Dr. Drew is a podcaster, writer, and host of five different podcasts. He's also the founder of KBC Los Angeles on Middays and the creator of the Soul Patrol and This Life With Bob Forrest. In this episode, Dr. Drew talks about how he got started in his career, what it's like being in a celebrity rehab center, and why he thinks there's no such thing as a woman who is a man who is in love with a woman. He also talks about why he doesn't like hubris and why it's a bad idea to become a hubristic. And he explains why he believes there's nothing wrong with being a woman in a male-dominated world like the one he grew up in. This episode is sponsored by Indochino, the world's largest made-to-measure menswear company. They make suits and shirts made to your exact measurements for a great fit, and then you wait for your custom suit to arrive in just a few weeks and it fits you like a glove! You don't have to pay James Bond prices to look like James Bond...you can get a James Bond suit that fits you better than anything off-the-rack could...and it's $379 for just $379! Plus, use promo code SHOPSHOP to get 50% off the regular price for a made to measure premium suit, and shipping is free! Use that promo code Shapiro at checkout when you enter SHOPCHA at checkout! when you checkout at checkout. You can get any premium suit for $379, using that code SHIPPING. at checkout, and you'll get a discount of $50 plus free shipping and free shipping! You'll get an incredible deal, plus an additional $5 off your first purchase when you use the promo code CHECKING at checkout and you get an extra 15% off your purchase of $35 or $50 when you place that code CHOPCHA. You get 10% OFF the regular rate, plus a free shipping. This is a deal that starts at $35 and includes free shipping, and an additional 15% OFF your first month, and a free copy of the latest issue of the new issue of The New York Times bestselling book that comes out in the next issue of Good Men Say. Subscribe to my new issue! I'm giving you a copy of my new book, The Good Men Project. I hope you like it!
00:00:00.000If you're empty and you can't find meaning in other people, in being service to other people, in contributing to society, I don't know what we're doing here.
00:00:17.000I am very excited to have with me today, Dr. Drew, and we'll be talking with him in just one second.
00:00:20.000But first, look, everybody looks better in a suit.
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00:01:44.000We got the Soul Patrol, which is a health and fitness podcast, and another one with Bob Forrest, the guy with the hat and the glasses that I did celebrity rehab with, called This Life.
00:01:53.000It's about mental health and addiction, that kind of stuff.
00:01:55.000So Dr. Drew has a very, very full plate.
00:02:20.000Well, this is why I think you're so popular.
00:02:24.000One of the reasons that a lot of the people we have on, I think, are so popular is because if you view life as a journey through knowledge, I think that you have a much better time doing it, and also you're less likely to become ticked off.
00:02:35.000So one of the things that's great about what you do is that you talk with a lot of people from a lot of variant points of view, but you're pretty even keel.
00:02:41.000I mean, you're not in the business of getting angry.
00:02:43.000The hubris is the furthest thing from what I think I should be.
00:02:47.000And when people become hubristic, that's where I get pissed.
00:02:50.000Because the human experience is so complex and so rich, for anybody to stand off and tell you this is how it's got to be, I get a little pissed off.
00:02:58.000So before we get into any of the deep stuff, I first want to get something off the table, because obviously there's an elephant in the room for those who know our history together.
00:03:05.000So the first time that we ever met in person is when I was on your show back on CNN Headline News.
00:03:10.000And it became sort of a cause celebre because there was an incident with Zoe Terzou.
00:03:13.000Zoe Terzou is a transgender woman, a man who is, in my opinion, believes he is a woman.
00:05:40.000Methamphetamine, and cocaine, and all kinds of other crazy things.
00:05:45.000We've always made the same mistake, which is we become over-enthusiastic, we don't understand what addiction is, we create addiction, and then we try to treat it with other drugs.
00:05:53.000We've made that mistake many, many times.
00:05:57.000There are a multiplicity of forces that came together to create it.
00:06:00.000There was, you know, the insurance situation.
00:06:03.000Insurance companies sort of took over the practice of medicine.
00:06:05.000Everything had to be very quick, and there's no quicker way to end it.
00:06:08.000And an appointment then opening a prescription pad.
00:06:11.000That and the fact that a group of physicians decided that they would stake their reputation on the fact that opioids are not addictive and you could treat pain liberally.
00:06:23.000The attorneys got involved with that and started not just suing doctors for malpractice but criminally suing them, civilly suing them for inadequate treatment of pain.
00:06:30.000The state medical boards got involved.
00:06:32.000The Joint Commission on Hospital Accreditation.
00:06:34.000All these forces came together and said pain is as important as your pulse.
00:06:38.000And pain controls what the patient says it is.
00:06:41.000Pain experiences what the patient says it is.
00:06:54.000And I just will tell you it was a catastrophe.
00:06:56.000And you would know 90% of the opiates on earth end up being prescribed in this country.
00:07:00.000And now we're beginning to find our way out of it.
00:07:02.000What happened was the heroin problem, as it was documented in Dreamland, there was a group of people who learned how to distribute it very effectively at a time when my peers were cutting off patients.
00:07:12.000They were beginning to learn that, oh my God, we were creating drug addicts.
00:07:14.000So as opposed to bringing the patient into the office and going, look, we didn't intend this.
00:07:22.000What do you think the solution to all this is?
00:07:23.000Because there's a lot of talk about, you know, putting a lot of government funding behind things, and it doesn't look like there's a very clean solution, and the government's always throwing money in.
00:07:44.000And I want to say too that the soil in which this thing took place was about us, right?
00:07:51.000I don't know how else to describe it except to say, and this is a deeper conversation, that we are in the midst of a deep spiritual
00:08:23.000I spoke to the head of the addiction program at Harvard just yesterday for a podcast coming out soon.
00:08:28.000And he and I both believe that they've got to get behind mutual aid societies, which are available in every corner and are free.
00:08:35.000And he's publishing a Cochran study that's going to show that these treatments, mutual aid societies like 12-step and smart recovery and these sorts of things, are as effective or more so than any other treatment.
00:09:30.000Yes, I'd like to go back, actually, to the first thing that you said, because I think that there is a deeper and more interesting conversation there.
00:10:20.000And the result has been a group of adults that are empty.
00:10:25.000And if you're empty and you can't find meaning in other people, in relationships and being service to other people and contributing to society,
00:11:01.000If it's why, my suspicion is it was some sort of reaction to the world wars of the first half of the 20th century.
00:11:08.000That those were so traumatic, and the children of those wars, somehow that trauma was rained down upon them.
00:11:16.000At the same time, we decided families are not important, or relationships aren't important, or families don't matter, or it takes a village, or whatever it is.
00:11:25.000I mean, families are the cornerstone of everything, and have always been throughout human history and every culture throughout time.
00:12:00.000So my theory is that there, I agree with you that in the aftermath of both World Wars, there was an existential angst that sort of washed across the land.
00:12:07.000But I think that a lot of that existential angst had to do not only with decline of religion, which you can see statistically taking a nosedive after World War II, but also having to do with this unfulfilled longing for community that had once been filled by either religion or a bunch of bad ideologies.
00:12:22.000So, the feeling of communal purpose was lost, and without that communal purpose, we saw ourselves as atomistic individuals.
00:12:27.000When you read existentialist philosophy, it's always me versus the world, right?
00:12:30.000You read Sartre, and everything is about, here I am in this chaotic universe as this atomized human being, and it's my will that's going to shape the world around me.
00:12:39.000Well, that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for a connection with other human beings.
00:12:42.000It does leave a whole lot of room for you to be by yourself.
00:13:04.000I mean, when you go... We have then started filling ourselves with so many things like money and cars and extreme activities that don't fill.
00:13:14.000It's a never-ending pit that we do here in this country.
00:13:16.000While there, they still have their families.
00:14:20.000And he goes way into outer space with it.
00:14:21.000It's a wonderful intellectual exercise.
00:14:23.000But it's how we think about neurobiology now, in a way.
00:14:26.000And what I want to say about that neurobiology is that we've moved away from a single skull system.
00:14:31.000You know, in the 90s we talked about the decade of the brain.
00:14:34.000A single skull, we're going to understand how the brain works.
00:14:37.000Turns out the brain does not work without other brains.
00:14:39.000And it really is, everything's in an interpersonal context.
00:14:42.000Where does your self emerge but out of a relationship with mom and dad?
00:14:46.000And it emerges out of this relationship.
00:14:49.000There's another phenomenon that is just poorly discussed, which is what people like me call affect regulation.
00:14:55.000The ability to be okay in our own skin, to be able to regulate emotions so they're not too prolonged, too intense, too negative.
00:15:02.000And it turns out that the normal interaction, normal frame for that to develop, it starts with mom.
00:15:08.000It starts being attuned to and being an object of scrutiny and learning that brains have content and learning that when I have a feeling, the mom reflects that back to me on her face and may offer me some soothing affects alongside that.
00:15:20.000That frame of closeness, of intimacy is what that is, is really where all meaning sort of resides in terms of feeling good about life and feeling good about yourself and experiencing yourself.
00:15:30.000And then we can move away from that and regulate autonomously.
00:15:34.000Well, when we've been traumatized, or when trauma is reigning through intergenerationally, that close frame becomes dangerous.
00:15:40.000A lot of unpleasant material gets reigned through, if not shattering material.
00:15:45.000Physical abuse, sexual abuse, abandonment, whatever it might be.
00:15:48.000And so, the frame of closeness, in which we can find so much meaning and satisfaction, becomes a dangerous place that we don't go to.
00:15:55.000Okay, so I want to have you expand on that a little bit in one second.
00:15:58.000First, I have to say thanks to our sponsors over at Helix Sleep.
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00:16:59.000So it's why I, I know you just interviewed Jordan Peterson, it's why I love him so much, because he would not disagree with anything I've said so far, but he takes all of this into a sort of a deeper frame, and he has a religious overlay to it, an anthropological overlay, and looks for the patterns of human behavior that are sort of reflective of what our neurobiology is.
00:17:17.000And what I was thinking about is how we've sort of, I don't know why I'm jumping all the way to this, but I'm gonna go.
00:17:27.000We've missed, in terms of understanding the human experience, we've become too relativistic in the sense that we just look at the superficial blush and not really ask the question, why do humans do that?
00:17:48.000As opposed to, oh my God, this was a population that had something called a codex, which was a systematic way to create a warrior by abusing the crap out of children.
00:18:00.000And when you take a bunch of people that are severely abused and you put them together, they have a hard time not acting their aggression out on one another.
00:18:08.000But if you focus that aggression out there in somebody,
00:18:12.000That you sacrifice every day, then there's this sort of a catharsis that goes on within the mob, now we're okay today, we did it to that one.
00:18:20.000And I mentioned to you before we started, before the cameras heated up, that I wanted to mention human sacrifice.
00:18:26.000And to me it's an informative phenomenon about the human being that no one ever looks at and it's in plain sight here at all times.
00:18:35.000And that is that if you look at every print of religion, you find human sacrifice, right?
00:18:47.000But, I mean, if you look at what Abraham, if people talk about the Abrahamic religion, what was Abraham doing when God sent the angel down to grab his hand?
00:18:59.000It was part of the ancient sacrifices that people did, and then some hallucination or whatever came through to him, and it changed everything in that moment.
00:20:14.000And this is sort of the point that I'm trying to make, which is that the Judeo-Christian tradition, in attempting to eradicate human sacrifice, right?
00:20:20.000The Bible is very harsh about human sacrifice.
00:20:23.000It's one of the big things, and it's one of the big puzzles about Abraham.
00:20:25.000So the traditional Jewish read on that is that this was Abraham's struggle, is he's being told to do something he knows is immoral, because God has already told him it's immoral to do this.
00:21:19.000My theory would be that the reason that we're able to focus and not be that way is because of families.
00:21:24.000Because our experience in development and our experience of self and other and the ability to develop affect
00:21:30.000It includes the experience of love, and ultimately, if we do enough connection with other people, we develop something called empathy.
00:21:36.000And with empathy, no way we're going to do stuff like that, right?
00:21:39.000So that's the highest order of human development, is deep empathy of other people, to be able to really appreciate other people's contents of their minds.
00:21:48.000If you're being traumatized and beaten or in war, or you're living in horrible circumstances,
00:21:54.000You're going to be prone to aggression.
00:21:57.000This need for family and this need for community and this need for interaction with the fact that we live in an individual rights society that suggests that you as an individual are the highest point of our system.
00:22:06.000How do we build a system that balances these two things?
00:22:09.000I think we distinguish, you know, what's healthy and what's politically proper, right?
00:22:16.000It's healthy to be part of a community.
00:22:18.000It's healthy to sacrifice on behalf of the community.
00:22:21.000My rights and privileges should be as an individual.
00:22:24.000But I think we've even gone way too far with that.
00:22:26.000I mean, the fact that you walk outside the street and you find a homeless encampment, those people are not, we're allowing those people to suffer.
00:22:32.000Right, those people are not capable of, there are a lot of mental, the percentage of mentally ill among the homeless is extraordinarily high.
00:22:37.000Chronically severely mentally ill, and we're allowing them, and I've been through the experience a number of times where you get them and treat them and they look back and go, who the hell let me sit like that?
00:22:57.000And so we have sanitation failure, we have human suffering in the streets, we have inability to intervene on their behalf to make them help them, and we're endangering the entire population of Los Angeles because of sanitation failure.
00:23:14.000It seems like the society has bifurcated into radical individualism versus radical communitarianism, and the in-between has sort of disappeared.
00:23:22.000I don't think the radical communitarianism really knows what they even mean by that yet.
00:23:35.000People who are pushing radical communitarianism will completely deny any of the possibilities of those things going bad, because obviously, how could it possibly go bad?
00:23:54.000And that's one of the things that I find so fascinating about the American founding in particular, because the American ideology from root was that it was your job to, it was government's job to stand up your way, but it was your job to be virtuous.
00:24:37.000I get so many letters from people who listen to my show, and I don't talk about this stuff particularly often on my show, but because I'm younger and because I talk about my relationship with my wife and all this, I get a lot of letters from people who say I've really screwed up relationship with this other person, and typically that's happening because they're not even talking to one another.
00:24:54.000They're not seeing each other as independent human beings with a set of values, and then they're not basing their relationships off that shared value at all.
00:25:04.000But a lot of what you're describing is shared intellectual experiences, which is again about listening to each other and appreciate each other's values and points of view.
00:25:12.000But there's a deeper piece where they're not even experiencing each other as wholly there.
00:25:17.000There's the other person's mind having real agency and content.
00:25:21.000It's just sort of somebody that I use to feel better.
00:25:25.000So I'll ask you a practical dating question that I've gotten a lot, because this is fun.
00:25:30.000So the practical dating question that I get a lot is, should people who have different value systems or different religions, for example, date each other?
00:25:38.000Is that if you want to have a long lasting relationship with somebody, you're both going to get old and wrinkly, and you're both going to not be as handsome and pretty as you once were, and you're not going to be as sexually attracted to that person as you once were.
00:25:49.000But what you see from the studies is that levels of commitment, committed love, go up over time.
00:26:11.000But if you have to bet, are you going to bet on the people who share values?
00:26:15.000I'm going to defer to my host, which is that if you look at common scripts, things tend to go better.
00:26:22.000Life scripts, family scripts, family of origin scripts, things where everything is already self-evident to one another.
00:26:28.000That tends to help relationships go along.
00:26:31.000But having said that, of course, the exceptions are always the radical differences where people form these new phenomenological experiences together, and that's very rich, and it's dangerous.
00:26:45.000There is a risk-reward ratio, but I wouldn't discourage somebody from that just based on that, for any more reason than I would discourage you and I from having a good dialogue, you know?
00:26:53.000Yeah, but I don't think we should get married, just breaking it to you now.
00:27:46.000And then I started talking on the radio about solving the homelessness problem, and I'm concerned about the lack of government functioning, basic functioning.
00:27:55.000And people started going to me, Leo Terrell, you know Leo Terrell?
00:28:06.000Although, the libertarian philosophy, I mean, I consider myself fairly conservative slash libertarian, and I think that most libertarians, there's different branches, and you and I agree on this.
00:28:15.000I like the Fed, I think the Fed should, I mean, you may not like the Fed, but I like
00:29:22.000Do we know enough about psychology to use psychology as a guide when it comes to policymaking?
00:29:27.000Because if you look back at the history of the use of psychology, there's a whole wing of people right now who say, if we just thought scientifically about things, if we just brought all the data to bear, then policy would inevitably arise.
00:29:37.000And you look back at the self-esteem movement, the self-realization movement, which was based on a fair bit of bad science.
00:31:05.000Create a hypothesis and create an experiment on giant human populations and then have a null hypothesis and you can't do science in the real sense of doing science.
00:31:15.000And it's in itself sort of infinitely complex, right?
00:31:19.000And so here it is something we can't do science.
00:32:38.000It was a lot of crazy-making, but it ended up
00:32:41.000Because of his judgment, and because of who he is as a human being, and because of his instincts, and the way he adjusted to some of the decisions he made, and the philosophy, and the intent, and the thinking going forward, Teddy Roosevelt, ended up where it needed to go.
00:32:54.000And the same is true, like, not that this is kind of a weird sidebar, but, you know, in medicine, we make decisions.
00:33:00.000You make your decisions based on your instinct, and you're informed by your experience.
00:33:04.000You don't expect to be right, necessarily.
00:33:07.000You have a backup plan, and you watch, and you adjust, and you think, and you're careful, and you set the table around the decision you made so you make sure that things don't run amok.
00:33:17.000That's what presidents are supposed to do, I think.
00:33:19.000And that takes a lot of energy, and it's a lot of...
00:35:00.000Personality disorder actually has pretty deep roots going all the way back to the post-World War II kind of Eric Fromm school of diagnosis, where there's the authoritarian personality, and if you support Trump it's because you have an authoritarian personality type.
00:35:11.000Do you think any of that sort of stuff is appropriate, or is it just overrated?
00:35:15.000But it really, you know, it really has echoes of, you know, something much more sinister, which is labeling people as your ex, your whatever, your other.
00:36:02.000When me and Adam were at your show and you were telling me that the news was so biased and I was like, man, no one's ever told me what to say or not to say or anything, which was true.
00:36:08.000At HLN we were sort of doing true crime and sort of C and BD stories in the news and no one ever, ever came to me about the way I should present my opinion or the news.
00:36:56.000And I started, and I had thought of this Teddy Roosevelt thing at the time.
00:36:59.000I said, you know, business people can be very hypomanic.
00:37:01.000He's got all those hypomanic qualities, but, and there's no doubt some narcissism, like all politicians and, and, but I don't see malignant narcissism because his relationship with his kids is too good.
00:37:10.000And the kids would not be putting up with that if it was really a malignant narcissism.
00:37:14.000And then I went on Teddy Roosevelt, who really was a belittled narcissist, and I said, you know, you don't know just because somebody's one thing doesn't mean they're a bad leader or a bad president.
00:37:40.000Yeah, they just released her medical records today and it really bothered me what the doctors were doing.
00:37:44.000So I did 30 seconds on, not her health, on the seriousness of her health and the kinds of decisions the doctors are making, which were bizarre.
00:38:56.000They announced two weeks later that I'd stopped the show.
00:38:59.000Well, the world, social media, went, aha, see?
00:39:01.000So they went from crucifying me because I'd say anything at all negative about Hillary, so her world was mobilized.
00:39:08.000And then I became the sacrificial, I became the scapegoat for everybody by having lost my job and everyone sort of felt good and sided with me, even though none of it had actually happened.
00:39:28.000Well, I think that one of the things that, you know, to bring some of this full circle, one of the things that has clearly happened is that the level of polarization in politics is leading to an enormous amount of anger, and that's leading to an enormous amount of reactivity.
00:39:39.000And I think that... It's so uncomfortable.
00:39:43.000And the level of just, I mean, I don't know, you have a huge following on Twitter, but you don't spend an awful lot of time on Twitter, it doesn't look like.
00:39:49.000It's so dangerous, it's so scary for me to say anything, because you just get crushed.
00:39:54.000It feels like there's a swarm that just eats you immediately.
00:39:57.000You know, I wrote that book on narcissism, The Mirror Effect, and I wanted to put an entire chapter, I actually wrote most of it, about other periods of history where narcissism had emerged so prominently.
00:40:08.000And every time, I was looking at pre-revolutionary France, I was looking at times like that, and when you see a lot of narcissism, a lot of childhood trauma, then a lot of narcissism, and again, that's because of our destroyed family.
00:40:38.000I don't think it's going to be big mobs.
00:40:42.000I feel like we're on the backside of some of it a little bit.
00:40:46.000It doesn't feel like it's calming down.
00:40:47.000I think that one of the things that's happened is that the mob mentality has become so obviously tribal.
00:40:52.000People are now rebelling against the tribalism.
00:40:54.000It's become so extreme that there's this push against it.
00:40:58.000So I see that mostly in the reaction to identity politics.
00:41:01.000I see that there are a lot of people right now where if you state a fact, people will immediately accuse you of being a sexist, racist, bigot, homophobe.
00:41:08.000If you say, for example, that the statistics that are usually cited about the wage gap are just plain wrong.
00:41:12.000Or if you suggest that there are biological differences between men and women, because there are biological differences between men and women.
00:41:17.000Obviously, every doctor ever has to diagnose somebody.
00:41:23.000I mean, I was hearing from a doctor friend of mine that there was a transgender person who came in and the hospital had been instructed that instead of that person writing down their biological sex on their form, they should instead write down their gender.
00:41:33.000They should write their perceived biological sex, their perceived gender.
00:41:36.000And so the person came in and if they had not done, they were complaining of lower stomach pain.
00:41:41.000Well, I mean, you're going to get a wildly different diagnosis based on whether that is a man or a woman if it's lower stomach pain.
00:41:47.000And yet if you say so much as that, there are a bunch of people who are willing to come down on you and just
00:41:51.000Yeah, I don't understand why we can't say that there are populations that have been ill-served because of science or because of lack of sensitivity to certain things, and now let's talk about the science.
00:42:02.000And let's hope, let's state up front that we don't want that science to be used to marginalize or condemn or be used improperly to hurt other people.
00:42:36.000Everybody has an equal, there are no bars in the way, in other words.
00:42:40.000I would say even if we can, you know, if we know the differences and some people need a little help or something, we can talk about helping it.
00:42:46.000If there's a biological difference that we can discuss or a scientific phenomenon that is relevant to helping one group out versus another, or keeping another group, whatever it is, let's just discuss the science.
00:42:57.000Because if we can't discuss the science, we're not in reality anymore.
00:43:00.000And this is what I'm saying with people.
00:43:01.000This is why I say I think there's a unifying moment that's happening because people on the political left, you know, Sam Harris, who is a Hillary Clinton acolyte and is a voter.
00:43:09.000And he was basically thrown out of good company by people like Ezra Klein because he had the temerity to say that the IQ studies that exist about group differences are valid.
00:43:20.000He was not saying that they're not environmentally caused.
00:43:22.000He was just saying that they're just the raw data show that there are differences in IQ between groups.
00:43:27.000And science has been used historically to keep down unfairly that population that fell out of those studies.
00:43:40.000It's too provocative or too dangerous to be discussed.
00:43:44.000I don't know what we do with it, but we still need a mechanism to discuss it.
00:43:50.000What country am I living in where science can't just be discussed without it resulting in an ad hominem attack?
00:43:56.000It's almost like there was a chain of thought that happened where people said, okay, science is going to make policy.
00:44:00.000And immediately, whatever science comes out, that will be the new guide for policy.
00:44:03.000And then all this new science came out and people said, well, we don't like the policy that we think would come out of that science, so we'll just get rid of the science.
00:44:11.000When the reality is, as you were saying earlier, there should be a gap between science and policy, and that gap is called ethics and morality and values, and that has to fill that in.
00:44:20.000That's a pretty deep well, that well to figure out, of what we do in between science and policy.
00:44:29.000And that's another area that we as Americans don't spend a lot of attention and time thinking about, which is, I mean, I think virtue ethics people do think a bit about these days, but guiding philosophies and what's good for humanity, I don't think people spend enough time on.
00:44:44.000So let's talk about that in just a second.
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00:46:31.000I think that, speaking of empiricism, I think that the pragmatists have a role, too.
00:46:37.000I think pragmatism needs to come back again, where the pragmatic outcome of what's good for humanity and human beings needs to take a seat at the table.
00:46:45.000I can see why you and Jordan Peterson get along.
00:46:49.000But I do believe that a great way to think about
00:46:53.000A lot of things was figured out by Aristotle.
00:46:57.000He, I mean, you know, the whole concept of eudaimonia, right, which is we now think in terms of eudaimonic happiness versus hedonic happiness, right?
00:47:06.000The happiness literature is all very wacky because I'm not even sure in this country we know what we mean by happiness.
00:47:11.000Because we think, I kept telling, first, when I first started seeing happiness literature, I was like, Jesus, my heroin addicts are happy 8 a.m.
00:48:02.000Where I want to go with this is a little bit different, which is that he felt in order to be armed properly to be able to achieve eudaimonia, you needed to have a certain amount of phronesis, wisdom, a certain amount of techne, skill.
00:48:17.000He had a couple other criteria that don't stay with me right now as much, but phronesis and skill I thought were very important.
00:48:25.000And this is the part that people miss.
00:48:27.000They think that if I'm leading a certain kind of life, most people will come to the point that participating with other humans is what really gives something nourishing, whether it's raising a family, or being community, or whatever it is.
00:48:41.000It's not necessarily layering soup in the homeless kitchen.
00:48:53.000That's not, that does not feel, that's not that fulfilling.
00:48:55.000It's good, I'm glad she does it, but it's not that fulfilling in the way that having a set of skills and wisdom to help another human being with something that they're struggling with.
00:49:05.000That's why I'm so grateful to be a physician.
00:49:07.000I have all that skill and wisdom of experience where I really am always loaded up and ready to do something like that.
00:49:12.000I'm very aware that that creates, if you use it and use it
00:49:43.000And I think we all got to remember and think about that.
00:49:45.000So the question is, and the reason I mentioned the teleology is, can you have eudaimonia in the absence of teleology?
00:49:51.000Can you have the eudaimonia without that piece where you say it's virtue in accordance with right reason and the whole system of Aristotle's, the idea of the unmoved mover, the idea that you were created to do certain things and those things can be discoverable in the universe by virtue of what those things are.
00:50:05.000So you as a human being, you were created to reason because this is what distinguishes you from the animals.
00:50:09.000And if you are not actually acting in accordance with that right reason and using that right reason in order to
00:50:16.000There's a great book called After Virtue by McIntyre and his entire argument is that what's happened in the West is that Aristotle's version of virtue has fallen away and it's been replaced by this other weird version of virtue which is basically we define for ourselves what virtue is.
00:50:35.000So we got rid of the Greek teleology and we replaced it instead with this idea that you were just supposed to be a nice guy.
00:50:40.000And that's not actually what Aristotle is saying.
00:50:41.000What Aristotle is saying is that you have to act in accordance with your reason as applied to the highest seekings of human beings.
00:50:48.000So human desires often take a backseat.
00:50:50.000But human desires do take a backseat and we have been hedonic for at least 30 or 40 years.
00:50:56.000But we've also abdicated our personal responsibility to figure out our own virtue ethics to the government and the law.
00:51:06.000And I think that's why, so we don't have a practice of that anymore.
00:51:08.000We're just like, the nanny takes care of us.
00:51:11.000And I think that the reason that I feel, you know, what I'm often saying is that Athens and Jerusalem is the Straussian model of what built Western civilization is.
00:51:19.000The ethic of Judeo-Christian values combined with this Greek teleology, this search for reason, which unite in philosophers like Aquinas, where he's clearly trying to apply Aristotle to the Bible.
00:51:30.000This is what has created Western civilization, which is where I was trying to go earlier in the discussion about the movement from human sacrifice, is that you have to combine a certain set of values and that people are actually not very good at discovering their own sets of values.
00:51:41.000That when people are trying to discover their sets of values, very often what they come up with
00:52:00.000That when we try to arrive at our own virtues, we become maniacs, essentially.
00:52:05.000And not that we become maniacs, but that we tend to prioritize our priorities over other people's priorities.
00:52:12.000It's hard to get to a place where you are prioritizing the larger concern of somebody else's humanity as an individual human being over even your utopian wishes.
00:52:22.000Ideology arises from your attempt to reach utopia.
00:53:24.000Whenever you think you know more than everybody, and by the way, there's a very natural sort of ebb from what she said to, well, I'll do whatever I want because I'm that guy.
00:54:14.000You know, the literature shows it's very strange, but I'm going to piece together a bunch of different little things.
00:54:21.000First thing you should do is make your bed.
00:54:23.000The happiness literature is very clear that if you start your day by making your bed, you're more likely to be happy and it tends to set a tone for the day.
00:54:30.000Like as you start doing something, get off your ass, start doing something.
00:54:35.000Secondly, one thing you can do is to, I advocate this rather strongly, is to watch the relationships around you and watch who you avoid and who you sort of gravitate towards.
00:54:48.000And start kind of hanging out with somebody you might not otherwise, doesn't have to be somebody you're aversive to, but somebody different than you normally hang with.
00:54:56.000And tell them about yourself and find out about them.
00:54:59.000You'll be stunned how often people have some moments of clarity about themselves as a result of something as simple as that.
00:55:06.000I call it seeing yourself with a new pair of glasses.
00:55:10.000We have lots of delusions and denial and stuff about ourselves and if we're not happy and we're in a bad spot, we're contributing to it somehow and we can contribute to getting out of it.
00:55:20.000But if we don't really see ourselves as we are, it's very difficult to do that.
00:55:25.000And I would attend to nutrition and exercise, all those simple things, and I would find some way to create meaning.
00:55:58.000You can build a life and it's really ultimately, it's about others and it's about who you build your life with and spending time with people.
00:56:06.000And I'm not saying, it's not going out really in arousing circumstances.
00:56:10.000I think that's where colleges have really done young people a disservice.
00:56:14.000It's all about these extremely intense parties and drinking and all that, hooking up.
00:56:18.000Opposite, quiet, shared moments, thinking, talking, discussing things, being present with other people, but be fully present.
00:56:27.000Rigorous honesty is another thing that I've found to be extremely important.
00:57:09.000They put together, out of thin air, in the first time in history, a country based on ideas.
00:57:15.000Never happened before and it has sustained us for 200 plus years.
00:57:19.000Get behind that notion and learn what it is and see if you can't contribute to it at whatever that means for you rather than... I'm not even sure our politicians even understand the country that they're serving right now.
00:58:15.000And I think when the history books are written, they're going to look at that as the reason that California implodes and becomes three states.
00:58:21.000I think we might be three states sometime soon.