Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and offers a roadmap towards healing. In his new series, provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. Remember, if you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Episode 82 features an interview with Rav Arora, an independent writer and blogger who examines the news, media, and pop culture from a critical, unfiltered perspective. Rav has been featured on The Hill, The Ben Shapiro Show, and on my podcast. He s also a regular contributor to The New York Post, Quillette, and other journals. He's also the author of the book Being Dead About God and has a new newsletter dedicated to psychedelics and spiritual experience called Noble Truths. and spiritual experiences. In this episode, Rav talks about the decline of spiritual experience in Western secular culture, and why it s time to abandon ideology and political dogmas. He talks about his experience with psychedelics, race, and the rise of meta-narratives, and how they re replacing spiritual experiences in Western culture. To find out more about his work, check out his new book, Being dead about God by clicking here. You can find him on Insta-Rav Arora here . and his new newsletter, Noble Truth s With Rav at Instapreneurs on Instapaper Insta: . and InstaRav , Instafrances: . . . Instacr Subscribe to Instaprism: , Instaparture: Instaport: Instacrt: Instaprt: @ Instacort: & Instacrit . , or Instacron: ) : Instapron: Instago: Instagr , and Instapoint: Instafron: @ Instago : .org/instacron : , .
00:00:01.000Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.000Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.000We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:19.000With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.000He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.000If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.000Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.000Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:51.000Welcome to Season 4, Episode 82 of the JBP Podcast. I'm Mikayla Peterson.
00:01:00.000For this special release, Dad was interviewed by the very young and very impressive Rav Arora.
00:01:05.000So the episode is mostly Dad, rather than him interviewing someone else.
00:01:09.000Rav is an independent writer and blogger who examines the news, media, and pop culture from a critical, unfiltered perspective.
00:01:16.000He's been featured on The Hill, The Ben Shapiro Show, and on my podcast a while back.
00:01:21.000He's also a regular contributor to the New York Post, Quillette, and other journals.
00:01:25.000Rav had great questions about spirituality, race, media misinformation, ideology, and a lot of other topics.
00:01:32.000Remember, if you want an ad-free experience for this podcast, check out show notes or go to jordanbpeterson.supercast.com.
00:01:43.000That'll change the JBP Podcast you press on in Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to episodes to the ad-free version automatically.
00:01:54.000This is Rav Arora, independent journalist based in Vancouver, Canada, most frequently contributing to the New York Post and the Globe and Mail.
00:02:03.000And I am most known for writing about crime, policing, racial identity politics, and vaccine mandates.
00:02:12.000The following wide-ranging conversation with Jordan Peterson and I centers on the absence or decline of spiritual experience in Western secular culture.
00:02:24.000We specifically talked about how ideological worship and political activism often unknowingly replaces real spiritual practices and contemplative traditions.
00:02:35.000Unbeknownst to me at the time of this recording several months ago, this whole conversation gradually inspired my new journalistic adventures in psychedelics, mystical experience, and new interesting mental health treatments.
00:02:52.000Over the past few months, I've been exploring the possibilities of human consciousness and inner healing grounded in science and reason.
00:03:02.000And my new Substack newsletter titled Noble Truths with Rav Arora documents my experiences with psilocybin mushrooms, mindfulness meditation, and talking to Sam Harris about learning how to live in the present moment and breaking down the mechanics of mental suffering.
00:03:22.000And my new essay published today, February 10th documents my incredibly profound and transformational experience with MDMA therapy in which I journeyed into the depths of my subconscious mind and gleaned new insights and lessons to apply to my daily life.
00:03:43.000And as I write in this essay on MDMA therapy, this whole process mirrors the hero's journey in which the hero has a call to adventure and then eventually the hero, a part of him or herself dies and then a new transformed self emerges as Jordan Peterson has talked about before several times with respect to psychedelics in particular.
00:04:09.000So this whole conversation inspired my new work and inspired my new work and inspired my new newsletter on Substack dedicated to psychedelics and spiritual experience.
00:04:20.000So I hope you enjoy this conversation and I hope it similarly sparks a call to adventure for inner transformation in your life.
00:04:34.000Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you devote a whole chapter in the book about abandoning ideology and political dogmas.
00:04:43.920Now, you know, we as humans were primed for meta narratives, right?
00:04:47.900Like we have spiritual impulses that need to be satisfied.
00:04:51.440And so one of the struggles right now is that religion is on the decline and it has been for a number of decades.
00:04:58.460And you refer to Nietzsche in the book about God being dead and his observation about the rise of totalitarian ideologies coming with the decline in religion and the various problems that come with that.
00:05:11.820And right now, particularly among young people and older people and older people as well, we're seeing politics replace religion.
00:05:22.300We're seeing people now replace spiritual meta narratives with ideological meta narratives.
00:05:29.800So so how do we how do we figure that out?
00:05:33.800How do we perhaps we're seeing that, you know, that's one hypothesis and it's one I favor.
00:05:40.780I did see polling data at one point, for example, from the Gallup Corporation.
00:05:48.120Indicating that lapsed Catholics were something some multiple of times more likely to be separatists during the heyday of the Quebec separatist movement.
00:05:58.220And I lived in Quebec during that period, some of that period.
00:06:03.040And it did appear to me that nationalism was functioning as a replacement for for lapsed Catholicism.
00:06:13.040I mean, Quebec was an intensely Catholic country until the 1950s, late 1950s.
00:06:18.920So in some sense, they underwent their transformation to a secular society somewhat later than most other European nations, let's say.
00:06:27.920And I thought that was reflected in the tremendous attractiveness of nationalism as a spiritual movement.
00:06:34.400And one of the things I learned from studying the psychoanalysts, both Freud and Jung in particular, was that Jung, I suppose, had to do with separating ultimate moral authority from the figure of the father.
00:06:51.480So you might say that as you mature, it's useful to replace your to realize that your particular father, your specific individual father, isn't omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent.
00:07:06.300And you have to realize that to some degree to become a mature adult.
00:07:10.860And so you don't want to confuse your father with the ultimate moral authority.
00:07:15.520And in the same sense, it's psychologically dangerous to confuse political explanations and ideologies with religious and spiritual ideologies and and movements.
00:07:29.660You don't want the political to carry the weight of the spiritual.
00:07:35.240I also believe that ideologies essentially function as crippled religions.
00:07:41.060So they have the motive force of religious belief and and the attractiveness of religious belief, which I think is actually a necessity for human beings because we're religious by nature.
00:07:54.260But they're they don't have the symbolic complexity that a religion has a well-established religion with its mystical elements and its dogmatic elements.
00:08:08.840So now you say, too, that religious belief is on the decline.
00:08:14.580Certainly, organized church attendance.
00:08:17.920In some countries is radically declining.
00:08:21.480Christianity is growing at an unbelievable rate in China, for example.
00:08:26.240So it's not necessarily a global phenomenon, but.
00:08:30.580I and with regards to abandoning ideology, there's danger in confusing your political beliefs and your religious beliefs,
00:08:37.660not noting that there's a difference between them.
00:08:41.220There's one of the associated dangers there, I think, in especially in totalitarian utopian systems,
00:08:46.580is the proclivity to raise the leader, whoever that might be, to the status of a demigod.
00:08:52.720That certainly happened in the Soviet Union and in Maoist China.
00:08:56.800Maybe will happen again in modern China.
00:09:00.860Who knows, as as the Chinese premier centralizes his authority, which he appears to be doing.
00:09:08.920You know, you're supposed to render unto Caesars that which is Caesar and render unto God that which is God.
00:09:14.200That's the fundamental ethos that underlies the idea of separation of church and state.
00:09:20.800And I think it's a good psychological truth as well.
00:09:54.940I also think in the chapter from Beyond Order.
00:09:58.060So this is the book that we're discussing, Beyond Order.
00:10:02.300The problem with ideologies, as far as I'm concerned, is that they're not useful as practical problem solving guides.
00:10:11.760Most of the problems that beset us are very, very complex and they need to be decomposed in a sophisticated way into their constituent elements until they're differentiated enough so that partial solutions for some of the problem can arise as a consequence of practical endeavors.
00:10:30.740And that requires the willingness to do that kind of detailed thinking and it requires the development of specialized expertise and ideology can blind you to your own stupidity.
00:10:46.780So we could take the case of poverty, for example, and I think we could all agree that poverty as such is undesirable.
00:10:54.820So that's the starting point and the motivation.
00:11:00.580Then you might say, well, what is poverty?
00:11:03.700And you could conclude that it's lack of money.
00:11:06.020And from that, you could conclude, because there's an unequal distribution of resources, that if the rich would only loosen their grip on wealth, then there wouldn't be poverty.
00:11:17.300And then it's not much of a leap from that to the rich are, by definition, causing poverty and morally culpable for it.
00:11:26.140And even though there is some truth to that some of the time in some situations, that doesn't mean that it's always true and it's the only reason all the time.
00:11:35.340And then there's an additional danger, which is that you now have a solution.
00:12:29.560Do you mean alcoholism, drug abuse, mental illness, physical illness, lack of education, lack of intelligence, lack of conscientiousness, anti-social behavior?
00:13:19.580In fact, it seems highly improbable that one solution is going to address all of them.
00:13:23.660And then there's the complex problem that you have a theory that identifies a problem and explains its existence and offers a solution.
00:13:35.140And so now you're going to assume that if you could only put that solution in place, that you would do that competently and it would produce the result that's intended.
00:14:30.280So let me just contextualize this topic here.
00:14:34.340So among young people here in the West, here in Canada, certainly, and in the United States, members of Gen Z particularly, there's this growing sort of political culture right now where young people are out protesting the patriarchy, protesting against white supremacy.
00:14:54.420And they've turned that into a religion, they're fighting against this evil, satanic force of sorts, which is white supremacy, or it's toxic masculinity, or it's transphobia, Islamophobia.
00:15:06.420Like these are the things that they are fighting against primarily opposed to fighting sort of the monster within.
00:15:12.980So there's kind of like an external locus of control here, right?
00:15:16.060It's fighting against the external opposed to the internal.
00:15:19.660Well, this is why, and I outlined this to some degree in Beyond Order and also in my first book, Maps of Meaning, there are, there are, the world is characterized by ignorance and malevolence and danger.
00:15:40.620Always, always, always, always, always, it's an existential truth.
00:15:46.660And then you might ask yourself, well, if that's the case, how might you best conceptualize that?
00:15:54.140Now, you can find malevolence and ignorance at the level of the individual.
00:15:59.800And so we would say that's the malevolence and ignorance that characterizes you and other individuals.
00:16:07.540And it's a, it's a viciously powerful and terrifying force.
00:16:12.840And then there's the malevolence and ignorance that characterizes social institutions.
00:16:17.860That's the great father, that the tyranny, that's the negative aspect of the great father in my terminology.
00:16:23.440And that's derived to some degree from union theory, especially through a man named Eric Neumann, who is a brilliant student of, of, of Jung.
00:16:34.080You're always a victim of the evil tyrant.
00:16:37.540And the reason for that is that human beings have a lengthy period of intense socialization.
00:16:42.960And that fosters and develops your individuality in some ways, but crushes and maims and distorts and destroys it in all sorts of other ways.
00:16:53.420And so it's a universal tendency to feel oppressed by the evil tyrant.
00:16:59.740And it's so powerful symbolically, it's such a powerful symbolic tendency that people don't even notice that it's a symbolic tendency.
00:17:08.280So I've been taken to task, for example, for insisting that we use gendered metaphors to portray the two fundamental attributes of experienced reality.
00:17:23.660Chaos and order, chaos and order, order is patriarchal.
00:17:29.920Well, people accept that at face value and don't even notice that they're trapped in a symbolic world.
00:17:36.060The very feminists who will criticize me for pointing out that femininity is associated with chaos symbolically, accept the idea that masculinity is the proper representation for social order without question.
00:17:51.080And are irritated beyond belief, if you point out that things are not so simple, they're caught in a myth, a religious myth, and they don't even realize it.
00:18:02.340And so if you accept that the patriarchy is masculine, well, then what's feminine?
00:18:09.420Well, the opposite of patriarchy and order.
00:18:16.620That's the Taoist theory of being, for example.
00:18:21.300It's the ancient Greek chaos and cosmos theory of being.
00:18:26.000It's the ideational structure that underlies the first chapters of Genesis, where God makes order out of a patriarchal God makes order out of tohu vabohu, which is the primordial chaos.
00:18:40.620So now young people find themselves motivated to stand up against the evil tyrant.
00:18:48.000And of course they should, because it's at that point when you're differentiating yourself that you want to take a look at the group that you're going to pledge allegiance to and note its shortcomings.
00:19:02.380But you don't want to be blind while doing that and fail to notice that, well, the social world is full of pathology and danger, malevolence and ignorance, let's say.
00:19:14.120But the natural world, which you will automatically tend to romanticize if you only believe the patriarchy is evil, the natural world is doing everything it can to kill you every second.
00:19:27.520And the only reason you're not dead is because the evil tyrant has a benevolent aspect that protects you in ways that are so deep and profound that you don't begin to understand them.
00:19:40.520I mean, you are shielded, as am I, by a nuclear umbrella, for example.
00:20:32.180And you certainly shouldn't assume that all the fault lies outside, which is the point that you made.
00:20:37.680And so ideology is extremely dangerous if it convinces young people that the moral stance is that all malevolence and ignorance lies outside of them.
00:21:07.880And I mentioned this in one of my Colette essays about our society being one of the most free, liberal, open-minded, inclusive societies that has ever existed, right?
00:21:20.480The most for ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, transgender folks, all of that.
00:21:24.820But yet, there's this narrative that, you know, me as a brown person, as an immigrant from India, like, somehow I'm more of a victim than you are, that I live under this.
00:22:43.320So now that we've laid out that, yes, we are living in the most free, open-minded, inclusive societies on Earth, then what's driving this—
00:23:32.880But now you have an enemy, and that enemy is the cause of everything you hate, and now you have all moral justification to go after them, to hurt them, to stop them because they're evil, and to elevate yourself morally as a consequence.
00:23:47.060So you have this unearned pathway to moral superiority that's actually dependent on your willingness to unfairly persecute based on your ignorance.
00:23:57.240It's terrible, and universities promote this.
00:24:20.260And you can be an activist when injustice happens, which it does.
00:24:23.740Just the problem that I'm finding right now among young people is the complete fabrication, or at least a total exaggeration, of injustice happening.
00:25:03.280And the patriarchy is the evil king, and it's got a satanic element too.
00:25:07.900And that's the transcendental symbolic locale of malevolence and evil.
00:25:12.820And those things have to be contended with, but you have to do that in a sophisticated way.
00:25:18.240Or it's better if you do it in a sophisticated way.
00:25:21.240You know, there's other technical issues here as well that we have to attend to.
00:25:27.240We're so connected that any instance of racial injustice is immediately broadcast across our experiential landscape.
00:25:36.260And so if you ask people, the social psychologists have established this, if you ask individuals how much prejudice has interfered with their movement forward,
00:25:46.760they generally claim that they've been relatively unscathed.
00:27:01.200And some of this is probably a positive feedback loop gone astray.
00:27:05.200We paid more attention to issues of racial prejudice, and perhaps that was good in many ways.
00:27:12.160But because we're doing that, more attention is being paid attention to it, and it becomes more and more salient.
00:27:19.120And you can see that that can ease, especially given all the new communication technologies and the rate at which outrageous occurrences can be distributed, and our intense difficulty at separating, at establishing base rate.
00:27:33.100It's like, well, who knows how many racial incidents of hate there are per day in a given city?
00:27:53.060And one indication, in my view, of just how rare and marginalized racial prejudice is right now is when people are fabricating claims about racial prejudice or exaggerating them significantly.
00:28:06.820So, there was a recent shooting in Atlanta that happened, which was horrible.
00:28:12.040The Atlanta shooter, he went to three different massage parlors, and he killed a number of people.
00:28:17.320And out of the eight deceased victims, six were Asian women.
00:28:21.280And if you look at all of the available evidence right now, and if you read what the actual shooter said about his motivation, he said that it was due to his sexual addiction.
00:28:35.780And he was addicted to pornography, and he also seemed to be kind of a religious fundamentalist type of person who felt guilty, and he felt very ashamed about his sex addiction.
00:28:49.400And he would go to these massage parlors to get these other illegal sexual services there.
00:28:55.520And he felt bad about doing it every time, but he kept on doing it.
00:28:59.640And so, there was this circular kind of battle that he was facing.
00:29:03.680And so, then one day, he thought, this temptation is bad.
00:29:06.120I know it's bad, but I can't stop myself from doing it.
00:29:09.560So, why don't I go and just physically murder these people?
00:29:13.400Well, that's a really good idea of demonization, exactly what I was talking about before.
00:29:23.420Perhaps the transformation of our society so that pornography is so rapidly accessible, but we can leave that aside for the time being.
00:29:33.380He had an internal moral struggle, and instead of dealing with that at the individual level, he demonized the handy enemy, those women who are tempting me in a satanic manner, essentially.
00:29:47.380Right, opposed to my own uncontrolled sexual impulses that I need to get in order, right?
00:31:16.380And obviously, you know, six out of eight victims being Asian women, you know, people make this mistake all the time of confusing disparities with discrimination.
00:31:24.960Well, they make that mistake because sometimes disparities are a consequence of discrimination.
00:32:06.020So, and you might say, well, we could use that as the default hypothesis given the history of slavery,
00:32:10.980which is clearly unacceptable in every possible way morally, although pretty much par for the course for most human societies throughout history.
00:32:57.440And the top six or seven are all Southeast Asian.
00:33:02.480So, again, you say, well, if it's systemic racism, what about, you know, maybe you could write off the Indians and the Muslims because they're more or less Caucasian.
00:33:13.540And I don't mean that positively or negatively.
00:33:16.400But then the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, they're more visually different than Caucasians.
00:33:28.360And then if you assume systemic racism, it also blinds you to all sorts of other factors, as we already discussed, that might be contributing.
00:33:35.540So, I know, for example, and I looked into this 20 years ago, that it looks like it's the familial structure and ethos of Southeast Asian first-generation immigrant families that are producing overperformance in their children.
00:33:49.900That disappears by the third generation as assimilation completes itself.
00:33:54.520So, among Southeast Asians, the emphasis on conscientiousness, essentially, perhaps with an additional, what would you call it, positive aspect of higher likelihood of intact family, two-parent family.
00:34:12.080There's this emphasis on conscientiousness, and conscientiousness is essentially hard work.
00:34:17.680Southeast Asian students, that's children of first-generation Southeast Asian immigrants, do homework, spend many more hours on homework.
00:34:25.820Well, conscientious striving actually does predict success.
00:34:28.940And the data that I reviewed, this was two decades ago, indicated that the typical Southeast Asian child gains competitive advantage from the conditions of their upbringing that's equivalent to 15 IQ points.
00:35:02.200Well, now, if you're blinded by the fact of racism to everything else, because racism exists, then you're not going to be able to decompose the problem and say,
00:35:13.160well, look, those Southeast Asians, they're outperforming Southeast Asians who are third generation in the U.S., also Caucasians.
00:35:34.180Like in my Colette essay, The Peculiar Racist Patriarchy, I looked into different attitudes towards life, towards education.
00:35:43.340And one interesting finding that I came across was that if you look at various polls, Asian Americans are most likely to believe in the idea of self-made success.
00:35:55.140They're most likely to believe that if you work hard, you can achieve what you want in your life compared to black Americans.
00:36:01.240Right. A white supremacist, racist trope that's now, what would you say?
00:36:33.240They're, they're ill, let's say, or they're, they're impaired in their intelligence or they haven't managed an education or there's all sorts of reasons that, that hard work isn't going to work.
00:36:44.980But that doesn't, even bad luck, even bad luck, various tragedies that happen in your life.
00:37:01.140And even, you know, you can control for economic status and still find some of these racial disparities.
00:37:06.340So low-income Asian Americans have higher upward mobility compared to low-income Black Americans and White Americans and Hispanic Americans.
00:37:16.360And it's probably native-born Black Americans because Nigerians seem to do pretty well.
00:37:20.940And generally speaking, Black immigrants to the United States outperform, just as, just as, let's say, people from the Indian subcontinent outperform native-born Caucasians in the U.S., the immigrant Black population outperforms the native-born Black population in the U.S. by a substantial margin.
00:37:40.660Yeah, even if you look in the same city.
00:37:43.080So Thomas Sowell has done some great research on this.
00:37:45.300In the city of Boston, you have the native-born Black Americans and you have the immigrant Black American group.
00:37:51.260And the immigrant Black American group, their performance is much higher.
00:37:56.140Their education rates, their high school completion, their earnings, they're much higher.
00:38:01.260But so in that same city, right, whatever force of systemic racism that exists, it's constant, right?
00:38:08.280Because you can't distinguish between somebody from Nigeria versus somebody who's Black.
00:38:12.900Well, you might think that it's actually worse for the immigrants because they have an accent and, you know, there are other features that mark them out as strange, different.
00:38:22.820Right, they're unacculturated to the various norms in society, lower rates of English-speaking proficiency, all those things matter.
00:38:30.900But there seems to be this kind of disinclination towards behavioral explanations for success.
00:38:38.420There only seems to be sort of external prejudice-based explanations.
00:38:43.120Well, part of it is that people are loathe to blame the dispossessed.
00:38:51.940It's reasonable to check yourself against doing that because you can pass the homeless person on the street and say,
00:38:58.200if you weren't so goddamn useless, you'd get a job.
00:39:01.420It's like, well, you know, maybe, but maybe not.
00:39:07.200And there but for the grace of God go I, which is something always useful to keep in mind.
00:39:12.920But the problem with not assuming that individual planning and diligent effort and moral evaluation and ambition matter is that you take away the very tools.
00:39:29.980You deny the validity of the very tools that could be most effectively used by most individuals who are dispossessed.
00:39:51.480Second, if you become more responsible, you probably won't hurt anyone by doing it.
00:39:59.480Right. It removes the convenience of the enemy.
00:40:02.680And that's given how terrible it is for us to generate, say, class-based explanations of enmity or racial-based explanations of enmity.
00:40:13.380That's something we really have to step carefully around.
00:40:16.520I mean, the worst crimes the human race has ever committed have been generated by class-based hypotheses of malevolence, class- or ethnicity-based hypotheses of malevolence.
00:40:32.160And I don't see that adopting more individual responsibility, even though it's not a cure-all, it doesn't – that's one danger it doesn't pose, in my estimation.
00:40:43.780And just to go back for a second to the white supremacy discussion and the different racial groups, you know, that whole narrative seems to be on life support right now.
00:40:53.080The idea of white supremacy being the governing force of Western society, whether it's the U.S. or Canada.
00:40:59.480So one thing that I mentioned in the Quillette essay, the main finding that I was exploring there was the fact that last year, for the first time in history, Asian women had higher earnings than white men did for earnings in 2020.
00:41:29.840And the difference was very – it was marginal, but still, for – you know, there are various gender differences at play here.
00:41:35.800But that finding is completely – it shatters the whole narrative of race and gender, for that matter, and the whole intersectional claim of race plus gender, you know, giving you –
00:41:54.280I said – you know, I went on this – about two months, I looked into the data, and I wanted to answer that question of why are Asian women making more than white men?
00:42:06.740And a few of the things that I found was that Asian women are least likely to have kids out of wedlock compared to women of other racial groups.
00:42:18.320They have less kids on average compared to other groups.
00:43:34.220But these explanations, these factors that I just laid out for you, this explains.
00:43:39.760So having more stable families, more financial security, and more time devoted to pursuing a career.
00:43:46.000These are the results of having kids later, having less likely to have kids out of wedlock, right?
00:43:53.540These are some of the consequences of these decisions.
00:43:56.480But these behavioral explanations just seem sort of taboo in a way because the implication there would be that if you make these decisions, if you take responsibility, you can actually achieve success.
00:44:10.500It doesn't matter if you're Asian or if you're a woman.
00:44:14.660Of course, there is anti-Asian bigotry, which seems to be on the rise, by the way, in Canada and the U.S. over the past year since COVID started, right?
00:44:22.580All those things exist, but they're not a barrier to success, right?
00:44:26.880They don't stop you from getting ahead in life.
00:44:29.380But the narrative seems to be that it is, which just seems totally perverse and counterproductive to me.
00:44:36.320Well, it has perverse and counterproductive effects.
00:44:41.140There's no doubt about that, and those can get very badly out of hand.
00:44:45.740Any political movements that are motivated by resentment, any actions that are motivated by resentment are to be viewed with extreme skepticism.
00:44:54.940It's a very, very, very dangerous state of mind, resentment.
00:45:01.700Now, going back to the earlier discussion we were having here about spirituality and young people.
00:45:07.220So, observing that young people are becoming sort of increasingly politically active, they're engaging in this protest culture, this fight against these various forces that they've identified, and it's being incentivized by the university, by mainstream media, by Hollywood celebrities, you know, people posting about racism all the time.
00:45:27.520And so, there's this exaggerated sense of this problem existing.
00:45:31.180So, all of that being true, you know, how do young people get out of that position?
00:45:38.160How do they find, and this is a question that I really want to ask you here, is how do young people find a value system to adhere to, given that religion is on the decline, given that religion doesn't seem cool, or just for whatever reason, it's not resonating, right?
00:45:54.440Ideologies resonating, not religion, but how do we replace that with something spiritual that fulfills our inner, innate desires to strive for, you know, God, the infinite being, the divine, whatever name you want to use for that?
00:50:10.660Now, you know, and as you climb up your career, as you expand your competence and power, well, then you can get involved in larger scale transformations if that's where your interest takes you.
00:50:21.640And so with job and career, you should be competent and interested in it.
00:50:49.120But the thing is, if you have a plan, that's great.
00:50:51.780And young people should have a plan and they should stick to it and they should have a vision for themselves of what they want to do and they should persevere towards that vision.
00:51:13.980Helping other people develop, that's extremely meaningful.
00:51:17.740A lot of the high-end people that I've seen who are extraordinarily successful in the socioeconomic domain derive a tremendous amount of their meaning from fostering that development among young people.
00:51:29.260And so there's micro meanings to be found in all of those domains.
00:51:33.040Now, you still might be searching for something transcendent.
00:51:38.000Well, and it's something you need as a kind of something you need as like the analogy would be like a crutch, right?
00:51:44.100When you're striving towards your vision and things don't go your way, tragedy happens, malevolence happens, as you say, and you're suffering in your life, you need some kind of base meta narrative.
00:51:54.980Something, you know, whether it's prayer or meditation or reading various types of scriptures.
00:51:59.760There's something to give you meaning, to give you hope, faith, and trust in something else, and just let you know that you're not in this alone, that you can get to where you want.
00:52:11.000You need that kind of emotional, spiritual crutch in your life.
00:52:15.020And this is what I wanted to ask you about, is that young people, they seem to have that less and less.
00:52:19.220So how do we find that spiritual crutch is the question.
00:53:28.320It's a meditative practice that helps regulate your physiological reactions under extreme duress.
00:53:33.880People who think that religious belief is a crutch, first of all, they're guilty of something I think is an unbelievable impediment to reasonable progress, which is casual contempt.
00:53:48.520Are you sure you know enough about that to be contemptuous of it?
00:53:52.240Religious belief has a history that's tens of thousands of years old.
00:53:57.600The capacity for religious experience, and perhaps even the need for it, is coded in us biologically.
00:54:03.880It's an unbelievably complicated problem and solution.
00:54:07.420You don't want to casually dismiss it.
00:54:10.200You can read philosophers and great writers and great religious thinkers and great psychoanalysts.
00:54:18.840Joseph Campbell, for example, is a great entry place for anyone who wants to take religious thinking seriously.
00:54:27.360And so this is where I'm getting at here.
00:54:28.980So you're saying spiritual experience is encoded in our genes.
00:54:32.420And I agree with that, whether, you know, even people who say they're atheists or they don't believe, you know, I think this is universal for everyone.
00:54:40.920But for people who don't have religion, who just have ideology.
00:54:44.420Well, the atheists don't even watch Star Wars.
00:54:56.540But people who don't have that spiritual practice, don't have that religion, who are watching Star Wars, participating in protests against white supremacy.
00:55:04.180How do they how do they how do they find that spiritual experience?
00:55:09.760That's kind of the fundamental thing that I'm wrestling with as our society becomes more and more secular and saturated with technology and and political polarization.
00:55:19.380All these other forces that seem to be distracting us from our inner it's primal need for for spiritual experience.
00:55:26.720I would say to some degree, that's the fundamental unanswered question of our age.
00:55:56.300Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:56:01.300Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:56:09.520In our hyperconnected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:56:14.480Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:56:23.980And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:56:26.840With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:56:34.620Now, you might think, what's the big deal?