that implies a hierarchy.
00:22:30.000You decide that you're going to do that instead of other things, so that's kind of a sacrifice, because you're sacrificing everything else to pursue that.
00:22:36.000And then you experience a fair bit of positive emotion and meaning as you watch yourself move towards the goal.
00:22:42.000And so the implication of that is the better the goal, The more full and rich your experience is going to be when you pursue it.
00:22:49.000So that's one of the reasons for developing a vision and for fleshing yourself out philosophically because you want to aim at the highest goal that you can manage.
00:23:01.000And then, what you'll find is that as you move towards the goal, there are certain things that you have to accomplish that frighten you.
00:23:07.000You know, maybe you have to learn to be a better speaker, a better writer, a better thinker.
00:23:12.000You have to be better to people around you, or you have to learn some new skills and you're afraid of that.
00:23:16.000Whatever, because it's going to stretch you if you pursue a goal.
00:23:19.000And so that'll put you up against challenges.
00:23:22.000Okay, so all the clinical data indicates, or the opposite of safe spaces, as Jonathan Haidt has been pointing out, You identify something that someone is avoiding that they need to do because they're afraid.
00:23:36.000You have them voluntarily confront it.
00:23:41.000What you try to do if you're a behavior therapist is you break down the thing they're avoiding into smaller and smaller pieces until you find a piece that's small enough so they'll do it.
00:24:08.000There's information in the action and then you can incorporate that information and turn it into a skill and turn it into a transformation of your perceptions.
00:24:16.000So there's more to you because you've tried something new.
00:24:20.000But the second thing is, and there's good biological evidence for this now, that if you put yourself in a new situation, then new genes code for new proteins and build new neural structures and new nervous system structures.
00:24:35.000Same thing happens to some degree when you work out, right?
00:24:37.000Because your muscles are responding to the load.
00:24:39.000But your nervous system does that too.
00:24:41.000So you imagine that there's a lot of potential you locked in your genetic code.
00:24:47.000And then if you put yourself in a new situation, then the stress, the situational stress that's produced by that particular situation unlocks those genes and then builds new parts of you.
00:24:58.000And so that's very cool because who knows how much there is locked inside of you.
00:25:04.000So, let's assume that that scales as you take on heavier and heavier loads.
00:25:11.000That more and more of you, you get more and more informed, because you're doing more and more difficult things, but more and more of you gets unlocked.
00:25:19.000And so then, what that would imply is that if you got to the point where you could look at the darkest things, so that would be the abyss, right?
00:25:28.000If you could look at the harshest things, like the most brutal parts of the suffering of the world and the malevolence of people and society, if you could look at that straight and directly, that that would turn you on maximally.
00:25:43.000And so that's the idea of rescuing your father because imagine that you're like the potential composite of all the ancestral wisdom that's locked inside of you biologically.
00:25:56.000But that's not going to come out at all unless you stress yourself, unless you challenge yourself.
00:26:01.000And the bigger the challenge you take on, the more that's going to turn on.
00:26:05.000And so that as you take on a broader and broader range of challenges, And you push yourself harder, then more and more of what you could be turns on, and that's equivalent to transforming yourself into the ancestral father.
00:26:19.000Because you're like the, what would you call it, you're the consequence of all these living beings that have come before you, and that's all...
00:26:30.000And then if you can push yourself, then all of that clicks on.
00:26:33.000And that turns you into who you could be.
00:26:36.000And that's the re-representation of that positive ancestral father.
00:26:40.000So that's why you rescue your father from the belly of the beast.
00:26:43.000So you think that this ultimate goal of sacrifice and of risking your life in order to save someone who's truly important to you, that this somehow or another maximizes your potential as a human being?
00:26:58.000Well, I think you can think about it religiously, too.
00:27:32.000Localized suffering, you know, put yourself together, but then you expand that outward and you decide that you're not a victim of that, even though, you know, you're part and parcel of it, but you're the potential solution to that.
00:27:45.000And so you accept that as a responsibility.
00:28:06.000You're responsible for addressing the suffering in the world.
00:28:09.000So that could give you some meaning, seems to me.
00:28:12.000Then the next thing is, there's a story of course that Christ met the devil in the desert, and so that's the encounter with malevolence.
00:28:18.000So that would be the other thing, because the two major problems that people face obviously are suffering, tragedy, and malevolence.
00:28:25.000And so that's the other thing that you're responsible for.
00:28:28.000Is that you're supposed to look at the capacity for human evil as clearly as you possibly can, which is a very terrifying thing.
00:28:35.000You know, that causes post-traumatic stress disorder in people that aren't accustomed to it.
00:28:39.000And in the mythology that's associated with the encounter with evil, it's almost always the case that the entity that does the encountering, even if it does it voluntarily, is terrifying.
00:29:10.000The idea would be that if you can face the malevolence and you can face the suffering, then that maximally, that opens the door to your maximal potential.
00:29:19.000And then the optimistic part of that is, and this is why it's so useful to peer into the darkness, let's say, the optimistic part of that is that although the suffering is great and the malevolence is deep, your capacity to transcend it is stronger.
00:29:37.000So what you get out of the most negative viewpoint is the most positive possible consequence.
00:29:43.000Because one of the things you'd like to know, if you wanted to know something deep about yourself, is that you could face the worst that there was in prevail.
00:29:49.000And I believe that people are capable of that.
00:29:54.000I think that despite how tragic life is and how malevolent things are, that fundamentally our spirit, let's say, has the capacity to confront that and to fix it, Like, psychologically, to confront it courageously,
00:30:10.000to be able to bear up under that if you do it voluntarily, but also to address it.
00:30:14.000Not only to deal with it psychologically, but to deal with it practically.
00:30:17.000And that we could make things much better.
00:30:19.000There's always a striving towards utopia, right?
00:30:22.000Like, this is the ultimate goal that if you ask people, what would you like out of civilization?
00:30:27.000Well, I'd like everyone to be happy and everyone to get along and there'd be no war, nothing, no suffering, no anything.
00:30:33.000In order to really, truly learn about yourself and about life, you have to overcome adversity.
00:30:39.000And I firmly believe that in order to truly appreciate love, you have to understand and really have felt hate.
00:30:47.000And to really appreciate camaraderie, you have to feel loneliness.
00:30:51.000So this is just a part of being a person, for whatever reason.
00:30:55.000Yeah, well, maybe, see, the other thing that I've been thinking along the same lines is that, you know, it isn't...
00:31:00.000So, in the biblical stories, in the Abrahamic stories, for example, Abraham basically hangs around his dad's tent until he's like 80. He's one of these guys that fails to launch, you know, in a big way.
00:31:11.000And God eventually gets sick and tired of him, like, you know, playing video games in his basement and says...
00:31:16.000Get the hell out there into the world and have a life.
00:31:21.000He leaves his father's tent and his community and his country, which is what he's commanded to do.
00:31:26.000And then he goes out and has an adventure.
00:31:28.000But, you know, the first thing he encounters is a famine, and then he encounters a tyranny, and then he encounters a bunch of people in the tyrannical state that want to take his wife.
00:31:36.000And so you can imagine that Abraham's response to that is like, it was a hell of a lot better sitting in my dad's tent playing video games.
00:31:43.000But what's cool about that story, what I realized when I was doing the lectures on it last year, was that that was a call to adventure.
00:31:49.000You know, and that the right way of conceptualizing what we're talking about isn't that utopia would be a place where everyone was happy.
00:31:57.000And I think because of what you just laid out is you need that polarity, you know, and people need a load, and we need adversity, and we need difficulty.
00:32:19.000See, Dostoevsky knew this because when he wrote Notes from Underground, which I would highly recommend to everyone who's listening.
00:32:25.000It's a great book and it's a very short book.
00:32:28.000He criticized socialist utopia back in like 1860, way before it became the sort of widespread idea that it is now.
00:32:38.000And what Dostoevsky said was that, well, human beings are these very peculiar creatures, and if you gave us a utopia so that we had nothing to do but eat cake and busy ourselves with the continuation of the species, that was his line— That the first thing we do is smash it all to bits just so that something unexpected and troublesome would happen.
00:32:58.000Because we're built for adventure and not for peace and happiness.
00:33:02.000Well, we're designed to overcome the natural world.
00:33:04.000The natural world is filled with that.
00:33:06.000The natural world is filled with things, trying to eat things.
00:33:10.000Everywhere you look, that's all you observe.
00:33:12.000You observe predators and prey and animals eating vegetables, and that's it.
00:33:16.000And I think that this concept of overcoming adversity, it's so human, it's so a part of what we are, that I want to bring it back to you.
00:33:25.000Because one of the things that I've been considering is that, I've said this many times, and I just had a conversation with my good friend Steve Rinella the other day, where he brought it up independently.
00:33:33.000He said, I think Jordan Peterson is the most misunderstood and misinterpreted guy in the world.
00:33:38.000He's like, people are always, like, not just misstating what you believe in, misstating what you say.
00:33:46.000This opposition to you, this, I mean, like, we were talking about this GQ interview, which I thought was, I thought that woman was far more intelligent than the, and her approach was far better and far more reasoned and well thought out than some of the other attacks on you before.
00:34:04.000So they're bringing in the varsity level players, is what I'm saying.
00:34:09.000I think this is part of what forges this message, is that you are, and this is one of the things that Eric Weinstein and I had said about you, is that you're essentially the Hoist Gracie of the intellectual dark web.
00:34:26.000If you don't know what that means, it's the early days of the UFC, No one knew what the best martial art was.
00:34:34.000And the idea was like, there was all these martial arts that are running around independently, and they were all claiming that they had the best technique, and let's see what happens.
00:34:43.000And Hoyce Gracie was the one who represented jujitsu and went out there and beat all these people with superior technique and superior strategy.
00:34:53.000Brazil, yeah, okay, I know about him, yeah.
00:34:55.000And he launched this Brazilian, and his family launched this Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu empire that has since taken over the world of martial arts.
00:35:04.000But you are the one who's consistently engaging in these people.
00:35:08.000You're the one who's involved in these Vale Tudo events where you're debating these people who are coming at you hostile, with notes.
00:35:17.000And I think, as uncomfortable as those moments are, like, who was the woman that said, so what you're trying to say is...
00:35:29.000I think she misinterpreted who you are, and she thought that she could come at you with this straw man sort of article, argument rather, and frame your positions in a very unflattering way.
00:36:24.000Well, she basically told me that we were going to have a war, you know, not so many words, but just there was a coldness to her and a distaste for me that was sort of radiating from her.
00:36:36.000So she was animus-possessed from a Jungian perspective.
00:36:40.000That's the right way of thinking about it.
00:36:41.000One of the ways of thinking about that is that she had a chip on her shoulder in relationship to me.
00:36:45.000So she'd already formulated who I was in her imagination.
00:36:49.000It was also maybe a form of projection, so like I was the embodiment of all the things that she found distasteful, and that's who she was.
00:36:57.000So there was no willingness to consider on her part that I could be different than her preconceptions of me, right?
00:37:08.000And so she was hostile to me in the way that you would be if you were prejudiced against someone right from the beginning.
00:37:19.000It was uncomfortable in the room, and there was a photo shoot, and so by the time the conversation started, I was more impatient than I would normally be, because one of the things that I do expect from journalists, and Kathy Newman was like this, by the way, and so have some of the other people that have gone after me,
00:37:36.000at least They had the professionalism to be civil before the interview started.
00:37:43.000Because there's a certain amount of politeness, I would say, not that I'm owed, but that someone you're interviewing is owed if they come out of their way to go talk to you.
00:38:12.000It's like, well, we're both here to do a job, and I've agreed to come, but no, there was palpable enmity in the air right to begin with.
00:38:21.000You know, I actually thought at the end of that interview, I thought, geez, you know, maybe I've done enough interviews because I found that I was more impatient than I would have liked to have been.
00:38:31.000Now, luckily, it doesn't seem to have gone overboard because I've been watching the comments on that GQ interview.
00:38:37.000I think it's got about 4.5 million views, some ridiculous number of views.
00:38:42.000And people have said that I was more impatient and a little harsher than usual, which I think is true.
00:38:49.000And I thought, God, you know, maybe I'm starting to run out of patience.
00:39:16.000There's no resentment for me, because you might think, well, this is a lot of work, and I've been running around like mad, and it takes a lot of organization, and it's quite demanding, and all of that, and that's all true, and none of that is a complaint.
00:39:31.000And I decided with Tammy right at the beginning that, well, first of all, that this was going to be work and not a vacation because we're not stupid.
00:39:38.000We know you can't have everything at the same time if you have any sense.
00:39:41.000You're lucky if you get some things that are good at once, you know.
00:39:44.000So we're very grateful to have that opportunity and that I was going to continue to do this as long as I was thrilled to be in front of the audience and Then when I meet people afterwards that I'm not looking at the end of the line to see when the night ends, you know, because I want to be sure that every single person that comes to meet me,
00:41:08.000You know, I've tried to have my agent screen out maybe the more egregious interviews, you know, the ones that would just be nothing but combat because I find them quite stressful, though I wouldn't say I'm hiding from them.
00:41:25.000To begin with, how an interview is going to go, and I could just say, well, I'm done having interviews for a while, but I can't help but see that the conflict is a necessary part of this, even though I don't find it pleasant.
00:41:38.000People accuse me of being a provocateur, of enjoying the conflict.
00:41:45.000It usually takes me about three days to recover from a particularly contentious interview, because I find conflict, interpersonal conflict, quite stressful.
00:42:17.000I mean, I don't even know how people deal with it because, I mean, I'm being fortunate because although, you know, I've had a fair bit of negative press coverage, the comments on YouTube in particular, which is where the bulk of them are, and I would say among the general public,
00:43:05.000You're taking in All of these opinions of hundreds, if not thousands, of people that you don't even know.
00:43:10.000You don't know if they're coming from a healthy place.
00:43:12.000And most of those opinions, they would not express it that way if they were talking to you.
00:43:17.000Even if they could get the same message across, like, I think you were ignorant to these facts.
00:43:22.000I think you're biased in your perceptions.
00:43:25.000Even if they had an opinion that was unflattering, the way they'd express it to you, they'd be considerate about you and your feelings as a human being.
00:43:34.000And if they weren't, you wouldn't take into consideration what they're saying because this guy's just an asshole.
00:43:38.000But when you just see it in type, we just see print, it just doesn't, it just, it could be a smart person, it could be a psycho, it could be a fool, it could be anything.
00:43:48.000Well, it's also funny too because the negative comments that are part of social media seem to be just as potent as negative comments in real life, but the positive comments don't seem to be as positive as the positive comments in real life.
00:44:05.000And I guess that's partly because we're wired to be more sensitive to threat and to negative emotion because we can be hurt.
00:44:13.000Well, it's also healthy, too, to not stroke your ego too much.
00:44:15.000If you're just concentrating only on...
00:44:17.000There's something distasteful if you go to someone's page and they just retweet all the positive things that people say to them.
00:44:23.000Because then it has this sort of reinforcing...
00:44:26.000People know that if I say something really positive to Jordan, he's going to retweet me.
00:44:29.000There are some people that they engage in this sort of commerce.
00:44:33.000You say something positive, they retweet you, and it's a little too strokey.
00:44:41.000People get really into that, stroking their own back.
00:44:43.000Yeah, I guess the danger of that is that There's a possibility of that ego inflation that you really want to avoid because that's a bad idea.
00:45:29.000With your research, you're backing it up with real science, you're backing up with a tremendous amount of history of the human race and of religion and of the scientific studies that have been done that show correlations between different types of behaviors and human beings and all this is rich.
00:45:49.000It's very rewarding if you could take it all in, but when it goes against What people have, their preconceived notions or their own set of beliefs that they're bringing to your conversations, to your debates, then it creates this hostile battle where what you're saying is very contrary to the way they've been living their life or the preset patterns of behavior.
00:46:18.000I went to Stockholm twice and Oslo twice and Helsinki twice and Copenhagen once.
00:46:25.000In the last month, and I spent quite a bit of, there was a lot of interviews, and a lot of discussion about the so-called gender paradox.
00:46:34.000That's a very interesting thing, because it's really put their tails in a knot in Scandinavia.
00:46:38.000And that makes sense, because the Scandinavians are going to have to deal with this first, because they've gone the farthest down the road for, like, making their society gender equal.
00:47:00.000And so that would mean that, you know, there's a wide range of talent across people regardless of their type, whatever that might be, sex, gender, race, ethnicity.
00:47:15.000And It's kind of a truism, and I would say a truism of the West in the deepest sense, that each of the individuals within those groups should be put in a position where they're encouraged to manifest those talents, partly because that would be good for them spiritually and psychologically,
00:47:33.000but also because that would be of obvious benefit to the community.
00:47:36.000I mean, talent's rare, which people don't understand.
00:47:39.000There's lots of different kinds of talent, but in each domain it's rare.
00:47:43.000And so it's to everyone's benefit to exploit talented people to the maximal possible degree.
00:47:49.000So even if you're just selfish, you'd want to push for equality of opportunity because the more talented people there are out there, the more cool stuff you get to have, and hopefully the more diverse and interesting your life is.
00:48:02.000So you can pursue equality of opportunity policies, and the Scandinavians have done that.
00:48:08.000Especially trying to knock down barriers for women in the workplace.
00:48:13.000And by all accounts, by all standard theories, the Scandinavian countries and places like the Netherlands, Canada too, to a slightly lesser degree, have gone farther than any other countries in pursuing those policies.
00:48:33.000Okay, and part of the consequence of that is that some of the differences between men and women have been minimized.
00:48:41.000So obviously there's far more women in the workplace than there were 40 years ago.
00:48:44.000And in many occupations, there's actually dominance by women.
00:48:48.000There's dominance in the universities.
00:48:49.000There's dominance in the healthcare fields.
00:48:51.000And so women have poured into the workplace.
00:48:53.000And hypothetically, there's problems with that because it's put a lot of stress on family structure.
00:48:59.000But Hypothetically, that's for the best.
00:49:03.000Because it gives people a broader range of choices and it gives everyone access to more talent.
00:49:07.000And then also, if you look around the world, you see that one of the best predictors of the probability of economic development in developing countries is the attitude in those countries towards equal rights for women.
00:49:49.000Utopia would be take every job, every conceivable kind of job, and then stratify that by every conceivable level of authority within every job, and then ensure that every single category of person is represented in precise proportion to their We're good to
00:50:28.000First thing to say about that is that's impossible.
00:50:31.000And the reason it's impossible is because there's no limit to the number of ways that you can categorize people into groups.
00:50:38.000So, you know, you know about sex and ethnicity and race, maybe those are the obvious ones, but now you have gender and then you have ethnicity and, you know, and then there's attractiveness and intelligence and temperament and height and age and socioeconomic background.
00:50:53.000And I mean, let's say there's 20, but there's a lot more than that.
00:50:56.000There's no possible way that you could ever regulate a society so tightly that every single one of those groups was equally represented in every single one of those occupations at every single level of the hierarchy.
00:51:19.000It isn't even obvious that they are, because I would say that a more significant one is cognitive ability.
00:51:24.000Because that's a way bigger predictor of long-term life success than sex or race.
00:51:28.000So I don't even think that we've necessarily identified the canonical groups.
00:51:33.000We've just decided that gender and race are the, maybe they're the most obvious.
00:51:37.000Right, but isn't there a problem is that people don't, what they don't do is they don't take, in terms of cognitive ability, they don't get on a team.
00:51:45.000They don't get on like, there's people that are sexist.
00:52:26.000But they don't think they could become part of the intellectual elite.
00:52:30.000And it isn't obvious to me that the intellectual elite, so those would be the liberal left-leaning types that dominate the media and academia, are particularly positive in their In their attitudes towards the typical working class person.
00:52:45.000I think they're prejudiced and elitist.
00:53:10.000But it's not also because there's caricatures, right, of the 1% of the economic elite, you just think of people that are in these lofty positions that are in control of the financial institutions, but the 1% of the intellectual elite, you think of in terms of, like, some of the more preposterous things you're hearing out of universities now,
00:53:32.000Well, there's no appreciation on the part of the intellectual elite for the pathologies of rationalism.
00:53:38.000I mean, there's nothing stupider than a smart person who went wrong.
00:53:45.000I've seen this in my clients frequently.
00:53:48.000If I have a particularly smart client who's particularly disordered in their personality, that's so difficult.
00:53:56.000It's almost unimaginable because they're so good at rationalizing, for example.
00:54:01.000What is your approach to handling someone like that who's super intelligent but yet completely their life is in disarray?
00:54:08.000Well, you know, I usually take a very practical approach.
00:54:13.000Like, you know, we try to identify, because I start always in my therapy practice, I always start with behavioral principles.
00:54:19.000It's like, okay, well, let's see if we can identify a few areas, you know, through negotiation that are really causing you grief and misery.
00:54:26.000You know, like, what's wrong with your life as far as you're concerned?
00:54:29.000And so that often takes a lot of discussion.
00:54:31.000And then we might try to figure out what's causing that.
00:54:34.000And that's often very difficult to figure out too because it might be, geez, it might be something physical.
00:54:39.000You know, you might be sick in some way because depression is, lots of depression is autoimmune related and anxiety can be a side effect of all sorts of physiological disorders or eating improperly or sleeping badly or not exercising, you know, enough to kind of keep yourself regulated.
00:54:55.000So you try to figure out what's causing it and then you try to sketch out some possible solution that we could both test.
00:55:01.000And then with the more intelligent ones, you know, often they can come up with all sorts of reasons why none of this is going to work.
00:55:10.000Or a thousand reasons why, yeah, well usually a thousand reasons why none of this is going to work.
00:55:15.000And with people like that, sometimes it's useful to turn to their dreams if they dream.
00:55:20.000Because one of the things that's cool about dreams is that even though they're hard to interpret, they never lie.
00:55:26.000And so sometimes you can take someone who's hyper-rational, and they'll have a dream, and they'll tell you the dream, and then you can work through an interpretation, which is a tricky business, and the dream will tell them something, and there's just no denying it.
00:55:37.000It's like, well, it's a statement from nature.
00:55:53.000So psychologists have, and this is what's putting a tail, not in the tail of the Scandinavians, psychologists have come to a pretty decent agreement about standard personality models, right?
00:56:03.000So there's extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, openness, and conscientiousness.
00:56:07.000And they look fairly stable cross-culturally.
00:56:10.000And that was all done by asking thousands of people, hundreds and hundreds of questions, and then grouping them statistically.
00:56:20.000We took computational power and statistics to find out that these are how traits group.
00:56:27.000So, inextroverted people are sociable and happy, and neurotic people experience a fair bit of negative emotion, so that's the positive and negative emotion dimensions.
00:56:36.000Agreeable people are maternal, and disagreeable people are competitive, and there's a fair bit of male-female difference there.
00:56:42.000Conscientious people are dutiful and industrious and orderly, and the open people are creative.
00:56:47.000And so those are your basic five dimensions.
00:56:49.000Okay, so that's been established, and everyone more or less agrees on it.
00:56:52.000Now, maybe there's seven dimensions, and we've got a questionnaire that breaks the five down into ten.
00:57:03.000But basically, there's good consensus on the five.
00:57:09.000Okay, so now, as soon as you have the five basic traits, you can ask some questions like, well, do men and women differ?
00:57:15.000And so what you do is you just give the questionnaire.
00:57:18.000You can either fill it out yourself or have other people fill it out on your behalf.
00:57:22.000And it could be a teacher, it could be a parent, you know, and that's all being done.
00:57:26.000And what you find is there are systematic differences between men and women.
00:57:29.000And the biggest differences are that women experience more negative emotion.
00:57:33.000And that they're more agreeable than men.
00:57:37.000And that's borne out by the psychiatric evidence because higher levels of negative emotion are manifested in depression and anxiety and women are diagnosed with higher levels of depression and anxiety all around the world.
00:57:51.000And with agreeableness, that's also borne out by the clinical literature in some sense, the medical literature, socio-medical literature, because disagreeable people are more likely to be incarcerated, because it's the best predictor of being incarcerated, even though it's not a very good predictor, and men are incarcerated at about a 10 to 1 rate compared to women,
00:58:09.000and are more likely to be anti-social and conduct disordered.
00:58:11.000So, the personality differences are mirrored in the socio-medical literature.
00:58:20.000Are those differences a consequence of socialization or are they biological?
00:58:24.000And the answer to that is tricky because How much something is social and how much it is biological actually depends on the social circumstances.
00:58:35.000If you have a society where no one has enough to eat and people are starving, then there's a huge cultural effect on people's intelligence, let's say, that's mediated by economic factors, even though it's got a biological impact.
00:59:36.000If the differences between men and women are primarily social, then as cultures become more egalitarian, men and women will become more alike.
00:59:49.000The more egalitarian the society, and it turns out the richer the society, because that's also being discovered now, the more different men and women become.
01:00:01.000So with agreeableness, for example, if you took a typical man and a typical woman out of the population, just randomly, and you had to bet that the woman was more aggressive than the man, you'd be wrong 60% of the time.
01:00:18.000So there's quite a bit of overlap, right?
01:00:20.000Because you'd be right 40% of the time.
01:00:23.000But the problem is that a lot of selection takes place at the extremes.
01:00:27.000Maybe you're only concerned about disagreeable people when they become violent.
01:00:31.000And maybe it's only the 1 in 50 most disagreeable person who's violent.
01:00:40.000A bit of similarity at the average level and big differences at the extremes.
01:00:45.000And the extremes is where people do things like employment selection.
01:00:49.000So the biggest difference that's been discovered between men and women, and this is the one that gets biggest in the Scandinavian countries, is interest.
01:00:57.000Men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people.
01:01:47.000Yeah, okay, so now this unravels in a big way.
01:01:52.000This is a hugely relevant issue politically because it means that you cannot have equality of opportunity and equality of outcome at the same time.
01:02:03.000It's not possible because as you make your society more egalitarian and you open up the opportunity for equality of outcome, You increase how different men and women are and that changes their occupational choice.
01:02:18.000So if men are more interested in things, which they are by a substantial margin, then way more of them are going to be engineers.
01:02:25.000Wouldn't that possibly support this idea that an enforced Model of equality would allow people to be themselves more.
01:02:38.000I mean, this is almost what you're saying.
01:02:40.000Well, that is the optimistic viewpoint.
01:02:44.000Well, look, it's so funny because the Swedish foreign minister told me to go climb back under the rock that I came out from under when I was in Scandinavia because I was describing this science.
01:02:56.000I read that, but I'm not exactly sure why Well, she regards me as misogynist because I think that there are, because I think, because I've been putting forward the evidence that there are genuine differences between men and women.
01:03:07.000But she should be held accountable for that, because that's just a flippant thing to say.
01:03:11.000Like, you should have, especially in a position of power like she's in, you should have a very specific argument.
01:03:18.000Saying, like, for a leader to have such a base thing to say, such a crude, dumb thing to say, crawl back under the rock that you came from.
01:03:27.000Well, I thought she was making a joke about lobsters, but I don't think she was.
01:03:33.000Yeah, and the bigger lobsters have better rocks.
01:03:35.000That was another very interesting thing in the GQ thing, where the woman was challenging you on your neurobiology, your neurochemistry, your understanding of lobsters.
01:03:42.000Well, hardly any psychologists understand that serotonin is associated with hierarchies.
01:03:52.000We can definitely get back to that, but I'm very curious about this, because this idea of enforced equality, right, ensuring that there is such a high emphasis placed on equality that you have the equal amount of men,
01:04:07.000the equal amount of women, and the opportunities are absolutely available as much to women as they are to men, this is enforced.
01:04:30.000So, there are fewer women mathematicians in the higher echelons.
01:04:34.000Okay, but here's something interesting about mathematical ability.
01:04:38.000First of all, it's very rare, so that's the first thing to keep in mind.
01:04:42.000Now, it looks like, if you look in junior high, that mathematically gifted men and males and females are approximately as common.
01:04:50.000Now, there's a little bit of debate about that, because there is some evidence that maybe at the very upper extremes there's a male advantage, just like there's a male disadvantage at the low end, because the male distribution for intelligence might be flatter.
01:05:02.000And so that's the greater male variability hypothesis.
01:05:06.000There's been papers putting that forward that have been retracted as a consequence of pressure from politically correct people, even though greater male variability is actually quite common in the animal kingdom for a variety of reasons.
01:05:18.000Men are more expendable, that males are more expendable in some ways, or you could say that males are more likely to pursue high-risk, high-return strategies.
01:05:27.000You can look at it either way, and it's certainly possible.
01:05:29.000In any case, The men, the males in junior high who happen to be mathematically gifted are less likely to also be verbally gifted.
01:05:38.000Whereas that doesn't seem to be the case for the females.
01:05:41.000And so if you're a male math nerd, then math is a pretty logical pathway for you because You don't have as many other options, whereas if you're a female math nerd, you have other options because you're more likely to also be verbally gifted.
01:05:57.000And so that's enough to, at least in principle, account for some of the reason why there are fewer women mathematicians than men mathematicians.
01:06:07.000And there's lots of complex reasons like this.
01:06:11.000And so we have this reflexive idea, and this is very much the case because this is like the core idea among the feminist neo-Marxist types, is that if there's differences in outcome, that's...
01:06:23.000That's proof of prejudice and that's support for the idea of the patriarchal tyranny and that's like the core axiom of the radical left is the patriarchal tyranny as far as I'm concerned.
01:06:34.000That's God for them, the patriarchal tyranny.
01:06:37.000It's like, well, if it turns out that many of these differences in outcome between men and women aren't a consequence of the patriarchal tyranny, In fact, even get bigger when you reduce the tyrannical aspect of the patriarch and even the patriarchal aspect to it, then it makes that theory not only...
01:06:55.000Wrong, but opposite of the truth, which is the worst kind of wrong.
01:07:00.000And so, you know, if men are more likely to pursue careers in the STEM fields, which seems to be the case, under conditions of optimal freedom for men and women, then that's going to drive income disparities because the STEM fields pay more.
01:07:13.000And they pay more partly because they're scalable.
01:07:16.000Like, it's really hard to scale care for people.
01:07:19.000You know, like if you work in a daycare, you're going to care for three infants.
01:07:22.000You're not going to care for 50, because you can't.
01:08:32.000So there's more return as long as you don't get hurt.
01:08:34.000And I think that's a pretty common male pattern, is there's more return as long as you don't get hurt.
01:08:39.000The problem seems to be, when discussing these things, in any way romanticizing or glorifying male behavior or putting any emphasis whatsoever on there being a positive aspect to a lot of the things that we think of as being negative,
01:08:57.000like aggression or ambition or competition.
01:09:29.000Very disturbing, in my opinion, trend of transgender women entering into these competitions now with women who are biologically female and dominating them.
01:09:39.000And that instead of calling people men and women, let's dispense with that.
01:09:44.000Yeah, you can be a man or a woman, that's your choice, and you can change it whenever you want.
01:09:48.000So you're a man or a woman, and that's your choice.
01:09:51.000But we're going to have a new rule, which is that if you have an XY chromosome, so you're an XY person, or an XX person, then if you're an XY person, you don't get to engage in physical combat with an XY person.
01:10:26.000It is reasonable, but if you talk about that, especially someone like you, who you were against this bill that was going to enforce these pronouns and compelling the use of these pronouns, that you're thought to be a transphobic person because you feel like there maybe should be some Rational discussion about the physical limitations of certain body structures,
01:11:38.000There's certain things like, I've always said, if you gave Brock Lesnar a sex change and put him in a dress, he's going to run through every woman that's ever lived in the history of women.
01:11:49.000There's not a single woman that's going to be able to deal with that bone structure and that mind that that guy has had with testosterone pumping through it for 39 years.
01:12:05.000Is the one thing that I was attacked on more than anything in my entire life is saying that I think it's ridiculous to have a trans woman compete against women in mixed martial arts.
01:12:15.000I was like, you want to have them do it in chess?
01:12:17.000You want to have them do it in something that's non-physical?
01:12:24.000But as soon as you're compelling people, like here's one that's going up lately.
01:12:27.000If you don't want to date a trans woman, then you're some sort of a bigot.
01:12:36.000You know, you remember in Brave New World, in Huxley's book, it was considered immoral to reject anyone's sexual advances because it was prejudicial.
01:12:53.000So that makes the question even more interesting, because the question is, at what point do you have the right to your prejudices?
01:13:00.000And one of the things that we seem to cling to, and I would say rightly, is that we're allowed to be prejudiced when it comes to who we interact with sexually.
01:13:44.000In terms of, like, what you like to eat, or what kind of films you enjoy, or what kind of books you read, you're allowed to have these preferences.
01:13:50.000But when it comes to what you're sexually attracted to...
01:13:53.000There's new emphasis now in trying to draw that line and say, but it's preposterous people that are pushing this, and almost everybody's pushing back.
01:14:01.000But I find it interesting when these things come up.
01:14:04.000Well, it's a logical conclusion to all these other things that have been happening, because that is where the rubber hits the road.
01:14:09.000It's like, you know, when I... Well, I've seen this in debates that I've had publicly where people, you know, talk about prejudice and I've pointed out to them that they have prejudicial attitudes with regards to their sexual preferences because they don't just sleep with anyone who asks them.
01:14:30.000Well, then the question is, under what circumstances are prejudices justifiable?
01:14:35.000And that's a conversation we don't like to have because we believe that there are no circumstances whatsoever under which prejudices are acceptable.
01:14:43.000There's a big difference between prejudices and discrimination.
01:16:04.000It also doesn't mean that the hierarchies, especially if they're human hierarchies, are good.
01:16:08.000Well, or that they're only, that's right, not that they're good necessarily, or that they're predicated on power.
01:16:14.000Like, one of the most pathological elements of the postmodern types, especially people like Foucault, is their insistence that all hierarchical structures are predicated on power, and that there's nothing other than power.
01:16:36.000So imagine that there's a hierarchy of plumbers ranging from very successful to very unsuccessful.
01:16:41.000Okay, and you say, well, what makes plumbers successful?
01:16:44.000Well, the power theory would imply that there are roving bands of mafiosial plumbers who come pounding on your door at three in the morning and tell you that if you don't get their particular posse to fix your pipes leaking or not,
01:16:59.000that they're going to come and burn down your house.
01:18:13.000If you're entering into a job straight out of college, you leave university, and now you're entering into your first year in the workplace, It's just a natural fact of life that there's going to be people that are further ahead in this race than you.
01:18:30.000Yeah, because they're better at what they do.
01:19:04.000Then we could say, well, then if you implement a solution socially, so with other people, then you're going to cooperate and compete in relationship to the solution.
01:19:13.000And that's instantly going to produce a hierarchy.
01:19:15.000Because no matter what the problem is, some people are going to be better at solving it than others.
01:19:52.000When you look at the people that are the head of giant industry, the CEOs of super successful companies, they're the ones who have the giant yachts and the big houses, and this is the incentive for people to try to get to that position.
01:20:04.000And the idea that there's no incentive and that there should be no incentive, but yet you're still going to have all this innovation is ridiculous.
01:20:12.000If human beings are going to work really hard, there has to be some sort of a reward, and it can't be an equal reward.
01:20:17.000Yes, and then what you could say, like, so, okay, so the right, that would be, roughly speaking, a conservative position.
01:20:24.000And then you can take a left-wing position that's reasonable, and you can say, yes, there are hierarchies, but we have to stay awake, because they can degenerate into power-hungry tyranny, so that it's no longer competence.
01:20:37.000It's political machination and game-playing and tyranny that produce the positional differentiation.
01:20:47.000And so we've got to criticize the hierarchies, not the fact of hierarchy, but the structure of hierarchy so they stay honest.
01:20:53.000And then we also have to be careful because when you do set up a hierarchy, Then a lot of people collect at the bottom.
01:21:00.000That's the necessary consequence of a few people collecting at the top.
01:21:03.000And so then you have to be concerned about those people at the bottom.
01:21:06.000And so there's a variety of things that you would do to express that concern.
01:21:10.000One, you might want to have a lot of hierarchies.
01:21:12.000So that people of different talents could play different games.
01:21:15.000And a complex society is pretty good at that.
01:21:17.000But you're still going to have people who stack up at the bottom of all hierarchies.
01:21:21.000Those are going to be people who are sick.
01:21:23.000Mentally and physically, and maybe people who are cognitively impaired or, you know, or experienced some kind of catastrophe in their life.
01:21:30.000And then you want to set up your system so that those people don't suffer unduly, partly because that's bad and partly because that destabilizes your whole society.
01:21:40.000And so you could say, well, that's the left's place, is to speak on behalf of the unjustly dispossessed.
01:21:48.000And the right's position is to stabilize and maintain functional hierarchies.
01:21:59.000And to the individuals within the competition.
01:22:01.000And then the political dialogue is a continual discussion between the left and the right saying, well, you know, this hierarchy is getting a little too steep and a little too rigid.
01:22:09.000And, well, for me, that's also the fundamental reason for the necessity of free speech.
01:22:41.000I mean, one of the things I really like about the...
01:22:44.000Psychologist Jean Piaget, who's, I would say, the world's foremost expert on games, is that he did a very careful analysis of, say, competitive games.
01:22:53.000Okay, so let's take hockey or soccer, doesn't matter, same example.
01:22:56.000Okay, you say, well, because people now, they have kids play these games and don't keep score, which, of course, the kids keep score because they're not stupid like the adults, but, you know, well, we can't have it be competitive.
01:23:17.000It's not like half the people are playing chess and another, you know, a third of them brought a basketball and two of them are boxing in a corner.
01:23:23.000Well, sometimes they do in hockey, boxing in a corner.
01:23:26.000But everyone's trying to do the same thing.
01:23:40.000But it's nested inside a fundamental structure of cooperation.
01:23:44.000And the cooperation is the basis of the game itself.
01:23:49.000Let's all arbitrarily agree that it's important to put this black disc in the net, which is to get your aim right.
01:23:55.000And then let's cooperate within our teams to do that.
01:23:59.000Because we're going to pass, and we're going to pass to each other, and we're also going to work so that each of us is a good player, but so that we all work for the betterment of our team, because we want to win games across multiple games, so that's also cooperative.
01:24:12.000And then you want to interact with your enemies, let's say, the other team, in a way that's indicative of good sportsmanship, so that the entire league can flourish.
01:24:21.000And to think of that as competitive is absolutely...
01:24:31.000It's an ignorant, unidimensional analysis.
01:24:34.000It's put forward by someone who's reflexively opposed to anything that smacks of competition and who isn't thinking it through at all.
01:24:42.000They're denying the benefits of competition and the fact that they reap those very benefits of competition by enjoying the products that are created by these corporations.
01:25:00.000It's like, well, yeah, fair enough, but you should have a little gratitude for the fact that you've got your iPhone to complain about.
01:25:06.000And those organizations, those corporations, are unbelievably competitive.
01:25:12.000And they fall apart almost instantly when that competition stops being an issue, because then there's no constraint on the behavior of the system.
01:25:24.000And you know, the issue with men, I think, with young men, and this is one of the things I've been trying to address, is that if your fundamental presupposition is that our culture is a patriarchal tyranny, which is an appalling presupposition, along with the idea that the best way of looking at history is that it was the oppression,
01:25:41.000the continual oppression of women by men, which is also something that I regard as an absolutely reprehensible doctrine, Then, okay, so it's a patriarchal tyranny.
01:26:06.000So if they concentrate primarily on that oppression, and that's their main point of study, and that's the thing they want to talk about all the time, They kind of have a point in the fact that if you're looking at all the events that have ever taken place, there's a significant number of them that have been women being oppressed.
01:26:21.000Yeah, but I don't know if there's more women who've been oppressed than men who've been oppressed.
01:26:52.000Like, there's this endless, what would you call it, vulnerability that characterizes our existence psychologically and socially and naturally.
01:27:00.000And I would say 150 years ago, that was even more intense than it was now, you know, because the typical person in the West lived on less than a dollar a day before 1895. And so, the way I think that we should view the history of the world is that men and women labored under virtually impossible conditions for the entire bulk of human evolution,
01:27:19.000and they did their best to cooperate And to compete, but to cooperate so that they had some modicum, some possibility of a modicum of security and satisfaction, and that that's the right framework.
01:27:34.000And then within that, of course, there's power games that are played by people who are corrupt.
01:27:38.000Yeah, within that there's horrible events.
01:27:40.000But there's a massive amount of hypocritical thinking when you are criticizing the actions of so many people and talking about how many people are complicit in these things while you're carrying around a phone that's made by someone who gets a dollar a day.
01:27:54.000I was talking to a journalist in Slovenia who is a lefty and not a very sophisticated one, and she was talking about the 1%.
01:28:04.000And I said, well, do you know that if you make more than $32,000 a year that you're part of the 1%?
01:28:21.000But what was so interesting was that for her, that characterization, the 1% victimizers, was only relevant within the confines of her national border.
01:28:33.000As soon as I said, well, no, all you have to do is expand that out a little bit and you're the problem and not the solution, then that was completely untenable for her.
01:28:42.000She couldn't include herself in the population of victimizers, even though, you know, she lives in a Western country, and she's a well-paid journalist, and she lives a very privileged life, so to speak, by historical and world standards.
01:28:53.000In comparison to someone living in the Congo or something.
01:28:55.000Well, or anybody living anywhere in the entire history of the human race.
01:30:45.000And Solzhenitsyn comments, not just the end of them, but the end of their children and their grandchildren as well.
01:30:50.000And Latsis was eventually executed by Stalin.
01:30:53.000Somebody wrote me and just told me that after I wrote the foreword.
01:30:56.000But one of the things I figured out was this, and this is really worth thinking about, man.
01:31:00.000So the intersectional claim is that, you know, each person has more than one group identity.
01:31:06.000So fundamentally, if you're going to calculate their victim status, then you have to calculate it across all the different groups that they might be victims in.
01:31:17.000Oh, who knows, a Native American is one form of victim in this line of thinking, but a Native American victim is, female, is like twice the victim, or however you would calculate that mathematically.
01:31:29.000It's like, okay, and maybe you have, maybe you can be put into six different groups.
01:31:34.000We already talked about that a little bit.
01:31:47.000If you're a victimizer among any possible dimension of analysis, then it's the gulag for you.
01:31:54.000And so that's the fundamental danger of that group identity, victimizer-victim narrative, is that you fragment your identity in multiple dimensions, you'll find out that you're a victimizer, and then everyone's a criminal, and then everyone's guilty.
01:32:08.000That's exactly what happened in Russia.
01:32:10.000And then you think, well, wait a minute, there were a bunch of people who were really compassionate about the poor.
01:32:14.000It's like, let's say, just for the sake of argument, that at the beginning of the Russian Revolution, that 20% of the communists were really concerned about the poor.
01:32:23.000Maybe we could say 50%, just to be arbitrary about it.
01:32:27.000The other 50% were jealous and resentful about anyone who anything more than they did.
01:32:31.000Alright, now, you put those two groups head-to-head in a battle for four years and see who's standing at the end.
01:32:36.000Even if you are one of those utopians who actually cares for the dispossessed, when the revolution comes, you can bloody well be sure that your head's going to be first on the chopping block.
01:32:46.000Because the people who are motivated by hate are going to be a lot more vicious in their attempts to eradicate than you're going to be, what would you call it, effective in your attempts to save.
01:32:56.000That whole game, that whole identity politics game, that is dangerous beyond belief.
01:33:00.000And it's predicated fundamentally on resentment and the desire to devolve people back into a tribal antagonism.
01:33:08.000I think it's so important that you talk about it this way, and I think it's really interesting when I see the resistance to you talking about it this way, and how many people are unwilling to look at it as this multi-level, historical sort of record.
01:33:21.000You could look and see how this played out, and you can look and see what's going on right now with these control games that people are playing socially.
01:33:29.000And that they are enforcing certain types of behavior and certain ways of thinking, and then trying to rein in earnings and rally against capitalism and support communism and socialism, and doing so in this sort of weird, trendy way, without understanding the full scope of the historical implications when it's been tried in the past.
01:33:48.000And that it's not as simple as, like, you know, you got this Anne Ryan thing doing, you're looking at this world of...
01:33:57.000You know, capitalism against socialism.
01:33:59.000It's good people who care about folks versus people who are ruthless.
01:34:25.000So there's like, you're kind of 1 20th oppressed by the manager.
01:34:28.000But now you're the manager, and you're managing 20 people, and you're responsible for them.
01:34:32.000And we're assuming that you're not a psychopath.
01:34:34.000And you're probably not, because you probably wouldn't have been able to get to be a manager if you were a psychopath.
01:34:39.000Because psychopaths generally aren't very successful, and they have to keep moving as people figure out who they are.
01:34:45.000So the idea that psychopathic power is a good route to power in a functioning organization is a stupid theory.
01:34:51.000There are some organizations that are pathological enough so that works, but they don't last very long either.
01:34:56.000So you're the manager, and you're a decent human being, and you've got 20 people who are dependent on you, and at least two of those people are real trouble.
01:35:44.000Today it's far easier to get called out on things.
01:35:47.000But even so, like, you know, even 20 years ago, like, if you didn't treat your customers properly, you know, and carefully, reciprocally, in long-term relationships, you were going to be a failure.
01:35:57.000And, you know, in any corporation that produces anything of any value, I mean, the production is one thing, so you have to be competent at the production, but you have to be in constant communication with your buyers and foster those relationships personally because there's intense competition and If those personal relationships aren't of high quality,
01:36:19.000And one of the things I really learned, because I spend a lot of time with business people as well as academics, is that business people do a tremendous amount of socialization compared to academics.
01:36:29.000Academics can judge each other's work more or less on the basis of its scientific merit.
01:36:35.000And so they don't have to establish personal relationships to the same degree.
01:36:39.000But business people are always wondering, well, can I trust you?
01:36:42.000Can we enter into a reciprocal relationship that's going to be of mutual benefit over the long run?
01:36:46.000And so they're testing people out socially all the time.
01:37:57.000I mean, you have to have an explanation for why people like games.
01:38:01.000I've been talking about this a lot in my lectures too.
01:38:03.000You think, well, any game, any competitive game, soccer is a good example, it's basically a hunting game because you're firing a projectile at a target.
01:38:16.000Okay, so the target's the goal and the projectile's the ball, but it doesn't matter.
01:38:20.000So you have teams that are figuring out how to hunt properly.
01:38:25.000Then you think, well, to hunt properly, you have to put the ball in the net as many times as you possibly can.
01:38:33.000And so you organize yourself in a hierarchy to facilitate that.
01:38:51.000And you say, I don't know what I mean, but it's still true.
01:38:55.000But here's what you mean, is that if you're in a league, you're not trying to win the soccer game.
01:39:01.000You're trying to win the soccer championship.
01:39:04.000And to win the championship, you have to win a whole bunch of games.
01:39:07.000And the rules to win a whole bunch of games aren't the same as the rules to win one game.
01:39:11.000You know, like you could go flat out as the prima donna and bend the rules and cut corners and exhaust everyone and win the game and then lose the next three because that's a stupid medium to long-term strategy.
01:39:22.000Or you could be like the superstar and hog the ball all the time and never give your teammates a chance to develop, but then you're injured and your team is out.
01:39:31.000So you think, well, what you have to do to win the championship is that you have to organize your team so that the best players lead, but that everybody gets developed, and that you play the medium to long-term game in a fair way, in a fair and decent way.
01:39:46.000Okay, and so you think, well, that's how you win a championship.
01:39:48.000I talked to a coach a while back and he said one of the things he did to select athletes was to watch what happened when they scored a goal.
01:39:57.000And if they were celebrating on their own, you know, in sort of an egotistical way Then that wasn't such a good sign.
01:40:03.000But if they scored a goal or a touchdown or whatever it was, and their entire team came in and mobbed them and then lifted them up on their shoulders, then they thought, that guy is an athlete.
01:40:12.000Because not only can he put the ball in the net, but he does it in a way that benefits the entire team.
01:40:20.000And that's the person you want around for the long run.
01:40:22.000And so then the goal isn't just to put the ball in the goal.
01:40:25.000The goal is to put the ball in the goal...
01:40:28.000The largest number of times while simultaneously benefiting as many of your fellow players as you can.
01:40:35.000Well, although I think that's a great strategy, I don't think that's necessarily the meaning of it doesn't matter if you win or lose, it's how you play the game.
01:40:41.000I don't think people think of it in terms of like a long-term strategy for championship leagues.
01:40:46.000I think when they're saying it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game, meaning don't cheat, do your best, and learn.
01:41:02.000Well, also learn from the experience itself.
01:41:05.000Like, if you make a mistake and you're trying your hardest, but you make an error because someone has a counter to that, then you learn from that.
01:41:14.000If you play stupidly and you don't think and you win just because you got lucky, that's not as good as playing intelligently and doing your best and losing because the other people are superior and then you learn from the fact that they figured out a way to have solutions to all the problems that you presented.
01:41:33.000So one of the things that you're pointing out is that while you're playing, you want to be expanding your range of skills so that you get better at playing the next game.
01:41:40.000But then you think, well, even the soccer championship isn't the whole game because your life is a whole series of games, of championships of different types.
01:41:49.000The idea is that championships will come if you continue to excel and get excellent.
01:41:54.000Yes, and also if people invite you to play.
01:42:28.000What you are in fact doing is you're going there to watch people develop expertise and to learn to play reciprocally in a noble and ethical manner.
01:42:40.000And all of that sport, when it's done properly, is a direct physical incarnation of that ethic.
01:42:47.000And so it's not surprising that that's why people get so excited when they see an athlete do something.
01:42:52.000Imagine the best thing that you can see at a sports event is someone who does something purely in the spirit of fair play and in a manner that's unbelievably excellent.
01:43:04.000Wayne Gretzky was very good at that, right?
01:43:06.000Because he was an excellent sportsman and also unbelievably skilled.
01:43:10.000And so people loved him and that's perfect because he was...
01:43:14.000A player who played the game like it was more important to play it properly than to win, and he was on the top of his game at the same time.
01:43:20.000And that's what you want to be in life.
01:43:25.000And so that's very cool, and you see a very high-order ethic emerge out of that.
01:43:30.000You want to be the kind of player that everybody...
01:43:32.000I kind of wrote about that in 12 Rules for Life, because part of my advice in Rule 5 was not to let your kids do anything that makes you dislike them.
01:43:40.000And that's part of the idea there is that, you know, if you're really on the side of your children, you help them develop in a manner that makes them eminently desirable to other children and capable of interacting properly with adults because then the whole world opens up to them.
01:43:56.000The thing that's cool about that too is that, and this is what makes the postmodern and the Marxist type so wrong, is that your best strategy for success in life isn't the exercise of raw power.
01:44:07.000It's a really counterproductive strategy.
01:44:09.000It doesn't even work very well for advanced animals.
01:44:11.000Your best strategy is skill and reciprocity.
01:44:17.000So there's a real high order ethic in that.
01:44:20.000So the idea that our hierarchies are predicated on power and they're corrupt because of that and the whole world is a battleground between hierarchies of, you know, different power hierarchies and it's winner take all and, you know, the devil take the hindmost.
01:44:40.000You very rarely find people who excel at competition and who have benefited from competition who are against competition.
01:44:49.000And you very rarely find people who have no skill in competition at all and who have never engaged and have shied away from it their whole life that support it and believe that it's an important part of our culture.
01:45:39.000Well, the other thing that's kind of sad about that is that no matter what system you set up, that's the outcome.
01:45:45.000If you look at the Pareto distribution, so if that's the distribution of wealth...
01:45:52.000You'll find that in every society that we know of, whether it's capitalist or socialist or communist for that matter, a small proportion of the people have a disproportionate amount of the resources.
01:46:04.000So the other thing that I've been trying to explain in my lectures is that if you were really concerned about the dispossessed and the poor, you wouldn't put hierarchical dispossession at the feet of capitalism.
01:46:18.000Because it's a way worse problem than that.
01:46:20.000You know, because the Marxist types, they think, well, if we didn't have capitalism, there wouldn't be hierarchies and there wouldn't be dispossession.
01:46:26.000And that's complete bloody rubbish, because the problem of hierarchy and the problem of dispossession is way deeper than the problem of capitalism.
01:46:33.000So, like, if you look at Neolithic grave sites, way before there was capitalism, you see that a small number of people are buried with all the gold.
01:46:42.000So the fact of unequal distribution of resources, that's as old as hierarchies are old.
01:46:55.000And so for the leftists to take an anti-capitalist position and assume that that's going to be of benefit to the dispossessed is an idea that's at least 145 years out of date as far as I'm concerned.
01:47:09.000We do want to keep someone from accumulating so much wealth that they dominate the world and have a disproportionate effect on culture and do things that are detrimental that could be, in fact, detrimental for decades and decades to come.
01:48:14.000So there's always this shadowy figure in the background that's malevolent and psychopathic and power-obsessed that's attempting to take over the hierarchy by ill-gotten means.
01:48:30.000And so that has to be taken into consideration.
01:48:33.000But the problem with The viewpoint that's so prevalent in our society right now is that, and that's the patriarchal tyranny viewpoint, is that it's only the evil king.
01:48:42.000And then that's particularly hard on young men because if you believe that all of our hierarchies are predicated on nothing but arbitrary power, and that that's a natural consequence of masculinity, then whenever you see anyone who's masculine manifest anything that's associated with competence or confidence or Or,
01:49:02.000let's say, competitiveness or, you know, heaven forbid, aggression, then you immediately assume that that's nothing but a manifestation of tyrannical power and that you discourage it or you certainly fail to encourage it.
01:49:15.000And I think that that's a dreadful mistake, because that masculine energy, whether that's characteristic of women or men, because women can certainly manifest that, that's something that should be integrated and celebrated.
01:49:27.000And the way you do that, that's partly why mechanisms like competitive sports are so necessary, is that you want to take kids, let's say boys, the more competitive and aggressive boys, just for this example, You want to take them and you want to socialize them intensely so that they take that aggressive competitive impulse and they're capable of manifesting it inside a social structure like a game so that it's of benefit to everyone.
01:51:23.000And in a functional organization that happens naturally.
01:51:25.000And the other thing that happens too, and the radical leftists never take this into account as far as I'm concerned, is that one of the things I've learned about people who've run successful organizations, whether they're academic or business, Is that they really love mentoring young people.
01:51:43.000Because, you know, you think, well, for the evil capitalist, it's winner-take-all and to hell with everyone else.
01:51:50.000And that's an unbelievably cynical view of human nature.
01:51:53.000It only really applies to people who are genuinely psychopathic, and they're very rare.
01:51:58.000And so, most of the people I know that have been hyper-successful are absolutely thrilled if they can find a young person, and they don't care, generally speaking, about sex or creed or colour or any of that crap.
01:52:11.000They want to find a competent young person who's got a lot of possibility and then open up all sorts of doors of opportunity for them and to see how they can help them develop.
01:52:20.000And if they can do that with 20 or 30 people, then...
01:52:22.000Like, my graduate supervisor had his...
01:52:27.000He's getting old, and he had his retirement party about two years ago, and about 30 of the people that he trained into becoming scientists came to his party, and they talked nonstop about the beneficial effect that he had on their life, you know?
01:52:41.000He found a lot of them were, you know, they were young and smart, but weren't really all that properly oriented in the world, and he picked them out and gave them opportunities, and he certainly did this for me, has opened all sorts of doors for me, and that was a huge source of pleasure in his life.
01:52:57.000He had a family as well, and obviously his family was of primary importance, but in his professional career it wasn't His name on papers and his name in the Marquet, it was all these young people whose careers he could foster.
01:53:11.000It was a never-ending source of satisfaction.
01:53:13.000Yeah, I think that's a critical aspect of being a successful person, that you have to realize that there's a great personal benefit in helping other people, and that you feel this.
01:53:23.000This is not just like something that looks good on paper.
01:53:25.000When you can show some young person who's coming up the way, you're 10 years ahead of them, And you can say, these are the mistakes that I made.
01:54:02.000It doesn't even work for chimpanzees because the brute chimps, the ones that rule purely as a consequence of force, as soon as they weaken two subordinates that are reciprocally engaged so that they have a friendship, tear them into pieces.
01:54:47.000Why is there this lack of understanding and appreciating this nuance in people that oppose these ideas?
01:54:59.000What's the willingness to be ignorant about all the variabilities, especially when you consider the bulk of the research?
01:55:06.000Well, I think some of it's justification for failure.
01:55:09.000You know, like if you're not doing very well, then it's really easy to think that the game is rigged.
01:55:14.000It's also easy to be resentful about people who seem to have more than you have, especially if you're not thinking about it very clearly.
01:55:21.000You know, and that's another thing that I've been trying to lecture to people about, is that you should be very careful about assuming that someone else has more than you do.
01:55:29.000I mean, one of the best predictors of whether someone has money is how old they are.
01:55:34.000So old people are richer than young people.
01:56:17.00017. I was in high school when I was 17. Well, the funny thing, too, though, is that even with people who have that sort of, let's call it good fortune, independent of their talent, you don't have to scratch beneath the surface very far,
01:56:33.000even in successful people's lives, until you find a pretty decent vein of tragedy.
01:56:39.000And so, that jealousy of the successful is also based on a really unidimensional view of exactly what constitutes success.
01:56:49.000You see the trappings, whatever they might be.
01:56:53.000Let's say it's a yacht and more money than you know what to do with.
01:56:56.000And you assume, well, that's going to put that person at the pinnacle of a satisfying life.
01:57:00.000But there's no shortage of dreadfully unhappy and addicted people.
01:57:14.000But celebrity and fame and fortune are also not that easy to deal with, and they come with their own pitfalls.
01:57:20.000Plus, there's lots of things they don't protect you against.
01:57:24.000You know, people still get divorced, and they still get sick, and they still die, and their parents still get Alzheimer's, and all of that.
01:57:29.000Like, the fundamental tragic elements of life are still in place.
01:57:34.000One of the interesting things about people that are jealous of other people that are extremely successful is that you're missing one of the core lessons of competition.
01:57:42.000One of the core lessons of competition is to be inspired by those who are more successful and not to try to chip them down and take away their accomplishments because they don't make you feel good.
01:57:53.000The people that are piss poor at competition are always the ones that are trying to diminish the accomplishments of those who are extremely successful.
01:58:02.000If you see a loser, fat sports fan talking about what a piece of shit LeBron James is because he dropped the ball or he missed a shot, the extreme reaction that they could have to someone who's extraordinarily successful is almost always in direct proportion to how Much of a failure they are in their own life.
01:58:23.000And that's one of the reasons why, in contrast, it looks so ridiculous.
01:58:27.000Yeah, well, that's part of the danger.
01:58:28.000I would say that's part of the danger of the entire identity politics movement is that reasonable care for the dispossessed, which we already talked about, is easily contaminated by hatred and resentment for people who are not only successful, but who are...
01:58:43.000The most annoying person who's successful is the person who deserves it, not the person who doesn't deserve it.
01:58:49.000Because you can write the person who doesn't deserve it off.
01:58:55.000But then you see the person who's broken themselves in half and, you know, come out of a really pathological background and has been successful and you're like, you're uselessly wasting your life away.
01:59:07.000That's the sort of person that you really don't like because they cast you in a very dim light.
01:59:11.000So this is where competition is so important, because the person that has a background in competition, has been involved in competition, sees a person who's busted their ass and becomes something really extraordinary, and it's incredibly inspirational.
01:59:25.000And you look to those people, and you want to read their biographies, and you want to watch documentaries on them, because it literally gives you fuel.
01:59:32.000Whereas the person who shies away from competition, is afraid of their own insecurities and failures, and really has never tested themselves, those are the ones that find these people extremely distasteful.
01:59:43.000Because when they put themselves in comparison to these incredible people, they come up short.
02:00:27.000And the trick seems to be that voluntary acceptance of the adversity.
02:00:32.000See, that's one of the things that I think is core to the mythos of Christianity, because there's an idea that you should pick up your cross and stumble uphill.
02:00:41.000And that's really what that means, is that you set your eyes on some high-level vision, the city of God on the hill, whatever that happens to be.
02:00:50.000And then you take the burden, whatever burden you're capable of lifting, which is obviously going to be a burden of suffering, at least to some degree, and you carry that voluntarily.
02:01:43.000And if you don't accomplish anything and you never encounter any problems, you are this gelatinous, soft, atrophied soul.
02:01:51.000And you don't have the intestinal fortitude or the spirit or the human potential has not been developed to the point where you can overcome adversity.
02:02:00.000The only way to overcome adversity is to face it.
02:02:02.000So that optimum that you were talking about, so I've really been interested in the neurophysiology of the sense of meaning.
02:02:13.000Neurophysiology of the sense of meaning.
02:02:15.000Yeah, because the meaning, the feeling of meaning is an instinct.
02:03:02.000It says you're on the edge where you're competent and out of undue danger, but pushing yourself enough so that you're continually developing.
02:03:13.000And that looks to me like it's a consequence of the interaction between the right and the left hemispheres.
02:03:17.000And a consequence of the interaction between the negative emotion systems, anxiety and pain, that regulate you, that protect you from harm, and the exploratory and play systems that drive you forward.
02:03:29.000You want the exploratory and play systems to drive you forward, but then they're regulated by these negative emotions so you don't hurt yourself.
02:03:36.000And if you get that optimally right, then that's the point of maximal challenge.
02:03:40.000And that makes you really alert, because your positive emotion is functioning.
02:03:47.000And your negative emotions are alert too, saying, yeah, but be awake and be careful.
02:03:51.000And you know what that's like in the weight room.
02:03:53.000You know, you're lifting something that's at the edge of your ability, and you've got a spotter.
02:03:57.000You want to push, and you can barely do it, and you want to make sure that you're not going to, like, pull your arm down and rip the hell out of your muscle.
02:04:04.000But you're right on that edge, and that's the place of maximal gain.
02:04:07.000And that sense of meaning, that's what puts you on the border between chaos and order.
02:04:27.000And the only way to find out where that edge is is to push it.
02:04:32.000Now, one of the things I recommend to young people, especially true for people in their 20s, is that you should push yourself beyond your limits of tolerance in your 20s to find out where it is.
02:05:19.000It's good to think about that as a goal.
02:05:22.000It's like you're trying to discover what your limitations are when you're in your 20s so that you can hit that edge so that you can sustain yourself across the decades.
02:05:30.000And so, yeah, because you don't want to have too much fun.
02:05:36.000You don't want to be the oldest guy at the disco.
02:05:39.000It's not fun being the 40-year-old at the singles bar, precisely.
02:05:43.000So you want to make sure that what you're doing is age-appropriate and you want to push yourself in every direction that you can, but you should be doing that with an aim in mind.
02:05:51.000It's like you're trying to make yourself into a better and more competent person.
02:05:54.000And so some discipline along with the fun is a good idea.
02:05:57.000So to take care of yourself and the people around you, that's a...
02:06:01.000One of the things I recommended to people, and I've had quite a few people actually tell me that they've done this, interestingly enough, I said, well, one thing you could aim at, if you had any sense when you were young, is to be the most worth, you could be the most reliable person at your father's funeral.
02:06:17.000And so I think that's a good challenge.
02:06:19.000And I had a bunch of people come up to me in this last tour and tell me that that's exactly what they did.
02:06:22.000These were often young guys, you know, like before 20. He said, my dad died suddenly or, you know, he died after a year's illness and it was just taking me out.
02:06:31.000He said, I was listening to your lectures.
02:06:33.000You said, you want to be the most reliable person at the funeral because everyone else is grieving and what the hell else are you going to do?
02:06:39.000He said, that's what they tried to do and that got him through it.
02:06:43.000No, that's part of that, picking up that load, as far as I'm concerned.
02:06:47.000You get a little self-respect out of that, too, in a real sense, right?
02:06:50.000Because, you know, you're this sort of sad, suffering creature that's capable of a fair bit of malevolence, but if you find out that you can carry a heavy load and take care of yourself and have a little leftover for some other people, then you can wake up at 3 in the morning and think, well, man, I could be worse.
02:07:05.000And this is not a political perspective.
02:07:07.000This is a positive, constructive way of looking at how to navigate the world.
02:07:13.000When you break down these sort of behavior types, whether it's the people that generally support socialism or socialist ideas or they're anti-competition versus people that are pro-pushing yourself.
02:07:28.000They fall into these right wing, left wing sort of paradigms in this really weird way.
02:07:34.000I think that's especially true on the radical ends, but I think you get that on the radical right, too, because you get people who are collectivist in their fundamental orientation, and they're trying to take undue credit for who their racial ancestors were.
02:07:49.000What I would say with the political issue is that I think that you can build decent, responsible people who are on the...
02:07:58.000Middle right of the spectrum and the middle left, you know, because I think that you can have left-wing political beliefs that are genuinely aimed at aid to the dispossessed without being resentful of the hierarchies and without contaminating it with jealousy for the successful.
02:08:17.000Because when I worked for the NDP when I was a kid, that was the Socialist Party in Canada, the leaders, some of the leaders were people like that.
02:08:26.000Like a lot of the low-level party functionary types, they were the activist types that you still see today, and they're mostly resentful.
02:08:33.000But some of the leaders were genuinely, genuine advocates for the working class.
02:08:38.000You know, and they had their flaws, obviously, but they put their money where their mouth was, and they were trying to ensure that the hierarchies were open to advancement for, let's say, the common person, so to speak, the person who's stacked up at the bottom, or for their children,
02:08:54.000which might even be more important, you know, so that the hierarchies remain open to advancement.
02:08:59.000Genuine competition based on competence.
02:09:02.000Which would be a perfectly reasonable thing for the left to insist on, right?
02:09:05.000Is that let's bloody well make sure that it's a fair game.
02:09:08.000And so that people don't get locked out of movement forward because of arbitrary positions of power.
02:09:14.000And that's a reasonable part of the discussion.
02:09:19.000So I think if you build better people, you can build better people on the left and on the right.
02:09:23.000And people that are going to appreciate that rules to the game are better for everyone.
02:09:27.000They're better for the people that win.
02:09:28.000They're better for the people that are coming up.
02:09:37.000Better off being a guy who's respected, who plays the game correctly, and just does his best, and really, truly becomes a champion and loved by all because of it.
02:10:20.000That sense of meaning tells you When you're Vygotsky, the Russian psychologist, called that the zone of proximal development, which I believe is where the phrase the zone came from.
02:10:30.000And so in the zone of proximal development, this is what adults do with children, little kids that are learning to talk.
02:10:36.000Adults automatically talk to little children who are learning to talk at a level that slightly exceeds their current vocabulary.
02:11:39.000And the reason for that is that there's enough information flowing between us so that we're being slightly transformed as a consequence of the discussion.
02:11:50.000We trust that the conversation is aimed at something that's of mutual benefit.
02:11:54.000We trust each other to tell the truth to the degree that we're capable of doing that.
02:12:00.000And then when you engage in this exchange of information, and to the degree that it's breaking you down a little bit and building you up in a different way, that's a little death and rebirth.
02:12:10.000There's constant little deaths and rebirths in a meaningful conversation.
02:12:13.000Then that keeps you alive and functioning.
02:12:28.000And I would say, here's another thing that's cool.
02:12:32.000So that line between chaos and order, that's the same thing that's happening when you're playing a game properly.
02:12:39.000Because you're in the game, and you're exercising your skill, but you're pushing it.
02:12:44.000But you're pushing it in a way that's also a benefit to your teammates and to the progression of the game as such, and to being a better general player.
02:12:51.000You're doing all that at the same time.
02:12:55.000With enough natural intelligence so that the sum total output of your nervous system says to you, you're in the right place at the right time doing the right thing.
02:13:05.000And that's what makes your life meaningful.
02:13:52.000And I would say as well that that's associated with the idea of the deep Western idea of the logos, which is meaning in action and speech.
02:14:00.000So, you know, if we have a conversation that's meaningful.
02:14:04.000Then, that's a manifestation of the spirit of the Logos, and that's the thing that destroys and recreates at the same time.
02:14:13.000Because you learn something, it destroys a little presupposition that you had that was erroneous, and replaces it with something that's healthier.
02:14:21.000And every time you have a meaningful conversation, that happens.
02:14:26.000That moves, and something new takes its place.
02:14:29.000So, and that's a little death and rebirth instead of The catastrophic death and rebirth that you might have to have if you weren't paying attention.
02:14:46.000Yeah, the concept of meaning, like what is important, that it's so huge to people, but so fleeting.
02:14:52.000It's so difficult to, like, what is meaning?
02:14:55.000Well, you know, there's the simple ones, right?
02:14:56.000Like family and loved ones and companionship and community and finding something that you enjoy doing that, you know, you can do that seems bigger than you or bigger than yourself.
02:15:07.000But meaning, like the meaning of life, what is meaning?
02:15:10.000It's one of the things that gives people so much existential angst, and I think is the cause of a lot of despair, because there's no real answer.
02:15:20.000But the thing is, is that that's one of the dangers of rationality, is that, see, the Egyptians associated, the Catholics did this to some degree, too.
02:15:29.000They associated rationality with a proclivity to malevolence.
02:15:35.000Partly because rationality tends to fall in love with its own productions.
02:15:38.000Intelligence has this like in-built arrogance.
02:15:40.000And the Egyptians in particular were really insightful.
02:15:45.000They tried to replace the idea of intelligence as the highest virtue with the idea of attention as the highest virtue.
02:15:54.000Island was an island that was populated by, had a lot of birds on it, and the birds could talk, and all they did was say, pay attention, to remind everybody on the island to pay attention all the time.
02:16:04.000You can undermine your sense of meaning and you can question it, but the best thing to do is to actually pay attention to when it manifests itself.
02:16:12.000Because it's a phenomenon like color or like love or like beauty.
02:16:40.000Maybe it's only ten minutes because your life is pretty out of balance, but you'll see that, oh man, I was engaged in something there for ten minutes.
02:17:20.000And then I need to practice being there more and more and more, which is...
02:17:25.000Well, that's the appropriate thing to try to practice.
02:17:28.000And that's to make, that's to come to some negotiated, what would you call it?
02:17:34.000It's to come to a negotiation with that intrinsic sense of meaning and to realize it as a fact rather than just as an opinion or something that's secondary.
02:17:43.000It's an alien concept for people, though, to be so aware of who they are and what they're doing, they could recreate that.
02:17:50.000So when they do feel that feeling of meaning, that they could figure out a way to get back into that state, and what were all the extenuating circumstances, and where was my head at?
02:17:59.000What caused me to have this feeling like things were right?
02:18:02.000Yes, well, it's like someone gives you a gift, and you think, well, I'd like that gift again.
02:18:05.000It's like, yeah, well, you have to figure out what it was that you did to deserve it, so to speak.
02:18:09.000And yeah, I know it requires a fair bit of careful reflection, but it also requires that ignorance, as you have to think, well, I don't know who I am.
02:18:19.000I'm going to find some things meaningful.
02:18:56.000Or you might find that someone who's really agreeable and kind of a pushover stands up to someone.
02:19:04.000Just once at work, says what they really think, and then they realize afterwards, wow, you know, that was exactly right.
02:19:10.000Then they think, oh my god, you know, I've decided when I was a little kid, maybe they had a harsh father, and they decided when they were four, I'm never going to be angry in my whole life.
02:19:18.000There's something wrong with aggression.
02:19:19.000So they've gone out of their way their whole life to be free of conflict.
02:19:23.000Then they find out that one day they stand up for themselves, that that whole domain that they'd parsed off as inappropriate actually contains exactly what they need to put themselves together.
02:19:33.000But you find what you need where you least want to look.
02:19:39.000I want to talk to you about activists.
02:19:43.000Because it's something that you brought up earlier, saying that you find them unappealing.
02:19:48.000I want to know what you think the motivation of a lot of these particularly radical left-wing activists that want to shut down lectures and scream people down in these auditoriums.
02:20:02.000What do you think the motivation of these people is, and what do you think is the root of it?
02:20:09.000Well, I think that it's a quick root to moral virtue.
02:20:13.000You know, like, it's actually really hard to put yourself together, and you have to do that in ways that you can't trumpet.
02:20:20.000You know, because most of the things that are wrong with you are kind of low, what would you call it, second-rate and embarrassing.
02:20:29.000You're all your stupid little habits and your proclivity to procrastinate and all the things that you're minorly ashamed of.
02:20:34.000And then you have to work on those slowly because the probability that you're going to be able to fix them quickly is low.
02:20:42.000And you can't really brag about it because it's so embarrassing just to admit that they exist to begin with that you can hardly brag about it and it's sort of painstaking private work and you don't get a lot of social, you don't get a lot of quick social status for it.
02:20:56.000It's effortful, embarrassing, humbling and difficult.
02:21:00.000And then you can do something like be an activist and you get all that public acclaim for being on the good side with no effort whatsoever.
02:22:27.000So I think that there's some impulse to...
02:22:31.000You know, there's some wish that things could be less unfair and that fewer people could suffer.
02:22:36.000But it's kind of a low-level virtue that reflects of compassion.
02:22:42.000You know, I'm not saying it's without merit, because that compassion is the basis for the ability to take care of people who are ill and infants and so forth.
02:23:28.000It doesn't make sense that people would shout her down, yet they do.
02:23:32.000They shout her down, they say horrible things about her, they mischaracterize her in a really brutal way that it completely invalidates their argument or their opposition to her, to anyone that's paying attention to what she said.
02:23:46.000Well, a lot of it is also just immature acting out.
02:24:12.000It's almost like if you're doing a play, or a musical, or you're singing a song, and someone just decides to start screaming out, well, that person's an asshole.
02:24:20.000But if you're espousing an opinion, and that person decides to scream out, and they do so under the guise of moral virtue, then they're tolerated.
02:24:53.000One of the things I realized about recently as well is that There isn't a debate about free speech, exactly.
02:25:02.000Not the way that we think about it, you know, because there's the classical defense of free speech.
02:25:07.000So the classical defense of free speech is that it's better for both of us if we're able to exchange our opinions because I have the opportunity to learn from you and you have the opportunity to learn from me and you have the opportunity to learn from your own mistakes and social feedback and so do I. And negotiation beats war.
02:25:27.000Okay, so that's kind of the classical...
02:25:30.000Now, but that's predicated on some assumptions, and those are you're an autonomous being, you're capable of formulating an opinion that's actually unique to you, and that in dialogue we can mutually modify each other's unique opinions in a way that produces a mutually harmonious and beneficial outcome.
02:26:15.000There's no one way of interacting with the world that's preferable to any other way.
02:26:20.000And so what people do is organize themselves into hierarchies of power and then struggle for dominance within the hierarchies and then the hierarchies struggle between each other.
02:26:29.000So it's a landscape of warring hierarchies.
02:27:54.000I've made this case before that the postmodern types, although they have to ally themselves with the Marxists for reasons that we don't have to go into, they are going after things that are so fundamental you can't believe it.
02:28:07.000There is no autonomous individual in the postmodern world.
02:28:12.000That's a modernist or an enlightenment viewpoint, or a Christian viewpoint, or a Judeo-Christian viewpoint, or maybe an Abrahamic religion viewpoint.
02:29:10.000The identity politics players, the people who are serious about this philosophically, they don't believe in the idea of the autonomous individual.
02:29:21.000So it's not like they're playing a game within, you know, you think, well, this is a game We're all playing a game where we agree on some things, and we're just disagreeing about the details.
02:29:46.000That's just a fiction set up by those who have used the idea of the autonomous individual to advance their power maneuvering within the confines of the colonialist West.
02:30:00.000And what's the rationalization for that perspective?
02:30:03.000Is this to enhance their argument, to try to push forth their ideas in a less...
02:30:12.000I think the motivation is hatred for competence.
02:30:52.000I think it's Cain and Abel all the way down.
02:30:54.000Do you think that when you're talking about the Scandinavian model where they've made it incredibly equal and through this massive effort to take away any opportunity or to rather open up every possible opportunity for women that men also have and you've seen these Differences in genders actually accentuate because of this.
02:31:20.000Do you think that maybe What we're seeing also, even in terms of the post-modernists and the radical leftists versus people on the right, this same sort of competition aspect of it is also problematic because it's one of the reasons why there's so much debate in the first place and that if we had maybe more middle ground and more opportunity,
02:31:47.000There would be less of a reason to have these These extreme polar opposites that may be embracing of more – like there's certain socialist aspects of our society that we just accept, right?
02:33:51.000And so the whole reason that you need the political discussion is to take a look at the particulars of the hierarchies and the particulars of the dispossession and say, okay, well, now we need to shim it up here, and now we need to shim it up here, and now we need to adjust this, and now we need to adjust this, because you can't come up with a final solution to those problems.
02:34:09.000I think that's partly why you have consciousness itself.
02:34:12.000You know, because if you could automate the solution, imagine there was a permanent solution.
02:34:17.000Well, there's a permanent solution to breathing.
02:34:20.000You have a part of your brain that just breathes.
02:34:31.000There's other problems that are so fluid, like they're eternal problems, but they're so fluid in their detail that you need awareness and linguistic capacity to address them.
02:34:39.000And I would say the problem of hierarchy and dispossession fit exactly into that category.
02:34:45.000Is that we're going to organize ourselves hierarchically because talent is unequally distributed.
02:35:53.000Right hand is justice and the left hand is mercy.
02:35:56.000Justice means you get what you deserve.
02:35:58.000But the world can't survive that way because people are flawed and make mistakes.
02:36:03.000And if you only got exactly what you deserved, it would be a hell of a world, right?
02:36:07.000Because you'd be punished for every single mistake you make.
02:36:10.000You know, you'd be held accountable in a way that would be unbearable.
02:36:13.000So that has to be tempered with mercy.
02:36:16.000And so, maybe the left is the end of the distribution that tempers with mercy, when it's functioning properly.
02:36:23.000But it can degenerate into that Cain-like resentment of the successful, and that's a danger.
02:36:32.000On the right, you have the opposite danger, which is, well...
02:36:35.000You know, you advance because of your competence, but then that can ossify, and so you want to hang on to that position even though your competence no longer justifies it.
02:36:44.000You start to use the advantages of your position to accrue benefits for yourself that you did not earn.
02:36:51.000And that's the proclivity of the hierarchy to become blind and tyrannical.
02:37:31.000Do you think that the Scandinavian model that has revealed that when you do make things more equal, you will find that people generally tend to gravitate more towards traditional gender roles?
02:37:55.000The indices of life satisfaction are pretty high in Scandinavia, but I don't know if anybody has done an analysis that would indicate whether the sexual sorting Is a contributor to that?
02:39:09.000And those sorts of societies, in some sense, are easier to manage.
02:39:13.000Is there any benefit to this model that we could perhaps bring to the United States or to Canada and maybe mitigate some of the issues that we have between the right and the left?
02:39:26.000Like, maybe there's some sort of a compromise that'll lead to less debate and dispute.
02:39:33.000Well, I think that you guys in the States are doing real well, actually, personally.
02:40:01.000And then in the last election, I mean...
02:40:04.000Maybe you could make a case, perhaps, that things had tilted a little too far to the Republican side, but that that got balanced out because the Democrats took the House again, and it seems like they were more moderate Democrats.
02:40:18.000So, you know, it isn't obvious to me that your system isn't functioning well.
02:40:23.000I think that one of the things that's happening that's making things look more contentious than they are is that The mainstream media is under such assault by the up and coming media forums,
02:40:39.000including people like you, that as their financial models I think?
02:41:02.000And it depends on how you calculate these things, but that the radical leftists and the radical right-wingers are only about 5% of the population on each side.
02:41:10.000And that the vast majority of Americans consider themselves something approximating the relatively silent majority.
02:41:19.000I don't think that things are polarized as badly as they seem.
02:41:24.000And it is also the case right now that if you poll people and ask them about the conditions of their life in the United States, they tend to say that they're doing quite well, but that other people aren't.
02:41:36.000I don't know this for sure, but I think maybe that the technological pressure that's being put on the mainstream media is driving extreme political views as a means of gathering the attention of a shrinking market share.
02:41:51.000That's a very interesting take on it, and I wonder how detrimental that is to us as a whole, because we are constantly dealing with this clickbait nonsense headline, and everything is a dispute, everything's a war.
02:42:07.000I mean, I noticed this years ago, because I really stopped watching the news 25 years ago, although I've been heavily involved in it the last two years.
02:42:15.000Because I noticed that most of what passed for news wasn't.
02:42:18.000Because my sense was, well, if it isn't important in a month, if it isn't important a month from now, it was never important.
02:42:25.000And almost everything that's news is like important right now.
02:42:50.000It's 24-hour news cycle and it's produced by everyone whether they're I think it's also similar to what we were talking about earlier when it comes to reading comments on Instagram or Twitter.
02:43:09.000I just think there's just an amount of data.
02:43:15.000You can't navigate that many relationships.
02:43:17.000I mean, this is the reason why we have this Dunbar's number in our head.
02:43:21.000If you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of people, in your case, a million followers that are constantly interacting with you, it's going to fucking drive you mad.
02:43:29.000Well, you don't even know what to do with it.
02:43:31.000Well, I don't even know what my ethical obligation is to my Twitter followers, you know, because there's a million people following me.
02:43:40.000Well, certainly I know one limitation, which is that having it drive me insane is probably not a good outcome for anyone, except for those who hope that I would fall, crawl back under my rock, let's say.
02:43:53.000Because they're responding, and the mentions are to you personally.
02:43:56.000But in a lesser way, perhaps, but is still also overwhelming, is just the sheer amount of information that's available constantly about everything.
02:44:07.000There's a million stories every day about every single thing that's going on in your life.
02:44:15.000And how are you supposed to navigate that?
02:44:18.000How are you supposed to get through life and concentrate on things that are truly meaningful for you in the present moment without being completely detached from the outside world?
02:44:57.000So we don't know how to adjust to that psychologically, but it's even worse than that because as soon as you adjust to the degree that you do, the technology changes on you.
02:45:12.000And it's always leading in that direction.
02:45:13.000Yeah, so it's a real, I mean, you know, I see this especially with parents who have teenage kids.
02:45:20.000It's like they know the phones aren't, you know, I've been talking to some teenagers lately about, you know, maybe these are kids that are getting bullied on social media.
02:45:30.000It's like, I think, well, when I was 14, you know, it's kind of a rough time of life and you go to school and you've got your friends and you've got your enemies and then you come home and Your friends aren't there and neither are your enemies.
02:48:11.000Well, Elon Musk was on the podcast talking about some new development they're working on called Neuralink and that this is some radical new way of accentuating bandwidth between human beings and information and just increasing the access to it.
02:48:28.000He said it was going to come out within X amount of months.
02:48:32.000Yeah, well, they've already, you know, there are scientists who've already managed direct brain-to-computer links, right?
02:48:38.000So they can get monkeys, for example, to move a robotic arm.
02:48:41.000And so, and I suspect that, you know, you can learn to control single neurons in your face.
02:48:48.000My suspicions are that we'll be able to develop technologies that'll be wearable, that won't have to be neural implants, that you'll be able to communicate with neurally.
02:48:56.000And that that's not very far down the road.
02:48:59.000You know, the probability that we're going to build...
02:49:03.000You know about, what's his name, Kurzweil's idea of the singularity.
02:49:11.000Well, it's a wild idea and it seems somewhat improbable.
02:49:15.000I had a friend who once told me that if something's impossible, then it won't happen.
02:49:20.000There'll be something that will come up to stop it that you won't expect.
02:49:24.000And maybe the singularity is one of those things.
02:49:26.000But, you know, I know a lot of guys who are in the High-end computational world, and a lot of them are convinced that we're within a decade of a machine that's as powerful as a human brain.
02:49:36.000And I know people have been saying that for a long time, but, Jesus, you know, computers are getting good at emotion recognition.
02:49:42.000They're getting really good at facial recognition.
02:49:44.000They can communicate with one another.
02:51:00.000And use it as fuel to continue to kill people.
02:51:02.000That sounds like a fine thing to develop.
02:51:05.000Just fucking imagine an army of robotic, armed, artificially intelligent things that eat corpses in order to have fuel to continue to kill more people.
02:51:21.000Yeah, well, I mean, part of the reason that I'm doing what I'm doing with regards to these lectures is, you know, I think that we're in a time of unparalleled possibility.
02:51:33.000And that the more people that there are out there who have their acts together, the better the probability that we're going to be able to manage it.
02:51:39.000Because we've all got some pretty hard decisions to make coming up real fast.
02:51:43.000You know, and these guys that are working on these AI systems, I'm hoping that the ones that are more ethically oriented in a proper direction will be the ones that have the upper hand.
02:52:31.000Well, that's why I think that the individual level of analysis is the right one, is that I'm hoping that, you know, that, like, every time someone comes up and talks to me and says, look, you know, I was in a dark place and I got my life together and this is how it's going, I think that tilts the scales non-trivially towards a good outcome.
02:53:18.000And one of the things that's quite sad is how little encouragement people need.
02:53:23.000It's so touching, you know, because I'm constantly in a state of, like, being overwhelmed, well, even with what happened this morning when I went to Whole Foods, you know, because it's overwhelming to have people come up and, like, they share these really intimate pieces of their life with you in, like, 20 seconds, you know?
02:53:37.000It's like you're an old friend, you know, and it's like, here's what my life was like.
02:53:40.000It's dark, you know, it's dark, and here's a bunch of good things that are happening.