The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - What To Do When You Have No Vision For Your Life

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00:01:29.060 Hello, everybody. I'm pleased to release another lecture in my We Who Wrestle With God collection.

00:01:37.400 I plan to make this a Sunday ritual, far into the foreseeable future.

00:01:42.980 Today's topic, how can you become a good person?

00:01:47.520 We're all dreaming up how we should act, and we produce our theories.

00:01:52.160 Our great storytellers aggregate those theories and portray them back to us in dramatic form.

00:01:58.580 we imitate the heroes of those stories thus we move ever closer to being good we can do this

00:02:07.040 consciously too explicitly and aim at becoming the heroes of our own personal stories on to the show

00:02:15.920 so a long time ago

00:02:22.620 It was probably in the mid to late 80s.

00:02:31.700 I spent a lot of time reading Carl Jung's work,

00:02:38.260 the Swiss analytical psychologist, student of Freud,

00:02:43.780 student of Nietzsche, both in equal proportions,

00:02:46.580 very profound person, incredibly imaginative,

00:02:50.580 imaginative, deep, deep

00:02:52.600 thinker. Sort of thinker that

00:02:54.760 frightens

00:02:56.900 psychologists so badly, I

00:02:58.660 would say they won't read him.

00:03:00.980 And so,

00:03:02.820 and I was reading his

00:03:04.400 works on alchemy, which

00:03:06.680 of all the things Jung

00:03:08.780 wrote are the most difficult

00:03:10.480 and the deepest.

00:03:13.580 And

00:03:14.000 he said

00:03:17.020 something, he said a number of

00:03:18.740 things that I found extremely fascinating.

00:03:23.940 He construed

00:03:26.160 alchemy,

00:03:30.760 the alchemical endeavor

00:03:32.500 which lasted thousands and thousands of years

00:03:34.840 as a kind of dream.

00:03:38.060 It was Jung's idea

00:03:39.500 derived in part from

00:03:42.580 Freud with influences from Nietzsche

00:03:44.620 that are

00:03:46.740 explicit ideas, you know, the ideas that we can state and that we understand most

00:03:53.980 completely and can communicate most directly, had their origins in the

00:04:01.460 imagination and in dreams. And that's a good way of understanding dreams, is that

00:04:07.040 so Freud sort of thought that dreams shed light on what you had repressed and did

00:04:13.580 not want to face or hadn't

00:04:15.400 integrated. And

00:04:17.100 Jung believed

00:04:18.580 that

00:04:20.880 dreams were the birthplace

00:04:23.600 of ideas.

00:04:25.900 Like, ideas have to come from somewhere,

00:04:27.760 you know, and our notions of

00:04:29.580 where we get our ideas are unbelievably

00:04:31.660 shallow. You ask yourself

00:04:33.760 a question,

00:04:34.960 you think up the answer,

00:04:37.980 or do you? Or does an answer

00:04:39.760 appear to you? And if it appears to you,

00:04:41.960 where did it come from?

00:04:44.360 and if you think it up

00:04:45.540 why didn't you know it to begin with?

00:04:49.040 so

00:04:49.560 the source of ideas is extraordinarily mysterious

00:04:54.380 Jung believed that ideas

00:04:57.740 appeared in the same way

00:04:59.880 if you walk into a kitchen

00:05:01.700 and the table appears

00:05:03.360 in front of you

00:05:04.540 you don't really think that

00:05:07.140 you conjured up the table

00:05:09.220 and it's not that much different

00:05:11.120 in the realm of thought.

00:05:12.400 If you ask yourself a question,

00:05:14.040 you get an answer.

00:05:16.000 There is the answer,

00:05:17.640 but it isn't any more obvious

00:05:22.080 that it was you that conjured it up

00:05:24.060 than it is that it was you

00:05:25.380 that conjured up the table

00:05:26.640 when you walk into a room.

00:05:30.620 Any case,

00:05:33.420 Jung believed that the dream

00:05:35.480 was the birthplace of the idea.

00:05:37.540 Now, think about it

00:05:41.120 There's another thing you can think about, I suppose

00:05:43.700 Is that, you know, there are things that

00:05:45.980 There are things you just absolutely don't understand at all

00:05:50.260 You don't even know you don't know them, right?

00:05:52.600 There are mysteries that are just absolutely

00:05:54.500 So far beyond you that they're invisible

00:05:56.860 Then there's the things you know you don't know

00:05:59.380 And that's a large category of things, too

00:06:02.200 It's not as large as the category of the things you don't know that you don't know

00:06:06.980 but it's pretty large

00:06:09.000 and then there's the things you sort of understand

00:06:10.820 and then there's the small handful of things

00:06:12.740 you've actually got figured out

00:06:14.200 and there's a developmental progression

00:06:16.700 from the realm of the absolutely unknown

00:06:20.380 to the realm of the thoroughly explicit

00:06:23.880 and the dream stands on the edge

00:06:28.560 of the absolutely unknown

00:06:30.200 and that's partly why dreams are so mysterious

00:06:32.520 you think, well you dream

00:06:33.620 you have a dream at night

00:06:34.940 or maybe you're daydreaming

00:06:37.260 But you have a dream at night, let's say, and you don't really understand the dream.

00:06:41.580 And you'd think, well, what is this dream doing?

00:06:47.640 And why doesn't it make itself clearer?

00:06:50.000 Why does it need to be interpreted, let's say?

00:06:52.560 And obviously, it doesn't need to be, because you dream whether you interpret them or not.

00:06:56.420 But you can interpret dreams, and it can be extremely helpful.

00:07:00.040 I did a lot of dream interpretation when I was a therapist with my clients who dreamed a lot.

00:07:05.260 And you don't have to interpret your dreams.

00:07:07.020 They still function, even if you don't.

00:07:09.560 But if you do, sometimes you can accelerate your development a lot.

00:07:13.240 And it's analogous to the difference in some ways between reading a book,

00:07:18.300 like a fiction book, let's say,

00:07:20.480 which you can do and never think about the book at all.

00:07:23.040 You can just read it.

00:07:23.880 Or you can read the book and you can think it through and you can analyze it.

00:07:27.640 And, you know, there's additional value in the book

00:07:32.460 if you also think it through and analyze it,

00:07:35.040 which is partly the utility, let's say, of a humanities education

00:07:38.440 or of the study of literature in general.

00:07:41.720 The story has a function independent of your explicit interpretation.

00:07:46.340 But if you're careful and you think

00:07:49.260 and you collaborate with others and you discuss,

00:07:53.240 then you can probe more deeply into the book.

00:07:58.160 And in principle, that's a value.

00:08:00.060 And the same thing happens on the dream front.

00:08:01.880 Now, Jung believed that he was trying to understand why the Western world developed the scientific endeavor.

00:08:13.300 Recently, 500 years ago, I mean, you could trace its roots back in some ways to the rational philosophy, let's say, of the Greeks.

00:08:21.500 But even that's only 3,000 years.

00:08:23.900 And in the entire history of humankind, that's like yesterday, right?

00:08:30.480 We've been creatures genetically identical to ourselves for at least 350,000 years.

00:08:39.800 And so 500 years or 3,000 years is just a tiny fraction of that.

00:08:45.040 Why did science emerge in the West and nowhere else?

00:08:49.380 Nowhere else in history.

00:08:51.640 And this baby doesn't like alchemy, let's say.

00:09:00.480 Jung believed that the alchemical endeavor

00:09:07.520 Remember, that was the endeavor to make gold out of base metals, out of lead

00:09:16.440 But it was more than that

00:09:18.340 He believed that the alchemical endeavor was the manifestation of a dream

00:09:25.080 But a collective dream that lasted literally thousands of years

00:09:29.020 And the dream was an intuition that if you study the transformations of the material world, you could benefit.

00:09:39.020 Now, animals don't do that. Animals don't systematically study the material objective world to benefit from it.

00:09:48.020 We do that, and we had to figure out that you could do that, and then we had to figure out how to do that.

00:09:55.020 And before we could figure out that you could do that, we had to dream up the notion that it might be a useful idea.

00:10:02.860 Now, the Philosopher's Stone, which is what the alchemists were searching for, was a miraculous substance that would confer upon the user immortality, perfect health, and indefinite wealth.

00:10:25.020 and you might think, well, that's a fiction, or it's a delusion,

00:10:30.700 but it's not.

00:10:32.660 It's a hypothetical ideal, and it's a dream,

00:10:36.080 and the dream is there's something hidden in the world of matter

00:10:40.120 that, if discovered, would bestow upon us longer lives,

00:10:47.460 better health, and abundant wealth,

00:10:50.460 Wealth and that is what happened when we developed the scientific process we

00:10:56.520 Learned to be healthier. We learn to live longer and we learn to be spectacularly more wealthy and so

00:11:06.300 The groundwork for that endeavor was laid by this dream

00:11:10.840 by the time 500 years rolled around

00:11:21.020 the early scientists

00:11:23.200 Newton, Bacon

00:11:24.520 in particular

00:11:26.320 Newton in particular was an alchemist

00:11:29.420 and most of what he wrote was on alchemy

00:11:31.440 and religion, physics was sort of

00:11:33.460 a side venture for Newton

00:11:34.980 they were searching for the philosopher

00:11:37.660 stone too

00:11:38.560 But they formalized the new technologies that became the scientific endeavor.

00:11:43.280 And then Jung believed what happened.

00:11:44.840 There was an ethical element to the alchemical dream.

00:11:49.520 The alchemists were wrestling with trying to understand what sort of people they would have to transform themselves into

00:11:58.120 so that they could pursue the deepest mysteries in the best possible way.

00:12:04.140 You know, you actually do get trained that way if you're trained as a scientist.

00:12:07.480 There's an ethical element to it, which is actually paramount.

00:12:11.100 This isn't exactly formalized by scientists.

00:12:16.160 It's more implicit.

00:12:18.120 So one of the things, this is why I think someone like Richard Dawkins, for example,

00:12:21.480 who's one of the world's most famous atheists, is actually a deeply religious man.

00:12:25.560 And the reason I believe that is because he embodies a kind of ethic.

00:12:29.800 And the ethic is that, well, here's part of it.

00:12:33.500 There's an order in the material world.

00:12:38.660 That's a hypothesis.

00:12:41.440 If you conduct yourself properly, you can understand that order.

00:12:47.200 To conduct yourself properly, as a scientist, would mean that you follow what the...

00:12:52.780 What careful observation...

00:12:55.780 You follow the pathway that is laid down by careful observation,

00:13:01.200 and you don't deviate from it

00:13:02.940 regardless of your personal concerns.

00:13:05.000 You have to put the pursuit of truth above all.

00:13:08.360 And any scientist who's worth his salt does that.

00:13:10.740 Any scientist who doesn't do that

00:13:12.520 never discovers anything.

00:13:14.600 All they do, in fact,

00:13:15.660 is pollute the scientific endeavor

00:13:17.180 and make things more difficult for everyone else.

00:13:19.760 Then you have to believe

00:13:21.160 that if you pursued the truth properly

00:13:24.860 and assessed the logic in the world,

00:13:26.780 that that would be beneficial to you

00:13:29.860 and to other people.

00:13:31.200 Right there's none of that's proved to begin with those are the your starting assumptions

00:13:35.240 Those are the rules of the scientific game. Those are the religious rules of the scientific game

00:13:42.540 Now a question that arises out of that is how do you make yourself into that kind of person and I would say

00:13:49.120 We don't know how to do that. That's why it's implicit in scientific training. I mean my graduate supervisor at McGill

00:13:55.920 You know he was a

00:13:57.920 practical person he helped his students learn how to conduct themselves so that

00:14:04.320 they could communicate well let's say with other scientists so that they could

00:14:08.340 present their data well so that they could move their independent careers

00:14:14.960 forward in the practical sense but he also insisted explicitly and by example

00:14:20.720 that you didn't muck about with the data right so you couldn't

00:14:25.600 gerrymander your statistics so that you got the result that you needed so that you could publish

00:14:31.920 the paper that you needed so that you could go to the right conference to get a job

00:14:35.680 if you do that you're done as a scientist and so is everybody else who's relying on you but it's

00:14:41.120 it's a tricky thing to manage because you can do a study as a scientist and you can spend a year on

00:14:46.480 it and it doesn't work and you got nothing and you know a year is a long investment and nothing

00:14:52.780 isn't a good return and you have to be willing to take that risk if you're going to actually

00:14:57.480 discover something and maybe it won't be a year it'll be five years of false trails right and

00:15:03.520 you have to accept that so how do you make yourself into that sort of ethical person

00:15:08.300 well there's a broader question under that which is well how do you make yourself into an ethical

00:15:12.800 person in general or even why should you bother well in the scientific realm if you're not ethical

00:15:18.600 you're not a scientist you're

00:15:20.980 you're the sort of narcissist who leads yourself and many other people astray

00:15:28.500 much to the detriment of the entire enterprise and to the broader society especially given the

00:15:34.600 power of scientific tools now it's an academy if you want an actual education with hand-selected

00:15:42.040 professors from top universities around the world bringing the best professors together

00:15:47.320 making sure they're not censored in any way,

00:15:49.280 giving them the audience and the remuneration and appreciation they deserve.

00:15:52.000 And you were true to your word.

00:15:53.020 You gave me absolute intellectual autonomy.

00:15:55.220 I have had it through every course.

00:15:56.820 We figure we can offer people a high-quality university-level education

00:16:00.840 for under $2,000.

00:16:02.420 Well, congratulations, Jordan.

00:16:03.680 It's honestly brilliant.

00:16:04.620 Can't wait to enroll myself.

00:16:05.860 I'll be doing that straight after this.

00:16:08.740 Funjo.

00:16:17.320 So the question of how to make yourself an ethical actor is actually paramount in the scientific world

00:16:24.220 Even though we don't know the answer to it

00:16:25.720 And I would say it's equally paramount in the general world

00:16:28.800 Now, Jung, the alchemists were wrestling with this notion of what sort of person you'd have to be

00:16:35.760 To discover the Philosopher's Stone

00:16:38.040 What attitude would you have to adopt?

00:16:42.440 How would you have to construct yourself if you were going to pursue the truth?

00:16:46.040 when alchemy turned in and there was a technical element to the alchemical enterprise as well

00:16:52.660 the alchemists were the earliest chemists and they were playing around with matter and its

00:16:59.460 transformations under conditions of heat and pressure and they didn't have any idea what

00:17:03.800 they were doing but they were starting to play and the technical side of science blew up like mad

00:17:09.200 starting 500 years ago and so we cottoned on to a technique that enabled the investigation of the

00:17:15.400 material world to progress at an exponential rate. And here we are and we

00:17:23.120 ain't seen nothing yet. I mean all of us have lived through technological

00:17:27.320 transformations that are just a string of miracles and now they're happening

00:17:31.720 every day. And God only knows what the consequence of that's going to be. But

00:17:36.520 Jung said, well we developed the technological side of the enterprise but

00:17:43.880 we left the ethical side

00:17:45.280 unconscious

00:17:46.940 and that's not good

00:17:48.840 because as your tools

00:17:51.560 become more

00:17:53.560 powerful

00:17:54.100 you better be better

00:17:57.520 if you're going to use them because

00:17:59.400 for obvious reasons

00:18:01.160 if you're

00:18:03.420 you know two-year-olds just

00:18:05.080 by sake of example two-year-olds are

00:18:07.480 the most violent human beings 0.81

00:18:09.200 if you group two-year-olds together

00:18:11.640 with other two-year-olds

00:18:12.640 They fight, and they steal, and they bite, and they kick

00:18:16.160 They scream, and they have tantrums

00:18:18.080 They're ready for university at that point

00:18:21.680 And so

00:18:22.840 And then they learn over the next few years

00:18:27.980 Most of them, how to regulate themselves as social beings

00:18:31.540 But two-year-olds aren't very dangerous

00:18:35.560 Because, like, they're this high, and they can't do anything

00:18:37.580 So the fact that they're violent doesn't matter

00:18:39.580 And uncontrolled doesn't really matter

00:18:41.620 you know even if they get in a fight two two-year-olds fighting aren't going to do that

00:18:46.660 much harm to each other but the impulse is there well we're not two-year-olds we've got major league

00:18:53.900 tools and weapons and boy if we don't have our act together those things are going to kick back

00:18:59.920 and that might be more true on the artificial intelligence front than it's being true of

00:19:04.560 anything we've developed yet i mean the hydrogen bomb is a test case you know and so far we've been

00:19:09.920 wise enough, thank God

00:19:11.640 not to use them

00:19:13.580 and they're sufficiently terrifying

00:19:16.540 like self-evidently

00:19:20.160 so that not even Stalin was tempted

00:19:23.340 to actually launch them

00:19:25.800 although there is evidence

00:19:27.620 that he was quite tempted to use them

00:19:29.820 AI is more amorphous in that manner

00:19:33.620 because it isn't as evidently dangerous

00:19:35.820 but we're going to teach

00:19:39.160 hyper-intelligent machines to be like us.

00:19:42.820 So we better be good.

00:19:45.780 Well, how should you be good?

00:19:49.240 Is there even any such thing?

00:19:51.060 And the thing is, we don't really have,

00:19:53.380 we don't have a solid theory of that exactly.

00:19:57.200 We're very confused about that.

00:19:58.580 Most of us are, we're materialist determinists.

00:20:02.800 That's the first problem.

00:20:04.320 We think that if we just gathered enough facts,

00:20:06.460 we would know how to act.

00:20:08.260 That's actually not true.

00:20:09.780 It's technically untrue.

00:20:11.460 It doesn't matter how many facts you gather.

00:20:14.120 You can't figure out how to act from the facts.

00:20:17.960 Partly because there's an infinite number of facts.

00:20:21.440 So, the mere aggregation of facts does not make you wise.

00:20:27.560 There needs to be more to it than that.

00:20:29.760 There's some other domain of knowledge that's necessary.

00:20:34.320 Now, when I wrote Maps of Meaning, I started to figure something out.

00:20:37.680 I made a hypothesis in that book

00:20:41.600 that I've been working on

00:20:42.900 differentiating for

00:20:45.660 still

00:20:47.140 I'm doing that now on stage

00:20:49.420 still trying to work it through

00:20:50.500 I started to understand

00:20:53.120 that there really were two separate

00:20:55.480 domains of knowledge

00:20:56.780 they had to overlap but they weren't

00:20:59.800 reducible to one another

00:21:01.880 and one is the domain

00:21:03.520 of scientific investigation

00:21:05.800 it's the domain of the objective

00:21:08.180 you know when people say

00:21:10.380 well there's nothing but

00:21:12.280 the objective facts but

00:21:13.720 as I said that runs into a major

00:21:16.320 impediment because

00:21:18.100 there's an infinite number of

00:21:20.300 facts and

00:21:21.900 you can't orient yourself in

00:21:24.280 the world of facts unless you

00:21:25.880 sequence the facts in terms of

00:21:28.160 their relative importance

00:21:29.340 and as soon as you sequence the facts

00:21:31.900 in terms of their relative importance

00:21:33.620 you're making a value judgment right because to say one thing comes before another that's a value

00:21:39.680 judgment to say that this is more important than that that's a value judgment and it turns out

00:21:44.300 you can't even perceive the world without making a value judgment you have to decide where to point

00:21:49.420 your eyes every second just to see you cannot see the world without imposing a structure of value on

00:21:56.340 it there's a revolutionary discovery it's emerged in about four different disciplines over the last

00:22:02.780 30 years. No one really understood that that

00:22:04.820 was the case, but that's been demonstrated

00:22:06.960 incontrovertibly. There's no

00:22:08.660 among people who know their

00:22:10.600 field, AI

00:22:12.220 engineers, robotics engineers,

00:22:15.240 literary critics,

00:22:17.020 and biologists

00:22:18.860 and psychologists studying perception.

00:22:21.260 They all came to the same conclusion.

00:22:23.000 That's the conclusion. You see

00:22:24.800 the world through a hierarchy of value.

00:22:26.860 A hierarchy of value, when you describe

00:22:28.920 it, is a story. You see

00:22:30.940 the world through a story.

00:22:32.780 you have to see the world through a story.

00:22:36.620 In fact, part of the reason we like stories so much

00:22:40.020 is because we have to see the world through a structure of value,

00:22:45.400 and stories are how we transmit that.

00:22:47.440 So, for example, when you go see a movie,

00:22:49.900 what you're doing is you're adopting the value structure

00:22:54.220 of the character you're watching on the movie screen.

00:22:57.400 You can imagine it.

00:22:58.560 Imagine a Batman and a Joker.

00:23:00.440 That's a very good example.

00:23:02.780 You know, Batman is a hero.

00:23:04.800 He's a positive figure, complex positive figure,

00:23:07.780 because there's a darkness to him,

00:23:09.180 but he's a complex positive figure. 0.90

00:23:11.080 And the Joker, obviously, evil clown figure. 0.97

00:23:13.940 He's satanic, essentially. 0.97

00:23:16.040 And if you're watching Batman,

00:23:18.620 well, then you embody the ethos of the hero,

00:23:22.240 and that's the experience that you're having in the theater,

00:23:24.740 is the author sketches out for you

00:23:28.420 the aims of the hero, the targets,

00:23:31.400 and you adopt those targets

00:23:33.620 and then your emotions

00:23:35.660 are guide

00:23:37.320 your emotions are guides to

00:23:41.380 the trajectory of that aim

00:23:43.440 so for example, if a hero is aiming at something

00:23:45.640 you're watching a movie and he makes a move

00:23:47.940 towards that goal

00:23:49.780 successfully, you'll feel positive emotion

00:23:52.080 he'll act that out on stage

00:23:53.500 but you'll feel that, because that's what positive emotion

00:23:55.840 is for, by the way, positive emotion indicates

00:23:57.960 to you that you're making progress towards a valued

00:24:00.020 goal. That's a good thing

00:24:02.020 to know too, because it means if you don't have any goals

00:24:04.000 in your life, or if your goals are

00:24:05.980 spread out and fragmented or trivial,

00:24:08.440 you'll have hardly any positive emotion.

00:24:10.840 You have to unify your

00:24:12.080 goals, and you have to have a high order

00:24:14.020 goal, and you

00:24:16.000 have to be able to progress towards it, or you

00:24:17.700 have no positive emotion. And then

00:24:19.960 if the hero is facing impediments

00:24:22.220 and complexity in his

00:24:23.900 pursuit of his aims, he'll act

00:24:26.120 out negative emotion, frustration,

00:24:28.180 anger, disappointment,

00:24:29.220 anxiety, that's the biggest one

00:24:32.140 and in the case of failure

00:24:34.320 pain, disappointment

00:24:36.300 and depression

00:24:38.000 and you'll feel that too

00:24:39.780 and what you're doing is

00:24:41.680 you're trying to replicate

00:24:44.440 emulate, imitate

00:24:46.200 the aim of the hero

00:24:48.860 and to experience the emotions

00:24:51.260 that are associated with that

00:24:52.760 so you can evaluate that as a pathway

00:24:55.160 so if you see a romantic adventure

00:24:57.220 you might find that

00:24:58.280 stimulating and exciting, and you think, that's a good way to live, right?

00:25:04.700 Or if you're watching an anti-hero, the Joker, or a horror movie,

00:25:09.180 you might think, that's a really good thing to avoid.

00:25:13.040 And then the movie helps you sort of sketch out the domain of things that you should

00:25:17.760 desire and approach, and the domain of things that you should

00:25:21.760 cast aside and avoid.

00:25:24.940 It's teaching you how to separate the wheat from the chaff

00:25:28.300 And so

00:25:29.380 The domain of knowledge

00:25:33.660 That orients you ethically

00:25:37.060 Is the domain that is literary

00:25:40.760 It's fiction

00:25:42.340 And we, modern people

00:25:46.460 We contrast fiction and fact

00:25:49.020 Fiction isn't real, fact is real

00:25:51.220 It's like, yeah

00:25:52.760 Ah, fiction is real too.

00:25:57.540 It's real like an abstraction is real.

00:26:00.980 You know, you might say, well, James Bond isn't real.

00:26:04.460 It's like, no, James Bond is hyper-real.

00:26:08.080 It's like mathematics. Is mathematics real?

00:26:10.720 It's like, no, it's hyper-real.

00:26:12.180 It's more real than reality, and you can tell that,

00:26:14.480 because as soon as you're a stellar mathematician,

00:26:18.380 the whole world opens up to you, right?

00:26:20.580 I mean, all of our computational power is a consequence of mathematical mastery.

00:26:25.660 It might be an abstraction, but that doesn't make it not real.

00:26:30.140 And fiction is the same.

00:26:32.080 Fiction is abstraction, but that doesn't mean it's not real.

00:26:35.180 It's hyper-real.

00:26:37.280 You don't go to a movie to see the same old thing.

00:26:40.760 You can just see that at home.

00:26:42.440 You go to a movie to see what's real distilled into what's most real.

00:26:48.600 You know, I've recommended to people frequently that if they're interested in fiction, they might consider reading Dostoevsky.

00:26:57.000 And I would say, read Crime and Punishment, because it's like the world's greatest thriller.

00:27:01.060 It's an amazing book. It's incredibly plotted, tense characterization, amazing conflict, brilliant psychological analysis.

00:27:10.720 But it's also a fast-paced thriller. Like, he really nailed the noir crime genre.

00:27:18.600 and Dostoev's characters are hyper-real.

00:27:21.980 They're like you, except expanded and multiplied, right?

00:27:25.980 Or you could think, like, his villains are like,

00:27:28.280 you take ten villains and you mix them together

00:27:30.260 and you pull out the hyper-villain,

00:27:31.980 and, you know, that's Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.

00:27:36.440 And this is what happens in movies.

00:27:38.120 You get distillations of story, of character.

00:27:44.080 You get distillations of character.

00:27:46.300 That's what fiction is.

00:27:47.320 it's distilled character

00:27:48.900 a character

00:27:50.800 that isn't the world of facts

00:27:52.520 character is a pattern

00:27:55.140 of action and

00:27:56.180 attention in the world

00:27:58.880 it's a

00:28:01.080 different domain

00:28:01.960 what should you attend to

00:28:04.600 that's a question, what should you attend to

00:28:06.900 what should you orient yourself towards

00:28:08.520 and how should you conduct yourself

00:28:10.580 how should you act

00:28:11.480 the world of literature

00:28:14.880 fiction

00:28:16.380 that's its domain of exploration

00:28:19.000 then there's a hierarchy of fiction

00:28:21.540 and you all know that

00:28:24.000 everyone knows that

00:28:24.960 and you might say

00:28:26.060 well why is this relevant

00:28:27.060 you know who the hell cares about

00:28:28.360 the domain of literature

00:28:29.340 I'm interested in stories

00:28:30.760 but so what

00:28:31.440 it's like

00:28:31.880 well yeah

00:28:34.200 you live in a story

00:28:35.640 you live a story

00:28:37.820 so that's so what

00:28:39.520 that's another thing I learned from Jung

00:28:41.760 is like

00:28:42.340 he thought that

00:28:44.300 certainly part of the purpose of

00:28:46.100 psychotherapy, but really part of the purpose of enlightenment itself in life was the discovery of

00:28:52.520 what story was living through you or that you lived. Because there's a story. It might be a

00:29:00.100 tragedy. It might be a fragmented tragedy, which I wouldn't recommend. It might be a fragmented

00:29:05.580 tragedy that's seriously aiming down living through you. You probably want to figure that

00:29:11.980 out, because it's possible you don't want to

00:29:13.700 live out a seriously

00:29:15.840 fragmented tragedy that's aiming

00:29:17.940 down. You know, there's the pleasures

00:29:19.820 of martyrdom in that. Poor

00:29:21.940 me, everything's going from bad to worse.

00:29:24.240 Look at how much I have to bear. The whole

00:29:26.100 world is conspiring against me.

00:29:28.180 You know, and you can make that true,

00:29:30.060 but that's just

00:29:31.980 a pathway to, you know, hell.

00:29:36.280 And maybe you don't want to go there.

00:29:39.300 And you might

00:29:40.020 think, well, no, this has nothing to do with me. It's like, you're either living out a great story

00:29:45.820 or a pathetic one. There's no non-story root here. And then you might ask, well, then what's the 0.94

00:29:53.480 greatest story that could grip you or that you could live by? And that is the central question.

00:29:58.660 It's the central question of literary criticism. It's actually the central religious question.

00:30:03.740 And I sort of mean that by definition. So here's a way of thinking about that. So,

00:30:07.520 you know if you come home after work you turn on the tv you want to watch

00:30:13.000 that's sitcom maybe you know it's shallow it's it's it's shallow entertainment it's not nothing

00:30:20.700 but you know it's not deep and you know the same thing if you're listening to music you know there's

00:30:25.200 kind of music that sort of catches your attention the first time you hear it you like the song but

00:30:30.400 once you've heard it three times you never want to hear it again and then there's another class

00:30:33.960 of music where you might not understand it the first time you listen to it but if you listen to

00:30:38.400 it you know five or ten times you start to understand it and there's some pieces of music

00:30:43.060 you can just listen to forever they're deep and stories are like that there are shallow stories

00:30:49.680 and there are deep stories and you all know that right and it might be that after a hard day at

00:30:55.440 work you just don't have the mental acumen for a deep story and you just want something to

00:31:02.280 preoccupy yourself. But now and then, you know, you might be in the mood for something with a bit

00:31:06.220 more depth. The same thing sort of applies on the conversational front, you know, you can have a

00:31:11.740 shallow conversation with people that you know, stay on the surface of things, and sometimes

00:31:17.420 that's just there to pass the time, and maybe pleasantly enough, but, well, that's not going

00:31:23.520 to work with your wife, not over the long run, or your husband, like, because you have to live with

00:31:28.460 each other and because you have to mutually confront the terrible problems that make up life

00:31:33.900 if you only communicate in a shallow way you won't form a relationship or a personality

00:31:41.240 that has the resilience and wisdom to deal with terrible situations and so you have to engage

00:31:47.620 in deep communication with your partner or you will suffer the consequences when a deep problem

00:31:53.120 comes along. And the reason that you have to

00:31:55.240 look deep into the domain

00:31:57.140 of ethics, let's say, into the fictional

00:31:59.340 domain, into the domain of character

00:32:01.260 is because

00:32:02.380 one reason

00:32:05.240 is because, look, difficult things are coming

00:32:07.220 your way.

00:32:09.080 100% certainty.

00:32:11.100 And you're either going to be there to

00:32:13.100 dance with them when they make

00:32:15.160 themselves manifest, or

00:32:16.620 they're going to come along and there's going to be

00:32:19.180 no you there, and it's

00:32:21.160 just going to grind you up.

00:32:23.120 And even something that might have only hurt you can just destroy you instead.

00:32:28.460 And that seems like not a very good medium to long-term plan.

00:32:35.180 So, that's the reason for depth.

00:32:38.380 And you kind of know this too, eh?

00:32:40.340 Because you'll go to movies.

00:32:43.720 You'll go to see horror movies, for example.

00:32:47.240 Or you'll go see movies about serial killers.

00:32:49.640 You'll go to movies that disgust you, and upset you, and frighten you, paralyze you even.

00:32:55.760 And you think, well, what the hell are you doing?

00:32:57.560 Why in the world would you choose voluntarily and pay for the opportunity to go and expose yourself to a bunch of terrible things?

00:33:05.960 And the answer is, because part of you knows that there's some wisdom in going to voluntarily expose yourself to terrible things.

00:33:12.920 Because terrible things are coming your way.

00:33:15.000 and you better get used to it

00:33:17.320 and maybe even get good at it

00:33:18.760 and one of the ways you can do that

00:33:20.100 is to practice a bit

00:33:21.180 and fiction, simulation

00:33:24.280 because fiction is simulation

00:33:25.780 can help you simulate that

00:33:28.680 and you don't want to

00:33:30.600 you don't want to have something terrible

00:33:34.160 that happens to you

00:33:35.620 be the first difficult thing

00:33:37.180 you ever contended with

00:33:38.380 like that's just a recipe for disaster

00:33:40.600 and that's a good thing to know about your kids

00:33:43.120 It's like, well, how much should you protect your kids?

00:33:45.720 It's like, you're not there to protect your kids

00:33:48.800 You're there to help them learn how to confront

00:33:53.980 Everything that's coming their way

00:33:56.920 And hopefully to master that

00:33:58.820 And that means that you have to

00:34:00.560 Courageously expose them to the whole world

00:34:05.320 And that's a terrible thing, you know

00:34:07.780 There's this great sculpture by Michelangelo

00:34:11.060 Paeta, it's Mary

00:34:13.220 and she has

00:34:15.160 the body of her son Christ

00:34:17.220 as an adult in her arms

00:34:18.940 after he's been taken off the cross

00:34:20.660 and he's all broken to bits

00:34:22.060 and she's

00:34:24.640 displaying him

00:34:26.640 that's a good way of thinking about it to the world

00:34:28.940 and Michelangelo carved that thing

00:34:30.740 I think when he was 24

00:34:32.020 which is really something because it's a piece of work 1.00

00:34:35.240 and I always think of it as the female

00:34:37.180 crucifix

00:34:38.040 why? Well because

00:34:40.540 It's a portrait of a mother 0.95

00:34:43.760 Offering her broken child to the world

00:34:47.320 Well, that's what you do as a mother 0.99

00:34:49.300 Or you're what breaks your child

00:34:55.480 You know, that's a vicious choice

00:34:58.880 Freud knew this, you know

00:35:00.340 He knew that one of the central dangers in families

00:35:03.120 Was an Oedipal relationship 0.98

00:35:06.700 And in an Oedipal relationship 0.98

00:35:08.580 the protective capacity of the mother is over-emphasized and so she holds the child 0.94

00:35:19.100 too close and there can be a sexual element to that because when things get out of hand 0.69

00:35:24.320 all sorts of things get out of hand at the same time and in the Oedipal situation the mother

00:35:30.220 encourages the child to remain infantile and then she becomes the destructive force because

00:35:35.700 no infantile adult can

00:35:38.300 can what?

00:35:41.820 No infantile adult can

00:35:43.420 well, certainly can't thrive

00:35:47.060 because

00:35:49.600 you have to be an adult to deal with the world

00:35:53.300 because the world's difficult

00:35:54.820 and so you have to prepare your children to deal with that

00:35:57.580 and you do that by

00:35:59.040 pushing them forward

00:36:02.180 you know, maybe right on the edge of their

00:36:04.900 ability to develop and you have to establish relationship with your child to do that because

00:36:09.720 you have to know how much they can take right some kids man when i used to take my little kids to the

00:36:14.600 playground when i took mikayla to the playground she would sort of hang around my legs for a while 0.91

00:36:21.080 you know she'd sit stand off to the edge and watch the other kids and it would take her two or three 0.98

00:36:27.340 minutes before she'd start moving away you know into the playground and then she'd be out there

00:36:33.040 playing she was she had that watchful cautiousness and julian my son he was like a puppy that you

00:36:39.040 hold over water you know if you hold a puppy over water their legs will be going before they hit the

00:36:44.500 water and that was he was like on the playground you take him to the playground and before you

00:36:47.960 put him on the ground his legs were already moving and he was just gone you know and so different

00:36:53.420 kids have different paces and the rate at which they can expose themselves to novel and dangerous

00:36:59.860 situations varies, and there's

00:37:01.800 temperamental variability there, just as

00:37:03.820 there is with all people, and you have to

00:37:05.680 establish a relationship with a person to

00:37:07.820 see where the

00:37:09.700 proper edge is for them,

00:37:11.920 and then you have to keep them on the

00:37:13.780 edge. That's what you

00:37:15.520 want to do, and should

00:37:19.700 do, and would find most exciting

00:37:21.860 and attractive if you managed also

00:37:23.860 with your wife or husband.

00:37:25.900 So you want to keep them on their toes,

00:37:27.480 and that's what they want too, and

00:37:29.160 And, you know, the word Eve, you know, Adam and Eve, Eve.

00:37:33.900 The word Eve means beneficial adversary in Hebrew.

00:37:39.440 And you think, well, what does that mean?

00:37:40.840 It's like, well, it's like a sparring partner.

00:37:44.820 Or maybe it's one-on-one pickup basketball and you have to pick an opponent.

00:37:49.020 It's like, you could pick someone you could just stomp and then you'd win.

00:37:53.940 Or you could pick someone who's a match for you.

00:37:57.300 or maybe even a little bit better at some things.

00:37:59.560 And so they keep you on the edge, that edge of development.

00:38:02.680 And that's an exciting place to be.

00:38:04.780 It's a challenging place to be.

00:38:06.280 And if the game gets a little rough, then, you know, things can go too far.

00:38:11.220 But fundamentally, you want to be in that zone.

00:38:14.720 It's called the zone of proximal development.

00:38:17.040 That's the place where you're learning optimally.

00:38:19.320 And if you're challenged, if you're dancing with someone properly,

00:38:23.580 then you're in the zone of proximal development.

00:38:25.840 that's also the zone of play

00:38:28.700 Tammy touched on that a little bit

00:38:31.140 tonight when she was talking

00:38:32.160 she said that one of the things

00:38:33.380 she realized was that

00:38:34.440 you couldn't enter that

00:38:36.760 domain of play

00:38:38.440 if there were

00:38:39.940 issues between you

00:38:43.060 that were

00:38:43.860 not thoroughly negotiated through

00:38:47.300 and that's a really useful thing to know

00:38:49.940 I knew as a clinician

00:38:51.080 I noted that with my clients

00:38:52.960 they had to spend about 90 minutes a week 0.99

00:38:56.560 in business discussion with their wives, let's say 1.00

00:39:00.600 or their husbands 0.97

00:39:01.560 to clear out just the mechanical issues 1.00

00:39:05.760 that arose from the difficulties of joint life

00:39:08.820 economic issues, issues of household maintenance

00:39:12.840 how to deal with the kids

00:39:15.340 day-to-day practicalities

00:39:17.300 it's not that surprising

00:39:19.900 because running a household is as complex

00:39:22.040 is running a small business

00:39:23.280 and the notion that you'd have to spend

00:39:24.680 a certain amount of time every week

00:39:26.900 dealing with, let's say,

00:39:28.520 managerial and administrative issues,

00:39:30.940 it's sort of self-evident

00:39:31.960 when you think about it that way.

00:39:33.460 But it's also very interesting to know,

00:39:35.260 and I do think it's true,

00:39:36.280 that if you don't do that,

00:39:37.440 well, two things happen.

00:39:38.860 You don't get to play.

00:39:41.140 That's not good.

00:39:42.600 But then this is the other thing that happens

00:39:44.480 because you might say,

00:39:45.240 well, I don't want to do that

00:39:46.100 because difficult things come up.

00:39:47.700 It's like, well, that's for sure

00:39:48.960 because life's difficult.

00:39:51.060 And my advice, I suppose, for my clinical clients was,

00:39:55.260 well, you could either spend 90 minutes a week talking to your wife,

00:39:57.900 or you can spend 90 minutes a week talking to her divorce lawyer

00:40:02.580 for, you know, $300 an hour for 10 years while you fight over your kids.

00:40:07.240 Those are your options.

00:40:09.380 Or, you know, if you don't make it to the divorce court,

00:40:11.960 you can just leave all these things that should be talked about undone,

00:40:15.740 And then your whole life will degenerate into a kind of abysmal complexity of, what, confusion and bitterness.

00:40:26.760 And there's no play in that, that's for sure.

00:40:30.960 There's just an ever-accelerating aging.

00:40:36.000 And if things go badly enough, the desire just to hurt each other, that just seems like a very bad idea.

00:40:42.700 So you spend 90 minutes a week, you know, discussing how to keep things straight

00:40:48.800 And where you're both aiming, and why you're both aiming in that direction

00:40:52.480 And how you do it jointly

00:40:53.680 Okay, so back to the dream and the story

00:40:59.640 Well, the literary endeavor is the dream of

00:41:05.820 It's the collective dream

00:41:07.980 That's a good way of thinking about it

00:41:10.000 We're all dreaming up how we should act, you know, and our great storytellers aggregate our theories about how we should act and portray them back to us.

00:41:19.000 They do that in movies, they do that in books, they do that in TV shows.

00:41:24.000 Anything that's got that fictional and dramatic end is the reflection back to us of our dreams about how we should act.

00:41:35.000 How might you make that practical?

00:41:40.720 Taking a page from Jung.

00:41:42.920 Jung said.

00:41:46.360 You're going to act out a story.

00:41:48.820 It might be a tragedy.

00:41:50.920 You should figure out what your story is.

00:41:52.700 And you should figure out what you want it to be.

00:41:54.720 And then maybe you could act that out instead.

00:41:57.700 So I made these exercises.

00:42:01.380 With my colleagues.

00:42:02.800 My former graduate supervisor.

00:42:04.880 Robert Peel.

00:42:06.000 Who is a very good guy.

00:42:07.120 Who I still work with.

00:42:08.280 He's in his mid-80s now.

00:42:09.500 and a student of mine at Harvard

00:42:11.280 who was an MIT-trained engineer, Daniel Higgetts.

00:42:14.960 And we talked through this sort of thing a lot.

00:42:18.100 And we wanted to do something practical about it.

00:42:20.700 And we had some rules for how we were going to proceed practically

00:42:23.900 when we were developing psychological interventions.

00:42:26.620 And the rules were,

00:42:28.680 we had to build an intervention that wouldn't hurt anyone.

00:42:33.460 That's the first thing you should do

00:42:34.920 if you're a medical practitioner or a clinical practitioner. 1.00

00:42:37.500 Your first rule should be, don't do something stupid that will hurt people. 0.99

00:42:41.820 That's the Hippocratic Oath, you know. 1.00

00:42:45.360 And, yes, well.

00:42:51.360 Yeah, the other thing that you learn as a wise social scientist as well, 1.00

00:42:56.520 is that just because you think your stupid thing will help people doesn't mean it will. 0.99

00:43:01.340 Because there's way more ways to hurt people than in order to help them. 0.99

00:43:04.220 And your mere good intentions, that's nothing.

00:43:07.500 So, I'll give you an example of that.

00:43:10.680 So, for a while, psychologists put psychopaths in prison in group therapy.

00:43:16.720 Yeah, well, see, look, there's some wisdom there.

00:43:19.120 You can see why that maybe wasn't such a good idea. 0.92

00:43:22.160 And the reason it wasn't a good idea was because they got a lot better at being psychopaths.

00:43:26.700 With all that practice.

00:43:29.040 And so, and now it's actually quite well documented.

00:43:31.260 Because, you know, dealing with antisocial people is a real problem.

00:43:34.460 and psychologists and other professionals

00:43:38.080 have tried to crack that problem for a long time.

00:43:41.660 And one of the things they definitely learned was

00:43:43.500 don't group psychopaths together so that they can communicate

00:43:46.400 and don't teach them psychological tricks.

00:43:50.640 So, you know, and it sounds like a good idea.

00:43:53.380 Take the poor psychopaths, let them unburden their soul,

00:43:56.600 walk them through the psychotherapeutic process with other people.

00:43:59.380 Everyone will win.

00:44:00.560 It's like, yeah, especially the psychopaths, as it turns out.

00:44:03.800 So that's just one example.

00:44:06.900 So we wanted to build tools that wouldn't hurt anybody. We wanted to build them

00:44:11.060 so that they were extremely inexpensive and widely distributable and scalable and would require no administrative

00:44:18.920 overhead or intermediation, no supervision.

00:44:21.800 And we wanted to do all that at a profit so that we could continue generating more tools and

00:44:28.760 also generate enough capital to market the

00:44:31.420 the resultant programs and so the first program we built

00:44:39.000 was the self-authoring suite and so i'll just tell you about it a bit it's something you might

00:44:45.500 think about doing like you don't have to do it but you have to do something like it

00:44:49.200 and you do do something like it you're either going to do it badly or well and you might as

00:44:54.780 well do it well and you might as well do it consciously because otherwise you'll do it

00:44:57.840 badly and unconsciously and that's not as good and it's takes a lot more time and there's a lot

00:45:05.400 more misery along the way so you might as well do it consciously one of the things you do as a

00:45:10.740 psychotherapist is you help people flesh out a vision for the future and you help them

00:45:15.100 straighten out the story of their past and story is like a map i suppose it's it's a description

00:45:23.700 of the territory with an indication of how you should conduct yourself while you're traversing

00:45:29.140 the territory. And in the self-authoring suite, there are three exercises, and the first one

00:45:35.000 helps you deal with your past. Now, some people, this is germane to rule nine. If old memories

00:45:43.840 still upset you, write them down carefully and completely. If old memories still upset you,

00:45:48.740 if they still grip you, they come back involuntarily,

00:45:53.980 it means that there are holes in your map of the past.

00:45:59.680 There are places you've been that you went to accidentally that were not good places,

00:46:04.100 and you don't know how the hell you got there.

00:46:07.560 And the wise, unconscious parts of your mind that are concerned with threat,

00:46:14.620 they don't like that.

00:46:16.000 they think

00:46:17.200 your map of the world was faulty enough

00:46:20.320 so that you deviated into this hellish place once before

00:46:23.660 and you don't know why

00:46:25.600 so that means it could happen again

00:46:27.820 and so insofar as that part of your mind

00:46:30.900 is convinced that it could happen again

00:46:32.680 because you don't know what happened

00:46:34.680 it'll never let you forget

00:46:36.360 you can't forget anything you don't understand

00:46:39.320 especially if it hurt you

00:46:41.100 so in the past authoring program

00:46:44.380 this is what you do in therapy

00:46:45.860 which one of the things you might do in therapy

00:46:48.660 is we have you break your life down

00:46:50.600 into seven epochs

00:46:52.600 you can break it down however you want

00:46:54.720 you know we kind of naturally do that

00:46:56.200 if you tell the story of your life to someone

00:46:57.900 when I was in elementary school

00:46:59.740 when I was in junior high school

00:47:01.160 when I met my wife

00:47:02.320 my first relationship

00:47:03.400 however that appears to you

00:47:05.620 imagine you broke your life down into seven sections

00:47:08.580 and then said well just write down

00:47:11.040 the most significant things that happened to you

00:47:14.200 during those times

00:47:15.560 negative and positive and then why do you think the negative things happened and

00:47:22.980 what were you doing right so that the positive things happen and how could you do

00:47:28.440 more of that and less of the things that got you in trouble and that's worth revisiting you know

00:47:36.120 because some of the things you do when you're like 17 or 16 or 5 or 30 you know you were young and 0.91

00:47:42.260 you didn't know what the hell was going on and you did stupid things and now maybe you're older 0.96

00:47:46.480 and somewhat wiser and you can go back and take a look and you can think well here's how I should 0.99

00:47:51.140 have conducted myself and if I conduct myself like that improved me going forward things will

00:47:58.400 work better and the part of your mind that keeps track of how unstable your existence is will be

00:48:04.760 very pleased to see you sort those things out and that's very good for your health by the way because

00:48:10.120 one of the ways your brain computes how stressed you should be on average

00:48:15.880 is by computing how many terrible things have happened to you in the past

00:48:19.960 that you don't know how to fix.

00:48:22.080 And the more of those there are, the more your brain thinks

00:48:24.380 that's how dangerous the world is.

00:48:26.980 And the more dangerous the world is, the more you're on edge and stressed.

00:48:31.760 And stress makes you old.

00:48:34.640 The more stressed you are, the faster you will age.

00:48:37.780 there's no distinction between those things

00:48:40.300 and so if you can clean up your past

00:48:42.080 you lower your levels of stress

00:48:44.220 you improve your immunological functioning

00:48:46.000 and you decrease the rate at which you age

00:48:48.520 plus you won't be plagued by horrible memories

00:48:51.740 and you should be able to move forward with more effectiveness

00:48:55.020 so that's a pretty good deal

00:48:57.440 and you can do that badly

00:48:59.320 and so one of the instructions we have in the self-authoring program is

00:49:02.960 don't be writing this down perfectly

00:49:06.120 it's like what the hell do you know

00:49:07.680 And you're not a professional writer anyways

00:49:09.740 And so just get it down 0.99

00:49:11.260 As stupidly as necessary 0.99

00:49:14.520 And it'll improve as you write through it 0.99

00:49:17.260 You can edit it and clean it up

00:49:18.740 Make it more coherent

00:49:20.160 And you want to work on it until you think

00:49:22.900 Now I've got it

00:49:24.660 Because you want to have it 0.99

00:49:25.700 Because it's your bloody life 0.97

00:49:27.100 And so you want to have it

00:49:28.480 And then the future authoring program

00:49:31.580 This is the one we did the most research on

00:49:34.640 There was a fair bit of evidence

00:49:36.500 before we made these programs

00:49:37.880 that if you got people to write about their lives

00:49:40.020 that that did produce improvements

00:49:43.200 in physical and psychological health

00:49:45.640 and that those improvements were proportionate

00:49:48.680 to the degree that deeper understanding

00:49:51.760 had been reached.

00:49:53.000 It wasn't a consequence of emotional expression

00:49:55.840 or catharsis.

00:49:57.220 It was a consequence of coming

00:49:59.180 to a more sophisticated understanding

00:50:01.840 of how you got to where you were

00:50:03.740 and the ability, development of the ability

00:50:07.480 to protect yourself against that as you were going forward.

00:50:10.060 Why do you remember the past?

00:50:13.020 So that you can duplicate things that worked in the past 1.00

00:50:16.780 and so that you can cease to do the stupid things 0.99

00:50:20.160 that hurt you in the past, in the future. 0.99

00:50:22.660 You don't remember the past to keep a record of it.

00:50:26.240 You remember the past so you can extract out

00:50:28.660 useful information going forward.

00:50:31.440 Well, that's the story of your life.

00:50:33.740 That useful information going forward.

00:50:35.940 That's the story of your life.

00:50:38.040 On the future side.

00:50:41.180 So here is, imagine there's a couple of different ways of conceptualizing yourself.

00:50:45.780 You sort of conceptualize yourself as a clockwork robot.

00:50:48.680 That's driven forward by deterministic impulses and needs and drives.

00:50:55.180 And you're sort of a machine, a deterministic machine.

00:50:58.460 Driven forward by causal processes in the world.

00:51:01.880 That's the modern metaphor for a human being, and it's wrong.

00:51:07.380 It's wrong partly because no machine that works like that can survive into the future,

00:51:13.360 because the future is unpredictable.

00:51:15.400 And so if you're just an automaton, you'll do the same thing that you did in the past,

00:51:20.720 but the future isn't the same as the past.

00:51:23.100 So that's not going to work.

00:51:25.460 So whatever you are, it's not that.

00:51:27.500 It's also not exactly the case that what you confront is

00:51:33.980 A world of objects that drive you forward

00:51:37.320 What you seem to confront, what your consciousness is for

00:51:40.460 Is to take the possibility that's in front of you

00:51:44.500 And to determine how it might be shaped

00:51:47.940 Now, you know this

00:51:49.640 You wake up in the morning

00:51:51.780 And you're not thinking about the furniture in the bedroom

00:51:56.000 you're not thinking about the objects around you

00:51:58.400 you're thinking, oh, it's a new day

00:52:00.660 and maybe you're happy about that, maybe you're not

00:52:02.540 but you're definitely thinking it's a new day

00:52:04.360 and you're starting to grapple with the possibilities of the day, right?

00:52:07.660 because the day is a set of unrevealed possibilities

00:52:11.560 that's what it is

00:52:13.040 it's not a set of determined objects

00:52:15.660 it's a set of unrevealed possibilities

00:52:17.640 and you have a certain degree of choice

00:52:22.700 in relationship to that set of possibilities

00:52:24.800 And if you have any sense when you're sitting there in bed, you're trying to figure out how to turn that realm of possibility into the actuality that you would like it to be.

00:52:35.100 Now, you can be all bent and warped in that pursuit because maybe you're angry and bitter and resentful.

00:52:39.880 And all you can do is conjure up images of how you could make your life worse or someone else's and extract out the revenge that goes along with that.

00:52:47.440 Or you could be thinking, you know, seize the day.

00:52:51.780 What could I do with this expansive possibility that's in front of me?

00:52:55.920 That'll certainly be true on a daily basis,

00:52:58.740 and it's true on a weekly basis, and monthly, and yearly.

00:53:01.800 It's this tremendous expanse of potential in front of you,

00:53:05.360 and you're called upon to grapple with it.

00:53:08.780 To what end?

00:53:10.980 That's the question.

00:53:12.340 That's always the question.

00:53:13.880 To what end?

00:53:16.120 To what end?

00:53:17.380 That's the question of fiction.

00:53:20.480 Towards what end?

00:53:22.260 Hero or villain?

00:53:23.640 There's a choice.

00:53:25.680 And that's just the beginning of the choice.

00:53:28.540 To what end?

00:53:30.600 Well, the future authoring program helps people figure that out.

00:53:34.020 So, it's based in part on a prayer.

00:53:39.660 I think thought, by the way, is secularized prayer.

00:53:43.540 Because this is what you do if you pray.

00:53:46.820 You ask yourself a question that you want the answer to.

00:53:50.020 You have to want the answer

00:53:51.920 You actually have to want the answer

00:53:55.020 And that's a dangerous place to start

00:53:57.840 You know, because you might ask yourself 0.98

00:53:59.560 Do you want to know what your wife thinks?

00:54:01.420 And generally the answer to that is

00:54:02.680 No, not really

00:54:03.740 But probably it'd be better if you knew

00:54:07.520 Even though it would mean

00:54:09.780 There was a lot of work in front of you

00:54:11.280 Might be work that would be good for you to do

00:54:13.660 You know, and that

00:54:14.600 And vice versa, of course

00:54:16.680 What might you pray for, let's say

00:54:24.300 Well, you might think

00:54:26.460 Well, if I could have

00:54:27.780 If I could be who I could be

00:54:30.500 And if I could have what I needed and wanted

00:54:32.960 Who would I be and what would that look like?

00:54:36.340 And this is a question

00:54:37.480 And our culture is remarkably bad at this

00:54:40.440 Like, miraculously bad at this

00:54:42.060 We never ask people this question

00:54:44.160 Not seriously

00:54:45.860 not even once

00:54:46.980 in their whole life 1.00

00:54:48.000 and that is a kind of miracle of stupidity 1.00

00:54:50.620 because there isn't a more important question 1.00

00:54:52.980 and so this exercise helps you grapple with that

00:54:55.360 it's like here's the deal

00:54:56.400 there's a gospel phrase

00:54:59.840 that underlies some of this conceptually

00:55:02.140 knock and the door will open

00:55:04.520 ask and you will receive

00:55:06.600 seek and you will find

00:55:08.420 you think well there's no way that's true

00:55:10.740 it's like

00:55:11.260 maybe you're not asking

00:55:14.080 With enough commitment

00:55:16.840 Because if you really want the answer to a question

00:55:20.760 It means you really want the answer

00:55:22.620 That means you'll give up anything to get the answer

00:55:25.640 And that's a hell of a thing to decide

00:55:28.000 Especially when the answer is going to be a little on the unsettling side

00:55:32.140 Because you can sit on the edge of your bed

00:55:33.780 And you can think 1.00

00:55:34.220 What stupid things am I doing to muck up my life 1.00

00:55:37.520 And if you want an answer 1.00

00:55:39.400 You'll get it

00:55:42.560 So generally, you don't ask the question, but you could.

00:55:47.000 In this exercise, you're asked to put yourself into a particular state of mind.

00:55:51.780 It's like a meditative state of mind.

00:55:53.160 It's not any kind of, you know, Zen, Buddhist, Western, mystical, you know, West Coast, California, mystical exercise.

00:56:02.680 It's just, it's pretty straightforward.

00:56:04.640 It's like, just imagine for a moment that would be okay if things were set right around you.

00:56:10.360 Despite all your flaws

00:56:12.280 Give yourself the benefit of the doubt

00:56:14.600 What would you say

00:56:18.800 As an act of mercy

00:56:20.720 I suppose

00:56:22.260 Who could you be in five years

00:56:25.360 If you could be who you wanted to be

00:56:27.120 What would that look like

00:56:28.000 Just in principle

00:56:29.760 Don't let yourself dream

00:56:31.560 That's the reference back to the dream

00:56:34.340 Let your imagination run

00:56:36.300 To daydream like a kid

00:56:38.120 Five years from now

00:56:39.560 You can be who you want to be

00:56:41.200 You can have what you need and want

00:56:42.980 But you have to figure out what it is

00:56:44.720 You have to allow yourself

00:56:46.540 To envision what it is

00:56:48.920 And that's dangerous too

00:56:50.040 Because once you know what you want and need

00:56:52.220 You can deny it to yourself

00:56:54.140 You can betray yourself

00:56:55.940 And so people will

00:56:57.420 Break rule three

00:57:00.280 Do not hide unwanted things in the fog

00:57:03.400 We hide from ourselves

00:57:04.720 What we most deeply want and need

00:57:06.440 Because we're afraid we'll betray ourselves

00:57:08.320 In the pursuit

00:57:09.920 And fair enough, because you betray yourself.

00:57:11.700 But it's a very bad strategy.

00:57:13.700 Because you will not get what you want unless you aim for it.

00:57:16.800 And you will not aim for it if you don't know what it is.

00:57:19.720 And you won't know what it is unless you let yourself in on the secret.

00:57:24.580 Okay, so write for 15 minutes.

00:57:27.340 What do you want?

00:57:28.100 What do you need?

00:57:28.940 And who could you be?

00:57:30.660 Don't edit.

00:57:31.880 Don't criticize.

00:57:33.300 You're not going to get it right anyways.

00:57:34.840 But you can sketch out an approximation, right?

00:57:38.400 and that's not bad

00:57:39.620 that'll put you farther ahead than you are now

00:57:42.360 and then you can work on it again

00:57:43.780 in a year or two years

00:57:44.980 when you know you're a little sharper

00:57:46.760 because you've moved a little farther down the path

00:57:48.940 any plan that's conscious and thought through

00:57:52.720 is better than no plan

00:57:54.360 and so you might think 1.00

00:57:55.880 well I'd make a stupid plan 1.00

00:57:57.440 it's like fair enough 1.00

00:57:58.460 make a stupid plan 1.00

00:58:00.540 implement it 1.00

00:58:01.780 then you'll find out why it's stupid 1.00

00:58:04.380 and then you can make a better plan 1.00

00:58:06.540 and that's life man 1.00

00:58:07.680 It's a successive sequence of stupid plans 1.00

00:58:12.640 That gets somewhat better as you proceed 1.00

00:58:15.320 And so, if you don't make a stupid plan 1.00

00:58:18.560 Well, that's right 1.00

00:58:19.340 So you sketch out what you want

00:58:24.280 Now you've got something to aim for

00:58:25.600 That's useful, because as we already pointed out

00:58:28.100 If you're not moving towards something that you want to aim at

00:58:30.700 You don't have any positive emotion

00:58:32.240 And that means you're hopeless

00:58:33.980 And so, if you set a goal

00:58:37.040 and you see yourself moving towards the goal now you have hope and that's a pretty good deal in a

00:58:44.000 world that's rife with suffering to have hope you know and hope is a good bulwark against catastrophe

00:58:51.140 and so if you're aiming at something you regard as noble and worthwhile now you have hope and

00:58:57.400 then you can break it down so that even someone who lacks talent as much as you could make some

00:59:05.520 progress in that direction and it turns out that's all you really need to do

00:59:09.360 because progress feeds on itself and starts to accelerate and so you know if

00:59:13.980 you set your goal and you're moving slowly to begin with as long as you're

00:59:17.040 moving forward you're gonna move faster and faster and that's an iron law of

00:59:21.120 reality just like if you're aiming down you'll aim down faster and faster and

00:59:25.980 so the next part of the exercise is the reverse it's like okay now we have a

00:59:32.040 A vision, laid out, positive vision, you can pursue that.

00:59:37.000 It's got to be something like, something you'd commit to, you know, a game you'd like to play.

00:59:42.040 If it could only make itself realized, right?

00:59:44.920 It has to justify the sacrifices that would go along with its pursuit.

00:59:48.540 And you have to be convinced of that. It has to be an honest game.

00:59:51.520 And then you can do the reverse. You can think, okay, if you took stock of your faults,

00:59:56.120 which you know of, most of them, some of them anyways, and you really let that get out of hand,

01:00:00.940 What sort of hell could you have

01:00:03.560 In five years

01:00:04.440 And you want to make that concrete

01:00:07.040 So you know

01:00:07.800 Meth, addiction, alcoholism

01:00:11.340 Serial affairs of the most

01:00:13.560 Tawdry type

01:00:14.480 Catastrophic failure at business

01:00:17.080 I don't know, whatever your

01:00:19.060 Vice happens to be

01:00:21.280 And you want to think that through

01:00:23.200 It's like, okay, if I just let myself go

01:00:25.120 What's the nature of the hell I would find myself in

01:00:27.860 And you want to write that down

01:00:29.460 because then the next time you're tempted in that direction you can remember

01:00:32.860 that's where this leads and it leads away from the place i want to go how about i don't do it

01:00:40.900 well then you have a place to aim from and a place to run away from and that

01:00:45.720 puts you in a pretty motivated position and you need to be in a pretty motivated position because

01:00:50.060 there's lots of obstacles to get the hell out of the way and then you might say i had clients who

01:00:56.100 said, well, I don't really know what I want. I don't know what to do. I don't know where the

01:01:01.240 meaning is to be found in life. And so I thought about that for a long time. And I thought, well,

01:01:04.820 where do people find meaning? You know, just on average. It's like, well, here's seven

01:01:11.000 ways of breaking your life into parts. Most people want an intimate relationship.

01:01:19.720 Now, maybe you don't.

01:01:22.320 You probably do.

01:01:24.300 But maybe you don't, you know.

01:01:26.020 And maybe it's fortunate for someone else that you don't.

01:01:29.140 But usually, it's usually a bitter lie that you don't.

01:01:34.680 But maybe you're misanthropic and better off on yourself, by yourself.

01:01:38.140 I'm not saying every single person has to do all seven of these things.

01:01:41.720 But they're good rules of thumb, especially if you don't know which way is up.

01:01:45.360 It's like, here's some ways that might be up.

01:01:47.360 have a relationship, okay?

01:01:50.520 If you could have the relationship you wanted,

01:01:52.780 what would it look like?

01:01:54.900 And this has to be,

01:01:55.760 there has to be some detail in this,

01:01:57.140 and you can imagine this fairly concretely.

01:01:59.040 Imagine that you're sitting down to dinner

01:02:00.680 with your family,

01:02:02.960 just for an hour, ordinary day,

01:02:04.480 and it goes really well.

01:02:07.420 And you'll have a little fantasy about that.

01:02:09.060 It's like, what does that look like?

01:02:10.340 Well, the food's good, let's say.

01:02:12.320 Maybe you even get served something you'd like to eat

01:02:14.660 without a lot of bitterness.

01:02:16.160 as a side dish.

01:02:18.820 And, you know, maybe your kids are there

01:02:20.440 and they're polite.

01:02:21.700 They contribute to the conversation

01:02:23.180 and they're thankful to the person

01:02:24.760 who made the meal.

01:02:26.920 Imagine that.

01:02:27.700 And you communicate a little bit, you know,

01:02:29.800 and maybe there's a bit of game in that,

01:02:32.040 a little play in that, you know,

01:02:33.400 and nobody's on their phone.

01:02:35.980 Or if they're on their phone,

01:02:37.520 they're on their phone judiciously.

01:02:39.020 You know, I don't know,

01:02:39.620 whatever your vision is,

01:02:40.780 but that's very concrete.

01:02:42.120 It's kind of mundane in a way, you know,

01:02:43.760 but you're going to have dinner

01:02:45.080 10,000 times

01:02:48.060 in the rest of your life.

01:02:49.980 It's going to be 10,000 to 15,000 times.

01:02:52.760 15,000 hours.

01:02:54.640 You might as well get that right.

01:02:57.060 You know, how you're treated

01:02:58.200 when you walk through the door

01:02:59.460 after you work all day.

01:03:01.040 These are all parts

01:03:02.000 of an intimate relationship.

01:03:03.620 You might as well have a vision for that.

01:03:04.960 You could always share that

01:03:05.760 with your partner

01:03:06.460 and join your visions together

01:03:08.540 and maybe you could both

01:03:09.560 be who you need to be

01:03:11.400 and get what you want.

01:03:13.740 Family.

01:03:15.080 Cammie has another story that she tells about how she decided to work on her relationship with her father and her sisters and put that in order.

01:03:23.200 You know, and she did that when she was like 45.

01:03:26.060 Pretty, you know, relatively late in life, but she made it a priority and it worked.

01:03:30.560 And so for 20 years, she had a great relationship with her sisters and her father.

01:03:34.600 And that had cascading positive consequences.

01:03:38.000 It's like, put your family in order.

01:03:40.880 First of all, figure out what that would look like. 1.00

01:03:42.580 And you know, you might have some miserable son of a bitch in your family 1.00

01:03:45.380 That there's just no moving forward with 1.00

01:03:48.280 And like that happens, you know

01:03:49.920 You get people who are so ensconced in their misery

01:03:52.500 That there's no possibility of communication

01:03:55.460 It's like, okay, well you're going to have to walk around that person

01:03:58.320 And you know, and that happens

01:04:00.320 I'm not trying to be, you know, naively optimistic about this

01:04:03.980 But most of the time the people who are in your family are no worse than you

01:04:07.680 And so, and they'd be actually kind of happy

01:04:11.140 If you made it a priority to sort things out

01:04:13.600 And one of the ways you can do that

01:04:15.440 Is to really listen to them

01:04:16.880 And that's true with people in general

01:04:19.880 But that's a good goal

01:04:20.800 Put your family in order

01:04:22.480 What do you want on the friendship front?

01:04:25.960 You know, it's good to surround yourself

01:04:27.580 With people who are happy

01:04:28.580 When things are going well for you

01:04:30.040 And who commiserate with you genuinely

01:04:32.740 When things aren't so good

01:04:34.000 And it's okay to have friends like that

01:04:37.180 And you could make that a goal

01:04:38.420 And you might think

01:04:41.080 Well that means I would have to not associate with certain people

01:04:43.840 And I would say well

01:04:44.700 Maybe they need to learn that

01:04:46.580 Because if they're helping you aim down

01:04:49.480 When you're trying to aim up

01:04:50.540 That's not so good for you

01:04:53.020 And it's not so good for them

01:04:54.060 So a little judgment on that front

01:04:56.580 You know if it's not narcissistic

01:04:59.940 It's a good thing

01:05:02.040 Not a bad thing

01:05:02.860 You have a plan for your job or your career

01:05:05.680 Job is something you have to do to keep body and soul together

01:05:08.540 You wouldn't necessarily pick it

01:05:09.820 It doesn't necessarily have to be intrinsically meaningful.

01:05:12.340 But you're pulling against the traces.

01:05:14.940 And you're contributing to the community.

01:05:16.820 And you're making enough money so that you can support your family.

01:05:19.240 And so good for you.

01:05:20.260 And a plan for that would be all right.

01:05:21.880 Maybe you're a bit more fortunate.

01:05:25.100 And you have a career.

01:05:26.280 And so you have a job that has some intrinsic meaning.

01:05:28.540 And you can develop that too.

01:05:29.700 But either way, job or career, why not have a plan?

01:05:34.240 You know, I worked with people in my clinical practice.

01:05:36.460 One plan we often made was,

01:05:38.060 Let's see if we can figure out how to make you three times as much money in three years

01:05:42.180 Like what would it take to do that?

01:05:45.100 And that was an interesting game to play

01:05:47.120 And it often required a certain degree of, you know, radical movement on the part of the persons involved

01:05:52.620 But it was almost invariably possible

01:05:55.300 You know, it took a lot of work

01:05:58.380 And a lot of patching up of CVs, you know

01:06:02.060 A lot of re-education

01:06:03.660 And a lot of planning

01:06:05.000 A lot of willingness to put yourself out on the job market

01:06:07.700 and to learn how to do an interview

01:06:09.160 and to both become and present yourself

01:06:14.780 as the sort of person

01:06:15.840 that an employer would be happy to take a risk on

01:06:18.880 and development of the ability to find an employer

01:06:21.320 had enough sense to want that, right?

01:06:23.880 It's not an easy thing to manage

01:06:25.280 but you're not going to manage it

01:06:26.980 unless you, like, give it a shot

01:06:28.920 and there's no reason

01:06:30.760 that you can't do it in a sophisticated way

01:06:33.460 I mean, people are successful from time to time

01:06:36.860 One of them could be you

01:06:39.420 Perhaps if you'd allow it

01:06:43.200 How are you going to educate yourself?

01:06:47.900 There's a multitude of ways to do that

01:06:49.580 So you stay on that developmental edge

01:06:51.380 How do you take care of yourself physically and mentally?

01:06:54.520 Like you take care of someone else

01:06:57.280 That you cared for

01:06:58.280 How do you regulate temptation?

01:07:00.480 Drug and alcohol abuse

01:07:01.520 You know the kind of temptations that are out there

01:07:03.320 Maybe you drink

01:07:04.340 Well, what kind of drinker do you want to be?

01:07:06.860 You know, you want to be Barney Gumbel from The Simpsons?

01:07:12.960 Or, you know, do you want to approach your vice with a bit of sophistication?

01:07:19.820 That's worth thinking through.

01:07:22.160 You might as well have a plan for it.

01:07:24.180 Maybe it means you can't drink at all.

01:07:28.460 Depends on what you want and who you want to be.

01:07:32.920 We added another component, which we haven't worked into the program yet.

01:07:36.560 It's like, what should you do on the civic front?

01:07:39.420 You know, because you have a civic responsibility.

01:07:41.520 Maybe it's just to your family.

01:07:43.000 Just, that's quite a lot.

01:07:44.340 But then you can have to take some responsibility for the broader community.

01:07:48.260 Because someone has to. 1.00

01:07:49.460 And if it isn't you, it'll be some crazy woke bastard. 1.00

01:07:52.880 And so... 0.99

01:07:54.060 Well, and so that's part of this self-authoring process

01:08:08.680 What is it part of?

01:08:10.560 It's part of developing a vision

01:08:11.880 Vision's a map

01:08:13.100 Vision's the story of your life

01:08:15.660 It's a map of the past

01:08:16.980 It's a map for the future

01:08:18.480 It's the story that you live in

01:08:20.780 It's the structure that directs your attention and aims your action.

01:08:27.720 And you need to develop that.

01:08:31.780 You're going to inhabit it one way or another.

01:08:33.680 If you're hedonic and chaotic, it just means that you inhabit a world of fragmentary narratives.

01:08:39.920 You're just gripped by one whim after another.

01:08:42.320 And it's a counterproductive way to live.

01:08:44.280 And if you don't develop a coherent

01:08:47.000 Vision for yourself

01:08:48.760 You'll be the pawn of other people

01:08:51.020 Or your whims

01:08:52.400 Those are the alternatives

01:08:54.040 And that's a story too

01:08:55.300 Like that's the story of

01:08:56.640 That's the story of someone who's 1.00

01:09:01.340 Immature and hedonically oriented 1.00

01:09:03.480 That's the story of Peter Pan

01:09:05.360 You know

01:09:05.720 Refused to grow up and live in a world of fantasy

01:09:08.680 Or there's the slave story

01:09:10.760 Because if you're not the author of your own ideal

01:09:13.420 Then you're playing a bit part in someone else's story

01:09:16.520 And they might not have given you the best part

01:09:19.320 And so

01:09:20.780 You know, and you can think too

01:09:23.700 If the world isn't laying itself out the way

01:09:26.280 You would want it to

01:09:28.260 If you had your choice

01:09:29.680 Then maybe you're not

01:09:31.260 Overlaying the proper structure of interpretation on it

01:09:35.000 And then you have to ask yourselves

01:09:36.700 Like

01:09:36.980 How would I have to contend with the possibility that's in front of me

01:09:41.800 so that the things that would justify my life with all its suffering,

01:09:46.100 how could that lay itself out so that would work for me?

01:09:50.120 Because we all have difficult things to contend with

01:09:52.480 and we all have very many difficult things to contend with.

01:09:55.420 And in all probability, you need a reason to contend with them

01:09:59.720 so that you don't descend into an abyss of bitterness.

01:10:04.780 And maybe you don't have to

01:10:05.980 because maybe you could structure the way that you're interacting with the world

01:10:10.100 in a manner that was sophisticated enough

01:10:12.480 so that you could have a great romantic adventure.

01:10:16.040 And it would be of high enough quality

01:10:18.560 so that all of the difficulty associated with it

01:10:21.600 would be, well, optimally, that'd be part of the game.

01:10:26.800 You know, when you're playing basketball,

01:10:28.660 you don't put the hoop down

01:10:29.780 where you can just drop the ball through it.

01:10:31.340 You want to set it up high enough

01:10:33.460 so that it's a bit of a challenge to make the shot.

01:10:37.700 It's like, well, how much challenge do you need in your life?

01:10:40.100 maybe a lot, maybe enough to justify its suffering.

01:10:45.940 That's a lot of challenge.

01:10:48.500 You know, maybe you have to see yourself as someone who can overcome

01:10:51.840 even the ultimate in obstacles in order to reconcile yourself to existence.

01:10:56.360 And maybe that's what you're like in the deepest recesses of your soul.

01:11:01.540 And that's the deepest religious claim, in some sense,

01:11:04.360 is that that is who you are.

01:11:05.840 You've forgotten it, or you're unwilling to realize it.

01:11:09.580 Maybe you're unwilling to take responsibility for it, but it's nonetheless the truth.

01:11:16.540 And I would say, too, that ties the whole story back to the beginning of this talk, too, which is...

01:11:23.580 Well, Jung's insistence that, you know, we blew up our technological ability and left our ethical ability primitive.

01:11:33.380 because what happens if we blow up our ethical ability

01:11:37.060 to the same degree that we've blown up our technological ability?

01:11:40.080 Well, it means that everyone has to wake up to some degree

01:11:43.640 and become developed enough to deal with the tools that we've produced. 0.99

01:11:49.340 You know, we'll end up like China, and quickly, 1.00

01:11:53.680 and that's not such a good idea, and I think that's your problem. 0.65

01:11:58.520 You know, part of the reason that Tammy and I continue the tour is because,

01:12:01.360 Well, it's ridiculously exciting

01:12:04.020 It's a great adventure

01:12:04.960 But it's also predicated on the firm belief that

01:12:08.960 We all are constantly making a decision

01:12:14.260 In terms of the direction that things go

01:12:17.440 Up or down

01:12:18.340 All of us

01:12:19.420 And all of us equally in some weird way

01:12:21.580 And I don't really understand that

01:12:22.940 It is the case that each of us is a center of the cosmos

01:12:27.560 In some fundamental sense

01:12:29.360 And it's hard to understand that

01:12:30.740 because you can't really think of something that has multiple centers.

01:12:33.820 But we are all each centers of consciousness.

01:12:36.420 That's indisputable.

01:12:37.540 And in the final analysis, we really don't know what that means.

01:12:40.540 It means something with metaphysical significance, right?

01:12:43.220 It means that mystery is the mystery of being.

01:12:47.500 It's a very profound phenomenon.

01:12:51.460 What does it mean to be a center of consciousness?

01:12:54.120 Well, it means that the cosmos rotates around you in some fundamental manner

01:12:59.040 and that you shape the manner in which it manifests itself by your choices.

01:13:04.000 And that's really the case.

01:13:07.040 And then you think, well, that's a hell of a thing.

01:13:09.240 It's like, that's for sure.

01:13:11.120 It's a daunting realization,

01:13:13.380 but it's also one that has an unlimited amount of potential associated with it.

01:13:18.960 Think, well, what would happen if you played a straight visionary game?

01:13:21.900 You know, you figured out just exactly who you could be

01:13:24.120 if you got your act together,

01:13:25.180 and then you spent the rest of your bloody life 0.97

01:13:27.200 Doing nothing but trying to make that 0.90

01:13:29.200 Manifest itself

01:13:30.800 Well at minimum you'd be a hell of a lot better off

01:13:33.300 Than you are now

01:13:34.100 And God only knows what you could develop around you

01:13:36.920 You know perfectly well

01:13:38.820 That in the past in your life

01:13:40.620 There are times when you really

01:13:42.640 Put the pedal to the metal let's say

01:13:44.640 And you got to where the hell you were supposed to go

01:13:47.560 And maybe you didn't do that very often

01:13:49.200 But now and then you did it

01:13:51.700 You think

01:13:52.140 Yeah

01:13:53.000 Could be like that all the time maybe

01:13:56.240 well that's a good thing to think

01:13:58.980 so

01:14:02.480 what's the conclusion

01:14:04.420 you're supposed to live out

01:14:10.160 the greatest story ever told

01:14:11.960 right

01:14:13.660 that's the religious duty

01:14:15.620 you have to figure out how to realize that

01:14:17.980 in your own life right

01:14:18.940 because you're

01:14:19.480 you're bound by the specifics of your time and place

01:14:24.320 right

01:14:24.580 you're you with all your possibilities and flaws you're in this time that's got its

01:14:32.100 opportunities and its obstacles and you have to take that universal story

01:14:36.340 of coping with cataclysm and catastrophe and you have to realize it in the confines of your own

01:14:41.620 life that's your ethical duty and because it's such a cataclysmic problem you have to have a noble

01:14:48.020 after nobility of vision to manage it properly and so you have to develop that vision and you

01:14:53.300 And you do that by dreaming.

01:14:59.340 You have to dream up something that justifies your miserable existence.

01:15:03.700 And then you have to pursue that.

01:15:05.500 And God only knows what will happen if you do that.

01:15:08.140 And you can be sure that if you do that properly, it will be the best thing that could possibly happen.

01:15:13.480 And that would be a great way to live, eh?

01:15:15.460 To live so that the best thing that was possibly happening, moment to moment, was exactly what was happening to you.

01:15:20.960 And if you developed your vision properly

01:15:23.740 And you pursued it properly

01:15:24.940 That's the way it would be

01:15:26.080 And I would say that if enough people do that

01:15:34.000 Then as things speed up

01:15:38.420 Which is what they're doing right now

01:15:40.580 We'll go up

01:15:42.460 And if enough people continue to do what they're doing now

01:15:45.920 Then we'll go down

01:15:47.960 And then we can all decide

01:15:50.140 and I think part of the reason that you're all here

01:15:52.600 is because you are deciding that.

01:15:54.560 Up or down?

01:15:57.800 So up.

01:15:58.800 How about up?

01:16:02.440 Good enough.

01:16:03.460 Thank you very much, everybody.

01:16:04.740 Thank you, everybody.

01:16:19.860 Thank you, everyone.

01:16:24.860 Hey, Tim.

01:16:46.100 Hello.

01:16:47.020 Hello.

01:16:54.860 Greg said you're kind of articulate.

01:17:02.360 Is that what he said?

01:17:03.180 Yeah.

01:17:13.200 Okay.

01:17:13.840 Judicial activism

01:17:21.720 on both the provincial and federal

01:17:23.840 levels have set legal

01:17:25.600 precedents harmful to Canadian

01:17:27.860 society. How do

01:17:29.780 Canadians fight back against this?

01:17:35.420 Was that upvoted a lot?

01:17:37.860 Pardon me? Was that upvoted a lot?

01:17:40.440 Was that question upvoted a lot?

01:17:42.000 not really okay okay okay i was just curious well you never know it might have been later

01:17:48.840 so yeah yeah yeah yeah well

01:17:52.380 i venture into the realm of the political with apprehension but i will tell you one thing that

01:18:03.460 i've noticed tammy and i've been traveling around the world the western world primarily

01:18:07.900 for quite a long time really for four years and we've been a lot of places and we've met a lot

01:18:13.060 of people and i can tell you that canada's international reputation is in shambles

01:18:17.480 you have no idea like even if you're not a fan of the manner in which we're currently operating

01:18:23.540 this country the probability that you understand the way canada is perceived

01:18:30.080 Outside of the country is very low

01:18:32.700 It's not good

01:18:33.960 The

01:18:37.360 The

01:18:39.160 Bank account seizures

01:18:41.620 That was really the nail in the coffin

01:18:44.380 That was shocking

01:18:45.420 That even shocked the socialists

01:18:48.500 In Eastern Europe

01:18:49.360 There are many things

01:18:58.660 going on in this country that are seriously not good and so and you did the activism of the

01:19:07.700 judiciary is certainly one of those things that's the abdication of responsibility on the part of

01:19:13.020 the legislative branch they won't make difficult decisions they slough them off to the judiciary

01:19:18.920 because the judiciary now has more power than it should because of that abdicated responsibility

01:19:23.940 the woke power mongers have invaded the legal field and now they dominate it.

01:19:29.160 The lawyers I know in Ontario who have a clue have told me multiple times that five years ago

01:19:36.820 when they took a court case, they knew if they're going to win or lose because they knew the

01:19:41.280 precedence and they knew if they had a strong case or not. And if they had a strong case

01:19:45.000 and they knew the precedence, they could predict the outcome. They told me recently that they can't

01:19:49.740 tell it all anymore because the probability that the judge will take it upon him or herself to

01:19:54.320 arbitrarily decide in some generally woke direction is enough to make the whole bloody process random

01:20:00.740 and that is seriously not good the only reason this country is rich is because it's ensconced

01:20:07.740 inside the english common law tradition and that's a tradition of precedent and you demolish that

01:20:14.100 precedent you're at the hands of the ideologues and that is not a good place to be and so

01:20:19.520 you know the the multiplication of say human rights tribunals and that sort of quasi-judicial

01:20:30.300 board you see that happening in universities too is that's that's the activist judiciary

01:20:35.920 spreading its tentacles everywhere and then you might say well why does that happen and i would

01:20:40.560 say and this is something we're thinking about practically speaking what's the rule

01:20:44.520 Notice that opportunity lurks

01:20:48.760 Where responsibility has been abdicated

01:20:51.020 That's a good thing to know

01:20:52.660 You know, if you think

01:20:54.360 That person's not doing his job

01:20:56.300 That really bothers me

01:20:58.120 It's like, well, it might be time for you to step in 0.99

01:21:00.260 And do the damn job 0.99

01:21:01.400 But another 1.00

01:21:02.540 Another issue is there

01:21:06.380 Well, opportunity lurks where responsibility

01:21:08.780 Has been abandoned

01:21:09.700 It's like, yeah, opportunity for tyrants lurks

01:21:12.160 And so

01:21:13.480 to the degree that ideologically addled tyrant wannabes run the country it's because

01:21:22.640 we've abdicated our civic responsibility and so if you're not happy with the people who make up

01:21:28.880 your local school board it's like well how'd they get there it's not like they're the world's most

01:21:34.340 competent people the door was open there was an invitation no one's doing this well i think i'll

01:21:41.940 take that it's like yeah no kidding so i would say if you're not happy with the way the country's

01:21:49.720 being run it's time to do something on the political front and you know then and then we

01:21:59.980 could make this concrete you know if if our institutions are so pathological that there's

01:22:05.480 no point in getting in you getting involved then you better head for the hills and dig yourself a

01:22:09.920 seller because that's your that's your basic option if the institution themselves are salvageable

01:22:17.140 then someone better salvage them and then you might say well how would you get involved if you

01:22:22.800 wanted to and why would you and i would say well it's easy to get involved it's like join a political

01:22:26.860 party you know join the worst one if you want and there's a field of opportunity for you you know

01:22:34.040 And then you might say, why?

01:22:38.220 And I would say, well, first of all, because it's your responsibility.

01:22:41.920 And second of all, how about because if you don't, someone worse will.

01:22:45.640 And then the next thing is, God only knows what you learn.

01:22:49.680 You know, maybe you're not a great speaker and you can't think that clearly.

01:22:52.700 Maybe your instincts are in the right place.

01:22:55.060 But because the political field in general is understaffed terribly, the opportunity for people who are even vaguely competent is ridiculously high.

01:23:08.760 And so you'll find if you do involve yourself politically at whatever level, and you actually do the work, that opportunities will just multiply like you can't believe.

01:23:16.940 it'll actually stagger you

01:23:19.800 because you'll find yourself quickly in a position

01:23:22.080 and you'll think

01:23:23.400 how the hell did I get in this position

01:23:26.020 and then you'll think

01:23:27.060 I was the most qualified person

01:23:29.260 and then you'll think

01:23:30.200 that's really terrifying 0.52

01:23:31.620 so like get the hell at it

01:23:37.580 you know and

01:23:38.240 I don't know what fraction of the civic responsibility

01:23:42.240 you have to take on to yourself

01:23:43.640 but zero is the wrong amount

01:23:45.300 And so, you know, there's 6,000 people in this hallway

01:23:49.140 If everyone here determined as part of their vision

01:23:52.880 To take on a certain degree of civic responsibility

01:23:55.340 That's enough people just in this arena

01:23:57.680 To completely change, certainly to change this province

01:24:00.320 So, you know, here's a way of sort of figuring out

01:24:11.060 Where you should get involved

01:24:12.060 What irritates you?

01:24:13.720 you know you're fuming away while you're watching the news we have a rule now i hate this rule but 0.81

01:24:19.840 we have it anyways i'm very bitchy in airports because i really hate airports i think they're 0.65

01:24:25.200 training grounds for totalitarians and they really grate on me and so i'm just crabby as 0.59

01:24:31.180 hell whenever i'm in an airport and that's not so fun for tammy because you know she knows that i 0.62

01:24:36.340 don't like totalitarians but she also doesn't like you know traveling with someone who's like a what

01:24:42.100 Cactus on fire, and so 0.89

01:24:45.860 The rule is now if I'm gonna bitch about something I have to write a column about it 0.83

01:24:50.020 And so if it isn't worth doing something about then I have to shut up. That's very annoying 0.69

01:24:59.380 But it's a good rule, you know, it's a good rule so

01:25:04.580 So if something bugs you

01:25:07.700 That's a marker to your responsibility because it's bugging you for a reason

01:25:12.100 it's bugging you because it's your problem it for whatever reason it happens to be your problem

01:25:18.740 and so if you don't do something about it either nothing will get done there's someone that you

01:25:25.220 don't want to do something about it will do something about it and then and then we'll be

01:25:30.900 going wherever the hell we're going at the moment and i don't think that's a very good idea so all

01:25:37.380 Two more.

01:25:39.620 Okay.

01:25:57.380 Okay.

01:25:58.400 What are your thoughts on the decriminalization of drugs

01:26:01.520 and the outcome on society?

01:26:03.180 well the the war on drugs wasn't very effective

01:26:11.360 there were a lot of reasons for that one of the unintended outcomes remember i said earlier that 0.99

01:26:21.520 your stupid intervention isn't going to do what you think it is it's going to do a bunch of things 0.99

01:26:25.940 you don't predict you know 20 years ago there was like five substances that you could use to really 1.00

01:26:32.420 screw up your life and now there's like 300 and the reason there's 300 is because we criminalized 0.98

01:26:38.280 those five and that just incentivized chemists many of them chinese to produce variants of those 0.96

01:26:43.920 chemicals that weren't technically illegal that were often even more addictive and so we now we 0.86

01:26:49.400 have instead of heroin now we have fentanyl and instead of amphetamine we have methamphetamine

01:26:54.500 and i suspect that in the not too distant future we'll have chemicals that'll make fentanyl look

01:27:01.520 like pablum and so no one expected that it's like we'll make five things illegal now we'll have 300

01:27:08.580 things it doesn't look like that's good policy now the opposite of that is just let people do

01:27:16.360 what the hell they want and then you get san francisco and that doesn't look good that doesn't

01:27:22.320 look good either and uh lots of toronto could lots of canada could look like san francisco in

01:27:28.420 the next 10 years if if we want that and so portugal decriminalized all drugs but they didn't

01:27:35.780 do it the san francisco way you don't get to make a public nuisance of yourself on your favorite

01:27:41.160 chemical and so if you're unable to regulate your own behavior then you get shunted off to treatment

01:27:47.400 now that's a bit dangerous right because it isn't obvious you want to put mandatory treatment in the

01:27:52.940 hands of the state but we already kind of do that with prison because prison is a form of mandatory

01:27:57.980 treatment for misbehavior so it looks like it doesn't look like blanket prohibition on drug

01:28:04.940 use is useful it didn't work with prohibition it certainly didn't work with marijuana didn't

01:28:09.060 really work with cocaine it caused a huge explosion in the prison population and then it produced this

01:28:14.720 multiplication of addictive chemicals the the approach in portugal seemed to work quite well

01:28:20.720 which is like somewhat liberal attitude towards the availability of drugs on the at least with

01:28:27.080 regards to their criminal what to criminal punishment but an insistence on public order

01:28:35.140 and on treatment in the cases where people are no longer able to regulate themselves because of

01:28:40.400 their drug use and so those policies already exist and there are countries that have implemented

01:28:46.400 them and if the do-gooders in canada who want to be you know welcoming and compassionate to the

01:28:55.300 addicted had the courage of their convictions they put some stick in along with the carrot

01:29:00.820 and then you know maybe we could guide ourselves with some degree of intelligence so

01:29:05.620 okay

01:29:10.820 you are following mek this is number this was the number one question

01:29:20.320 who

01:29:22.720 he's an

01:29:25.040 he's a leader

01:29:26.340 in the

01:29:27.520 Arab world

01:29:30.100 that's his name

01:29:31.440 you're following this person

01:29:33.180 and Marianne

01:29:36.260 Javi

01:29:36.920 on Twitter

01:29:38.420 MEK murdered

01:29:42.220 more than 15,000 people 0.52

01:29:43.860 does this mean you support

01:29:46.400 them

01:29:46.660 the fact that i follow someone on twitter doesn't mean i support them

01:29:55.220 i mean why why would you draw that conclusion

01:29:59.620 i follow all sorts of people on twitter and they're often people i'm trying to keep an eye on

01:30:10.980 not not people i support so um

01:30:15.300 and i would also say that and this is no doubt due to my you know still remaining vast pools of

01:30:26.340 ignorance mek isn't someone whose activities i particularly concentrate on and that isn't

01:30:31.800 necessarily because they're not worth concentrating on it's more the fact that there's only so many

01:30:36.660 things you can concentrate on and that isn't one of the things that has announced themselves to me

01:30:41.980 as requiring my concentration at this moment i'm not even saying that's right it's just that's just

01:30:48.500 how it is so but there's no reason to assume that mere following means support i mean i follow

01:30:54.700 kamala harris you know whatever the i'm not supporting whatever the hell she's doing i'm

01:31:05.440 not supporting it so so i don't want to be flippant about that answer you know it's like

01:31:11.500 i i'm that's that political domain i'm not nearly as informed about as i could be that's part of

01:31:18.260 the reason why i'm following uh in the manner that i am and trying to learn about it but

01:31:22.720 it's not a matter of support so that's the answer to that question okay one more all right all right

01:31:31.580 here's one do you have a kermit the frog themed suit

01:31:36.340 not yet no i should i should i should tell the lgfg guys that yeah so this suit manufacturer

01:31:47.800 lgfg they're called they came to me about a year ago with this proposal they just sent it to me out

01:31:53.700 of the blue they said they would make me one suit for each rule from my first book and they made a

01:31:59.000 very creative set of suits they sent it like an illustrated little book along with it and

01:32:03.220 i got to tell you about this one because this one's really funny so this is a tuxedo and this

01:32:10.400 fabric which they invented is a cloth that's saturated with jade which is why it's green

01:32:18.640 now i so they crushed it you know down to the molecular level i suppose and impregnated the

01:32:24.340 the cloth with it which is why it's all glittery like uh liberaci and uh and so and in the back of

01:32:34.480 these suits one of the rules is printed on each of the underneath the collars now this suit has

01:32:39.940 a renaissance motif it's the garden of eden inside it as the lining and this

01:32:48.480 is the pocket square

01:32:51.900 which they custom made

01:32:54.180 and it's

01:32:55.460 I know you can't see it

01:32:56.440 but I'll tell you what it is

01:32:57.540 it's Adam and Eve

01:32:59.500 and there's the tree

01:33:01.020 of the knowledge of good and evil

01:33:02.300 and there's the serpent

01:33:03.460 and they put Justin Trudeau's head

01:33:06.740 on the

01:33:07.200 so that's

01:33:20.920 I think he stands

01:33:23.860 I think he stands

01:33:24.800 for the sin of pride myself

01:33:26.800 and

01:33:27.840 so that's ridiculously comical

01:33:30.200 and I walked through

01:33:31.520 the suits they made

01:33:32.660 and they were funny

01:33:33.480 and witty

01:33:34.540 and so I thought

01:33:35.520 fine

01:33:35.920 you know

01:33:36.340 Well, if you want to make me those suits, then just go ahead.

01:33:39.340 They made me a Twitter suit, which I've only worn once.

01:33:44.600 It's light blue corduroy. 0.93

01:33:46.220 It's a ridiculous thing. 0.70

01:33:47.340 It's light blue. 0.88

01:33:48.540 First of all, baby blue.

01:33:50.060 It's Jesus.

01:33:50.660 Like, I haven't seen a baby blue suit since, you know,

01:33:52.920 demented people wore them in the 1970s.

01:33:55.640 And it's corduroy. 0.76

01:33:59.200 And then it has this tie that's covered with Elon Musk heads.

01:34:03.900 and so that's ridiculously funny and they brought this suit over and i thought oh there's no bloody

01:34:11.240 way i'll ever wear that and so i put it on and i wore it one night and i thought i like this suit

01:34:17.780 look and tammy at least didn't object too much and i think secretly she liked it too and so

01:34:24.640 they've made me some very wild suits and uh and uh

01:34:29.320 and this one's the funniest i think this trudeau bloody

01:34:34.440 pocket square is ridiculously comical so you know and i'll tell i'll tell you a story i'll

01:34:43.620 tell you a little story about this suits and and then we'll close and so in 2017

01:34:49.520 i rented a theater in toronto and i did this lecture series on genesis and it was the first

01:34:58.740 public lecture series i'd done and so my family rented the theater and we rented it for 16 shows

01:35:06.420 and so we took a risk because we didn't know if people would come and listen to the lectures

01:35:11.880 you know because i was lecturing on genesis and i mean who the hell wants to come and listen to

01:35:17.720 that it turned out lots of people did mostly young men which was also completely shocking

01:35:22.980 and so we packed the theater and uh and then we rented a theater in LA I had my daughter I think

01:35:31.640 Mick arranged that that was really comical too because I didn't know what the hell I was doing

01:35:36.560 I phoned up this theater and and and I found out who the theater was and I think I phoned them it

01:35:44.560 might have been Michaela and they were kind of dismissive because it's a big theater it held

01:35:49.000 four thousand people and you know first of all performers don't phone theaters and arrange for

01:35:56.340 the rental they have agents that do that there are professionals that do that so if you phone

01:36:00.320 a theater and ask to rent it they just think you're they're that you're insane and so they

01:36:06.740 didn't know what to make of me but they did agree to rent the theater to me and it sold out and so

01:36:13.120 then they were they were much more pleased with me after that but and then we found at that point

01:36:18.940 because i had arranged to some people had arranged for me to speak in london at the same time

01:36:25.640 and as soon as they put the tickets on sale they all sold out and so they booked another hall and

01:36:30.200 they all sold out and so then it and then the same thing happened in new york and so then we realized

01:36:35.840 that it looked like the theaters would sell out wherever we booked them so we decided to arrange

01:36:42.540 a tour and this agency creative artists agency got a hold of me at about the same time they're

01:36:48.360 always on the lookout for um for people who can fill theaters because that's what they do and

01:36:55.020 they're good sharks and they're the professionals at negotiating this sort of thing they've handled

01:36:59.720 that ever since anyways we laid out this tour and uh i was thinking about how to prepare and i thought

01:37:06.720 well I'm going to prepare a hundred percent because this is a ridiculous opportunity and

01:37:13.420 I'm going to give it absolutely everything I've got and so I'd always dressed up as a professor

01:37:19.560 I always wore a suit even when I was very young and I have my reasons for that my father was a

01:37:23.660 teacher and he always wore a suit and I asked him why he did that at one point he said it was to

01:37:27.720 show respect to his students and I thought that was a good answer my dad was a hunter and a kind

01:37:32.940 of a rough guy and it's like he lived in a suit he wore it to work and when I started teaching at

01:37:39.160 Harvard I wasn't much older than the students that I was teaching and wearing a suit was also

01:37:43.180 a good way of establishing the proper hierarchy and I'm not averse to proper hierarchies in fact

01:37:49.800 I know they're necessary and that helped too because the students knew who the students were

01:37:55.260 and who the professor was and we got along just fine as a consequence so when I went on tour I

01:38:01.040 thought I'm going to get some nice suits and so I went to this tailor in Toronto and I bought a

01:38:06.480 very nice blue suit and I spent like more money on it than I'd spent in clothes on clothes in my

01:38:10.960 entire life and it really quite made me quite nervous because I thought you know can you really

01:38:15.700 justify that sort of expense and I thought no bloody way I'm going out to talk to 150,000 people

01:38:23.680 I'm not leaving anything anything to chance and so I bought that suit and a couple of others and

01:38:29.400 and so here was one of the consequences

01:38:33.220 this is so cool

01:38:34.300 and it wasn't what I expected at all

01:38:36.040 now as we travel around the world

01:38:39.300 about

01:38:40.480 now you guys are falling short in this regard

01:38:43.780 I must say

01:38:44.380 but I think it's the laid back BC thing

01:38:47.380 kicking in

01:38:47.960 but in about a third to a half

01:38:50.760 of the people who come to the shows

01:38:52.100 are dressed in suits

01:38:53.280 and they're often three piece suits

01:38:55.420 yeah

01:38:56.540 and the couples who come are often dressed quite formally like they're at a wedding and so

01:39:01.980 that's so cool to see and a lot of the guys that come up in the meet and greets afterwards because

01:39:07.180 i meet about 150 people after these shows it's like the first suit they've ever bought and they

01:39:12.300 bought it for their for the for the event and i had no idea when i you know laid out the investment

01:39:20.820 for that first suit that it would have that kind of social consequence but it has and it's nice to

01:39:25.300 see people it's nice to see young people dressed like adults you know i mean there's a place for

01:39:32.180 casual wear and fair enough on all of that but it's just it's just another example of the

01:39:40.320 unintended consequences i suppose of aiming up you know i wanted to do that right and then that

01:39:45.280 had a social consequence and everything you do right has a social consequence way more than you

01:39:50.900 think way more than you think who knows how far it echoes you don't know echoes through eternity

01:39:57.560 that's actually true the good and the harm you do they they both echo through eternity

01:40:02.960 that's a very daunting idea but it's true and so and so no i don't have a kermit suit

01:40:11.340 but it's a good idea maybe i'll ask them about it so thank you all very much for coming tonight

01:40:17.880 And thanks, Tim.

01:40:19.240 You're welcome.

01:40:19.920 Very nice to see you all.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - July 12, 2026

What To Do When You Have No Vision For Your Life

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