The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - March 11, 2024


430. The Attack on Faith, Family, & Science ｜ Dr. Phil


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 53 minutes

Words per Minute

152.50293

Word Count

17,301

Sentence Count

966

Misogynist Sentences

9

Hate Speech Sentences

18


Summary

In this episode, Dr. Phil McGraw talks about his new book, "We've Got Issues," and why he believes we're under attack, both psychologically and socially, in the West. He also discusses the role technology plays in society and the role it plays in shaping it, and why we should all be concerned about the impact it can have on our ability to communicate and connect with each other. Dr. McGraw is a clinical psychologist, author, and media personality, and has worked with some of the world's most famous celebrities and media personalities. He's been in the business for over 40 years, and is one of the most well-known clinical psychologists in the world. He has been on TV for over 30 years and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, CBS, NPR, and many other media outlets. He is also the author of a number of books, including "We're All Under Attack" and "Free Speech Is Yours: How We're Under Attack." and "We Have Issues." He is a frequent guest on CNN and NPR, as well as being a frequent contributor on Fox News and NPR. Let's talk about how we're all under attack by technology, and what we can do to defend ourselves, both personally and collectively, from the tyranny of the fringe, and from the forces that are pushing us all to the edge of our understanding. of what's really going on in our society. and how we need to speak up and speak up to stop the loudest and loudest to speak out. about what's going on the truth and speak the truth. in order to have a better, and to make a better version of ourselves in the 21st century. We're all in this, and we can all have a brighter future you deserve a brighter, better, more of a brighter and more peaceful, more productive, more prosperous, more beautiful, more woke, more kinder, more thoughtful, more informed, more compassionate, and kinder world. Let's all get together, and let's all be kinder and more aware of the truth, shall we all get better at listening to each other, and more awake, more aware, more awake and more understanding each other so we can hear each other out loud, and see more of each other's ideas and less of our thoughts and thoughts, so we don't have to be so loud, we can be more like that.


Transcript

00:00:00.940 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740 We 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.
00:00:20.100 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420 Hello everyone.
00:01:10.340 I have the opportunity today to talk to Dr. Phil McGraw, who's probably perhaps the world's most well-known practicing clinical psychologist,
00:01:19.220 certainly on the media side of things, and he's been doing that with extreme success for decades,
00:01:25.500 and that's quite something to pull off.
00:01:27.300 And he's come leaping forward once again, not only with a new network that's going to launch on cable and elsewhere on April 2nd,
00:01:36.260 but also with a new book called We've Got Issues, which is definitely the case, both psychologically and socially, in the West.
00:01:44.260 And so that's what we're going to walk through.
00:01:46.840 He offers a diagnosis.
00:01:49.460 He sees that three fundamental pillars of Western society and psychological stability are under assault,
00:01:57.100 ideological assault, practical assault simultaneously, pillars of faith, family, and free speech.
00:02:04.260 So that's a bit of a diagnostic enterprise.
00:02:06.080 And then he offers 10 working principles to deal with those assaults.
00:02:11.920 And some of those are valid psychologically and some of them valid socially.
00:02:17.480 They all circulate around a central ethos, you might say.
00:02:20.980 So we discuss all 10 principles.
00:02:22.940 We discuss the ethos around which they circulate.
00:02:26.000 We discover that we discuss the necessity of principled conception and action for psychological stability and social unity.
00:02:34.460 And that constitutes the discussion.
00:02:38.040 So you're welcome to watch and listen.
00:02:42.800 Thanks very much.
00:02:44.240 All right.
00:02:44.600 Well, hello, Dr. Phil.
00:02:45.660 It's very good to meet you.
00:02:47.780 And thank you for agreeing to talk to me today.
00:02:50.280 It seems like you're everywhere at the moment.
00:02:53.040 And I want to talk about how you managed that.
00:02:55.460 But I suspect it has something to do, at least with the topic of your new book, which is We've Got Issues.
00:03:02.240 Yeah, well, that certainly seems to be the case.
00:03:04.720 And you start the book by outlining in your estimation, by making the case that there is something that's under attack or a set of things that are under attack.
00:03:14.680 And you concentrate on free speech, faith, and family.
00:03:18.520 And so I guess the first obvious question is, why do you believe that we're under attack, so to speak?
00:03:26.060 Why that metaphor, under attack by what?
00:03:28.700 And why did you pick those three principles as the central focus of your alert and your defense?
00:03:37.960 Great question.
00:03:39.000 And it's so good to sit down and talk to you.
00:03:41.800 So thank you for having me as a guest.
00:03:44.840 I'm honored to be here.
00:03:46.220 I'm honored to be here.
00:04:16.940 My career in psychology, it was way back in the 70s.
00:04:23.560 So I've been through the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, all the way up till now.
00:04:26.520 When I started out on television, it was 2002.
00:04:29.560 And the first text message hadn't even been sent at that point.
00:04:34.140 So things have really changed.
00:04:36.580 And the rate of change has really accelerated across time.
00:04:41.480 And a lot of this technology is good.
00:04:43.700 I mean, there are great benefits from it, of course, but there are a lot of unintended side effects as well.
00:04:50.260 And when I look at what's going on in this country, I think that the backbone of any society is the family.
00:05:01.040 I think that's the strength of any society.
00:05:03.760 And when I say it's under attack, I think it's under attack in part unintentionally by technology and in part because there are people that are pushing narratives in current society that have nothing to do with reality, have nothing to do with science, have nothing to do with fact, nothing to do with history.
00:05:26.620 They're just running an agenda that's very self-referential and it is not in our best interest at all to sit silently by and allow these people to hijack what's going on, the narrative of this country.
00:05:41.460 And I'll tell you further that I believe that if we don't speak up, I call it the tyranny of the fringe.
00:05:50.420 I think if we don't speak up, they're going to hijack and start taking over.
00:05:56.260 They're going to take over language.
00:05:57.700 They're going to take over priorities and how those priorities are pursued.
00:06:05.120 And I hear I'm talking about things that I think could absolutely undermine society, like this equality of outcome concept.
00:06:17.740 To me, I can't think of anything more destructive to a society than teaching everybody that we're going to work towards an equality of outcome.
00:06:28.740 That's been tried.
00:06:30.160 We've got 100,000 corpses to prove that doesn't work.
00:06:35.760 And so I think that we've been just the same in America and in Canada.
00:06:44.360 It's been built on a meritocracy where hard work was rewarded, talent was rewarded, added value was rewarded.
00:06:52.720 And now all of a sudden, we're violating some of the most fundamental principles of the psychology, like just simply don't reward bad behavior.
00:07:02.000 Don't support things you don't want to see more of.
00:07:04.500 I mean, this is Psych 101, but it seems like people skipped that course.
00:07:11.400 It seems like those that are trying to run some of these agendas don't understand that you have to have an insight into how people are motivated, what gets them passionate, what gets them moving forward.
00:07:27.300 And when I see these things happening, I say, well, somebody's got to step up and call this out for what it is, which is lunacy.
00:07:33.840 And, but, you know, we're, people are three times as unwilling to speak up now as they were in 1950.
00:07:44.020 I mean, the number of people unwilling to take the risk has tripled since 1950.
00:07:48.960 Okay, so let me walk through these things again.
00:07:51.320 I'll lay out a bit of my understanding.
00:07:53.380 And then if you could push back and elaborate on that, that would be helpful.
00:07:57.800 So it seems to me with regard to family, so human beings are unique biologically because of the unbelievably extended dependency period of our children.
00:08:08.420 And so we are, we have a particular reproductive strategy.
00:08:13.160 Other creatures have that reproductive strategy to some degree, but we are the ultimate exemplars of low reproductive rate, high investment strategies.
00:08:24.420 And it seems to me that the corollary of that is that raising children is sufficiently challenging and difficult and also important that one person can't do it well on average.
00:08:38.200 And so the rule seems to be both morally and perhaps arguably biologically that the nuclear family is the necessary minimum of social arrangement that allows for propagation.
00:08:52.920 It's something like that.
00:08:54.160 And so if we fragment the family below the level of the nuclear, then things fall apart.
00:08:59.920 Now, maybe the nuclear family is also too fragmented, but we can start with it as a minimal basis.
00:09:06.080 And so any attempt to, for example, put forward the claim that all familial structures are of equal value is counterproductive if it's the case that raising children is so complex that a minimum of two people have to engage in it.
00:09:21.140 So that's on the family side.
00:09:22.360 On the free speech side, I don't think there's any difference between free speech and thought fundamentally.
00:09:29.120 Thought can be awkward because critical thought requires that people dispense with their foolish ideas and that can be painful.
00:09:36.820 And people who push the no offense agenda would like to believe that we can think and we can think critically without any emotional consequences.
00:09:46.880 And I don't think that's true because it's actually painful to have your ideas exposed as foolish and then to dispense with them.
00:09:54.680 And so we seem to have entered a situation where compassion for short-term consequences means that we're willing to allow foolish things to propagate even though that will cause long-term catastrophe.
00:10:08.980 And there's a technical description of morality in there too, which I think you kind of point to when you talk about your working principles.
00:10:17.820 Don't reward bad behavior, support conduct you do not value, for example.
00:10:23.200 That's an injunction not to let foolish things occur in the present, even if stopping them causes some emotional disruption because then worse things will happen in the future.
00:10:33.760 And then the last one is faith and faith is a hard thing to defend in some ways because people say faith in what?
00:10:41.940 But my sense is that we have to move forward in faith because we're ignorant and that means that we have to bet on some things rather than others.
00:10:52.460 And so the question there starts to become, you know, what is it that we should bet on?
00:10:56.820 And so with regard to faith, how do you negotiate that?
00:11:01.160 You're a scientifically oriented thinker as well.
00:11:03.580 And so when you're making the case that if faith is under attack, we're in trouble, how do you justify that claim?
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00:12:46.760 Well, for me, I think there are some things that we know.
00:12:54.760 There are some things we don't know.
00:12:57.720 There are some things that we can't know.
00:13:00.960 And we have to kind of sort those out.
00:13:04.280 And that's where faith comes in.
00:13:07.100 I think back, you know, scientifically, there was a time that we didn't have the instrumentation to see a molecule.
00:13:14.620 That didn't mean it didn't exist.
00:13:17.300 We just didn't have the instrumentation to observe it.
00:13:21.060 And I'm the same way about what you were saying about thoughts.
00:13:27.040 You know, I guess if I was going to categorize myself value-wise from a professional standpoint,
00:13:33.800 it would lean more toward cognitive behaviorists than anything.
00:13:37.880 And in cognitive behaviorism, we treat thoughts as behaviors because they are observable to a public of one.
00:13:45.380 And so the fact that it is an observable event, even if to just a public of one, I tend to treat those as behaviors.
00:13:53.820 So I think we have to look at what our thoughts are and think about, okay, we see this.
00:14:03.980 Are we being rational in our thought?
00:14:06.260 Are we not being rational in our thought?
00:14:07.980 And to me, it's not irrational to recognize that we are not all-knowing.
00:14:16.260 We are not the repository of all knowledge.
00:14:18.480 And to assume that just because we can't show you faith on an x-ray, just like we can a broken leg, is the same thing about depression.
00:14:28.940 People don't understand how psychometrics work.
00:14:31.820 They think we're measuring depression.
00:14:33.500 And in fact, we're not.
00:14:34.400 What we're doing is saying, we're going to give you these psychometrics, and what we're going to do is tell you that you have an awful lot in common with people who have been observed to be depressed.
00:14:45.180 They have higher suicidality.
00:14:47.440 They spend more time crying.
00:14:48.860 They spend more time with flat affect or whatever.
00:14:52.320 So we can't tell you you're depressed, but we can tell you you answered these items consistent with an awful lot of people who are depressed and that we have observed.
00:15:01.220 And so, you know, again, there's a certain extrapolation from that that we have to rely on.
00:15:08.800 We can't measure it like we do with an x-ray or an MRI with a brain scan.
00:15:12.680 And it's not a big leap to me to say that I do have faith.
00:15:20.440 I mean, I am a Christian.
00:15:23.200 I've never seen a conflict between that and my approach to science.
00:15:28.840 I just look at this as something that we don't yet have observable measurement for, just like we didn't for the molecule or other smaller units of function.
00:15:42.940 So I don't have trouble reconciling that, but I guess I take it on faith, which is kind of defining something by itself.
00:15:52.080 And I know that's circular in nature, but it works for me.
00:15:58.160 And I think an awful lot of people find comfort in the belief system that there is a higher power that I choose to call God that is kind of involved in our lives on as active a basis as we want to acknowledge.
00:16:19.260 And I'm one of those Christians, Jordan, that believes in pray to God, but row for the shore.
00:16:28.240 So that's why I don't see it as conflict.
00:16:30.980 I'm still going to do everything I can do.
00:16:34.520 I'm still going to work as hard as I can work.
00:16:37.140 I'm going to do everything because I believe that if there is a God, and I believe there is,
00:16:45.200 then I think I've been given certain gifts, talent, skills, abilities, and free will to do what I can and will do.
00:16:55.040 So to me, I don't see that there is equity in creating a conflict between science and faith.
00:17:04.800 So I'm going to elaborate on the faith idea here too, because you pointed out that because we're ignorant,
00:17:14.320 we have to rely on our judgment to move forward.
00:17:20.560 And we're permanently ignorant because we actually can't predict the future.
00:17:25.240 The future is actually not predictable.
00:17:27.640 The world is not deterministic, and we know this for a number of reasons, many of which are scientific.
00:17:32.680 So we have to move forward in faith.
00:17:35.500 And so the monotheistic hypothesis is that there's an ultimate unity, and also that that's what we should have faith in.
00:17:43.520 And so I want to run something by you, and you tell me what you think about this.
00:17:47.120 So there's an autobiographical account in the Gospels of one of Christ's reactions to a particular question.
00:17:58.500 And so he's being tormented by the scribes and the Pharisees and the lawyers.
00:18:06.160 So nothing's really changed.
00:18:07.620 The Pharisees are hypocrites, the scribes are academics, and the lawyers, well, they're still lawyers.
00:18:12.500 And what they're essentially trying to do continually in the Gospel account is to trap Christ into making a heretical statement so that they can have him arrested and destroyed.
00:18:21.760 And so they're attempting to reputation savage, essentially.
00:18:26.000 And so at one point, this is a very famous scene, and I'm sure you know it.
00:18:31.620 One of his opponents challenges Jesus to describe which of the commandments is the primary commandment.
00:18:43.420 And the hope there is that he'll pick one, and by picking one, we'll denigrate the others.
00:18:48.620 And because he's denigrating the others in comparison, they can bring him up on charges of heresy.
00:18:53.940 And he says something quite remarkable.
00:18:56.580 He says that the Ten Commandments are manifestations of an underlying unity of moral conceptualization, and that they circulate around a particular theme.
00:19:06.940 And the theme, you can express the theme quite concisely in a twofold manner.
00:19:12.060 You should aim at what's best, God.
00:19:15.420 You should align yourself with the highest possible aim.
00:19:18.480 That's number one.
00:19:19.840 So that orients you.
00:19:21.140 And then number two, you should treat other people as though as you would like to be treated.
00:19:25.680 You should put yourself in their position and work for that harmonious unity that would emerge if you treated other people the way you would want to be treated if you were treating yourself properly.
00:19:37.760 So it's interesting.
00:19:38.520 So really what he's doing, it's so interesting, he's taking a cloud of conception, which is the Ten Commandments, which were themselves derived from an analysis.
00:19:47.800 It's an analysis like you said you conducted in some ways by listening to the tens of thousands of comments that you've received from the people who've been watching and listening to what you've been doing.
00:19:57.240 You accumulated all of this cries from the people, let's say.
00:20:02.460 You derive a set of principles as a consequence of that, but those principles themselves orient around something that's central.
00:20:10.520 That central point of orientation, I think, is equivalent to God, and it's also equivalent to what we should have faith in.
00:20:18.040 And so I would say, you tell me what you think, but this is where the question is.
00:20:21.760 Now, you outlined a set of problems, attack on free speech, faith, and family, and then you identified ten working principles.
00:20:29.040 So what do you think of the idea that that which you have faith in, and I'm speaking personally here, that which you have faith in, is equivalent to the spirit that all of these principles point to?
00:20:42.140 You see what I mean, that there's an underlying unity there that makes those principles coherent.
00:20:47.100 Does that strike you as plausible?
00:20:49.260 It does strike me as plausible, and I leave room for that to be defined differently by each person.
00:20:59.040 That is sorting through the events of their life.
00:21:02.100 You know, the first principle that I have in, we've got issues, how you can stand strong for America's soul and sanity, which is, I think that the subtitle of this book is as important as the title because the book is very prescriptive.
00:21:18.100 You know, any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one back, and I don't like it when people criticize and then don't offer a better alternative.
00:21:29.540 If you don't have a better alternative, why don't you just shut up?
00:21:32.520 Because all you're doing is just poking holes in something, and I think you need to have an alternative.
00:21:38.660 And I think it begins with something that—the reason I say that I think it's each person comes at it from a different point of view, even though there is a unifying principle, is I think we all have a personal truth.
00:21:51.520 And that personal truth is what we think, feel, and believe about ourselves when nobody else is looking, nobody else is listening, we've taken off the social mask, and we're being honest with ourselves.
00:22:08.400 And unless people have made a concerted effort to do some repairs, we all have a damaged personal truth.
00:22:19.360 And so, I mean, it's—I think about it like a brand-new, shiny, yellow cab rolling out in New York the first day, and it looks great, and it's shiny, and everything is perfect.
00:22:34.300 And you catch up with it 20 years later, it's going to look like a dog's been chewing on it out in the backyard.
00:22:41.300 It's going to be dinged up.
00:22:42.660 It's going to have had fender benders.
00:22:44.380 It's going to have people that have thrown up in the back seat.
00:22:47.320 I mean, it's going to just have taken on a lot of hits along the way.
00:22:51.420 And I think we're that way in life.
00:22:52.940 And some of us, more than others, I think the reason personal truth is so important in getting to that unifying principle is we generate the results in life we think we deserve.
00:23:08.200 And so, if we think we're a second-class citizen, if we think we don't measure up to everybody else in some way, we're going to generate the results that are consistent with that.
00:23:22.640 And, you know, this will sound arrogant, but I think most people are capable of doing this.
00:23:29.260 There are certain people I can see just walking down the sidewalk, and without any other information than just what I'm looking at, there are certain things that I know about that person.
00:23:40.040 I mean, if there's somebody that, A, doesn't take care of themselves, their clothes are unkept, doesn't matter how nice they are, it's just they're unkept.
00:23:48.920 You know, they're kind of heads down, they're shuffling along.
00:23:51.660 It just seems like every step is barely what they can do.
00:23:56.780 I know for one thing for certain in my mind is that person has a damaged personal truth, because they're generating that existence in their life.
00:24:08.640 They're not walking with their head up and their shoulders back.
00:24:11.760 They're not out in the middle of the sidewalk.
00:24:13.820 They're just kind of skulking along the side.
00:24:15.700 They're generating exactly what they think they deserve.
00:24:18.280 And I think that 80% of society can wind up in that role if they feel guilty about what they think and believe.
00:24:28.600 And we have evidence of this in that the number of people willing to speak out has tripled, unwilling to speak out has tripled in the last 75 years.
00:24:40.000 So there's a lack of passion and conviction, perhaps, and a fear of being canceled, attacked.
00:24:48.280 Having the woke mob come after them.
00:24:53.200 And, you know, I'm a perfect example of it.
00:24:56.780 I grew up with an alcoholic father.
00:25:00.300 It was a chaotic and oftentimes violent home.
00:25:05.140 A lot of times we didn't have money to turn the electricity on.
00:25:09.560 I had three sisters.
00:25:11.260 Two of them were married between them 11 times, which I think is pretty hard to do unless you start when you're like 14.
00:25:18.280 And then you can get some in fairly early on.
00:25:22.400 And I live with all of this.
00:25:24.380 And people make this mistake.
00:25:25.940 And it's why our young people right now, I'll get to that in a minute maybe, but it's why our young people right now are experiencing a mental emotional crisis.
00:25:33.540 With high levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, suicidal ideation, and suicidality.
00:25:41.240 Because people compare their personal truth with other people's social masks.
00:25:47.860 And I could go to school and I know that I just left a house that was in chaos.
00:25:54.400 The utilities were turned off.
00:25:55.820 We didn't have food.
00:25:56.880 My dad was drunk in the street.
00:25:58.760 And I'm sitting next to a kid with a pressed shirt on and a washed face and his hair's all combed.
00:26:05.480 And if I compare my reality to his social mask, I'm going to lose every single time.
00:26:11.820 Now, he may have it worse off than I ever thought of having.
00:26:16.000 But if you compare your reality to his social mask, you're going to lose.
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00:27:30.180 You know, we elaborated on the idea that, you know, you elaborated out a set of principles and that there's a unifying theme behind them.
00:27:37.560 And then you said you bought that explanation, but then you pointed to the fact that other people may come to the table with a different set of principles.
00:27:47.620 And so there's a way that the universal particularizes itself in each life.
00:27:53.800 You know, I would say, tell me what you think of this proposition.
00:27:56.960 So imagine that another person might generate a different list of 10 working principles, but that the higher order principle from which those are derived would remain essentially constant.
00:28:09.560 And I would think that would be equivalent to the undamaged car that you described.
00:28:16.120 You know, so there's an Old Testament account of the prophet Elijah.
00:28:19.800 And Elijah is the first prophet who posits that God is the voice of conscience.
00:28:27.280 Now, when you, you made the case that, you made the case at least by inference that people are blessed with the ability to find, to establish a relationship with something that calls to them from within.
00:28:42.680 That might be slightly, that might happen in a different way for each person.
00:28:46.040 I mean, that's really the difference between people's personality and their temperament.
00:28:49.800 Then you made the case that if they deviate from that, that becomes so obvious that you can even see it in their day-to-day behavior.
00:28:56.700 You can see it when you're watching people when you walk down the street.
00:29:00.140 You know, Dr. Phil, one of the things I've noticed is that most people don't watch other people when they walk down the street, right?
00:29:08.420 They look at the ground or they're in their own little bubble.
00:29:10.440 I mean, if you watch people on the street, you can get an eyeful of who they are very, very rapidly.
00:29:15.980 And, you know, if people are particularly angry and bitter and they're walking down the street and you pay attention to them, that actually sometimes makes them angry, which is why people will avoid eye contact.
00:29:25.660 Because you reflect back to them the hell that they've trapped themselves in, and they find that very unpleasant.
00:29:32.120 You know, part of the reason I wrote in my first book, I wrote the injunction to people to stand up straight with their shoulders back,
00:29:39.040 was to reflect in the microcosm of their behavior an orientation upward and towards what the good was.
00:29:47.020 And that that is embedded in everything that people do and every glance they make and every step they take forward.
00:29:54.640 So, I think it is the case that people can have their own set of principles.
00:30:02.360 That would be the same in some ways is that they come to what is highest in their own personal way.
00:30:08.460 But that doesn't indicate that the landscape is morally relative or that there's no unity towards which our conscience and our moral orientation point.
00:30:20.160 So, that's a way of reconciling that plurality.
00:30:23.440 Go ahead.
00:30:24.020 I would even say that they come at it with a different point of view.
00:30:28.340 They might not even want to change the ten principles, but they might interpret them differently in how they apply to their own existence.
00:30:41.540 So, they may not even change the ten principles.
00:30:44.980 And some of them are so universal.
00:30:47.900 Like, the tenth principle I talk about in the book is treat yourself and others with dignity and respect.
00:30:53.520 And, you know, a lot of people can look at that and say, look, Doc, I don't need to buy a book to know that.
00:31:01.180 That seems pretty forthright and self-evident.
00:31:06.640 But it is not.
00:31:08.700 And I will tell you why I think it is not.
00:31:11.120 It's the first two words.
00:31:13.600 Treat yourself with dignity and respect.
00:31:18.720 Because I believe you can't give away what you don't have.
00:31:22.440 So, if somebody doesn't treat themselves with dignity and respect, if they don't heal that damaged personal truth,
00:31:34.360 and however that damage came about, maybe it's a woman that has been sexually abused growing up by an uncle or whatever.
00:31:45.140 And, you know, we know 95% of molestation is by someone they know to the family.
00:31:50.060 It's not the predator in the raincoat at the schoolyard saying, you know, see some pictures and candy.
00:31:57.100 I mean, it's somebody we know and trust usually in these situations.
00:32:00.900 But let's say it's a woman that has been molested and raped in her childhood, and that's never been healed in her.
00:32:12.540 Well, if she doesn't deal with that trauma, if she doesn't heal that trauma, then her children are not going to get 100% of their mother.
00:32:25.560 They're not going to get 100% of the woman that is that mother, or if it happened to the father.
00:32:30.880 They're not going to get 100% of who he could be, who they could bring to the table, the mother or the father bring to the parenting table,
00:32:41.740 unless they heal that damaged personal truth.
00:32:45.100 And, you know, for me and my situation growing up with that, I had to heal that personal truth.
00:32:51.840 My father died when I was 42 years old, and by that time, I had graduated number one in my class with a double core of Ph.D. programs,
00:33:04.740 one medical psychology and one clinical psychology.
00:33:07.340 And I had a very successful business.
00:33:12.660 I had a very successful marriage and children.
00:33:15.740 And I'd gone to school on two athletic scholarships.
00:33:27.340 I'm not saying I was the greatest son in the history of the world, but I had had some achievement.
00:33:32.160 But by the time he passed away in 42, when I was 42, not one time ever did he speak the words, I'm proud of you.
00:33:44.800 I never heard that from my father.
00:33:48.560 And so I learned early on, sometimes you have to give yourself what you wish you could get from somebody else.
00:33:54.560 You know, sometimes you've got to step in front of the mirror and say, I'm proud of you.
00:33:58.340 Maybe he can't say that, but you can.
00:34:02.860 And so you have to go through whatever's necessary to heal yourself and your personal truth where you say,
00:34:09.720 I'm in time.
00:34:10.380 This success over here, this peace, this happiness, this tranquility is not just for other people.
00:34:17.920 That can be for me, too.
00:34:18.900 I deserve that as much as anybody else does.
00:34:20.920 And unless and until you can do that, you're cheating everybody around you that loves you, cares about you, or interfaces with you out of all of who you are.
00:34:31.600 And I think right now, what I'm seeing in this country, in this society, is intimidation.
00:34:40.000 People are not necessarily yet willing to step up and say, I deserve for my values to be considered.
00:34:49.600 I deserve for my voice to be heard.
00:34:51.720 I deserve to be considered.
00:34:55.020 And I think they are intimidated because we've got these fringe factions that have weaponized certain ideals and turned them into attack strategies.
00:35:10.460 And I think we have to fortify these people and then treat others with dignity and respect.
00:35:17.880 But as I say, you can't give away what you don't have.
00:35:20.340 So, you know, it all starts with yourself.
00:35:23.100 Now, if you do that, if you look at number one, which is be who you are on purpose.
00:35:30.060 Be who you are on purpose.
00:35:31.500 Live with intention.
00:35:32.480 I mean, it drives me crazy to see people that get up and just go with the flow.
00:35:38.220 Whatever comes their way, what are we going to do tomorrow?
00:35:40.020 Well, we'll see.
00:35:41.220 No, we won't see.
00:35:42.440 You need to decide what you're going to do tomorrow.
00:35:45.340 Live with intention and own it.
00:35:47.120 But, I mean, people criticize me sometimes, and I own what I say.
00:35:56.920 I own what I do.
00:35:57.760 If you want to criticize me, criticize.
00:35:59.100 Somebody's going to criticize you no matter what you do.
00:36:01.260 So you might as well do what you're passionate about, what you believe in.
00:36:04.800 And if they come for you, then I'm easy to find.
00:36:09.820 I realize that, so I'm an easy target, just as are you.
00:36:15.260 But we have to decide we're going to be who we are on purpose.
00:36:18.480 We're going to live with intention.
00:36:20.080 And then you jump to number 10, treat yourself and others with dignity and respect.
00:36:25.880 And, you know, that's a jump from one to 10.
00:36:28.400 But to me, they're very highly related.
00:36:30.980 And no matter what walk of life you come from, whether you're well-educated or you're not,
00:36:35.600 whether you're black, whether you're white, whether you're male, whether you're female,
00:36:38.200 whatever, you may come at that from a different point of view.
00:36:42.720 But those principles, to me, are important to how you live your life.
00:36:48.080 And I think they fit everybody from a different point of view.
00:36:52.740 Okay, so let's, I'm going to talk about your principle 10 to begin with here,
00:36:59.200 well, to elaborate on what you said.
00:37:01.640 The first thing you said was that you could be criticized for putting forward
00:37:06.920 truths that are so obvious they don't need to be put forward.
00:37:10.160 And my books have received that criticism too.
00:37:12.700 And my response to that generally is, is sometimes what was formerly self-evident now
00:37:18.040 needs to be buttressed and explained.
00:37:21.060 And so, but I'd like to make some counter-proposals to your principle 10,
00:37:26.060 just so people know what's even more self-evident, right?
00:37:30.260 So here's, here's some things you could do instead of abiding by your principle number 10.
00:37:36.560 Treat other people as if they are the short-term means to whatever end you're pursuing in the moment.
00:37:44.200 Okay, so that's what you do if you're an immature hedonist,
00:37:47.560 is you look at other people and you think,
00:37:49.880 not only what can I get from this person,
00:37:52.580 but what can I get for this person to satisfy the whim that I've allowed to possess me this moment, right?
00:38:01.440 And the, the ultimate expression of that, as you know,
00:38:03.980 clinically is something like narcissistic psychopathy, right?
00:38:07.680 Where every single other person is nothing but a landscape of,
00:38:11.200 of opportunity for, for pleasurable and immediate self-gratification.
00:38:15.520 And that's the core of truly antisocial, criminal, and predatory behavior.
00:38:20.140 Or, or you can take another perspective that would be other than treating people with dignity and respect.
00:38:28.640 And you could say, well, treat other people,
00:38:31.280 treat other people as if they're your pawns if you can exercise power over them.
00:38:38.160 Now, those are, both of those principles are in some ways equally self-evident.
00:38:42.840 Like, if I can get what I want from you right now, why the hell shouldn't I do it?
00:38:46.400 And if you're weak and stupid and I can force you into things, why shouldn't I do it?
00:38:51.800 And I mean, it, I, and I picked hedonism and power for a particular reason.
00:38:55.700 Like, one of the things I've figured out, Dr. Phil, recently was that when the uniting principle dissolves,
00:39:01.800 so when God is dead, let's say, in the Nietzschean terms,
00:39:04.660 that what comes up immediately to supplant him is hedonism on the one side.
00:39:09.040 And so that's the pull of instinctual whim and, and the drive to power on the other.
00:39:14.920 And those two have a dance.
00:39:16.940 And so your principle 10 is, you, you aim at,
00:39:21.160 you don't treat other people like they're means to your own short-term ends,
00:39:24.360 and you don't worship power.
00:39:26.520 Does that seem, does that seem reasonable to you?
00:39:29.040 And then you've aligned it with rule one or with principle one,
00:39:32.380 and I'll get to that in a sec.
00:39:33.580 But is that, what do you think of that take on your 10th principle?
00:39:37.360 No, I think it's a good take, but it's also not make,
00:39:42.260 it's also not challenging everybody to be totally altruistic if there is such a thing.
00:39:46.960 Right, right, right.
00:39:48.300 And we can talk about that probably till the cows come home.
00:39:51.420 But my point is, like, I can go make a deal.
00:39:56.140 You know, you and I could make a deal.
00:39:57.440 We could, we could open a business and, and we could say, okay, Jordan,
00:40:02.400 you're going to show up every day at eight o'clock,
00:40:05.200 and you're going to close every night at 8 p.m.,
00:40:08.340 and we're going to be 50-50 partners.
00:40:12.380 And you can be so excited about it that you say, well, yeah, okay.
00:40:17.400 Well, that's not a good deal for me,
00:40:20.000 because you're not going to sit still for that for very long.
00:40:24.560 It may look like I made a great deal, but I didn't make a great deal,
00:40:28.000 because you're going to rebel against that in a, in a really short period of time.
00:40:32.760 Right.
00:40:33.180 Because you're going to be thinking, that was stupid.
00:40:35.320 I'm doing all the work, and he's getting half of the, the profits out of this.
00:40:39.220 So it, it really doesn't work out if, if you exploit, manipulate.
00:40:45.540 And the thing is, narcissists just don't learn.
00:40:48.340 You know, you, you can't argue with them,
00:40:49.940 and they only see things from their point of view,
00:40:52.180 so they don't learn, and they can't generalize from one situation to another.
00:40:57.160 But I think most people can, and, and this isn't really asking for altruism.
00:41:03.300 It's asking for people to say, look, do what works.
00:41:07.380 And it really works if you treat yourself and other people with dignity and respect,
00:41:11.300 because now you get collaboration.
00:41:13.760 And, and together, we're better than we are separately.
00:41:17.660 Right.
00:41:17.920 Well, so, so what you're saying is that,
00:41:22.180 sustainable, reciprocal, sustainable, reciprocal altruism is not stupid self-sacrifice.
00:41:29.980 Right.
00:41:30.840 That's basically the issue.
00:41:32.140 Well, and I think you pointed to the proper rationale for that,
00:41:35.200 is that if, if the deal you make with someone that iterates,
00:41:39.180 so like a partnership or a marriage, it's going to extend across some time.
00:41:43.240 If it's not predicated on something like principles of universal justice,
00:41:47.300 which would mean equality of worth within the relationship,
00:41:51.060 then all that's going to happen is it's going to devolve into a counterproductive bitterness.
00:41:57.200 And so if you're establishing, I'll give you an example.
00:42:00.460 I set up a business enterprise with my son and we had been working on a project and he was working
00:42:07.340 at another job and, but he decided that it might be worthwhile to stop doing his other job
00:42:14.360 and to focus entirely on our project because he thought it had some legs.
00:42:18.400 So what I suggested to him was that he go away.
00:42:22.220 So he wanted to know, because we had worked on it jointly,
00:42:25.440 what sort of deal I would be willing to enter into with him.
00:42:29.700 And I said, well, why don't you go away and come back with a proposal for me
00:42:34.820 that you're really thrilled about bringing to me that you think would also maximize my incentives?
00:42:44.260 You know, because there's a certain utility being associated with me,
00:42:47.220 partly because I have a lot of marketing clout, let's say,
00:42:49.760 if you want to make it just a capitalistic decision.
00:42:53.020 So I asked him to go away and come back with a plan that would maximally motivate him
00:42:58.680 while simultaneously maximally motivating me.
00:43:01.880 And that's a good, like, there's no stupid self-sacrifice in that.
00:43:06.420 And that's a great thing to bring to a marriage, for example.
00:43:09.640 My wife and I have got better at this in recent years, especially since our children left, you know.
00:43:14.920 Our deal now, the deal I have with her, for example,
00:43:18.340 about whether or not she should accompany me on tour
00:43:20.560 and how we decide to go about doing the next things we're going to do,
00:43:25.360 is I've told her and vice versa that she doesn't have to do anything.
00:43:30.120 I don't want her to do anything that she's not fully on board with, right?
00:43:35.200 Now, I could force her and compel her and manipulate her and all of that,
00:43:38.940 but your point is that, well, if you do that with someone, they're going to kick back
00:43:43.980 so that the relationship won't be sustainable.
00:43:48.480 How long have you been married?
00:43:51.440 34 years, but I've known my wife for 52 years.
00:43:56.020 Yeah.
00:43:56.760 We've had a friendship for 52 years, so a long time.
00:44:02.720 Yeah.
00:44:03.880 That is a long time.
00:44:05.340 I've been married 47, and we've been together 50 as well,
00:44:08.480 so it didn't take her as long to make up her mind about me, I guess.
00:44:17.740 Yeah.
00:44:18.000 Yeah, well, yeah, that could easily be the case.
00:44:21.960 So let's go through this first one, and let's turn to this one.
00:44:24.840 Be who you are on purpose, right?
00:44:27.540 And so that's very much akin, I would say, to your principle number five,
00:44:32.160 which is consciously choose which values deserve attention.
00:44:36.540 So there's an intentionality there.
00:44:38.820 Okay, so do you think you can differentiate for everyone who's watching and listening
00:44:42.840 what the difference is between that kind of conscious intentionality and the exploitation
00:44:48.940 of others?
00:44:50.500 No, because it's tricky, right?
00:44:52.720 Even with this interview, I could come to this discussion with an end in mind.
00:44:57.740 I could say, well, I want to leverage the chance, the fact that I have a chance to talk
00:45:03.060 to Dr. Phil.
00:45:03.780 I want to leverage that to my advantage.
00:45:05.780 I want to increase my viewership and listenership.
00:45:09.920 I want to attract his fans.
00:45:11.920 And the funny thing is, you know, there's some of that that's actually relevant and
00:45:16.020 important, because I wouldn't be doing a podcast with you if I didn't think that it
00:45:19.620 would be of interest to the people that I already have listening, but also to attract
00:45:25.460 new people.
00:45:26.460 But then if I bend the interview to my narrow ends, then I'm manipulating you and using you,
00:45:33.860 and it becomes...
00:45:35.000 So I'm wondering how do you help people negotiate that line between developing an intentional
00:45:41.440 vision and consciously choosing their values and yet serving something like a higher-order
00:45:48.140 good?
00:45:49.540 Well, you know, I think that when you look at number five, consciously choose which voices
00:45:55.860 in your life deserve the most attention.
00:45:57.840 You know, what you're really focusing on here is making an informed decision, which may be
00:46:09.840 part of number one.
00:46:12.220 When you be who you are on purpose, you have to decide, am I going to just pay the most attention
00:46:22.200 to the loudest voice just because they're the loudest?
00:46:26.100 Is that what I've been doing?
00:46:29.760 And if it is, is that what I want to do?
00:46:34.500 And when you get to number five, it's I'm going to consciously choose, which goes up to number
00:46:41.480 one, being who you are on purpose, which voices deserve the most attention in my life?
00:46:46.820 And maybe it's your conversation with yourself, maybe it's your conversation with God, maybe
00:46:53.300 it's your conversation with people outside your bubble, maybe it's people that challenge
00:47:01.280 what may be a confirmation bias.
00:47:05.060 You have to decide which voices you choose to make an investment in.
00:47:14.440 And, you know, I used to think, I've employed a lot of people in my life because I've always
00:47:25.840 been entrepreneurial and I know at times I've employed as many as a thousand people in, you
00:47:36.340 know, collective endeavors.
00:47:37.400 And I used to think, for example, that if I had two people sitting in front of me that
00:47:45.940 were the same in everything that I could determine, and the only difference was that one had been
00:47:52.840 to college and one had not, that if there were no other tiebreakers, that frankly, I would
00:48:01.800 tend to go with the one that had graduated from college, even if the degree was in art history
00:48:09.960 or something that wasn't germane to the job I was hiring them for.
00:48:13.800 And the reason was, I knew something about that person I didn't know about the other.
00:48:18.340 I knew they could sustain the pursuit of a long-term goal.
00:48:22.240 Right, right.
00:48:22.720 I knew they could get along with assholes.
00:48:24.800 I knew they could work as a team.
00:48:27.600 I knew they could meet deadlines.
00:48:29.380 I knew that there were a lot of things about them that I knew that I didn't know about this
00:48:33.580 other person.
00:48:34.560 That other person might, could as well, but I knew that about this person.
00:48:38.420 I don't know that anymore.
00:48:40.400 I don't know that about college graduates anymore.
00:48:43.580 Because now they don't have the attitude that it's their job to get along with the professor.
00:48:48.900 It's their attitude that the professor has the job to get along with them.
00:48:52.620 Uh, it's, I have no idea how much their mind has been poisoned by what I've termed intellectual
00:48:59.540 rot from some of these, uh, elite universities.
00:49:02.620 So what I used to have as kind of a tiebreaker, because I knew something about a graduate I
00:49:07.680 didn't know about a non-graduate, is not valid anymore.
00:49:11.080 So I've had to change which voices I'm willing to listen to and what things I'm willing to give
00:49:16.480 weight to.
00:49:17.700 Uh, and so in being who I am on purpose, I've had to make adjustments as the world has changed
00:49:22.520 around me.
00:49:23.640 So this, in this question, be, or this principle, be who you are on purpose.
00:49:31.100 So one question that arises out of that is, well, who am I?
00:49:35.940 Okay, so I'd like to propose to you that there are default answers to that question.
00:49:42.140 The default answers are the immature answers we described earlier.
00:49:46.800 So if you're not intentional in who you are, you end up being your instinctual whims and
00:49:53.260 your drive to power.
00:49:54.800 So basically it's what a two-year-old does.
00:49:57.760 And, and I even mean that neurologically.
00:50:00.040 It's like, you know, a two-year-old isn't very mature.
00:50:03.060 They aren't who they are on purpose.
00:50:05.160 They're operating on instinct and whim, and they have to be socialized in, into the adoption
00:50:11.080 of a higher order self.
00:50:12.920 So you might ask yourself, if you're not your short-term desires or your short-term avoidance,
00:50:19.940 your short-term wish to avoid pain, who are you?
00:50:23.840 Right?
00:50:24.280 And that would be, be who you are on purpose.
00:50:26.740 So you might say, well, where can you find who you are?
00:50:30.360 And so I want to ask you what you think about this.
00:50:33.160 There's a gospel statement that describes the nature of our relationship with divinity
00:50:38.700 in a very optimistic manner.
00:50:40.900 And it proposes that if you knock, the door will open.
00:50:44.860 And if you ask, you will receive.
00:50:46.560 And if you seek, you will find.
00:50:48.760 And so I've tried to make that concrete.
00:50:51.620 Let's say when I was operating as a behavioral therapist, when I was trying to help people
00:50:56.380 discover who they were.
00:50:58.100 And so one gateway to that is to ask yourself, this is in keeping with your principle 10 too,
00:51:08.980 to treat yourself with dignity and respect.
00:51:11.300 Imagine that you are caring for yourself as if you're valuable, right?
00:51:17.020 Give yourself the benefit of the doubt.
00:51:18.740 And then ask yourself, this is part of the development of the vision, ask yourself if you
00:51:23.760 could have what you needed and wanted in a manner that would be best for you.
00:51:27.920 What would that look like?
00:51:30.480 And you'll get an answer to that question.
00:51:32.580 You'll start to be able to develop a vision of what your life would be like if you were
00:51:36.800 deeply who you are in a way that was sustainable.
00:51:40.880 And then you can start doing that on purpose.
00:51:44.120 Now, the reason I'm asking you that question and presenting those possibilities is because
00:51:52.480 the question of who you are, that's the question of identity, is begged by your first principle.
00:51:58.720 You know, when people are saying now that they're their sexual identity, right?
00:52:02.660 That's the biggest claim in our society and that they should be proud of that claim.
00:52:07.800 And to me, that just reduces who someone is to, well, to essentially to a very unidimensional
00:52:15.120 biological drive that seeks immediate gratification.
00:52:18.600 It's a very low order conception of who you are.
00:52:22.340 So when you say be who you are on purpose, what do you think you're pointing to in that
00:52:27.200 who you are?
00:52:27.940 You know, I think it is a much harder question than people anticipate when they begin, which
00:52:34.020 is why I say you've got to really sit down and think about this, because when you ask
00:52:38.580 somebody, tell me who you are, and you cannot use your occupation or what you spend most of
00:52:48.300 your time doing in the answer.
00:52:53.060 If I take that away from them, like if you're an accountant, that's what you do all day,
00:52:58.980 50, 60 hours a week, and I say, tell me who you are, and you can't use your occupation
00:53:04.940 in the answer.
00:53:07.660 It's astounding to me how people struggle, because they identify themselves with labels.
00:53:15.460 And, you know, I'm an accountant, or I'm a welder or a welder's helper.
00:53:20.000 And now, as you say, a lot of people have adopted a cause, and so they put that like they want
00:53:33.240 to tattoo it on their forehead.
00:53:36.780 That's not who they are.
00:53:37.960 And sometimes do.
00:53:39.540 Yes, exactly.
00:53:41.560 But that's not who they are.
00:53:43.900 Who they are is multidimensional.
00:53:47.160 It cuts across interpersonal, interpersonal, spiritual, familial.
00:53:56.040 It cuts across a lot of different levels, and I think it comes down to a real heavy—if
00:54:04.520 you're doing a weighted equation, you have to give heavy weight to what they believe and
00:54:11.540 what they're passionate about.
00:54:13.080 And if in that description there's not something in there that they're really passionate about,
00:54:20.540 I really say, wow, you—I would encourage you to seek that passion, because I think going
00:54:30.520 through life without a passionate pursuit, man, that's got to look like nine miles of bad
00:54:38.220 road.
00:54:39.400 I mean, you're just pushing a rock up a slippery hill.
00:54:43.840 If you're not passionate, if you're passionate about something, then all of a sudden, work
00:54:49.340 becomes something that you want to do.
00:54:53.780 It becomes something—it may be your work and your vocation and your avocation can't be
00:54:59.240 the same thing, but if you ever hit that, you've won the lottery if you love what you do enough
00:55:07.520 that it's both your vocation and your avocation.
00:55:11.700 Right.
00:55:12.300 Well, I think that's the fortunate circumstance that you find yourself in when you align what
00:55:19.320 could otherwise just be whim with a higher order calling.
00:55:23.400 And I think the traditional insistence—you know, there's a traditional insistence that
00:55:27.880 the Spirit of God is the divinity in calling, right?
00:55:32.840 And you're pointing to that.
00:55:34.140 You're using secular language and likely purposefully, but your notion is that there are things that
00:55:40.540 will interest and compel you in your life, and your job is to—that's the call of the treasure
00:55:47.460 that the dragon guards.
00:55:48.860 That's a good way of thinking about it.
00:55:50.360 And that if you pursue that, that infuses your life with a kind of sustaining meaning.
00:55:55.580 You know, when I wrote my first book, when I wrote Maps of Meaning, I wrote a chapter
00:56:00.280 in that book called The Divinity of Interest, and it was really a pan to calling.
00:56:06.240 And I knew it was incomplete, and so I want to run this by you because I think this is implicit
00:56:10.980 in your principles, too.
00:56:12.260 You know, you say, for example, don't reward bad behavior or support conduct you do not value.
00:56:17.480 That's number three.
00:56:19.840 Do not stay silent just so others can remain comfortable, actively live, and support meritocracy.
00:56:26.140 Those seem to me to be pointers to integrate conscience with calling, right?
00:56:33.140 So imagine that there's two mechanisms that orient you towards your higher realization.
00:56:39.160 Let's put it that way.
00:56:40.440 One would be the calling that infuses your life with significance and meaning.
00:56:44.560 But it can go off track, right?
00:56:47.080 It can become a delusional enthusiasm or a whim.
00:56:51.860 You need another countervailing force that's something like conscience.
00:56:56.480 And maybe that's the voice of integrated negative emotion, you know, the warning voice.
00:57:01.240 And so the calling says, go this way.
00:57:03.480 And the conscience says, yeah, but stay on the path, right?
00:57:07.180 Don't be tempted by short-term callings.
00:57:11.560 Stay on the path and watch, keep yourself in check.
00:57:15.600 And so that seems to me to be manifested, for example, in this, let's look at number six
00:57:21.020 just briefly.
00:57:22.420 Do not stay silent just so others, you could say as well, do not say stay silent just so
00:57:28.360 others and yourself can remain, what, comfortable.
00:57:32.440 And you mean temporarily comfortable, I would presume, in that utterance as well.
00:57:36.420 So the question that begs is, well, look, if I can stay silent and other people are comfortable,
00:57:43.300 then why shouldn't I stay silent?
00:57:47.620 And so let's walk into that.
00:57:50.180 What's your sense of that?
00:57:52.180 Well, my sense of that is that you have a lot of people right now that are going to be
00:58:00.800 uncomfortable if you call out some narratives that are being pushed on society that don't
00:58:09.920 gel with your values, don't gel with your sense of factual base and science.
00:58:19.200 And that's why if you look at number four, measure all actions based on results and all
00:58:24.720 thoughts based on rationality.
00:58:27.140 And you're right, I'm describing these in secular terms on purpose.
00:58:33.860 And people think, well, rationality is not a word I use every day, so how can I use that?
00:58:40.800 It's really very simple.
00:58:43.600 Number one is that thought based on verifiable fact.
00:58:47.800 So if you have a thought, and we tend to believe ourselves, right?
00:58:53.020 I mean, if I put a blindfold on you and walk you around downtown or whatever, and you believe
00:59:01.480 I've walked you to the edge of a 10-story building, and you believe that, we tend to believe ourselves.
00:59:07.620 And that's what you're telling yourself.
00:59:08.800 You're going to fight like trying to put a cat in a sack if I'm getting you to take the
00:59:13.480 next step.
00:59:14.140 You're like, whoa, no, I'm not going to do this because I've told myself this is going
00:59:19.280 to be a doozy when I take this step.
00:59:21.540 So if you're telling yourself that, you tend to believe yourself.
00:59:25.060 Well, we've got to start getting people to verify their thoughts.
00:59:31.580 I say that to people that are suicidal all the time.
00:59:35.660 Test the rationality of your thoughts.
00:59:37.460 It's what you're telling yourself.
00:59:40.280 Are you telling yourself you want to die?
00:59:42.720 Or are you telling yourself you want to stop the pain?
00:59:45.580 Those are two very different things.
00:59:47.640 And both of them have long-term consequences.
00:59:49.560 So let's really test that out.
00:59:52.680 Second, does it protect and prolong your life?
00:59:56.120 Does it get you what you want?
00:59:58.120 I mean, there are just some very simple questions that you can ask yourself.
01:00:01.860 And all of a sudden, if it fails any of those simple criteria, then you go, okay, I got to
01:00:10.640 replace this with something that fits the criteria.
01:00:14.240 Now, people aren't just kind of wandering around deciding, well, I trusted myself, but I didn't
01:00:20.740 really know how to test my thinking.
01:00:22.120 Well, I'm just giving them a very simple way to test their thinking, number one being, is
01:00:26.460 it verifiable fact, what you're telling yourself?
01:00:29.380 And if it's not, don't even go to number two.
01:00:32.640 You've got to deal with facts and reality.
01:00:36.000 And people that are rejecting science, saying biology just doesn't apply, we're going to decide
01:00:43.200 that we're changing all that.
01:00:45.220 You know, there aren't men and women, we're going to change all that.
01:00:47.820 Well, I'm sorry, you don't get to just decide that.
01:00:51.960 Yeah, I guess you can decide that for yourself, but you're certainly not going to decide it
01:00:54.920 for me.
01:00:56.080 And if you're pushing that agenda, that's where you can't stay silent so others remain
01:01:01.380 comfortable.
01:01:01.960 You just can't let them run roughshod over you and everybody else with that agenda just
01:01:07.800 so they don't get upset with you for saying, no, sorry, I'm not going to let you rewrite
01:01:13.080 biology for me and my family, me and my life.
01:01:16.300 I'm not going to let you pretend we didn't have slavery in our history just because you've
01:01:21.320 decided that it's not good for kids to hear about that.
01:01:25.400 Well, I've decided it is good for kids to hear about that.
01:01:28.460 I've decided they need to know that there were dark times in our history, and we can
01:01:33.160 only learn from those dark times by acknowledging them.
01:01:37.080 You can't change what you don't acknowledge.
01:01:38.760 You've got to acknowledge this.
01:01:41.260 And so I think I'm trying to get people to start thinking, but if you give them some
01:01:47.760 rules for thinking, they're going to be more efficient about it.
01:01:52.720 Right.
01:01:53.360 Okay.
01:01:53.700 So you're integrating.
01:01:55.060 In that answer, you integrated principle three, four, and six.
01:02:01.500 Three was don't reward bad behavior or support conduct you do not value.
01:02:05.140 Do not stay silent just so others can remain comfortable.
01:02:08.060 That's six.
01:02:08.840 And four was measure all actions based on results and thought and rationality.
01:02:12.680 So if I understand you correctly, one of the things you're pointing out is that you're
01:02:17.760 called upon to make your opinion known.
01:02:21.400 You're called upon to say something.
01:02:23.420 You're called upon to differentially reward and punishment based on the concordance of what
01:02:28.680 you're hearing with what you know to be true rationally.
01:02:31.780 And so the idea there would be that part of your conscience calls you to oppose opinions
01:02:40.160 that are not aligned with the natural order of things.
01:02:45.540 Right.
01:02:45.720 I mean, it's tricky, right?
01:02:46.700 Because you hear all the time in the Enlightenment rationalist types, they say, follow the facts.
01:02:52.620 And that's a weak argument because facts themselves don't specify a destination.
01:02:57.680 On the other hand, there are opinions that fly in the face of what's real so egregiously
01:03:03.560 that if you attend to them, you're going to walk into a pit.
01:03:07.540 You're going to walk off a cliff.
01:03:09.780 And so if you, your principle number six, the justification you had for that was that
01:03:18.160 you shouldn't stay silent just so others can remain comfortable when you know that what
01:03:23.840 is being said violates the.
01:03:27.680 A reasonable understanding of the natural and social order.
01:03:32.300 It's something like that.
01:03:33.780 And so that indicates a belief in an order that's beyond the mere verbal.
01:03:38.300 Right.
01:03:38.940 You know, like the Derrida in particular, I think it was Jacques Derrida on Grammatology.
01:03:44.260 He famously said, there's nothing outside the text.
01:03:47.640 Now, he walked that back to some degree when he was pushed on it.
01:03:50.720 But I think it does get to something that's core in the postmodernist ethos, which is the
01:03:56.840 idea that there's nothing to truth but the consensus of words.
01:04:02.340 And that if you can change the consensus of words, you can change the truth.
01:04:07.000 But the thing is, is that the verbal order has to reflect the intrinsic order of the cosmos
01:04:13.180 or it becomes delusional.
01:04:15.580 Like a delusional verbal representation is internally consistent, right?
01:04:20.560 And people can even develop a consensus around it, which is what a fad is or a social contagion.
01:04:26.380 And so your hypothesis is something like conscience calls us to speak when the consensus has become
01:04:36.140 delusional.
01:04:37.060 It's something like that.
01:04:38.160 Does that seem reasonable?
01:04:39.740 That is a reasonable interpretation.
01:04:40.900 And you know from your clinical experience that how difficult it is to penetrate a well-structured,
01:04:48.880 deeply entrenched delusional system.
01:04:50.860 I mean, sometimes you can spend months and months and months trying to penetrate an individual's
01:05:01.660 delusional system and think you're making all this way in the world.
01:05:07.780 I had a woman one time that I was working with that was convinced that she was being followed,
01:05:14.440 monitored, and hearing voices from her walls.
01:05:17.320 And I've spent all this time and felt like I really had made progress.
01:05:22.740 And she said, yeah, you've convinced me.
01:05:26.380 I'm 100%.
01:05:27.560 You got me cured, Doc.
01:05:30.580 I'm great.
01:05:32.920 And on the way out, she said, I did, however, cut the wires to all the intercom system in the house
01:05:39.380 because that's where I'm hearing the voices.
01:05:41.760 So it's like, I'm with you.
01:05:43.680 But on the other hand, I did strip all the intercom out of the house.
01:05:47.620 And I thought, you know what?
01:05:48.820 I'll take that partial victory.
01:05:51.420 But you get into confirmation bias with people.
01:05:54.960 And folks don't understand.
01:05:57.220 When you're dealing with people with confirmation bias, research tells us if you bring them solid
01:06:03.480 evidence to the contrary, they just dig in their heels.
01:06:06.600 It gets worse, not better.
01:06:09.020 Even if you show them scientific, verifiable evidence to the contrary, they just dig in
01:06:16.100 their heels more.
01:06:17.100 So you got to deal with that first before you can get that new data to take hold.
01:06:21.900 Yeah, well, do you suppose that's maybe a reflection of something that you pointed to earlier?
01:06:27.160 I mean, you know, in the story of Exodus, the story of Exodus indicates that when people leave a tyranny,
01:06:34.580 they enter a desert, right?
01:06:37.000 They don't leave the tyranny and go to the promised land.
01:06:39.560 They leave a tyranny and they go to a desert.
01:06:41.480 And maybe the problem with treating delusions with rational argumentation is that you break down
01:06:48.060 the person's self-imposed interior tyranny, but you present them with the desert.
01:06:53.080 So I wonder to what degree, maybe this is reflected in the fact, you know, one of the most effective
01:07:00.680 long-term cures for addictive behavior, especially alcoholism, appears to be religious transformation.
01:07:07.760 And part of the reason for that, and AA capitalizes on that, but AA also provides people with a community
01:07:14.620 that isn't focused on addictive behavior.
01:07:16.620 I wonder if the solution to the supplantation of a delusion isn't deconstruction, you know,
01:07:26.220 isn't just poking holes in the delusion, but the simultaneous elaboration of a more comprehensive
01:07:32.100 system of explanation that doesn't have the same flaws as the delusion.
01:07:36.300 And you kind of intimated that when you said that it was immoral to do nothing but deconstruct,
01:07:42.260 to do nothing but poke holes without providing a solution.
01:07:45.400 So I don't know what you think about that clinically.
01:07:49.180 And that hadn't occurred to me before with regard specifically to working with delusions.
01:07:53.560 Yeah, well, I've seen it in the real world in working with juries.
01:07:59.740 I think one of the biggest myths is the burden of proof is on the prosecution.
01:08:06.620 That's a myth.
01:08:07.660 That may be written down in the rule books, but if you're really going to defend someone,
01:08:15.500 you better present the jury with an alternative explanation.
01:08:19.100 Right, right, right, right, right.
01:08:20.880 Just proving a negative is very hard to do to begin with.
01:08:24.700 But they want to hear, if we're not down here for the reason we're told we're down here,
01:08:29.300 then you better give me an alternative explanation of how this happened and why we're down here.
01:08:36.140 And until you give them an alternative explanation, you're fighting an uphill battle for sure.
01:08:42.960 And I think that's true with what you're saying about delusions.
01:08:45.300 You need to give them an alternative existence outside that delusional system that's not a desert.
01:08:50.840 Yeah, well, I think part of the reason people need a coherent belief system because otherwise they're incoherent, right?
01:09:03.700 And so what happens, I think this is also why power and hedonism have become focuses of identity,
01:09:10.960 is when the higher forms of identity collapse, then people default towards narratives of power.
01:09:18.700 That's what the Marxists do, right?
01:09:20.860 Or this metamarxism we have now is every single dimension of potential comparison between people devolves into explanation of power, right?
01:09:31.700 It's that all there are, there's an infinite number of dimensions of oppression.
01:09:36.760 And it's an interesting explanation because when systems deteriorate, they do deteriorate in the direction of power and oppression.
01:09:47.460 So there's almost no system that you can point to that can't be explained in part with a power narrative.
01:09:53.260 And alternatively, you can have a narrative of instantaneous gratification, something like that.
01:10:02.660 And it's better to replace that with, well, that's what we're struggling with in this conversation, right?
01:10:09.180 Is that you want to replace those narratives of power and gratification with a higher order narrative that offers more and explains more simultaneously.
01:10:20.120 You at least want to replace it with a social system where you're not in a situation where you've, I would, and I'm not the first one to say this,
01:10:34.780 and it's been said better than I can say it, but I would a lot rather have questions I can't answer than answers I can't question.
01:10:45.020 And right now we're in a situation too often where we have answers we can't question because if you question an answer, you're labeled a hater, you're labeled some kind of phobe, you're labeled some kind of heretic.
01:11:01.520 Just by asking a question, God forbid you disagree, but I would a lot rather have a whole set of questions we haven't found the answers for yet than have a whole set of answers I'm not permitted to even challenge, question, dig in on.
01:11:21.200 And I think that's where we are when we're dealing with cults, when we're dealing with power mongers.
01:11:27.060 So imagine that it's easy to confuse a questioner with a deconstructionist, right?
01:11:32.560 So let's say I'm in a comfortable delusion and you come along and start asking questions.
01:11:37.820 Now, my objection to you could be, you're doing nothing but poking holes.
01:11:43.300 Now, you're making the claim, and I think this is actually a pointer to what the higher part of identification should be.
01:11:51.380 You know, is that, so for example, the ancient Egyptians worshipped the open eye, right?
01:12:00.880 That's the eye of Horus.
01:12:02.160 And their notion was that the force that renews everything is the eye that pays attention.
01:12:08.760 And it's akin to the idea of questioning, right?
01:12:11.880 The redemptive questioner questions to build.
01:12:18.320 He doesn't question to destroy.
01:12:20.660 But it's easy for people who are entrenched in the delusion to treat every questioner as if he's nothing but an agent of destruction.
01:12:28.160 And, you know, you mentioned something here, which is work hard to understand the way others see things.
01:12:37.240 Because if you're a questioner and you're using your questioning to do nothing but destroy the other person's belief system, to elevate your moral stature, right?
01:12:49.260 To show that you're smarter, to show that you have all the answers.
01:12:52.740 That's like the sin of intellectual pride, I would say.
01:12:56.120 It's easy to be viewed as a deconstructive agent.
01:12:58.740 And then you can understand why people get defensive about their beliefs.
01:13:01.860 So, you need to question in the attempt to replace what's insufficient with something better, right?
01:13:09.680 So, you have to be a builder and a questioner.
01:13:11.720 And it seems to me that that conception of who you are that's part and parcel of treating yourself and others with dignity and respect or even being who you are on purpose,
01:13:26.240 that means something like the recognition that you're a building questioner, right?
01:13:33.500 Not a destroying questioner and putting that at the center.
01:13:36.200 I think that requires you to do something that most people, I don't think, come to naturally.
01:13:44.220 And that is, we have to determine what other people's currency is.
01:13:50.880 Because we assume that people have the same currency as ourselves.
01:13:58.380 And that not only is not true, it's often not the case.
01:14:03.800 For example, I think, and I work a lot with law enforcement.
01:14:09.520 And I've done training with law enforcement on interrogation techniques, how to do deception detection, things of that nature.
01:14:25.080 And I always love talking to the negotiators about how to get where you want to get in a negotiation.
01:14:35.120 And Chris Voss, who's probably the most experienced negotiator with the FBI, who's now retired, will tell you this very thing.
01:14:51.020 He will tell you that your best shot of ever getting hostages out from a hostage taker is if you can get that hostage taker to fully and completely believe that you understand why they took that hostage to begin with.
01:15:11.220 Whether it's a domestic violence situation or a political situation or whatever, if they understand that you get why they did what they did to begin with, so they feel heard that a big part of their currency is, I want to be heard.
01:15:31.620 I want to be understood here.
01:15:33.000 I want people to understand and get why I felt driven to this desperate act, that if you can convince them that, hey, I get it.
01:15:43.620 I'm not saying I agree with you, but I see through your eyes how the world looked and why you did what you did.
01:15:50.800 Not saying I agree with it, not saying you're going to get away with it.
01:15:53.740 I'm just telling you I understand how this looked from your point of view.
01:15:58.320 And, I mean, that's true all the way down to a teenager wanting to have a later curfew.
01:16:05.740 They can assume, well, my mom and dad just want to control me, and they're saying he's just wanting to be more independent.
01:16:16.380 And if you really listen, you can find out, wait a minute, they're being motivated by the currency of safety.
01:16:23.740 They know that most of the accidents happen between when the bars let out and the next two hours.
01:16:31.580 They want me off the street for safety purposes.
01:16:34.340 And if they understand, he wants to be with his friends when all the fun's happening right at the end of the evening.
01:16:40.020 And they could negotiate where they both get what they want.
01:16:44.000 If they can just agree you're going to be at somebody's house, verifiably, hanging out during that time, then we can negotiate something in between.
01:16:53.060 You're off the street, but I don't have to be home with mommy and daddy.
01:16:56.940 So if they understand they each have a different currency, giving becomes much easier.
01:17:03.500 But to do that, you've got to really listen and learn from somebody to know what's important to them.
01:17:07.620 Right. Well, and you're pointing to something there that's a source of inestimable reward in relationship to listening.
01:17:15.900 Because, you know, a skeptic might say, well, for example, why should I listen to you if I can just force you to do what I want?
01:17:23.640 And there's a couple of answers to that.
01:17:26.100 I mean, the first answer is, well, you might be able to force the person now, but that doesn't mean you're going to be able to force them tomorrow.
01:17:33.140 And it certainly doesn't mean you're going to be able to force them once they come along with all their friends and tell you to go to hell.
01:17:40.240 And so solutions imposed by force tend to be unstable.
01:17:45.100 So that's very much worth knowing.
01:17:47.480 And, you know, I've looked.
01:17:48.500 So, you know, I interviewed Chris Voss, by the way, but I also interviewed Franz De Waal about chimpanzees.
01:17:55.540 And he's one of the world's foremost primatologists.
01:17:58.080 And he's pointed out quite clearly that chimp alphas who use force have very short-term and violent reigns.
01:18:06.260 And they reign over very fractured and destabilized chimp troops.
01:18:10.440 So you can use force for a while, but it'll come back to haunt you.
01:18:15.480 So then you might say, well, what's the alternative?
01:18:17.860 And you laid that out to some degree with work hard to understand the way others see things.
01:18:24.520 If I can understand what it is that you value, and then I can negotiate with you a solution that enables you to move forward to what you value,
01:18:36.080 while I move forward simultaneously toward what I value,
01:18:39.820 then we've instantly created a relationship that will survive without supervision, right?
01:18:47.800 That's one of the things that's so cool about that is that if you pay attention to someone and you understand what motivates them,
01:18:54.900 and then that's built into your agreement,
01:18:58.160 you don't have to be a tyrant and you don't have to micromanage because
01:19:01.300 you and the person will walk side by side without mutual supervision, right?
01:19:07.060 So Jean Piaget figured this out, by the way, when he was studying children.
01:19:11.140 You know, he figured this out technically.
01:19:13.040 He said, if you put, imagine you put two systems in head-to-head competition with one another.
01:19:18.480 One system was like an aristocratic tyranny, top-down using force,
01:19:24.220 and another system was bottom-up using voluntary agreement.
01:19:29.220 The system based on voluntary agreement will always out-compete the system based on force
01:19:34.220 because the system based on force will waste energy in enforcement.
01:19:41.340 Well, and he was exactly right.
01:19:43.500 And, you know, Piaget also showed that actual learning that would be incorporated and saved
01:19:51.080 was much better from the bottom-up than from the top-down
01:19:55.880 because people felt a degree of cooperation, and Piaget was right about that.
01:20:00.820 Right, right, right, right.
01:20:02.380 Yeah, well, that's partly why, too, even in psychotherapy, you know,
01:20:05.980 part of the reason you don't give people advice as a psychotherapist is because
01:20:10.420 if you haven't walked through the process of coming to the conclusion,
01:20:16.660 the conclusion itself is rather weak.
01:20:19.900 So if I deliver my client a ready, you know, now and then, you know this,
01:20:23.540 it's now and then you've got someone in your therapeutic practice,
01:20:26.340 and they're in a fix, and you know how they could get out of it.
01:20:29.220 You could just tell them.
01:20:30.820 But if you tell them, first of all, they don't get to solve the problem.
01:20:35.760 And you can take credit for that.
01:20:37.360 You steal that from them.
01:20:39.120 And second, they actually haven't gone through the effort necessary to generate the knowledge structure
01:20:43.920 that will enable them to solve similar problems in the future.
01:20:48.280 It's like you can control everything your child does, and nothing bad will happen to them.
01:20:53.300 But as soon as your child doesn't have you around, they're completely bereft.
01:20:58.300 You know, maybe that was your goal all along if you're like a devouring mother, for example.
01:21:02.160 But I wonder how much of that, is that associated, are those ideas associated with your principles seven and eight,
01:21:11.420 said actively live and support meritocracy and identify and build consequential knowledge?
01:21:16.120 Is there a bridge to that, what would you say, that willingness to take it upon yourself to solve problems
01:21:25.720 and to deal with your own affairs?
01:21:29.560 Well, you're certainly right about the meritocracy.
01:21:33.360 I believe this, we've made some really bad decisions, and I saw it happen with COVID,
01:21:44.940 where the United States government spent $5.5 trillion in giveaways during COVID,
01:21:56.260 and $4.4 trillion of it went into checking or savings, which means it wasn't urgently needed.
01:22:04.720 People just tucked it away and said, yeah, thanks, we'll take that and tuck it away.
01:22:10.300 And then they pay people more not to work than to work.
01:22:17.040 And I mean that literally, when you take all of the bonuses and the credits and extending unemployment
01:22:27.380 plus the $600 a week bonus on top of unemployment, and the person is able to stay home
01:22:35.360 and not pay what in L.A. was $7 a gallon for gas at one point,
01:22:40.280 so they don't have to do the commute and have that expense,
01:22:43.220 and they don't have any wardrobe expense and all, and they can just sit on the couch and not work,
01:22:51.920 and then all that's over, and they can't understand why the supply chain is paralyzed.
01:22:59.020 Well, you know, let's think that through, guys.
01:23:01.980 You pay people not to work, and so you get people not working.
01:23:07.040 Hell, Lassie could figure this one out.
01:23:09.360 You got what you paid for, and we had so many lifelong businesses wiped out by the mismanagement of COVID
01:23:22.080 that it's heartbreaking.
01:23:25.020 I mean, these people have spent generations building these family businesses that work so hard,
01:23:31.220 and the margin was narrow, and a high percentage of those businesses never recovered.
01:23:36.380 They never came back.
01:23:37.420 And you see what happened, and one of my problems is we do have a generation
01:23:45.100 that is experiencing a mental, emotional crisis with the highest levels of anxiety, depression,
01:23:53.960 and loneliness since records have been kept.
01:23:59.780 And the agencies that keep those records, the CDC and the Department of Education and others,
01:24:09.840 are the very ones that shut the schools down.
01:24:13.800 They shut the schools down.
01:24:15.320 And as I said early in our conversation, I was fine with that for a couple of weeks,
01:24:19.460 but then it turns into months, and then it turns into a year,
01:24:22.820 and in some cases it turned into two years with remote learning that they knew did not work,
01:24:28.720 particularly with low socioeconomic and inner city populations who didn't have good Wi-Fi connections,
01:24:37.480 didn't have parents there to help them along the way.
01:24:40.440 And when they shut the schools down for that long,
01:24:43.720 they did that knowing these kids were in a mental and emotional crisis,
01:24:47.800 and they knew that those schools were a lifeline to those kids,
01:24:52.800 that they needed that for emotional development.
01:24:55.260 They needed it for educational achievement.
01:24:57.440 They needed it so they had social development, and they shut it down anyway.
01:25:02.540 They also knew that the mandated reporters, the teachers, the counselors,
01:25:07.300 the cafeteria workers and bus drivers and coaches were at the schools,
01:25:10.980 and those were the ones who had their eyes on these children and could report if they saw signs
01:25:16.340 that the child was being molested or the child was being abused in the home.
01:25:20.780 They shut all of that down.
01:25:22.600 And when they did, those referrals dropped 40% to 50% in some major markets,
01:25:28.520 and these kids were sent home behind closed doors, locked up with the very abusers.
01:25:34.960 It's not that the abuse went down 40% or 50%.
01:25:37.620 Then it probably went up because of the frustration of being locked up at home behind those doors.
01:25:43.600 And they shut the schools down without any plan for bringing them back.
01:25:48.580 And so you ask questions about it, and they say,
01:25:51.440 well, we did the best we could with what we knew at the time.
01:25:54.900 No, you did not do the best you could with what you knew at the time.
01:25:58.120 You had information that these children were not as susceptible to this disease as everyone else was.
01:26:03.660 You knew they were in a mental health crisis.
01:26:05.700 You knew this was their lifeline, and you yanked it out from under them.
01:26:10.100 And you damn well knew what you were doing when you did it.
01:26:13.800 So lurking behind that, your principles seven and eight,
01:26:18.960 I've got about three more questions I hope we can address.
01:26:21.400 And so we'll start with this one, I think.
01:26:23.860 I've been thinking a lot about what might constitute a meritocracy from a technical perspective.
01:26:29.680 And so, well, the first thing we might point out is that hopefully we could all agree that
01:26:36.240 there are some things that are worth doing in comparison to other things.
01:26:40.020 And if we can't agree on that, we can't ever get anything done.
01:26:43.200 So some things are worth doing in comparison to others.
01:26:47.080 Doing the things that should be done efficiently and effectively means that we can do more of them,
01:26:53.140 or we can do the good thing faster.
01:26:55.680 And so that seems to be good.
01:26:56.900 And then a meritocracy is, it's essentially reward for those things.
01:27:02.440 It's reward for those things and punishment for failure to do it, right?
01:27:05.640 So once you decide that something is to be done, you've valued it,
01:27:10.500 then you value those actions and patterns of attention that will lead to that outcome.
01:27:16.100 And that's a meritocracy, right?
01:27:18.160 And so then you could add another level of definition there that ties in with what we've
01:27:23.500 been describing is that if the proper you, if the proper self is something like long-term
01:27:32.520 harmony established voluntarily with others, then a proper meritocracy is a system that rewards
01:27:40.400 behaviors that are aimed at that and punishes those that aren't, right?
01:27:45.240 And that's also what you would be called upon to speak about, for example, when you're not
01:27:50.660 staying silent just so others can remain comfortable.
01:27:55.080 So there's a technical issue with regards to meritocracy here.
01:27:58.560 Now, I want to, so you can tell me what you think about that, but then I want to tie that
01:28:03.720 into something you mentioned much earlier too, which is the tyranny of the fringe, right?
01:28:08.740 So I think there's always a fringe, right?
01:28:11.320 And I think the fringe generally tends to be people who are pursuing power and people who
01:28:17.820 are pursuing short-term hedonistic self-gratification.
01:28:22.080 And the fringe is much noisier and much louder and much more dominant than it's been certainly
01:28:27.660 that I can ever remember.
01:28:29.960 And I'm wondering, Dr. Phil, do you think maybe it's, I've been wrestling with this idea,
01:28:34.220 you know, we're all connected together now and there's no reason to assume that what's
01:28:41.220 pathological can't spread with equal rapidity compared to what's valuable, right?
01:28:47.900 So now we're all hooked together.
01:28:49.420 We can say, well, good ideas spread faster, but we can say, well, yeah, bad ideas, bad
01:28:54.680 contagious ideas also spread faster.
01:28:57.180 Now, part of what stops bad, contagious ideas from spreading in real life is that there's,
01:29:07.300 you can identify the people who are spreading them and you can stop them.
01:29:11.960 It's because you see them face to face and maybe you, in principle, continually interact
01:29:16.320 with them, right?
01:29:17.600 So they can be held responsible.
01:29:19.460 So here's a hypothesis.
01:29:21.820 It's a deep hypothesis.
01:29:23.240 You tell me what you think about it.
01:29:24.520 Virtualization enables psychopathy.
01:29:29.560 And the reason it does is because it decouples action from consequences.
01:29:34.920 I mean, it's almost like a definition of virtualization, right?
01:29:37.540 I mean, if I'm an anonymous, sadistic troll, I can say whatever the hell I want to anyone
01:29:44.140 whenever I want.
01:29:45.880 And not only do I not have consequences, I may get attention for it, right?
01:29:49.960 So the incentive structure.
01:29:51.340 So imagine this, and I'm asking you your opinion as a psychologist.
01:29:55.700 So two questions.
01:29:57.360 Do you think virtualization might enable psychopathy?
01:30:02.440 And if it does, then what do you think of the danger that poses?
01:30:07.840 Well, I'll answer both of those questions.
01:30:10.140 And I answer them pretty much in the affirmative.
01:30:15.140 I don't think that situations create heroes, for example.
01:30:22.360 And I don't think situations create psychopaths.
01:30:25.640 I think it reveals who they are.
01:30:28.020 And so you get someone that becomes a keyboard bully.
01:30:34.140 You get somebody that goes just completely out of control.
01:30:40.860 I would suggest that they probably were just lying in the weeds, waiting for the opportunity
01:30:49.500 to be who...
01:30:52.220 To exploit.
01:30:53.160 Yeah, to just exploit, attack, and be who they were without the consequences.
01:30:58.400 And that's why you see people in road rage yelling and screaming with veins popping out of
01:31:05.840 their neck at somebody in a car that can't hear them.
01:31:09.000 They would never say that to somebody in an elevator.
01:31:12.220 Right, right, right.
01:31:13.100 But they've got the anonymity.
01:31:14.340 That's also that anonymity.
01:31:16.040 Yeah, exactly, exactly.
01:31:17.640 And it's the same thing with the keyboard bullies.
01:31:21.640 They've got the anonymity, and it may be somebody in their grandmother's basement, or it could be
01:31:27.120 somebody that you work with, and they have a different identity, and they would never say that
01:31:32.720 to you across your desk.
01:31:34.220 And I think that's a real problem.
01:31:40.640 So, yeah, I do think it enables them to be who they probably were to begin with, and that's
01:31:50.560 one of the consequences.
01:31:52.660 That's one of the unintended consequences of the technology.
01:31:55.280 And I hear people talking about some of the things with the uptick in activity and the
01:32:11.140 transgender movement, and they say, well, we don't think there's a contagion effect here.
01:32:14.920 Well, really, you know, you've got 10, 8, 9, 10 times the activity, and with girls, that
01:32:27.160 we didn't have before.
01:32:29.700 I mean, it was typically boys, not girls.
01:32:32.540 Now girls outstrip the boys like, what, 1,100%?
01:32:36.060 And I'm saying that by recall, so I'm not offering that as fact, but certainly by a big number.
01:32:44.680 And they say, well, we don't think it's a contagion effect.
01:32:46.960 Well, of course it is.
01:32:50.220 It's got to be a contagion effect.
01:32:51.900 People are saying, well, they just feel more free to come out about it.
01:32:56.400 Well, it's the popular, yeah, that's such rubbish.
01:32:59.380 The, not only is it a contagion effect, as we can tell by its insanely rapid spread,
01:33:04.900 but we know it's a contagion effect because psychogenic epidemics have always raged through
01:33:11.360 young women.
01:33:12.780 Like, there's a documented history of that going back 350 years.
01:33:17.120 There's a great book called Discovery of the Unconscious by a man named Henry Ellenberger,
01:33:21.340 which was a canonical text for psychoanalytic training for about 30 years, and truly is
01:33:26.620 a brilliant book.
01:33:27.580 And he documents psychogenic epidemics, literally going back, I'd say, 400 years.
01:33:32.840 And it's always young women.
01:33:34.080 And it's partly young women, I think, because they are more agreeable.
01:33:37.460 But it's also partly young women because they hit puberty earlier and have to wrestle with
01:33:42.200 its relatively dramatic psychological consequences at a slightly less developed, at a slightly earlier
01:33:50.000 age, and that makes a real difference.
01:33:52.000 And so the fact that you're pointing to the contagion of the trans phenomena among not its
01:33:58.080 typical sufferers, who, as you pointed out, historically were male, but young women, is
01:34:03.200 clear evidence to anyone who isn't purposefully stuffing up their ears and blinding their eyes
01:34:09.860 that this is a social epidemic.
01:34:12.180 And I'm so embarrassed.
01:34:13.620 I'm so embarrassed to be a member, really, of the psychological community at this point,
01:34:18.200 Dr. Phil, because this epidemic has revealed a cowardice among my peers that I would have
01:34:26.300 never believed possible.
01:34:28.420 A level of pathological silence and enabling that runs against absolutely everything that
01:34:36.080 the psychotherapeutic enterprise, in principle, was designed to forestall.
01:34:41.740 So it's a hideous situation.
01:34:45.540 Well, we've seen the—it's more than just silence, I'm afraid, because we've seen the
01:34:50.640 American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical
01:34:55.840 Association, the Academy of Endocrinology, on and on, that have all signed off on it.
01:35:04.340 And I—
01:35:04.880 They're complicit, not just silent.
01:35:06.500 Yeah, and I just—I've never seen anything else where people had—where these organizations
01:35:15.500 or professions had less evidence that something didn't cause long-term harm before they signed
01:35:22.680 off on it, ever.
01:35:25.640 Yeah, ever.
01:35:26.400 Right.
01:35:26.780 I agree.
01:35:27.660 So I don't get it.
01:35:28.840 And I don't think history's going to be kind.
01:35:30.740 Now, I'm not a physician, so I always tell people, you know, I'm not a physician, so,
01:35:36.180 you know, take that for what you will.
01:35:39.940 But, you know, I think the thing that got me into this profession to begin with is as
01:35:46.120 early as 12, 13 years old, I became fascinated with why people do what they do and don't do
01:35:51.320 what they don't do.
01:35:52.160 And I remember the day that it got a grip on me, and I was never the same after that
01:36:01.400 day.
01:36:01.780 But I've been fascinated with that equation, why people do what they do and don't do what
01:36:06.820 they don't do.
01:36:07.360 And if you understand that, I mean, that is a great tool in life in getting things done
01:36:15.800 and understanding others.
01:36:19.040 And I just, you can't spend your life focused on that and not see things like a contagion
01:36:26.240 effect.
01:36:27.000 You know, there are rules for reporting on suicide, you know, for the media.
01:36:30.960 We'll do a story about young girls.
01:36:32.640 There were two young girls up on the East Coast one time that were in love with the same
01:36:37.180 boy, and they had this insane suicide pact.
01:36:40.080 So they stepped in front of one of these high-speed trains together, and when it impacted them,
01:36:47.260 it made the shape of a heart where it impacted them.
01:36:51.180 And all these media were romanticizing this and showing this.
01:36:55.460 And I'm thinking, how could you do that?
01:36:58.240 Every girl with a broken heart now can see that and say, oh, my God, how romantic is that?
01:37:05.880 You're inviting contagion when you do that.
01:37:08.720 And we refuse to report it.
01:37:11.660 Dr. Phil, that's going to happen in Canada.
01:37:14.240 Like, this is what's going to happen in Canada.
01:37:16.800 So I told the Canadian government back in 2016 that their Bill C-16 would produce a social
01:37:22.680 contagion among young women.
01:37:24.180 I said that directly to the Senate.
01:37:26.820 But now there's something else happening, and I'd like your opinion about it.
01:37:30.240 So Canada is going to extend its euthanasia operation to the mentally ill.
01:37:36.420 Now, they've already tried to do that.
01:37:38.100 It didn't work yet, but that's where it's headed.
01:37:40.740 So my sense now, I'd already seen one case report of this, but my sense is that this is
01:37:45.660 what's going to happen, is that they'll extend MAID, medically-assisted death.
01:37:51.040 It's the Canadian euthanasia program.
01:37:52.960 They're going to extend that to the mentally ill and to minors.
01:37:55.640 And so what we're going to get is a death romanticism of MAID suicide among young women.
01:38:03.060 And it'll eclipse the trans contagion, I think.
01:38:07.200 And I think it'll happen for exactly the reason that you just described, is we'll get romantic
01:38:11.280 accounts of early suicide among attention-seeking, desperate young women who are also tempted.
01:38:18.560 You know this, too, because if someone does have a pronounced depressive temperament, one
01:38:23.780 of the temptations that's going to befall them is the belief that everyone else around
01:38:28.740 them would be better off if they weren't there.
01:38:30.740 And so you can see how that can take on a...
01:38:34.100 Yeah, it's the number one reason for suicide, right?
01:38:36.400 They're a burden.
01:38:36.940 They believe they're a burden.
01:38:38.460 Right, right, right.
01:38:39.700 Exactly, exactly.
01:38:40.700 And that can easily be romanticized, especially if you also want to avoid the responsibility
01:38:45.740 of growing up, right?
01:38:48.080 Because that's another...
01:38:49.420 Well, that's why there are suicidal crises among adolescents, is because they are deciding
01:38:54.880 whether they're going to take on the burden of responsibility of adulthood.
01:38:58.000 And the opportunity and adventure of adulthood as well.
01:39:01.240 Well, how do they answer...
01:39:01.700 And it's easy to romanticize the...
01:39:03.460 Go ahead.
01:39:03.960 How do they answer this question?
01:39:05.540 How does that individual, if they have a mental illness to this level that they want to die,
01:39:16.040 how does that person give informed consent if they're incapacitated to the point with a mental
01:39:22.220 illness that they want to die?
01:39:23.560 How do they give informed consent?
01:39:25.620 Oh, yeah.
01:39:26.260 You and your logic.
01:39:28.200 Look, man, how does a 13-year-old give consent for a double mastectomy?
01:39:32.800 We're already way past that.
01:39:34.680 We've blown out the necessity for informed consent long ago.
01:39:39.700 And that'll provide absolutely no barrier whatsoever to the people who are pushing the main agenda
01:39:47.340 in Canada.
01:39:48.480 Like, Dr. Phil, that question won't...
01:39:50.880 There'll be endless academic papers written by demented ethicists providing an answer in
01:40:02.160 the affirmative, which will be something like, well, they still have sufficient capacity to
01:40:08.760 decide whether their lived experience indicates that their suffering is such that it would be
01:40:13.620 better if they didn't exist, and you have no right to interfere with that.
01:40:17.540 There.
01:40:17.880 That's how it'll be justified.
01:40:19.540 Jordan, are we just clinicians that forgot to check our common sense at the ivory tower when
01:40:25.300 we were leaving campus?
01:40:26.880 Is that the problem?
01:40:28.940 Look, you know, well, you know, I don't know what to make of this because I know perfectly well that
01:40:35.340 the cohort of people I graduated with, say, back in the 1990s were very well-trained clinicians.
01:40:40.720 I think that, well, what's happened to me in Canada, you may know this, is that my license
01:40:47.020 is being threatened by the Ontario College of Psychologists.
01:40:50.780 It's not just being threatened.
01:40:52.120 I mean, their plan is to take it.
01:40:53.960 Now, they're taking it because of things I've said.
01:40:57.420 Now, the thing about me is that I don't give a damn if they take it.
01:41:00.420 And at this point, I'd just as soon not be part of their bloody club anyways.
01:41:03.880 But, you know, there's nothing they can do to me.
01:41:07.380 I'm not practicing at the moment except on a broad public scale.
01:41:11.000 And I have multiple independent sources of income.
01:41:14.180 And I don't even have to live in Canada.
01:41:16.380 So, you know, I can tell them to go to hell without too much damage.
01:41:20.040 But I'm watching what's happening in Canada.
01:41:22.320 And the colleges, the medical colleges and the psychological colleges have sufficient clout
01:41:28.220 so that anyone who puts a toe outside the lines can be certain that they will be the
01:41:33.860 recipient of anonymous denunciations, that they will be subjected to endless expensive
01:41:39.280 lawfare, and that they could well be stripped of their right to practice.
01:41:44.400 And those are not trivial punishments.
01:41:48.340 And, you know, generally people can't withstand them.
01:41:50.940 So, I have a two-part question maybe that we can use to wrap things up here.
01:41:58.860 The first, first an observation, you've been popping up everywhere in the social media world,
01:42:07.360 especially in the last couple of weeks.
01:42:08.960 And I have a question about that that's personal and also one that's more issues-based, let's say.
01:42:16.760 I've noticed that it's been very hard for people who've made a name for themselves in the traditional media
01:42:22.940 to transition, so to speak, to the online world.
01:42:27.980 It's sort of like watching TV actors try to make it in the movie world.
01:42:31.760 Sometimes that works, but most of the time it doesn't.
01:42:33.900 Now, it does really seem to be working for you, and I'm wondering why that's working for you
01:42:41.200 and how you've managed it, how that's related to your new book,
01:42:44.740 and what you think is driving you forward to continue speaking
01:42:51.060 as you have in your legacy media career, but now increasingly online.
01:42:56.400 So, let's see if we can address all of those points.
01:42:59.800 What is it that you're doing right to make this transition to the online world,
01:43:05.720 and what is driving you forward to continue to speak on these issues?
01:43:11.480 Well, that's a two-part question, and I'll treat it just that way.
01:43:14.700 I think the part about social media is probably driven from a negative standpoint
01:43:25.260 in the sense that I think there are a lot of factions out there
01:43:29.600 that think I'm very dangerous right now
01:43:31.560 because I'm talking about things that don't allow them to remain comfortable,
01:43:37.700 and I'm willing to debate anybody anywhere about anything
01:43:42.000 that I'm qualified, in my opinion, to talk about.
01:43:46.180 Now, I'm not going to tell you what to do with your 401K
01:43:48.320 because I can't add two and two and get five every time,
01:43:50.680 but when you talk about the things that are in my book,
01:43:55.340 if you've noticed, there are extensive references
01:43:59.700 to the professional literature at the end of every chapter
01:44:03.040 because I do my homework, and I know that literature backwards and forwards,
01:44:07.600 and I've studied it, I've read it.
01:44:09.600 I don't go get my information on Google.
01:44:13.160 I get it by actually reading the core articles
01:44:16.460 and understanding why these things are happening,
01:44:20.200 and I think when I go out and talk about these things,
01:44:24.880 I think it's very threatening to some people.
01:44:26.760 I've been shadow banned.
01:44:28.520 I've had videos that go up,
01:44:30.420 and they just go crazy viral for 15 minutes,
01:44:33.560 and all of a sudden, bang, they're gone,
01:44:36.360 and my cybersecurity people tell me that they're being targeted
01:44:40.120 and taken down, things at the border when I've been down there,
01:44:44.360 things that I've talked about just concerning content in the book.
01:44:52.340 I think that clearly it's backfiring.
01:44:57.520 There's an attempt to silence me on these matters,
01:45:00.680 and I think it's backfiring
01:45:02.440 because people want to hear what I have to say,
01:45:08.220 and people are getting their information differently now.
01:45:11.180 They're getting their information on YouTube
01:45:13.980 and social media platforms and that sort of thing,
01:45:16.860 so a lot of that stuff I'm not posting.
01:45:20.000 Others are posting from what I've done
01:45:22.800 or said somewhere here, there, or on,
01:45:25.760 but April 2nd, I do launch Merit Street Media,
01:45:29.720 the 24-hour network,
01:45:31.240 and we'll be in somewhere between 75 and 90 million homes.
01:45:35.020 I think it'll be the biggest launch since Fox, as I was saying,
01:45:39.660 so I think it's going to be prolific for people to find.
01:45:42.920 And, you know, you've got to take a position,
01:45:45.960 and I'm willing to take a position,
01:45:48.020 and I think people find that both threatening and refreshing.
01:45:52.460 I think it covers the gambit, and that's okay.
01:45:57.340 I get a lot of hate mail.
01:45:59.420 I've had death threats, you know, all that.
01:46:03.580 I took a strong position on Hamas and Israel.
01:46:07.900 I was sickened to see students on campuses around the United States,
01:46:14.160 elite campuses, out rallying for what I consider to be assassins and murderers.
01:46:22.580 It's like we're not teaching critical thinking here.
01:46:25.240 How is it?
01:46:26.680 I'm hearing rhetoric that I haven't heard
01:46:28.900 since I had read translated transcripts of the Hitler Youth Movement
01:46:32.800 on American campuses.
01:46:35.880 How is this possible?
01:46:38.560 And nobody was saying anything about it,
01:46:41.100 so I started saying something about it.
01:46:43.340 And, boy, did that heat things up.
01:46:46.760 You know, you're in a position where your words have authority,
01:46:50.060 and you have access to much public attention,
01:46:53.080 and that's a position that I'm in and have been for a while.
01:46:57.140 And I'm wondering how you differentiate in your own life
01:47:03.300 between the temptations of narcissistic self-aggrandizement
01:47:07.540 in the public eye, let's say,
01:47:10.000 and your duty to speak forthrightly about things you believe to be important.
01:47:16.680 I mean, you have had a long career.
01:47:18.900 You have more than enough money for the rest of your life.
01:47:21.200 There's no need for you in the privation sense
01:47:25.820 to be in the public eye speaking.
01:47:29.280 How do you protect yourself against the fact that
01:47:32.140 you can be tempted towards self-glorification,
01:47:36.640 let's say, and self-aggrandizement
01:47:38.040 by the fact of your media presence?
01:47:40.940 And how do you know that you're speaking
01:47:43.600 for what's true rather than blowing your own horn,
01:47:49.220 let's say, and, you know, increasing your own,
01:47:53.160 building a Tower of Babel to your own posterity?
01:47:56.800 Well, absolutely fair question.
01:47:59.300 And I think, I've long believed that
01:48:04.480 too much time in the spotlight fades the suit.
01:48:07.520 And, you know, I'm in a position where I can go
01:48:12.140 pretty much on any media outlet
01:48:15.840 any time that I want to.
01:48:18.840 They're happy to have me on.
01:48:23.560 I think it's going to get less so
01:48:26.100 with some outlets pretty fast.
01:48:29.680 But I think my rule has always been
01:48:34.240 if it's not real obvious to the viewer
01:48:38.820 why you're there, you shouldn't go.
01:48:42.980 If you're going just because you can,
01:48:45.920 instead of it being really obvious
01:48:48.800 that you're there with a purpose and a passion
01:48:52.500 to speak about things that matter to people who care,
01:48:57.860 you shouldn't be there at all.
01:49:00.740 And, you know, I probably do, you know,
01:49:04.740 one out of 10 or 20 media requests that I get
01:49:07.980 because I just, I think it's important
01:49:13.020 to play big, not long, play big, not often.
01:49:17.040 And I think if you choose carefully
01:49:19.840 where you speak and what you say,
01:49:22.720 you can have much more of an impact
01:49:26.320 than just being elevator noise,
01:49:29.580 bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop.
01:49:31.260 And why would you say that you're compelled
01:49:34.380 to continue to do it?
01:49:36.320 What do you think you're up to?
01:49:38.200 What do you hope you're up to?
01:49:39.540 I hope what I'm up to is, you know,
01:49:43.600 I really looked around and was very, very concerned
01:49:48.340 where this society's headed right now.
01:49:52.240 And I also looked around to see
01:49:54.620 who was willing to step up and speak about it.
01:50:00.100 And I am certainly not the only one,
01:50:03.400 but I felt like being trained in clinical psychology
01:50:10.340 and some of the things that I have experience in,
01:50:14.280 that I had a unique perspective
01:50:16.480 to talk about the collective consciousness.
01:50:20.240 Because as you know, there's an individual consciousness
01:50:23.160 and then there's a collective consciousness
01:50:26.000 of the family, of the community, of the region,
01:50:28.760 the state, the country.
01:50:30.460 And I think that I was seeing a void
01:50:34.480 where people weren't really talking about that.
01:50:37.260 They weren't really talking about people exercising
01:50:40.800 their right to have a voice
01:50:45.300 within that collective consciousness.
01:50:47.460 And I was concerned that what we were seeing taught
01:50:51.320 in the universities was going to put a generation
01:50:54.600 in charge of this country next
01:50:57.320 when my grandchildren are going to be out there
01:51:00.840 living their lives that I was just uncomfortable with.
01:51:04.560 I just thought, you know, we're coddling these students.
01:51:07.820 We're not preparing them for the next level of life.
01:51:10.820 Somebody's got to step up and raise hell about this.
01:51:15.060 And I felt passionate about it.
01:51:17.120 And so that's why I decided to keep going.
01:51:20.460 I see, I see, I see.
01:51:21.800 Well, I can, I hope, I hope I can relate to that.
01:51:25.760 So, all right, sir.
01:51:27.260 Well, I'm wondering if there's anything,
01:51:29.720 we covered your book relatively comprehensively.
01:51:33.120 We covered a lot of ground today.
01:51:34.740 I'm wondering, is there anything else?
01:51:37.380 I'm going to continue to talk to Dr. Phil,
01:51:39.660 as many of you know, on the Daily Wire side.
01:51:43.080 I'm going to delve into autobiographical matters a bit
01:51:45.900 and get to know him on the personal side.
01:51:47.840 And so if you're inclined to join us for that,
01:51:49.860 that would be well and good.
01:51:51.660 On the free speech side, it doesn't hurt to throw some support the Daily Wire way
01:51:56.980 because they are doing what they can to be a bastion of alternative opinion
01:52:01.720 in a landscape of woke nonsense.
01:52:04.220 And so that's worth some consideration.
01:52:07.680 Is there anything else that you would like to bring to people's attention on this side
01:52:12.600 before we bid each other farewell?
01:52:15.040 Well, I would just like to say it's really been refreshing to talk to somebody
01:52:21.760 that knows what the hell they're talking about.
01:52:24.320 And I'm talking about a lot of these concepts and principles that are sometimes nuanced.
01:52:32.160 And you obviously did your homework on this.
01:52:36.040 And I really appreciate that.
01:52:39.120 And I know how busy you are.
01:52:41.200 But to have a clinician on the other end that picks up the nuances of what we're doing
01:52:46.380 has been very refreshing, Jordan.
01:52:48.260 So I can't thank you enough.
01:52:50.180 It's a pleasure to talk to you.
01:52:51.880 And I appreciate the fact that you took the time to talk to me today
01:52:55.580 and to everyone that's watching and listening.
01:52:57.440 And to all of you who are watching and listening as well,
01:53:00.420 your attention is never taken for granted.
01:53:03.540 And it's much appreciated.
01:53:05.000 And to the Daily Wire Plus folks for making this possible here in Florida today,
01:53:09.600 I appreciate the effort that went into that.
01:53:11.700 To the film crew here as well for handling this so professionally,
01:53:15.420 that's also much appreciated.
01:53:16.860 And so farewell to all you who are watching and listening.
01:53:21.520 And Dr. Phil, very good to talk to you today.
01:53:24.960 Look forward to talking again soon.
01:53:26.400 Thank you.