The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Why Listening Beats Every Argument

00:00:00.000 The midterms are not just one national race.

00:00:02.680 There are dozens of individual contests,

00:00:04.880 each reacting to its own headlines and developments.

00:00:07.480 In Maine, Troy Jackson and Susan Collins

00:00:09.380 are competing in one of Calci's

00:00:10.760 most actively traded Senate markets.

00:00:13.220 Track the race live in Calci's midterms hub

00:00:15.460 and trade the outcome you believe will happen.

00:00:18.100 A correct contract is worth $1 at settlement.

00:00:21.020 Don't just watch the race.

00:00:22.000 Take your position on Calci.

00:00:23.740 Use code DAILY, D-A-I-L-Y,

00:00:26.360 to get up to $25 when you trade at $25.

00:00:29.500 It's Kalshi, K-A-L-S-H-I, Kalshi, trade on anything.

00:00:34.440 18 plus only, restrictions and eligibility requirements apply.

00:00:38.120 Event contract trading involves risk

00:00:39.700 and may not be suitable for all investors.

00:00:41.900 Kalshi products are not available in all jurisdictions.

00:00:44.740 Prices, values, and available markets

00:00:46.140 may differ from those mentioned.

00:00:47.840 For more information, see Kalshi.com slash regulatory.

00:00:51.560 Are you noticing your car insurance rate creep up

00:00:53.640 even without tickets or claims?

00:00:55.580 You're not alone.

00:00:56.980 That's why there's Jerry,

00:00:57.860 your proactive insurance assistant.

00:01:00.540 Jerry handles the legwork by comparing quotes side-by-side

00:01:02.900 from over 50 top insurers, so you can confidently hit buy.

00:01:06.500 No spam calls, no hidden fees.

00:01:09.100 Jerry even tracks rates and alerts you when it's best to shop.

00:01:12.360 Drivers who save with Jerry can save over $1,300 a year.

00:01:15.360 Don't settle for higher rates.

00:01:16.800 Download the Jerry app or visit jerry.ai slash wire today.

00:01:21.320 Who says Halloween only lasts one day?

00:01:23.640 With Wayfair, one night of Halloween becomes a whole season at home.

00:01:27.060 From larger-than-life yard decor and moody lighting to festive accents for every room in the house, Wayfair has what you need to make Halloween feel like magic all in one place.

00:01:37.460 Because the best Halloween memories aren't made in just one night.

00:01:40.860 They're made all season long.

00:01:42.620 Shop Halloween decor now at Wayfair.com.

00:01:45.400 That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com.

00:01:48.880 Wayfair, every style, every home.

00:01:50.880 Last night, I figured something out that I'm going to expand upon a bit tonight.

00:02:01.240 So, when I, in an event like this, I have a, what would you say,

00:02:09.840 there's something I'm always trying to accomplish.

00:02:15.120 And I've learned how to do it, and then I learned how to identify what I'm doing and to explain it.

00:02:20.100 So because often you know if you're living beyond your own understanding

00:02:25.220 If you're really living you're living beyond your own understanding

00:02:28.400 You sort of catch up with yourself as you go

00:02:30.800 Or not

00:02:32.400 So I use the opportunity

00:02:37.820 This opportunity and I did this when I was a university professor

00:02:41.320 I use the opportunity to speak to think

00:02:45.120 About something so I'm not

00:02:47.180 presenting my audience, let's say, with a pre-conceived notion

00:02:54.680 and attempting to convince them that that's the case.

00:02:59.440 You can do that, and you can do that better or worse.

00:03:05.500 But the problem with doing that is that

00:03:07.760 it doesn't move you along in exactly the right direction.

00:03:13.900 It doesn't move the audience along in the optimal direction.

00:03:18.040 It moves, it cements you in your own presuppositions,

00:03:22.560 and it moves the audience towards a predetermined end.

00:03:29.100 And there's something to be said for that,

00:03:32.700 but it's more exciting to take yourself and the people you're talking to along for the ride.

00:03:42.000 Towards what?

00:03:43.440 Well, when I come out and start a lecture,

00:03:47.920 I have a question in mind.

00:03:50.040 I have three questions in mind tonight.

00:03:51.640 So one of them is,

00:03:53.640 what's the nature of man and woman?

00:03:58.740 So that's a question about identity.

00:04:00.880 How do you conceptualize identity?

00:04:02.620 It's a very major preoccupation with our whole culture at the moment.

00:04:09.120 It's identity politics.

00:04:11.000 What's that? A dispute about the nature of identity.

00:04:15.020 So we'll investigate that.

00:04:16.760 We'll investigate the identity of the divine,

00:04:20.600 and both of those investigations will be in some manner,

00:04:24.880 a matter of definition, right?

00:04:28.360 And then the third question,

00:04:31.160 they're all interrelated, these questions,

00:04:32.740 is what's the nature of the relationship

00:04:34.400 between man and woman and the divine?

00:04:38.160 Okay, so now those are the questions.

00:04:40.600 Now, one thing that really struck me hard last night is that question and the word question and the word quest are the same word as the word inquiry and question and quest are the same word.

00:04:56.140 And a quest is an adventure, and a quest that you'd find fascinating,

00:05:03.940 a movie quest, let's say, and most movies are quests,

00:05:07.660 is it's a journey towards an unspecified destination

00:05:11.820 that transforms in an unpredictable way.

00:05:15.080 That's a quest.

00:05:15.920 And if it's, say, a heroic quest, which is a true adventure story,

00:05:21.860 then the destination is worth the effort, and the quest is difficult but

00:05:33.180 meaningful. And a question sets up a quest, and if you know that, then you can

00:05:40.980 use the question to set up a quest, and that could be the talk, and that could

00:05:46.160 be the... that's the basis of a good conversation. Someone like Joe Rogan, for

00:05:50.020 example, who's obviously spectacularly good at conversations, by at least insofar as the opinion

00:05:57.140 of people everywhere in the world is concerned. He's always on a quest, right? Because Joe asks

00:06:03.800 questions because he wants the answers, and he doesn't know where it's going to go. And he has

00:06:08.520 his opinions, but those are expressed as questions, right? They're not so much impositions of his

00:06:15.800 belief on the person he's talking to or the audience as the foundation of the questions

00:06:24.460 that he's using to interrogate his guest, let's say, and to move the conversation along

00:06:30.740 in the direction of what enhanced knowledge, something like that.

00:06:34.480 So it's a pretty high order quest.

00:06:35.780 And the goal would be to be wiser at the end of it in a valid manner and then also to be

00:06:44.300 engaged along the way, and that would be good. Like, if you could live your life like that,

00:06:50.540 that would be good, so that you get wiser as you move along, and it's engaging along the way.

00:06:55.440 That would be good, and so that's what a quest offers, and so a quest, a question is a quest,

00:07:06.020 and that's good. A quest for meaning and wisdom. Okay, so now we have three questions in front of

00:07:12.740 us, and they're complicated questions. What is a man and a woman? I mean, Matt Walsh, as many of you

00:07:19.320 know, he... right, well, we're... right, what is a woman? It's very strange that we're asking that 0.82

00:07:29.420 question. But we are, but we are, and that's worth noticing, and you could parody that, and he did,

00:07:36.640 and quite effectively, but that shouldn't blind you to the fact that that's actually become a

00:07:40.640 question, and there's a lot of foolishness in that, but there's also a reason that question has come

00:07:47.400 up, and it's not trivial, and if you're asking the question, what is a woman, you're asking the

00:07:54.000 question, what is a man, because you can't ask one of those questions without asking the other,

00:07:58.400 so there we're, that's where we're at in the culture, is that we're, we're questioning our

00:08:05.420 most fun, truly our most fundamental assumption. I don't think there's a more fundamental assumption,

00:08:12.400 even speaking biologically, than what constitutes male and female. It's more fundamental than down

00:08:21.000 and up, or black and white, or night and day. Creatures differentiated sexually before there

00:08:27.740 were nervous systems. Like I said, an old distinction. So that means things without

00:08:32.740 brains can tell the difference between male

00:08:34.880 and female. 1.00

00:08:37.360 Right. 1.00

00:08:38.940 But

00:08:39.420 but it's become

00:08:44.780 a question.

00:08:47.300 Okay, so

00:08:47.820 I'm going to start this. Remember the

00:08:50.860 questions. What is a man? What is a woman?

00:08:54.180 What's the nature 1.00

00:08:55.060 of the divine? And what is the relationship

00:08:57.100 between man and woman

00:08:58.840 and the divine? Those are the three questions.

00:09:00.840 Now I'm going to hit that those questions from a variety of different perspectives, and

00:09:07.720 Hopefully that'll culminate in something like

00:09:10.960 the goal of the quest, let's say

00:09:13.540 So I'm going to start by telling you a story. This is from Tolstoy's

00:09:18.080 Leo Tolstoy was a great Russian author. He wrote War and Peace and Anakredina

00:09:24.100 Many people believe that War and Peace is the greatest novel ever written. I don't think so

00:09:29.260 because I'm more of an admirer of Dostoevsky, but

00:09:33.180 Tolstoy is more of a sociologist and

00:09:36.080 Dostoevsky is more of a psychologist, and I'm more psychologically minded, so I like Dostoevsky, but Tolstoy is a great author, and

00:09:43.020 War and Peace is a masterpiece by any

00:09:45.660 definition, and so whether it's number one or number five in terms of great books, it's it's still, you know,

00:09:53.460 doing well, and

00:09:55.860 Tolstoy was an extremely

00:09:59.260 successful man by any standard of success. So he had immense estates. He had a huge family.

00:10:09.660 He was extremely wealthy because of the success of his literary works, which is a pretty hard

00:10:16.180 thing to pull off. And he was a renowned author, so it wasn't just that he was famous and rich

00:10:24.160 because of his writing.

00:10:25.180 He was also extraordinarily admired.

00:10:28.300 And so, and at the height of his fame,

00:10:33.500 literally at the height of his success,

00:10:36.060 he was deeply suicidal, deeply suicidal.

00:10:41.580 He was constantly afraid on his estate

00:10:45.300 when he was there walking

00:10:47.520 that he'd hang himself in the barn or shoot himself.

00:10:50.440 He had this very strange combination of success at the highest conceivable level and absolute despair.

00:11:02.060 And I think it was also the disjunction between those two things that drove him to despair.

00:11:07.240 Because, you know, it's one thing to be miserable when you're actually miserable, right?

00:11:11.480 And that's kind of understandable.

00:11:12.880 Everything's not going your way.

00:11:14.440 but then to have everything that you could think that anyone would want and to have even earned it and deserved it

00:11:20.940 And then to still be in a state where you're desperate beyond belief. That's there's a kind of a perverse hell about that. That's

00:11:28.440 You know, you could argue it's better to be rich and miserable than poor and miserable and you know fair enough, but you don't have to use your imagination

00:11:36.800 to any great degree to understand that

00:11:39.920 that's a very perverse and paradoxical form of suffering and that that might have because what

00:11:46.200 what would he think it's like I've got everything that I could have and I can't see any way to to

00:11:51.040 be grounded in my life I'm I'm drowning in misery and yet there's nowhere to go

00:11:56.540 so there's a kind of particular desperation in that now Tolstoy wrote a book called Confessions

00:12:03.420 or Confession I don't remember if it's singular or plural and it's a relatively short book it's

00:12:09.680 very much worth reading. It's a pretty straightforward read, all things considered,

00:12:15.480 although it's a deep book, and it's a meditation on success and suffering, and it ends in a very

00:12:21.220 interesting manner, because he didn't commit suicide. He reconciled himself to life, and

00:12:27.600 he turned his attention increasingly to religious matters as he became an older man, and he wrote

00:12:32.480 some very great books

00:12:34.480 that were religiously oriented

00:12:36.520 specifically. One had

00:12:38.500 a fairly major impact on me

00:12:40.500 called The Kingdom of God is Within Us.

00:12:42.360 It's a great book. And

00:12:43.980 he had a

00:12:46.380 dream or a vision

00:12:48.000 while he was starting

00:12:50.520 to recover from his intense suffering.

00:12:53.760 The dream was

00:12:56.380 that he was

00:12:57.100 suspended

00:13:00.000 in mid-air.

00:13:01.340 at extreme elevation

00:13:03.640 so that the earth was

00:13:05.300 spread out below him but

00:13:07.420 thousands of feet below and

00:13:09.740 he

00:13:11.180 he had that feeling of vertigo

00:13:14.020 that you'd get appropriately

00:13:15.920 if you found yourself suspended

00:13:17.540 thousands of feet in the air. He's looking down

00:13:19.920 and it was

00:13:21.800 extraordinarily

00:13:23.240 painful physically and

00:13:25.940 psychologically to

00:13:27.020 contemplate the depth

00:13:30.040 of the abyss that was beneath him.

00:13:32.800 And it doesn't take Freud, it doesn't take the genius of Freud to understand how that

00:13:41.040 vision related to his predicament, because Tolstoy was suffering from gazing into the

00:13:49.580 abyss, right?

00:13:50.280 The abyss of meaninglessness, the abyss of chaos, and the dream was representing that.

00:13:55.540 But then, and he could see that he was, there was a rope descending from him that reached

00:14:03.040 all the way to the ground, and that was somehow stabilizing him, that was establishing the

00:14:09.460 relationship between him and the ground.

00:14:10.960 But in looking down, he was overwhelmed, and he realized that he could look up, and what

00:14:18.080 he saw when he looked up was the same rope, golden rope, except it was extending so far

00:14:24.540 above him that he couldn't see its culmination point, and that that was suspending him over the

00:14:31.580 abyss. It was what was stopping him from plunging to his death. And he saw the rope, and he gazed

00:14:40.780 upward, and that's when he woke up, and that was the beginning of his recovery. Now, what Tolstoy

00:14:46.960 realized, it's very complicated, that image. What he realized, I'm going to unpack it for you. This

00:14:53.540 is the way you would unpack a complex dream, which is a very difficult thing to do. A dream is a

00:14:58.700 place where ideas are born, and so in a dream, a new idea can emerge, but not in full-fledged form.

00:15:06.480 It emerges as a vision or an image, and it may take, it may be beyond you to transform it into

00:15:13.520 words. If you look at a profound painting, profound religious, Renaissance painting, for example,

00:15:18.860 dealing with, like, a deep religious matter,

00:15:22.280 you could write about it forever.

00:15:24.760 Like, images can be of infinite depth,

00:15:27.980 which is often why cathedrals, for example,

00:15:30.720 are decorated with complex images,

00:15:33.080 because they're inexhaustible in their meaning.

00:15:36.480 And dreams are like that.

00:15:37.780 And they mean a lot, but...

00:15:40.780 You might say even that they mean so much

00:15:44.520 that they can't be easily comprehended

00:15:46.240 or put into practical...

00:15:48.860 into practice. Ideas have to be born somewhere. An idea won't just, a truly

00:15:58.280 creative and original idea will not just emerge in the theater of your imagination,

00:16:03.100 fully fledged. It has a developmental history like anything complex. And the

00:16:07.640 birthplace of the explicit idea is the image, the dream. A dream is a moving

00:16:15.020 image, like a movie. And so Tolstoy is trying to work out this problem he has, which is

00:16:21.740 how to cope with the abyss of life, even when the material abundance that life can bring

00:16:33.860 is insufficient to provide orientation. That's a complicated problem. And the dream is a

00:16:40.700 step towards solving that. And what Tolstoy saw in the dream was the fact that

00:16:45.340 as deep as the abyss is below us, the expanse above us is infinitely, as infinitely high.

00:16:54.680 And that there was some relation, just as there was a relationship between Tolstoy and the abyss

00:17:00.720 beneath him, there was a relationship between Tolstoy and the infinite expanse above him.

00:17:08.120 And it was that relationship with what was above that was sustaining him,

00:17:13.340 even though he didn't know it, over the abyss.

00:17:16.060 Okay, now the question, of course, then is, well, what is the infinite expanse upward?

00:17:22.300 Tolstoy knew what the infinite abyss downward was.

00:17:25.340 That was suffering and misery and nihilistic catastrophe and hopelessness and pain.

00:17:33.580 but he only got a glimpse of what it was

00:17:39.220 that was extended equally above him.

00:17:43.860 Okay, so now if you're critically minded

00:17:46.140 you might think, well, why assume that there's anything above?

00:17:49.440 And that would be a nihilistic stance, let's say

00:17:52.480 or an atheistic stance

00:17:54.220 possibly a hopeless stance

00:17:58.320 if your experience of gazing downward

00:18:02.660 was hopelessness there's nothing that sustains us over the abyss well that's a

00:18:08.540 hard claim to make because people do live in the spite in spite of their

00:18:12.860 suffering and their misery so we obviously can prevail and it's clearly

00:18:19.040 the case that we're not suicidally miserable all the time so despite the

00:18:26.300 fact that we confront our own limitations and death

00:18:32.660 There are things that sustain us.

00:19:02.660 level education for under $2,000. Well, congratulations, Jordan. It's honestly brilliant.

00:19:07.720 I can't wait to enroll myself. I'll be doing that straight after this. Fun, Joe.

00:19:17.200 Now, Tolstoy, I would say, spent the rest of his life

00:19:20.300 trying to puzzle out what that might be, that upward relationship. And he turned to

00:19:27.480 traditional Christianity to flesh out his vision, which is a wise thing to do, because

00:19:33.500 it's very difficult. The problem of defining the infinite upward expanse is a very complicated

00:19:41.280 problem, and other people have tried to specify that expanse and our relationship with it, and

00:19:53.440 there's no reason not to draw on that if you have any sense.

00:19:57.760 Just like with any endeavor, you would want to gather as much knowledge as you can

00:20:04.480 about the territory before wandering off on your own.

00:20:09.920 And so, okay, so now that's one story.

00:20:13.220 So keep that story in mind.

00:20:14.320 Now I'm going to tell you another story.

00:20:15.940 It's the same story.

00:20:18.040 And so there's a parallel between them.

00:20:20.540 And the point we're aiming at is illustrated by the parallel.

00:20:24.360 I'm going to tell you a bunch of stories that are parallel.

00:20:26.960 And it'll be in that, the exposure to those parallels that the understanding will emerge.

00:20:35.020 That's part of the investigation.

00:20:36.640 Okay, so now there's a story in the Old Testament about a man named Jacob.

00:20:41.920 And Jacob, Jacob is a man whose identity transforms as he has his adventure.

00:20:48.820 Okay, that happens to all of us.

00:20:50.540 is that we know that, is that you're not the same as you were when you were a child.

00:20:54.340 You might not even be the same as you were last week.

00:20:57.000 People can get stuck so they're in a rut, and they can remain static for decades,

00:21:01.500 or they can transform so completely that it's as if they become a completely new person.

00:21:06.600 There's a lot of range in the mutability of our identity.

00:21:12.020 And Jacob is a man who starts as a very bad man and ends as a very good man.

00:21:19.420 And so that's a radical transformation.

00:21:21.420 And he does that in part because he decides that he's going to do that.

00:21:25.600 So that's an interesting, that's an interesting beginning.

00:21:28.480 So Jacob becomes Israel.

00:21:32.360 And the word Israel means the chosen people first.

00:21:36.380 But it also means those who wrestle with God.

00:21:40.660 And I learned that seven years ago, something like that.

00:21:45.800 And it struck me because I thought I understood what it meant.

00:21:49.500 And it means something like, well, who are the chosen people of God?

00:21:53.920 Those who wrestle with God.

00:21:55.900 Well, what does it mean to wrestle with God?

00:21:57.740 Well, it means to wrestle with your destiny.

00:22:01.540 It means to wrestle with the difficult moral decisions that constitute your navigation forward.

00:22:08.580 And it means if you're striving to do that, wrestling, which is the striving,

00:22:15.800 then you're one of the chosen people of the divine.

00:22:20.600 And so, that's an interesting thing to know.

00:22:25.920 To know the next time that you're trapped in a difficult ethical decision

00:22:30.580 and that you're trying to find your way forward.

00:22:34.720 That the fact that you're plagued by ethical consideration

00:22:39.100 puts you in the game.

00:22:41.760 Now, Jacob famously transforms

00:22:44.600 his identity in the final sense

00:22:47.860 one night when he's off

00:22:50.240 to reconcile himself with his brother

00:22:52.860 after being absent from his family

00:22:56.320 14 years.

00:22:58.440 After 14 years previously,

00:23:02.020 after being really quite a terrible person

00:23:04.000 who was dependent on his mother

00:23:07.620 in a way that wasn't good,

00:23:09.300 who betrayed his father in a very deep manner repeatedly

00:23:13.000 and who deceived and manipulated his brother

00:23:18.320 in as profound a way as is possible. 0.84

00:23:21.320 In a manner so egregious that his brother became homicidally enraged 0.70

00:23:27.460 and Jacob had to leave the family. 0.77

00:23:29.440 So, and Jacob's brother had every reason to be as angry as he was

00:23:37.760 because what Jacob did was not forgivable in some ways.

00:23:44.160 There was a law in place at the time that if you were the oldest son,

00:23:51.220 you inherited the lion's share of the estate.

00:23:54.080 And there's a reason for that.

00:23:55.760 Modern people might not think that's fair,

00:23:57.380 but there was a reason for that, particularly in agrarian societies, 0.98

00:24:00.760 because if you kept splitting the land or the ownings,

00:24:04.640 the agricultural holdings, over successive generations, everybody would end up with just

00:24:09.360 enough land to starve to death on. And so it was, it made for a more sustainable society

00:24:15.480 to keep the agricultural holdings intact, to give them to the firstborn, because there

00:24:22.200 had to be some arbitrary decision, and that's an arbitrary decision in some ways, and to

00:24:27.620 tell the other children that they more or less had to fend for themselves. And you might

00:24:32.120 say, that's not fair. It's like, that's not a very thoughtful analysis. It's a complicated problem

00:24:38.700 that these people were facing, and for better or worse, that was their solution. And so Esau had

00:24:45.080 the rights of the firstborn, and Jacob conspired to take those rights to himself. And so, and he did

00:24:55.900 that very treacherously. So he wasn't a good guy. And yet he

00:25:01.360 became one of the greatest heroes, let's say, of the biblical

00:25:04.700 stories. And the founder of Israel. The founder of the

00:25:10.360 people of God. So that's quite something, given that he was not

00:25:15.280 such a good guy to begin with. And it's one of the things that

00:25:17.840 might give you hope from a narrative perspective, right?

00:25:20.520 Because you're probably not as good as you could be. And like

00:25:23.640 Maybe your past was, you know, pretty shady.

00:25:26.620 And you might think, well, there's no hope for you.

00:25:29.120 And, you know, the more sin you've accumulated as you've moved forward,

00:25:35.220 the harder it is going to be for you to aim up.

00:25:40.720 But so the story goes, that doesn't mean it's hopeless.

00:25:45.000 And so Jacob's story actually lays out the pattern of upward transformation.

00:25:49.560 So when Jacob leaves his mother, who he connives with, when he runs away after his crimes,

00:25:59.240 he leaves his mother, he leaves his father, he leaves his brother, he goes to visit his

00:26:03.240 uncle, and on the way he decides that he's going to be a new guy.

00:26:10.440 And so he builds an altar, and he makes sacrifice, and then he has a dream.

00:26:16.900 Okay, so what does it mean that he builds an altar?

00:26:18.700 So all these story elements, they meld together.

00:26:22.600 They're all pointing in the same direction.

00:26:24.620 They're coherent.

00:26:28.320 He builds an altar to signify his willingness to sacrifice towards what's highest.

00:26:36.700 Okay, so there's no difference between doing that and deciding that you're going to sort yourself out.

00:26:43.240 It's just the concretization of that, you see.

00:26:45.740 because if you decide you're going to sort yourself out,

00:26:49.320 then you're establishing a relationship with what's up instead of down.

00:26:53.920 By definition, you wouldn't think that you had to sort yourself out

00:26:57.340 unless you were willing to draw a distinction

00:26:59.580 between the terrible things you'd already done

00:27:02.160 and some other way of being that was better, right?

00:27:05.680 So you're establishing a gradient between good and evil,

00:27:08.640 and then you're deciding that you're going to serve good,

00:27:12.240 even though what the hell do you know? 0.98

00:27:13.660 because, you know, you're just, you're not a good person. 0.98

00:27:16.920 And so you're going to do it pretty badly,

00:27:18.520 but at least you've decided that that's going to be your intent.

00:27:22.600 That's going to be your aim.

00:27:24.340 And then you might say, well, why the sacrifice?

00:27:26.720 The answer is, well, you're going to have to give up some things to do this.

00:27:31.200 Like who you are, right? 0.97

00:27:34.600 Because the more corrupt you are, 0.99

00:27:36.880 the more you're going to sacrifice to aim up. 0.76

00:27:39.980 And you see this as the story unfolds.

00:27:42.600 You see this in the story of Abraham, too, because these people, they transform so completely,

00:27:47.740 it's as if they're new people.

00:27:49.520 That's why they end up with a new name.

00:27:51.360 Jacob becomes Israel, which is a name bestowed upon him by God.

00:27:54.740 The same thing happens to Abraham.

00:27:56.700 Abraham starts as Abram, A-B-R-A-M, and ends as Abraham.

00:28:02.380 And the meaning of the story is that aiming up can take you on a journey that can transform 0.53

00:28:11.680 your character so completely that it's as if you're a new person, as if you've been reborn.

00:28:16.700 That's a way of thinking about it. In fact, baptism itself is a symbolic portrayal of

00:28:22.980 that radical capacity to transform. It's a way of dramatizing it. So you, in a baptismal

00:28:31.480 ceremony, you're plunged into chaos. That's the water, the baptismal water. That's a dissolution

00:28:37.640 into the water that existed at the beginning of time.

00:28:41.700 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:28:42.900 The waters that the Spirit of God rested upon

00:28:45.900 at the beginning of time.

00:28:48.140 You're plunged into that.

00:28:49.560 Your old self is dissolved and your new self emerges.

00:28:53.220 It's like the rise of the phoenix.

00:28:55.500 That's another image of the same thing.

00:28:57.260 And it's a dramatic portrayal of the human capacity

00:29:02.540 to transform.

00:29:04.160 and possibly to transform upward.

00:29:09.580 Now remember, in Tolstoy's vision, Tolstoy had a vision of up, right?

00:29:15.080 It wasn't a delineated vision.

00:29:18.220 There was not any information in the vision about the nature of up,

00:29:22.780 except that the rope that connected the suffering author to the transcendent

00:29:30.940 was what was suspending him above the abyss.

00:29:34.160 So that's a very interesting idea is that your relationship with what's up in the highest sense is what

00:29:42.000 Suspends you over the

00:29:44.000 Catastrophic abyss what maintains you that's a proposition that Tolstoy's dream is offering now

00:29:52.040 Dreams are very interesting

00:29:54.240 phenomena because they don't lie

00:29:56.420 You you can trust a dream you might not be able to figure out what a dream means and that's a problem, but

00:30:02.440 But a dream is a natural phenomena, like a tree, or a rock, or an animal.

00:30:08.740 There's no guile in it.

00:30:10.100 There's no deceit in it.

00:30:11.540 It just portrays something.

00:30:14.060 And so the dream portrayed to Tolstoy the idea that

00:30:17.120 he was suspended over the abyss of his despair by

00:30:20.980 his relationship with what was highest.

00:30:27.060 Now, there's still plenty of problems with that formulation,

00:30:30.300 because, for example, it shows, it sheds very little light on what's highest, right?

00:30:37.000 What's the nature of what's highest?

00:30:38.380 Now, remember, we talked about the questions.

00:30:41.620 What's the identity of man and woman?

00:30:43.340 What's the identity of the divine?

00:30:45.000 And then what's the relationship between the two?

00:30:47.820 So the question of what's highest is part of the question,

00:30:51.640 what's the nature of the divine?

00:30:53.300 What's highest?

00:30:54.760 Okay, so Jacob decides he's going to be a good guy.

00:30:59.260 Now, you've done this lots of times.

00:31:01.500 I hope you've done this, at least to some degree, many times in your life.

00:31:05.880 You looked at the way you're acting, the way you're attending,

00:31:08.800 and you think, God, you know, I've got to do something about that

00:31:11.540 because it's not going in the right direction.

00:31:14.380 And I'm going to change.

00:31:16.700 I'm going to try to put myself together.

00:31:18.480 And, you know, depending on how disciplined you are

00:31:22.020 and what sacrifices you're willing to make

00:31:23.900 and whether your new direction is appropriate,

00:31:27.240 That's all going to determine whether you succeed or fail.

00:31:30.020 But you need to understand what experience is being represented here.

00:31:34.520 It's the experience of guilt, let's say, and shame and recognition of wrongdoing

00:31:42.040 and then the determination to do something else

00:31:46.400 or maybe to figure out what that something else would be

00:31:50.540 because if you're steeped in sin, so to speak,

00:31:54.940 it's going to be hard for you to see what's up, but you can at least decide that that would be

00:31:59.400 your aim. Now, Tammy pointed out something interesting, which is once you aim at something,

00:32:05.000 the world of your perceptions rearranges to show you the pathway to that goal. And so that's,

00:32:11.440 this is a remarkable, this is dead true. This is how perception works because you wouldn't get

00:32:16.240 anywhere if your perceptions didn't mark out a goal for you, right? Because if you want to walk

00:32:21.040 across the stage, you look at the destination, and you see the pathway, and that's how your

00:32:27.440 perceptions work. Your vision is an aid to navigation, and so the path that reveals itself

00:32:34.580 is going to be defined by your aim. This is an amazing thing to understand, because it means that

00:32:41.660 you could decide to aim up, and without even knowing what up meant, but to really mean to aim,

00:32:47.300 and the pathway there would start to reveal itself.

00:32:52.060 And so, now you might not be very good at it

00:32:54.220 and the Old Testament heroes,

00:32:55.980 they're not very good at it when they start.

00:32:57.920 They stumble around pretty badly in their initial adventures,

00:33:01.040 you know, because they got to get going.

00:33:02.480 But you know this too,

00:33:04.000 because you know when you decide to transform yourself

00:33:07.360 to some degree 0.99

00:33:08.100 and you're stupidly trying something new 1.00

00:33:10.780 as the fool you are, 1.00

00:33:12.880 that you're not great at it to begin with, 1.00

00:33:15.580 But as you do it, you do get better.

00:33:18.340 And so what that means is once you decide to aim up and you start acting that out,

00:33:23.160 you would gather more information that sharpens your knowledge about your direction

00:33:28.120 and makes you more skillful.

00:33:30.160 Obviously, because if that didn't happen, you'd never learn anything.

00:33:33.960 So clearly that can happen.

00:33:35.940 So you can establish the intent of up.

00:33:39.680 And then you can make the presumption that the path will appear, however obscured.

00:33:44.360 and that if you walk it, it will clarify and your understanding of up will improve.

00:33:50.140 And that's, I would say, that's part of the covenantal offering of relationship with the divine.

00:33:56.720 As a matter of definition, like one of the insistences of the biblical stories

00:34:01.560 is that you can establish a relationship with what's up.

00:34:06.100 That's part of your nature.

00:34:10.340 Okay, so let's take that apart.

00:34:14.360 So I'll close with one more episode from the story of Jacob.

00:34:20.200 So the night that Jacob decides to change his life

00:34:25.320 and build an altar and make this sacrifice,

00:34:28.840 which is a dramatization of his willingness to offer something valuable

00:34:33.860 in the hope of changing, let's say,

00:34:36.520 he goes to sleep and he dreams.

00:34:39.720 He has a famous dream and it's the dream of Jacob's ladder.

00:34:42.700 And he dreams of a staircase, so often represented as an upward turning spiral.

00:34:50.580 I like to think about it as a piece of music.

00:34:52.860 That's a nice analogy, because I think music represents the same thing.

00:34:56.580 In any case, he has a vision of a structure that unites the earth with up, with the heavens.

00:35:04.080 and that there's a pathway

00:35:06.900 and that the top of the pathway

00:35:10.220 disappears into what's unknown

00:35:12.740 and he saw angels

00:35:15.120 descending and ascending

00:35:17.820 on the ladder

00:35:19.280 and that was a

00:35:22.900 vision of the

00:35:26.200 structure that relates

00:35:28.200 the earth and heaven and man and God

00:35:30.900 that's the claim

00:35:34.160 Now, a skeptic would say, well, what's your evidence for that?

00:35:42.900 That's what we'll investigate.

00:35:45.660 Now, you'll note, if you're using your imagination,

00:35:50.100 that there's an analogy between Jacob's vision and Tolstoy's vision, right?

00:35:55.140 Jacob and Tolstoy both saw something ascending upward

00:35:58.400 that disappeared into an infinite expanse above.

00:36:02.680 So part of the idea there is that what's the highest form of up,

00:36:09.400 so the highest good, isn't within the realm of your conception.

00:36:15.400 It's just like if you're a materialist and you dig into the bottom of the world,

00:36:20.220 you eventually run into a completely impenetrable mystery, right?

00:36:24.260 You run into whatever the hell is going on at the quantum level,

00:36:27.220 which is, it's incomprehensible.

00:36:31.160 Even the people who can model it mathematically don't understand it.

00:36:34.500 So if you drill down into the material world, you hit something beyond your comprehension.

00:36:39.560 The same idea obtains here is if you go up instead of down, so to speak,

00:36:44.620 if you go up into the spirit, domain of spirit, instead of down into the domain of matter,

00:36:50.360 your knowledge, finite as you are, your knowledge cannot conceive of what's at the pinnacle.

00:36:58.960 okay

00:37:00.220 if there's an up

00:37:03.320 there's a greatest up

00:37:06.760 that's one way of thinking about it

00:37:08.640 what's the nature of the greatest up

00:37:10.620 well in Tolstoy's vision and Jacob's vision

00:37:13.280 that's not an answerable question

00:37:15.240 so here's another way of thinking about it

00:37:17.160 the good, the highest good

00:37:18.960 recedes as you approach it

00:37:20.500 otherwise you'd exhaust it

00:37:23.520 and

00:37:24.960 you're not going to exhaust it

00:37:26.700 no matter how good you get

00:37:28.240 you're not done. And maybe even at the end of your journey, you're as far away from the pinnacle as

00:37:33.800 you were when you started. And you might think, well, that's hopeless. It's like, no, not exactly.

00:37:38.600 You wouldn't want it to be exhaustible, because then you could be finished. Now, you kind of

00:37:42.920 understand this in your own life, you know, because you can work to improve your circumstances,

00:37:48.500 and then you can improve them. But you don't want to be done. You want to now, in your improved

00:37:54.020 circumstance, have a vision of how you can improve your circumstances, right? And

00:37:58.460 then when you improve them again, your circumstances and your character, let's

00:38:02.540 say, then hopefully you'll be wise enough and well-situated so that you can see

00:38:06.800 the next step. And why would you assume that that has, suffering doesn't seem to

00:38:15.560 have a limit. Why would the ability to move away from suffering, let's say, have

00:38:20.720 a limit. Okay, so the hypothesis in the vision of Tolstoy and the vision of Jacob is that

00:38:28.560 that which is it, the highest place, is beyond our comprehension. It moves out of our field of

00:38:35.940 understanding. But that doesn't mean it isn't real. It just means that it's beyond us. Now,

00:38:41.220 you see, this insistence occurs repeatedly in the biblical texts. And this is an important

00:38:45.700 thing to understand if you're trying to wrestle with the idea of religious belief. I believe in

00:38:49.780 God. I don't believe in God. It's like, what do you mean by

00:38:52.500 God? Exactly. The atheist types, they'll parody that. It's like

00:38:58.560 the old man with a beard in the sky. It's like, that's an

00:39:02.900 image. It's not the reality that's portrayed in the biblical

00:39:07.920 texts. It's an image. It's a characterization. It's a

00:39:11.800 fragmentary characterization. Why do I say that? Well, it's

00:39:16.200 simple. All you have to do is read the text and you figure

00:39:19.000 that out, so I'll give you some examples. And these are relevant to the notion of

00:39:23.980 what's at the pinnacle. So, Moses encounters the divine twice, directly. And then

00:39:31.320 multiple times peripherally. But in a visionary manner, at least twice. The first

00:39:39.160 time, both of these episodes are very famous. Almost everyone knows them, even

00:39:43.240 in a secular society. The first time is when he encounters the burning bush. So

00:39:48.380 now, the situation there, Moses has killed someone in Egypt, kind of impulsively, and

00:39:56.120 he's had to run away. So, it's not a great beginning. And he's like an older adolescent

00:40:01.380 when that happens. And he leaves Egypt, because word of his actions gets out. He's kind of

00:40:06.940 impulsive and a little bit tempted by power. That's Moses' pattern of sin. And it recurs 0.82

00:40:13.440 repeatedly throughout his life.

00:40:16.120 He leaves Egypt,

00:40:19.680 and he goes to Midian. 0.98

00:40:23.280 He joins the Midianites,

00:40:25.440 and he gets married,

00:40:28.460 and he establishes an adult identity,

00:40:31.520 and he likes his father-in-law,

00:40:33.200 who's a Midianite priest,

00:40:34.100 and he likes his wife.

00:40:34.960 I think he has two wives,

00:40:36.180 and he's become an adult,

00:40:38.160 and so that's a transformation, right?

00:40:40.060 An upward transformation.

00:40:40.860 He's become an ordinary responsible adult, and good for him. 0.99

00:40:45.380 That's better than impulsive, power-seeking Junal. 0.98

00:40:50.280 And so now he's a shepherd in this new land that he's occupied,

00:40:56.340 and that's a demanding job.

00:40:58.300 It's a responsible job.

00:40:59.400 You have to take care of these sheep, and they're sheep.

00:41:02.460 They're not that bright, and so you have to pay attention to them,

00:41:05.100 and they're vulnerable, the lambs in particular, and edible,

00:41:08.100 and that's a big problem

00:41:09.760 when there's wolves and lions about

00:41:11.760 which there were plentifully at that time

00:41:14.760 in that part of the world

00:41:15.640 and so if you're a shepherd

00:41:17.000 you have to be the sort of person

00:41:19.220 that can guard the vulnerable from the predator

00:41:22.340 it's a good definition of what a man is

00:41:24.880 by the way

00:41:25.960 and so

00:41:26.980 well that's why

00:41:28.780 that's why the shepherd is a recurring image

00:41:32.500 that's associated with redemption

00:41:34.140 in the biblical text

00:41:35.300 a shepherd isn't a high status job

00:41:37.760 But it's a hard job, and it needs to be done.

00:41:40.320 And it's also emblematic of a certain pattern of ordinary heroism.

00:41:47.780 And the value of the shepherd is indicated, for example,

00:41:52.520 in the fact that Christ is often represented as a shepherd,

00:41:55.480 but also that the news of Christ's birth is first revealed to shepherds.

00:42:01.780 And low-status shepherds at that.

00:42:04.180 And so, and David, of course, King David is a shepherd.

00:42:07.940 And so, and why a shepherd?

00:42:09.620 Well, I said why.

00:42:10.500 Because if you're a shepherd, you have to be the person who can take out the real predators.

00:42:17.540 So that's a monstrous element.

00:42:19.780 But who protects the most vulnerable.

00:42:22.620 And that is what a man does if he's a man.

00:42:25.900 That's the perfect definition of being a man.

00:42:28.280 It might not be exhaustive, but it's dead on the money. 0.95

00:42:32.500 And it's what women look for in men. 0.94

00:42:35.200 They look for men who have a monstrous element 0.99

00:42:37.640 so they can keep the real monsters at bay,

00:42:40.600 but who have associated with that,

00:42:44.140 that capacity to protect and serve.

00:42:46.860 And that's a tough set of opposites to bring together.

00:42:52.940 So Moses is a shepherd, and good for him.

00:42:55.940 He's an adult.

00:42:57.240 And, you know, he could live his life as a shepherd, let's say.

00:43:00.100 But one day he's wandering around by a mountain,

00:43:04.200 which is where the messages, mountains connect the earth and the heavens.

00:43:11.040 And so it's very frequently the case that because the mountain is up and heaven is up

00:43:16.360 and up is good and up is towards the light and up is towards the heavens.

00:43:21.860 And so the mountain is a place where earth stretches up to the heaven.

00:43:25.280 It's a place where revelation can be received.

00:43:27.900 That's its symbolic significance.

00:43:30.600 And Moses is by the mountain, and something attracts his attention.

00:43:37.700 Okay, so that's a good thing to know.

00:43:40.400 Something attracts his attention.

00:43:42.140 Because things attract our attention, right?

00:43:45.660 And in some ways, independent of us, you know, it's not exactly the case that you can decide what's going to attract your attention.

00:43:56.800 Sometimes it seizes you.

00:43:59.480 Well, and then a very tricky question arises in consequence of that realization.

00:44:03.560 It's like, well, if it's not you, maybe you're attending to something despite yourself.

00:44:09.760 That's often what happens, for example, if you fall in love with the wrong person.

00:44:13.480 It's like, well, what's gripping you?

00:44:16.620 It's not you.

00:44:17.820 You're thinking, man, I wish I could get out of this.

00:44:20.480 It's like, it's not you.

00:44:21.620 What is it?

00:44:23.380 That's a hard question.

00:44:24.680 Okay, so Moses is being a shepherd and minding his own business,

00:44:29.800 and something captures his attention, and he makes a decision,

00:44:33.900 which is a decision we all make all the time.

00:44:36.680 His decision is he's going to go investigate what captures his attention.

00:44:41.520 Now, that's worth thinking about, right?

00:44:44.520 Because that story tells you how to establish a relationship with the divine.

00:44:49.460 is that you watch

00:44:51.540 while you're about your ordinary business

00:44:54.780 and you see

00:44:56.720 what captures your attention.

00:44:59.300 Now, it might be something that calls to you.

00:45:02.000 It interests you.

00:45:03.340 It makes you enthusiastic.

00:45:05.560 Or it might be something that

00:45:07.120 pulls at the heartstrings of your conscience.

00:45:12.700 But it makes itself manifest

00:45:15.520 with a kind of independence

00:45:16.880 and it presents itself to you.

00:45:18.780 Now, you do not have to pay further attention.

00:45:25.180 Maybe you're intrigued by something.

00:45:26.960 Maybe you have a dream of starting a new business, let's say,

00:45:30.440 and you have a kind of an ordinary job and you're feeling a little constrained by it,

00:45:34.460 and you've got this dream and you're interested in this new possibility.

00:45:40.220 And you can just put that aside.

00:45:43.400 But then what?

00:45:45.160 Well, then you forego the opportunity of relationship with what compels you forward now

00:45:52.980 That's a dangerous thing to do because life is hard and if you don't have a relationship with what compels you forward

00:46:00.260 Then you have suffering without meaning and if you turn away enough times from what compels you forward

00:46:09.160 Because you want to remain ordinary. Let's say you want to remain as a shepherd

00:46:12.560 let's say, then all of what calls you forward will vanish. And that is not a good idea.

00:46:20.340 And that's not what Moses does. Moses goes off the beaten path to investigate. Now, this isn't a

00:46:27.840 forest fire, right? It's a burning bush. It's not even a tree. It's a bush. It's not that big.

00:46:34.960 So he could ignore it. But he doesn't. He goes off the beaten path and he investigates.

00:46:40.920 Okay, so what does that mean?

00:46:43.500 Well, a bush is a living organism.

00:46:46.500 It's a small tree, let's say.

00:46:48.120 A tree is a symbol of life, partly because it's alive.

00:46:51.380 Partly because life has a branching quality.

00:46:54.580 Like all the blood vessels in your body are tree-like.

00:46:57.140 All the neural structures in your brain are tree-like.

00:47:01.820 The genetic history of an organism is tree-like.

00:47:06.240 And a tree is alive.

00:47:08.220 And so why would it be burning?

00:47:09.760 Well, because alive things burn. 0.97

00:47:11.860 That's metabolism.

00:47:13.120 Everything that's alive is on fire.

00:47:15.080 I think when you fall in love with someone, you see them on fire.

00:47:19.820 Everyone else is, you're blind to everyone else.

00:47:22.800 Like you're blind to other people's children in a way.

00:47:26.380 Your own children are on fire for you if you love them.

00:47:29.100 That's because you see them properly.

00:47:31.260 You see them accurately.

00:47:33.020 And so you're compelled by them.

00:47:35.280 That's the burning bush phenomena.

00:47:37.760 Phenomena.

00:47:38.800 That word, it's from the Greek,

00:47:41.020 phenes thai.

00:47:42.260 That means

00:47:42.920 to shine forth.

00:47:49.100 That's what phenomena means.

00:47:50.720 Now if you watch, you'll see that in your life,

00:47:53.660 things shine forth.

00:47:55.760 They call.

00:47:56.760 Because they grip you.

00:47:57.800 They grip your interest.

00:47:59.160 And then you can, you have a decision to make.

00:48:01.180 You can forego that interest,

00:48:04.060 or you can investigate.

00:48:07.080 That's a quest. Moses investigates. Now, he gets closer and closer to this object of interest.

00:48:13.580 So imagine that's what you do when you start to take something that interests you seriously.

00:48:18.380 That's what a scientist does who's curious about some minor phenomenon, hypothetically minor,

00:48:24.700 and so he decides to focus his attention on it, and he studies that phenomenon for years,

00:48:30.880 and as he studies, his knowledge of it grows and grows, and his understanding of the world deepens

00:48:36.540 and becomes more profound, and if he's committed to that, then he'll get to the bottom of things

00:48:41.160 and figure things out, and that's what happens to Moses. He interacts with this burning bush. He

00:48:46.320 gets closer and closer to it. Then he realizes he's on sacred ground. What does that mean? He

00:48:52.040 gets to the depths. What's the moral? Things that attract your attention, it's the deep is calling

00:49:01.620 to you in the guise of the things that attract your attention. They'll glimmer to begin with,

00:49:06.720 and they might even be trivial initially. If you take them seriously and you dive in,

00:49:12.500 you'll go farther and farther down into the structure of the world itself. And that's how

00:49:18.460 you learn deeply. That's how you become an expert. And that's what Moses does. And he takes off his

00:49:24.980 shoes while he's doing this, and that's to signify his transformation of identity. Shoes are a symbol

00:49:30.580 of identity, like work boots

00:49:32.560 or dance slippers. He takes off

00:49:34.580 his shoes because he's going to be going

00:49:36.400 somewhere new. He's going to be being someone different,

00:49:38.760 which is what will happen to you if

00:49:40.520 you establish a relationship with

00:49:42.360 beckons to you.

00:49:45.320 And so, 0.95

00:49:46.300 the culmination of that process

00:49:48.700 is that the voice of

00:49:50.720 the

00:49:52.860 voice of the divine speaks to Moses.

00:49:54.780 He gets to the bottom of things.

00:49:57.600 And that's what people

00:49:58.580 do when they take what

00:50:00.560 beckons to them seriously. They get to the bottom of things, and they become the sort of person

00:50:04.860 whose words have weight, because they know what they're talking about. And God, who speaks from

00:50:14.100 the depths of the bush, tells Moses that he's going to become a leader, and that he is going to speak

00:50:20.520 to the Pharaoh, the tyrant, and he's going to free the slavish Israelites and lead them to the

00:50:27.560 promised land. He's going to take them on a journey. He's going 0.93

00:50:30.040 to take them on a quest. He's going to aim them upward. And

00:50:33.940 Moses says, why will anyone listen to me? And the answer to 0.63

00:50:37.920 that is, God says why. The voice that speaks to Moses says,

00:50:45.140 tell them I sent you. And Moses has had that experience, and

00:50:51.500 the ground on which he's standing when he speaks is firm. And

00:50:56.580 so his words are compelling in the way that the words of someone who speaks

00:51:00.740 compellingly and is believable are compelling. And you might ask, well, why is

00:51:06.320 that? And the answer is, well, it says in the Gospels that Christ spoke as one

00:51:11.960 with authority, right? And that his words were compelling. Well, there's a

00:51:17.280 reason, there's a reason that words are compelling. And the moral of the story

00:51:24.540 of Moses is that words are compelling

00:51:26.380 in precise proportion

00:51:27.560 to their connection with what's deepest.

00:51:31.280 Right.

00:51:32.100 And that's a very hard thing

00:51:34.480 to dispute.

00:51:38.020 So Moses

00:51:39.100 establishes a relationship with the divine

00:51:42.540 and that's what makes him into a leader.

00:51:44.980 And there's leader is defined

00:51:46.240 in that text. A leader is someone who stands

00:51:48.520 up against tyranny and who frees

00:51:50.640 those who are enslaved. That's

00:51:52.440 always true.

00:51:54.540 Right? Always. That's what you do for yourself, if you stop tyrannizing yourself.

00:51:59.480 That's what you do with your family, if you stop tyrannizing them.

00:52:02.520 That's what you do with your children, if you encourage them not to be slaves.

00:52:06.020 That's how you set your culture right.

00:52:07.680 It's always the case that the leader is he who delves deeply into something,

00:52:13.660 establishes a relationship with what's fundamental,

00:52:16.660 faces down the tyrant, and brings the slaves on a journey towards the promised land.

00:52:21.340 That's a definition of leadership.

00:52:24.540 Okay, so that's an idea about the divide.

00:52:31.600 So that's a characterization, in part, of what's at the top of the rope that Tolstoy saw,

00:52:39.540 or the top of the ladder that Jacob envisioned.

00:52:43.560 Okay, it's just one characterization.

00:52:45.480 It's not total.

00:52:47.540 Now, here's another example.

00:52:50.420 So at one point, Moses, who's worked very hard in the service of his people,

00:52:56.400 he's rewarded by God, and God says that he'll get a chance to see God.

00:53:02.000 Now, he's already seen him a bit in the burning bush episode,

00:53:07.940 but it's a little more complete vision this time.

00:53:10.840 But it's still not very complete,

00:53:14.320 because God puts Moses between like two cliffs

00:53:17.160 so that he can only see out a crack and then he says I'll let you see my back after I've passed

00:53:23.400 for quite a distance and so Moses gets to peer out through these two cliffs and see God as he's

00:53:30.560 passed by and well why is the story set up that way well it's to point to the same reality that

00:53:37.300 we already described is that what's at the pinnacle of up what's at the top of everything so to speak

00:53:44.040 is not comprehensible, right?

00:53:46.600 It's beyond you.

00:53:47.400 It's something you can establish a relationship with,

00:53:52.440 but whose final comprehension exceeds the capacity of even a prophet like Moses.

00:53:59.880 So you have to remember this when you're talking about God,

00:54:02.560 let's say, and about your belief.

00:54:03.820 It's like, what is this God that you believe in?

00:54:06.960 Well, the biblical insistence in the final analysis is that

00:54:10.240 there's a, that the essence of the divine is beyond comprehension, and that's no different

00:54:16.340 than the claim that there's no limit to up as you move upward, right, and it's no different

00:54:22.320 than the idea in a way that at the base of material reality itself is an impenetrable

00:54:28.120 mystery, the foundations of the world from a material perspective, the nature of the

00:54:33.960 foundations exceeds your comprehension, just as the nature of the ultimate divine exceeds

00:54:38.820 your comprehension. Now that doesn't mean that you can't establish a relationship

00:54:42.580 with it, right? Now much of what the biblical texts do is describe that

00:54:49.020 relationship. They describe it as covenantal, for example, that it's a

00:54:52.560 contractual relationship. It's a deal. It's a bargain. And the bargain is

00:54:59.600 something like this. It's likely a bargain that you act out to some degree.

00:55:03.820 we assume that if we do well, we'll do, if we conduct ourselves properly, we'll do well.

00:55:11.560 Right, that's sort of the essence of faith, you could say that's the essence of faith

00:55:15.900 in the goodness of being itself, and you wouldn't, you wouldn't do well if you didn't believe

00:55:20.980 that in some fundamental way, you're willing to bargain, you're willing to take your bet,

00:55:25.860 especially once you decide to be good, because your bet is, well, if I'm good, then the world

00:55:31.060 will sort itself out properly around me,

00:55:33.100 within me and around me. But you don't

00:55:35.020 know. You don't know.

00:55:37.140 That's why faith is necessary.

00:55:38.800 There's no way of determining whether that's going to happen

00:55:40.940 before you do it. Just like there's no

00:55:43.000 way of determining how your marriage is going to go

00:55:44.840 before you get married.

00:55:47.580 Right? You have to stake

00:55:49.100 yourself on the game.

00:55:52.220 And

00:55:52.500 you do that in this

00:55:56.680 contractual manner.

00:56:01.060 Okay, so now, I want to build another ladder that's associated with identity, and it should

00:56:11.120 shed light on the identity of men and women, and the identity of the divine in the relationship.

00:56:16.680 Okay, so, for a long time in the West, we've had a liberal idea of identity, and I mean

00:56:24.120 classic liberal identity, classic liberal conceptualization, and the conceptualization

00:56:30.300 is that the fundamental reality of the person,

00:56:35.220 man and woman, is the individual.

00:56:38.340 Now, there's truth in that.

00:56:42.880 But it's truth that only holds in a certain condition.

00:56:50.660 There are preconditions for that being a tenable hypothesis.

00:56:57.140 There are preconditions, social preconditions, contractual preconditions that must be in place before the decision to focus on the individual at the level of interaction, individual interaction, or society works.

00:57:15.060 Now, when the Scottish Enlightenment types conjured up classic liberalism, they conjured it up within the confines of a society that had very profoundly established Judeo-Christian roots.

00:57:27.140 That was the, that was what? That was the ecosystem in which the liberal

00:57:31.760 philosophy emerged and flourished. And whether it can flourish in the absence

00:57:37.600 of that underlying structure is doubtful. So now we need to think about what that

00:57:45.960 underlying structure might be. That would be the structure that allowed your

00:57:49.520 founding fathers to say, we hold these truths as self-evident. What made them

00:57:56.860 self-evident. It means everyone takes them for granted. That means there's a social contract in

00:58:02.280 place that's so profound and deep that there are certain propositions, what is a woman, for example,

00:58:08.980 that everyone takes for granted without further discussion. And that means that society has to

00:58:14.140 be structured in a certain manner so that that agreement can take place. And that structuring

00:58:19.360 was a consequence of the propagation of Judeo-Christian ideas 0.75

00:58:23.620 throughout the West for 1,500 years or more.

00:58:29.580 And that's all shaky now.

00:58:32.440 Which is why we have intense debates about the nature of the individual.

00:58:36.500 So let's investigate the individual a bit.

00:58:40.080 The nature of man and woman.

00:58:41.900 So we could build a person from the bottom up.

00:58:45.240 So you say, well, there's a level of analysis that characterizes you at the subatomic realm.

00:58:54.360 It's a mysterious level, but you partake in that.

00:58:58.440 There are people who believe that your consciousness itself is a quantum phenomena.

00:59:02.860 I have no idea if that's true.

00:59:05.460 My point is that down into the material world, you exist at levels.

00:59:13.160 You exist at the quantum level, you exist at the subatomic level

00:59:18.240 At the atomic level, at the molecular level, at the level of the cell, at the level of the organ

00:59:24.480 Then at the level that we perceive

00:59:26.880 And then you might say, well that's that, that's the whole story

00:59:30.820 That's not the whole story 1.00

00:59:32.940 That's foolish 0.95

00:59:34.700 I'll give you an example, why 0.96

00:59:39.140 So, when psychotherapy had its origins, it was a very liberal enterprise.

00:59:49.700 It focused on the individual.

00:59:51.140 So the idea would be, your mental health is a consequence of how you're structured internally.

00:59:57.040 How your psyche is structured.

00:59:59.260 What's inside you.

01:00:00.760 You could even think of a variant of that would be, you're psychologically healthy if your brain is healthy.

01:00:05.200 And obviously, there's some truth in that, because you can develop a brain tumor, and it can derange your perceptions and your behaviors

01:00:12.200 extremely significantly.

01:00:15.200 But then, as the psychotherapeutic enterprise proceeded, there were people who started to object to that conceptualization,

01:00:23.200 because they noticed that, well, you could find a family where one person was really not doing well,

01:00:31.200 And if you analyze the dynamics of the family, you'd find something like, well, that, let's call him Hunter.

01:00:38.940 That person bore the brunt of all the pathology of the family.

01:00:45.520 Yes, it'd be good if that was funny instead of true.

01:00:50.560 And so then the right level of analysis for that situation wasn't necessarily the problems of that individual,

01:00:56.900 although those were relevant the right level of analysis would be the dynamic within the family

01:01:02.540 well why well let's think about your identity it's like if you're married

01:01:08.740 what's the difference between you and your wife or husband

01:01:13.600 like why why would you why would you assume that you're different like I mean the insistence

01:01:23.020 in a sacralized marriage is that you become one thing.

01:01:27.620 And that isn't how liberal types think.

01:01:31.480 And I mean most of us, insofar as we're classic liberals.

01:01:35.000 Because we have an notion of us as separate individuals.

01:01:37.720 But it's a weird idea, because let's assume that your marriage is permanent.

01:01:43.280 And, which is what marriage is supposed to be.

01:01:45.980 It means that person is there with you all the time.

01:01:49.080 Right? Right to the end of your life.

01:01:50.420 and your identity is going to be characterized to a great degree

01:01:54.120 in consequence of the pattern of interactions

01:01:57.460 that you have with your wife or your husband, like continually.

01:02:01.680 And so to think of you and your identity

01:02:03.740 as somehow not a subset of that coupling,

01:02:08.440 that's, it's just not reasonable.

01:02:10.880 It's so that your boundaries,

01:02:13.520 if you're an individualist liberal, your boundary is your skin.

01:02:18.140 But that's completely belied by the fact that if you're married,

01:02:23.480 your wife is as important as you are to you.

01:02:27.980 And why?

01:02:28.840 Well, because the quality of your experience is absolutely dependent on one another.

01:02:34.960 Because you're continually, it's like you're playing tennis, right?

01:02:38.860 There's no sense thinking about yourself as the only person playing tennis

01:02:42.920 if you're in a tennis game.

01:02:44.940 And the game is real.

01:02:47.220 If you focus on the single player, you miss the game.

01:02:50.780 And then it's not just the marriage, obviously, because, well, then you have kids.

01:02:55.960 And so, to what degree is your identity then not primarily that of father?

01:03:01.800 So that means you're nested inside a higher-order system family.

01:03:06.520 And is that not real? Is that not as real as what's happening inside you?

01:03:11.440 And is it not the case that even your psychological stability

01:03:14.940 is going to be absolutely dependent on the stability of your family?

01:03:19.320 So that even if you're a well-constituted individual,

01:03:22.460 if one of your children start to suffer terribly,

01:03:25.520 that's going to affect you directly.

01:03:29.000 And so that means your mental health isn't inside you.

01:03:32.300 It's a consequence of the nature of the relationship

01:03:35.000 that you have with your wife and your kids, let's say.

01:03:37.800 But that's not all.

01:03:38.640 there's wife and kids, then there's community, there's career and the business that you're

01:03:45.540 embedded in, there's your town, your city, your state, your nation, and then there's whatever

01:03:50.940 your nation is founded on. Maybe that's the nation is embedded in the natural world,

01:03:57.600 and then all of that's embedded in whatever everything is embedded in, and all of that is

01:04:03.400 part of you, all of it, equally, strangely enough. And so the notion that your identity ends at your

01:04:12.100 physical boundaries as an individual, that's not right. And you can tell that it's not right,

01:04:19.400 in part, because that identity is fragmenting in our culture, right? That identity is not

01:04:24.760 maintaining its coherence. And part of that is, is that your identity as an individual cannot

01:04:30.080 maintain its coherence in the absence of your relationship with other people.

01:04:33.840 Obviously. Why obviously? You can take the most anti-social people there are, like

01:04:39.340 serious criminals, and you can punish them by isolating them. That tells you

01:04:45.720 everything you need to know about people. You take people who are the least 0.57

01:04:48.460 social people you can imagine, and you can make them seriously miserable by

01:04:53.920 making them alone. Well, that shows you how much we're individual. Now, you could

01:04:59.580 say, and should, imagine now that you're in a well-constituted marriage, in a

01:05:06.300 well-constituted family, in a town that's functional and stable, in a state

01:05:12.600 that's abundant and predictable, in a country that works, in a metaphysical

01:05:21.600 reality that's, what would you say, wise, in a natural order that's sustainable, then

01:05:30.260 you can be an individual. But that's a lot of preconditions that have to be met before

01:05:35.500 you have that dynamic flexibility that enables you to focus here and now on you. And that,

01:05:46.920 those higher order levels of existence, let's say, they're predicated on an ethos. They're a kind of game.

01:05:55.620 There's a way you have to treat your wife for it to work. Ask her. She'll tell you. She'll certainly tell you, 1.00

01:06:02.860 even if she won't tell you the rules, she'll tell you when you break them. Right? And you want that.

01:06:10.080 You want that. We're doing that to each other all the time, you know? It's like, if I'm interacting with you

01:06:14.540 in a way that you accept as desirable,

01:06:18.120 then you'll want the interaction to continue.

01:06:21.240 You'll be enthusiastically and voluntarily engaged,

01:06:24.120 and we'll progress, and likely upward,

01:06:27.020 assuming that we're not doing something together that's nefarious.

01:06:32.240 And we might not even know what the rules of that dynamic are,

01:06:36.220 but we will know when one or the other of us breaks the pattern.

01:06:41.120 Right?

01:06:41.360 There'll be a disjunction, an awkward pause in the conversation, let's say, right?

01:06:46.000 Or a mutual misunderstanding, a breakdown of the relationship.

01:06:50.360 And so here's a way of conceptualizing mental health.

01:06:54.800 It's a musical conceptualization.

01:06:57.040 You know how a note has its place in a phrase and in the melody and then in the piece as a whole? 0.89

01:07:02.860 Well, that's your mental health.

01:07:05.620 It's like, if you're well constituted in your higher order relationships, then the harmony that exists is your mental health.

01:07:15.580 That's not something you carry around inside you, like a well constituted psyche or a healthy brain.

01:07:21.760 It's partly that, because there's all those underlying levels that we talked about, right?

01:07:27.460 Molecular, the molecular level, the level of the organ, that's all real too.

01:07:32.600 You want that whole thing to be harmonious.

01:07:34.320 That's hard.

01:07:35.020 You want that whole thing to be harmonious.

01:07:36.960 Right from the quantum level to whatever's at the pinnacle, right?

01:07:41.820 One nation under God.

01:07:43.120 What is that superordinate reality in which everything's embedded?

01:07:48.420 Well, we saw a little bit of that in the story of Moses, right?

01:07:53.700 Moses makes contact with that when he pursues what interests him

01:07:57.480 and delves into it deeply.

01:07:59.220 He establishes a relationship with that transcendent reality that underlies everything.

01:08:06.420 And one of the insistences in the biblical corpus is that that's one of the ways God,

01:08:11.400 this is a definition.

01:08:13.680 The divine is what makes itself manifest in what calls you forward.

01:08:18.220 Now that's a wonderful thing to know.

01:08:21.540 And I think it's technically true.

01:08:25.560 So imagine this, is that, imagine that you have a vague apprehension of these higher

01:08:35.560 order systems in which you live, right?

01:08:38.720 Now, some of that knowledge will be explicit and some of it won't be.

01:08:42.440 You don't know exactly how to be a good brother, exactly how to be a good father or good husband.

01:08:47.960 You have some sense of that, but you definitely, let's say you want that.

01:08:54.620 So now that's your aim. That's the arrangement you make with the structure of the world. You

01:09:03.340 want to be a better husband. Okay, so now what happens to you is that the pathway to better

01:09:10.320 makes itself manifest as those things that grip your attention. That's what will happen. And then

01:09:17.160 you can think about that as the voice of what's, you can think about that as the voice of your

01:09:22.180 higher aim conferring with you. And that's correct. And then you, that's correct. That's how your

01:09:29.760 perceptions work. That's how your emotions work. Once you establish your aim, your perceptions

01:09:35.440 lay out the pathway in the world towards that aim, and your emotions come into alignment. So that if

01:09:44.600 you're aiming at point A, and you see yourself moving towards point A, that fills you with

01:09:49.940 enthusiasm. And if you see that you're deviating from the path, that produces

01:09:53.640 negative emotion. That's how emotions work. So your aim determines the structure

01:09:58.580 of your perceptions and your emotions. Now, once you've established an aim, I'm

01:10:03.500 going to be a better person. Then the spirit of that aim makes itself manifest

01:10:11.280 to you in what grips your attention. Now, you might say, well, what does that have

01:10:15.780 to do with the divine? That's a hard question, because it's the same question as, well, what

01:10:23.260 relationship does your approximation of what's good have to what's ultimately good? Now,

01:10:31.540 you wouldn't say none, because then it wouldn't be good, right? I mean, if you're aiming at

01:10:38.340 the good, you've established some proximal relationship with what's ultimately good.

01:10:43.500 You're participating in that process.

01:10:45.900 And then you don't know if what grips your attention or perhaps disturbs your conscience.

01:10:51.440 You don't know how high up the ladder that message is coming from.

01:10:55.820 Now, the story of Moses is predicated on the insistence that if you do this seriously,

01:11:03.500 you'll establish contact with as much contact as is possible for you to withstand with what's actually at the highest point.

01:11:14.460 Now, you kind of know this because you know that there are times when you're enticed forward into action, say, by something that really makes you feel committed.

01:11:25.340 You think, yeah, this is for me.

01:11:27.200 This is something I'd work for, I'd sacrifice for, because work and sacrifice, that's the same thing.

01:11:32.500 This is something that would get me out of bed in the morning, even if I was miserable.

01:11:36.320 So

01:11:38.460 So let me tell you the other

01:11:49.580 Let's see

01:11:51.500 I'll tell you the story of Abraham

01:11:53.760 A little bit of the story of Abraham

01:11:54.960 Because it makes this clear

01:11:55.940 Okay, so now what have we done

01:11:57.660 In terms of answering these questions

01:11:59.200 So I made the case that

01:12:01.680 we're connected to what's

01:12:08.720 above us, so to speak,

01:12:11.080 in this manner that

01:12:13.120 speaks of our nesting

01:12:15.220 within higher order structures.

01:12:18.080 Right? Marriage, family, 0.92

01:12:20.420 town,

01:12:21.540 city, state, nation,

01:12:24.100 natural order,

01:12:25.460 and then whatever that's all grounded in.

01:12:28.280 That's the,

01:12:28.780 that's that structure that

01:12:30.280 Tolstoy envisioned that sustained him above the abyss and you know this is true like when you're

01:12:36.340 doubtful about your own validity let's say which was Tolstoy's situation why wouldn't you make

01:12:41.020 reference in your own imagination to the service that you've been for your wife or your children

01:12:46.660 or your community why wouldn't you justify your own miserable existence to yourself by remembering

01:12:51.520 how you were in service to what was highest that is what you do that's what gets you through a long

01:12:57.400 night. And why the biblical insistence is that it's the establishment of that upward-oriented

01:13:04.220 relationship with what's transcendent that does characterize the relationship between

01:13:10.380 the individual and the divine. And I can't see anything wrong with that reasoning. It

01:13:17.180 seems to be how things are structured. It seems to be how our perceptions work. It seems

01:13:22.020 to be how our emotions work. And so, okay, so let's, let's return to the

01:13:28.320 questions. What's the nature of man and woman? Well, we, we exist at multiple 0.57

01:13:38.440 levels, from the microcosm to the macrocosm. And we're related, we're not

01:13:44.580 only related to everything at all of those levels, we're, we're actually

01:13:48.540 constituted at all of those levels.

01:13:50.780 That's why you're a citizen of your country.

01:13:52.940 Is that not part of your identity?

01:13:57.720 So we exist at all those levels.

01:14:00.060 And then, well, what's the nature of that existence?

01:14:02.520 Well, the higher levels are beyond us.

01:14:05.020 They're transcendent.

01:14:06.880 Do we have a relationship with that?

01:14:09.620 Well, as a citizen of your country,

01:14:11.840 you certainly have a relationship with that.

01:14:14.200 Do you have a relationship with your aim?

01:14:15.720 Well, if you don't, then there's no way it's going to manifest itself in the world.

01:14:20.660 If it doesn't shape the way that you see and think and feel,

01:14:25.180 then that's a non-starter for you.

01:14:29.020 Your aim better shape you because otherwise you're not going to pursue it

01:14:32.040 and you're certainly not going to attain it.

01:14:37.980 What's the nature of the divine?

01:14:41.240 The divine is the ineffable up.

01:14:44.840 And that's a definition, you see.

01:14:47.020 And this is a good thing to know when you're plagued by religious doubt.

01:14:52.280 I don't know whether I believe in God.

01:14:54.200 Well, do you believe in the good?

01:14:56.640 And do you believe in the good that could get better?

01:14:59.040 And is there an end to that?

01:15:01.100 And wouldn't you characterize what's at the pinnacle as the place towards which all good moves?

01:15:07.420 And then what, are you going to say that's not real?

01:15:09.740 If it's not real, then why are you doing anything?

01:15:12.940 Because the whole presumption of your action is that

01:15:17.200 the sacrifices that you're making move you towards somewhere better. I mean unless you're working at cross purposes to yourself, right?

01:15:23.360 You can work to make yourself miserable. You can work to turn everything into hell. But assuming you're not doing that, you're aiming up.

01:15:30.920 Under the presumption that if you aim up, that up exists, and that you can continue with that process. And so why would that

01:15:37.520 be without end?

01:15:40.260 Why would it be without end? And that's Jacob's vision and that's

01:15:45.400 That's Tolstoy's vision and that's embedded in the notion of the burning bush and it's part of the characterization of the divine and

01:15:53.640 It's very useful to understand especially when you also understand that that is what calls to you that you can make that connection is that

01:16:01.140 What you I've laid this out psychologically partly in this book?

01:16:05.640 Look, you do get intuitions about how to act as a consequence of your relationship to your higher aims.

01:16:13.380 That's how the intuitions work.

01:16:15.780 Well, of course, that's how they work, right?

01:16:18.020 I mean, if you're imagining establishing a restaurant, let's say,

01:16:21.980 you want to establish your own business, you're going to have a vision of the restaurant.

01:16:26.220 If you let yourself go there, and that's going to be this, that'll become this city on the hill, let's say,

01:16:33.740 hospitable city on the hill.

01:16:35.640 that you're aiming at. And you're going to think, well, I'm interested in that. It's gripping me.

01:16:39.720 And then, having established that as an aim, you're going to tell yourself when you're moving

01:16:44.080 toward it, when you're not. That's how your emotions orient yourself, and you're going to

01:16:48.580 have ideas that are related to the goal. Or what good would your ideas be? And so it's obviously

01:16:55.540 the case that your intuitions are informed by your vision, and your emotions are structured by your

01:17:02.200 aim. And so then the logical conclusion to that is, aim as

01:17:06.480 highly upward as you can. That's what Christ tells his followers

01:17:11.400 in the Sermon on the Mount, right? It was actually an

01:17:13.800 instruction manual of sorts. Christ says, love God above all

01:17:19.700 else. Okay, so what does that mean practically? It means

01:17:23.000 whenever you do anything you do, start by aiming up. That's

01:17:28.620 what Jacob does when he builds an altar. Sequentially, that's

01:17:32.000 what Abraham does when he builds an altar and rekindles his

01:17:35.440 covenant with God. He makes a decision at the beginning of

01:17:38.160 every adventure to remember the aim. And what should your aim

01:17:44.660 be if you could have the aim you wanted? It's like, well, why

01:17:47.500 not aim at what's highest? You can aim at what's lowest? That's

01:17:52.220 not a good plan. You know, if you're going to start a

01:17:55.540 restaurant,

01:17:57.040 you might as well start one that people want to go to.

01:18:01.880 And then that, you know, what one of the insistences in the Old Testament is that hospitality is a divine virtue.

01:18:09.580 Well, if everyone made everyone else welcome, then

01:18:13.180 the world would turn into the Garden of Eden.

01:18:15.360 And so what attracts you in your vision of, let's say, a hospitable cafe, is a

01:18:22.260 a walled garden, because that's what paradise means, that's hospitable. And that's the divine

01:18:28.600 itself laying itself out to you as an ambition within the confines of your own vision.

01:18:35.420 And that's a great thing to know. And as far as I can tell, it's just true. Like, it's true

01:18:43.000 theologically. It's true philosophically. It's true biologically. It's true practically.

01:18:51.620 it's true materially, that's just how things are. And the contrary hypothesis is, your aim has

01:18:59.480 nothing to do with your perception, which is a staggeringly foolish proposition, and that neither

01:19:06.300 your aims nor your perceptions have anything to do with your ideas or your vision. It's like, yeah,

01:19:12.160 no, that's... Look, I'll give you an example. Let's say you're fighting with your wife,

01:19:18.060 an example of possession.

01:19:20.260 Let's say you're fighting with your wife or your husband

01:19:22.040 and you're resentful.

01:19:25.340 So that's your aim, is to express your resentment.

01:19:29.080 And so that's what you're orienting yourself towards.

01:19:31.380 And so what speaks to you in that moment?

01:19:34.580 The voice of the spirit of resentment.

01:19:38.120 Obviously.

01:19:38.940 Is that possession?

01:19:40.600 Let it possess you for a year or two and you'll find out.

01:19:43.460 And so, yes, definitely, 100%, the spirit of your aim informs your emotion and your perceptions.

01:19:53.840 That's a hell of a thing to understand.

01:19:56.360 As it means, too, in part, if the world isn't laying itself out to you as a space of expansive opportunity,

01:20:03.100 then perhaps your aim is wrong.

01:20:06.720 So.

01:20:07.280 I said I would talk to you about Abraham

01:20:14.920 But I won't because I'm out of time

01:20:16.620 And so if you want to know about Abraham

01:20:18.500 You have to read this book apparently

01:20:20.680 So

01:20:21.700 Thank you very much everyone

01:20:37.280 See, you are a hot crowd.

01:20:55.580 All right, Tim.

01:21:00.800 Question time.

01:21:07.280 Are you on? 1.00

01:21:17.340 Tammy's microphone needs to be turned on.

01:21:26.120 You could ask me a question and I'll... 0.99

01:21:28.500 What? Oh.

01:21:29.640 there we go

01:21:37.640 all right

01:21:41.640 yeah lots of questions

01:21:45.940 okay

01:21:46.360 okay let's see 0.99

01:21:55.540 My sister has fallen victim to the woke virus.

01:22:05.140 How would I go about closing the distance?

01:22:09.540 She is between herself and her family.

01:22:16.300 Close the distance between herself and her family

01:22:18.820 because she's, I think, getting further and further away from them.

01:22:26.540 Well, here's a good rule.

01:22:32.540 If people aren't listening to you, stop talking.

01:22:36.540 Okay, so...

01:22:40.540 I mean something very specific by that.

01:22:45.540 You can think about it as a strategy.

01:22:48.540 But it's not a manipulative strategy, it's an existential strategy.

01:22:51.540 strategy. It's a variant of the idea that Christ puts forward in the Gospels, which is, do not

01:22:57.880 cast pearls before swine. And I'm not associating your sister with swine, by the way. And I'm

01:23:05.340 seriously not. I want to delve into the meaning of that statement. There's no sense offering what

01:23:15.720 will be misused.

01:23:19.600 See, if you're talking to someone

01:23:21.900 and they're not listening,

01:23:24.840 you aren't where you think you are.

01:23:27.860 You've got the terrain wrong.

01:23:30.520 And this is something I really learned as a therapist,

01:23:32.480 because you want to keep

01:23:34.900 the space

01:23:37.280 where the dialogue is progressing

01:23:39.680 active.

01:23:42.040 And if, as a therapist,

01:23:44.440 you make a verbal move

01:23:46.300 and the person

01:23:47.980 resists

01:23:49.380 resistance in psychotherapy

01:23:52.000 or

01:23:52.520 circumvents the topic

01:23:56.100 or doesn't

01:23:58.380 use the

01:23:59.080 offering as an invitation

01:24:02.340 to continue to play, then

01:24:04.160 you said the wrong thing.

01:24:06.840 You said the wrong thing.

01:24:08.360 This is a really useful thing to know.

01:24:10.340 It's like, you're trying to make your point

01:24:12.260 and you're not going anywhere. It's like,

01:24:14.440 You're not, you're not where you think you are.

01:24:18.380 You're not talking to who you think you're talking to.

01:24:21.140 God only knows who you're talking to.

01:24:23.720 The person you're talking to might not even know who they are at that moment,

01:24:27.880 or what possesses them, so to speak.

01:24:30.720 If you're talking to someone who's ideologically possessed,

01:24:34.080 the probability that you're talking to the ideology is extremely high.

01:24:37.580 And good luck with that.

01:24:38.900 And I mean that technically, because you can tell this, because...

01:24:43.900 If there are ten people, and they have the same ideology, you could talk to any of them, and you'd get the same answer.

01:24:49.980 So you're obviously not talking to the person.

01:24:52.480 You're talking to the ideology, and the probability that an ideology will listen to you is,

01:24:57.860 especially if you insist, it's, forgive it.

01:25:01.660 Like, going directly at it is probably, is more likely to fortify it than anything else.

01:25:08.260 So, what can you do instead?

01:25:11.720 Instead, well, I would say in that situation, don't offer any of your opinions.

01:25:19.280 None.

01:25:19.600 Zero.

01:25:20.300 Just take yourself out of the game completely.

01:25:23.580 And instead, listen and watch.

01:25:30.000 Remember your aim.

01:25:30.920 You have an aim.

01:25:31.480 You said your aim in the question, right?

01:25:33.280 Your aim is to reestablish a relationship with your sister.

01:25:37.600 Okay.

01:25:38.280 Now, you have no idea how you're going to be able to do that.

01:25:41.720 And the probability that you'll do that by talking her out of radiology is,

01:25:46.180 well, you already know that's basically zero.

01:25:48.220 That hasn't worked.

01:25:49.700 The family's fractured.

01:25:51.260 That's not working.

01:25:52.780 So you don't know what to do.

01:25:54.720 But you know what you want.

01:25:56.840 Okay, so now you're, well, you look for an opening, right?

01:26:02.620 Maybe you invite her for dinner.

01:26:04.500 And then you watch, and you think, you watch, and you see,

01:26:07.520 when is what we're doing working

01:26:09.900 and when is what we're doing not working?

01:26:12.600 And you try to find your pathway, right?

01:26:15.480 And you're searching.

01:26:16.260 That's a quest.

01:26:17.020 It's like, what's the quest for?

01:26:18.500 I want my sister back.

01:26:21.160 You've got to remember that.

01:26:21.960 I want my sister back.

01:26:22.980 I don't want to win the argument.

01:26:24.520 I don't want to talk her out of anything.

01:26:25.900 You can want that,

01:26:27.020 but then you're not going to get your sister back

01:26:28.500 because you're not going to get all the things you want.

01:26:31.880 You don't want to sacrifice the lower thing.

01:26:34.260 You're going to win the argument to the higher thing,

01:26:36.320 which is you want your sister back.

01:26:38.680 Now, if you really want your sister back

01:26:40.580 and you pay enough attention,

01:26:44.620 she'll tell you how to get her back.

01:26:47.040 She won't even be able to help it.

01:26:48.900 So there's something I learned as a therapist.

01:26:50.940 This is so interesting.

01:26:52.120 It's so cool.

01:26:53.800 Well, there's two things, I guess, that go together.

01:26:56.280 One is that if you're bored by a conversation,

01:27:00.800 you're the dull one.

01:27:03.280 Okay? 0.76

01:27:04.000 So if you find people boring, it's like,

01:27:06.320 you should take a look in the mirror because what you're doing is reducing all your interactions

01:27:12.360 with other people to only that which is trite. And you're doing that to protect yourself for

01:27:18.240 some reason. Because if you listen to people, and I don't care who they are, if you listen to people,

01:27:24.240 they're so interesting that you want to run away screaming. Because people are very weird,

01:27:29.660 they're very strange, and they're full of snakes and twists and bends, and that's just true for

01:27:35.600 so-called simple people as it is for sophisticated people. And so, you want to engage it with the

01:27:43.980 person in a way that keeps the fascination alive. And then you want to listen. Because if you really

01:27:51.180 listen, they'll tell you what they're up to. They won't be able to help it. Because if you run across

01:27:57.480 someone who listens, especially if no one's listening to you, you will tell them everything.

01:28:02.120 And as soon as someone tells you everything,

01:28:03.840 then you can figure out how to get them back.

01:28:06.860 And that works.

01:28:08.980 It might take a while.

01:28:10.720 And it might take a while before your sister trusts you,

01:28:13.160 that's for sure.

01:28:14.120 And what will happen is, you know,

01:28:15.640 you'll invite her over and hopefully she'll come.

01:28:18.580 Or you'll say to her,

01:28:19.420 look, is there some circumstance under which I could meet you?

01:28:23.320 Like, could we meet?

01:28:24.900 Can you want to come over for dinner?

01:28:26.340 Well, no, I don't think I can do that.

01:28:27.680 You know, you voted for Donald Trump.

01:28:29.540 It's like, okay.

01:28:31.560 You don't say, well, you know, don't you like Trump too?

01:28:35.860 It's like, that's kind of obvious.

01:28:37.040 I think we already know the answer to that question.

01:28:40.460 Then you might say, well, you know, would you meet me for coffee in the morning

01:28:44.980 for like five minutes and see how that goes?

01:28:48.520 And if she still says no, then you might say, well, is there any circumstances

01:28:51.680 under which we could speak or meet?

01:28:55.080 Any.

01:28:56.000 Well, and if she says no, well, you know, wait.

01:29:01.060 Wait.

01:29:01.560 You say, look, the offer's on the table, and I'll phone you in three months, and we'll

01:29:05.960 try again, you know, like, you gotta find a place where you can meet, and then when

01:29:11.360 you meet, you gotta listen, and she's not gonna trust you, and if you listen enough,

01:29:18.540 she'll tell you something private, and then she'll be really mad at you and probably won't

01:29:22.140 talk to you for like three weeks again, because, you know, you sucked her in, and that'll 1.00

01:29:29.340 make her mad. And so then you'll have to kind of

01:29:31.360 start, not quite again, but sort of

01:29:33.300 again. And,

01:29:34.760 but if you keep that up, 1.00

01:29:37.240 she'll start talking to you. And then

01:29:41.060 when she talks to you, she'll tell you

01:29:43.080 what she needs. And

01:29:44.760 if she tells you what she needs, then you can

01:29:47.200 deliver it. And I don't mean

01:29:49.300 in a way that's going to violate your own integrity.

01:29:51.140 That's not helpful. And then you

01:29:53.200 can get her back.

01:29:55.240 But, you don't do

01:29:57.280 that by winning the political argument. That's for

01:29:59.260 It's not a political argument if your sister is willing to sacrifice your relationship with her to the political

01:30:05.660 This is nothing to do with politics. It's way deeper problem way deeper problem than that

01:30:11.320 And so you're certainly not going to solve it by discussing the political

01:30:18.400 Why do you not cast pearls before swine because they make no use of them that it's the wrong

01:30:25.820 It's the wrong place for treasures

01:30:29.760 And so this is a good thing to know if you're talking to someone and they're not listening. 0.98

01:30:33.220 It's like, shut up. 0.97

01:30:34.600 You're not where you think you are. 0.99

01:30:37.180 You're not who you think you are to that person.

01:30:40.420 And that person is not who you think they are.

01:30:43.840 You're in the wrong place, delivering the wrong message to the wrong person.

01:30:48.300 And so what do you do?

01:30:49.240 You do what Tammy said at the beginning of her talk.

01:30:51.760 You pay attention. 0.98

01:30:53.620 You think, okay, who the hell are you? 0.84

01:30:56.400 And what is that's what I do to journalists when they start torturing me. It's like 0.96

01:31:01.520 You know, I thought you were a journalist

01:31:04.300 But you're not there's something wrong with you

01:31:08.180 Now I have to treat you like there's something wrong with you. That's annoying, but you made it necessary

01:31:14.920 so 1.00

01:31:16.920 Tammy resolved a relationship with her sister

01:31:28.120 by listening to her 0.98

01:31:29.100 Tammy's sister had the wrong idea about her 0.58

01:31:31.960 really like an old idea 1.00

01:31:33.520 she was a lot older than me

01:31:34.640 she was a lot older than me 1.00

01:31:36.600 and she lost her fiance

01:31:39.260 when she was 21

01:31:40.300 and I was like 13

01:31:42.560 and then

01:31:44.560 she was probably 40

01:31:46.780 and we saw each other as regularly as i saw anybody else in my family but we always ended

01:31:55.540 up in some sort of misunderstanding and we had just found out that my mom had dementia and we

01:32:01.640 gave my sister a cognitive test and it looked like she was developing the same problem and i said to

01:32:08.700 George, I need to do something because, you know, I need to do something.

01:32:17.200 I want my sister back.

01:32:18.560 Yeah, I want my sister back.

01:32:19.740 Time is wasting.

01:32:21.800 And he said what he thought would work would be to listen.

01:32:28.100 So I didn't say anything for the rest of the weekend, really.

01:32:31.600 I just listened.

01:32:33.240 And I didn't get in any more trouble.

01:32:35.460 So that was good.

01:32:36.240 and at the end of the weekend we went whale watching we were on vancouver island

01:32:42.840 we went whale watching at the end of the day we went to a restaurant

01:32:46.340 uh with my aunt and jordan and i and we sat down and she started to tell me who she thought i was

01:32:53.660 and she was saying you were i was dependent on my parents that they did everything for me

01:33:00.600 that you got everything you ever wanted without any effort yeah yeah and i was kicking jordan

01:33:06.820 under the table i wasn't saying anything i was like wow just no defender you didn't defend

01:33:11.520 yourself at all no and then at the end of that she said you know you're a really good mother

01:33:15.560 so i think she had never said out loud what she had been thinking maybe i hadn't given her

01:33:21.640 a chance and uh then we got along very well she the next year she said the same thing the same

01:33:29.380 thing story and then at the end said you're a good mother and then i never heard that story again and

01:33:34.700 we had 20 really good years so it works yeah it was so it was very cool it's very cool to watch it

01:33:45.580 because tam's sister when we were sitting this restaurant really took a strip off her but it was

01:33:52.140 so, like, I knew Tammy, and her sister had formulated a picture of Tammy, like, 20 years

01:33:59.160 ago, that was, like, the picture a 19-year-old might formulate, and had never really questioned

01:34:06.040 it since. And it was so unlike what Tammy was like, that it was like she was talking

01:34:11.240 about someone who wasn't even there. And so, it was even hard to take offense to. It's

01:34:15.520 like, that's what you think? And then at the end of it, as Tammy pointed out, she sort

01:34:20.300 of shook her head and realized that actually bore virtually no relationship whatsoever to the

01:34:25.460 reality that she was actually observing. And she would have never figured that out if you would

01:34:30.100 have said anything to defend yourself, right? You had to let her tell the whole story. She didn't

01:34:34.420 know what she thought of Tammy until she said it. And then it was preposterous. And then it was

01:34:40.700 obvious that it was outdated and useless and not accurate. But it would have never, that would

01:34:47.500 realization would have never come if you would have started defending yourself because she would

01:34:51.400 have just backed into a corner and you would never heard what she thought. I think she was very

01:34:54.940 traumatized you know when she was 21 and that just solidified in time that was where our relationship

01:35:03.680 was she must have looked at me at 13 not having had any tragedy in my life and felt some jealousy

01:35:12.260 or, you know, for...

01:35:14.500 Because she was in such pain

01:35:15.820 and she never talked about it

01:35:19.000 until that moment.

01:35:20.520 So that was very interesting.

01:35:21.620 And that only took three days.

01:35:23.480 Yeah, three days.

01:35:24.800 Yeah.

01:35:25.160 Yeah, it was amazing.

01:35:26.340 It was amazing.

01:35:27.460 So, okay.

01:35:28.520 Well, that's that question.

01:35:32.260 Mm-hmm. 0.74

01:35:34.460 Good luck with your sister.

01:35:36.540 Yeah.

01:35:36.660 It's a good...

01:35:37.280 It's a mystery to crack, eh?

01:35:38.740 Like, you can do it.

01:35:39.940 You can do it.

01:35:40.860 You gotta...

01:35:42.260 It's like taming a wild animal, you know.

01:35:45.100 Seriously, you've got to be awake and see where the pathway is.

01:35:50.320 Are we getting along or not?

01:35:51.460 Like, can I adjust myself?

01:35:52.720 Is it time to shut up?

01:35:53.700 Don't take it personally. 0.90

01:35:55.200 That's right.

01:35:56.200 Don't take it personally.

01:35:57.380 No.

01:35:58.140 Yep.

01:35:59.340 Yep.

01:35:59.820 Okay, new question.

01:36:00.820 Yep.

01:36:00.980 I'm newly engaged and my fiancé is here.

01:36:04.580 That's a good thing.

01:36:05.680 I'm newly engaged

01:36:10.020 and my fiance is here with me

01:36:11.840 tonight what advice would you

01:36:13.800 give us as we enter into our marriage

01:36:16.080 together

01:36:16.660 tell

01:36:19.420 each other the truth

01:36:20.660 like

01:36:22.280 right from

01:36:25.300 the beginning and if you've got lies

01:36:27.520 happening now

01:36:28.400 get them

01:36:31.480 sorted out maybe not all

01:36:33.620 at once the same night

01:36:35.780 You know, but look

01:36:40.860 Yeah, you want to build your house on a firm foundation and

01:36:45.480 Lies are not a firm foundation and the problem with building your house on lies is that when the storms come your house will fall

01:36:53.040 that is what will happen because the storms will come and

01:36:57.040 The probability that the storms will destroy you is proportionate to the instability of your foundation and

01:37:03.460 and so you build your relationship on the truth, and the truth will set you free.

01:37:10.260 That's the promise, and how could it be otherwise?

01:37:13.500 Because you want to adapt to the world, and to your partner,

01:37:16.860 and you adapt to the world by admitting to the existence of the world,

01:37:21.040 and conforming to its contours, and you do that to each other.

01:37:28.040 You have to say, so here's an example of the truth.

01:37:31.240 So let's say I'm having a scrap with Tammy.

01:37:33.460 about something. And, you know, some of that scrap is merely going to be the fact that the two of us

01:37:38.920 are confronting an actually difficult problem. Maybe it's like how to discipline our three-year-old

01:37:43.220 son. Because, you know, kids are tricky. They're full of tricks. They're complex. Every child is

01:37:49.300 an individualized relationship. Exactly how to do it right is very, very difficult. And so you might

01:37:55.580 have a disagreement. You're likely to have a disagreement merely because you're trying to

01:38:00.880 think it through, right? I mean, if you're trying to figure out how to deal with your,

01:38:06.060 the bratty behavior, newly emergent bratty behavior of your three-year-old, you're going

01:38:10.320 to have arguments in your own head about what to do. So why wouldn't your wife have an opinion 1.00

01:38:15.240 that's different than yours? And unless you know what to do, which would mean he wouldn't have had 0.78

01:38:21.100 the problem to begin with, you'd probably listen. Okay, and so you want to listen, you want to tell

01:38:29.940 each other the truth and you also want to you want to do that in a manner that is revealing

01:38:36.320 so for example here's here's a something to understand if you have a fight because you'll

01:38:41.540 have a fight now you'll have a fight partly because you have things to fight about you have 1.00

01:38:44.600 things to think through and partly because you're both stupid and ignorant and you want to win and 1.00

01:38:48.920 it'll be contaminated with your own pathology but some of it's just the fact that you have 1.00

01:38:53.520 difficult things to deal with as a couple okay so now if you're having a scrap with your partner

01:38:58.660 and it's kind of augering in.

01:39:01.420 One of the things you can do,

01:39:03.420 here's two things you can do that really work.

01:39:05.360 One is you can separate

01:39:06.700 and you can go your own way for a minute or two

01:39:09.760 knowing you're going to come back together

01:39:11.220 because you shouldn't run away from the fight.

01:39:13.580 You can go to your corners, so to speak, like boxers

01:39:16.480 and you can think, 0.99

01:39:17.780 I'm, you know, certain that my wife is like 95% wrong

01:39:21.160 in this argument.

01:39:22.940 But there's some possibility that, you know,

01:39:26.480 I contributed to it like maybe five percent, maybe, sometime. How? Now you have to want the

01:39:35.800 answer to that question, which is very annoying, because you really don't want to know the answer,

01:39:40.380 because you want her to be wrong, because that would be convenient, except that if your wife

01:39:44.980 is always wrong, then you're married to someone who's always wrong, and that's really annoying,

01:39:50.220 unless you always want to be right. So you don't really want her to be wrong, certainly not all

01:39:56.160 the time. And you don't want to

01:39:58.100 defeat her all the time unless you want to live with

01:40:00.040 someone who's permanently defeated.

01:40:02.900 And then you can be a martyr

01:40:04.100 and you can proclaim to your friends how terrible

01:40:06.220 it is to live under the

01:40:08.200 weight of this defeated person.

01:40:10.520 And, you know, that's fun, but

01:40:12.220 it's a hell

01:40:14.160 of a way to have a marriage.

01:40:16.220 And so, anyways,

01:40:18.640 you're sitting there and you think about 1.00

01:40:19.980 the stupid thing you did and then you can go tell your 1.00

01:40:22.140 partner the stupid thing you did to 1.00

01:40:24.140 contribute to the fight, and she can tell you the stupid thing that she did, and then you're both 1.00

01:40:28.720 stupid, and then you can have a talk, and maybe you can sort it out. And that's a good thing to do. 1.00

01:40:34.340 You know, look to your own sin, so to speak. And then the other thing you can do is

01:40:39.060 you can tell the person what you want. It's like, say you're embroiled in a fight with your partner.

01:40:46.340 It's like, we've done this, like, very bluntly. Is there anything I could say at this moment that

01:40:51.840 would hypothetically satisfy you. Right? And that can be a genuine offer. It's like, use your

01:40:59.260 imagination for a second. We're having a fight. Clearly you want something. Clearly. Now, I don't

01:41:05.220 know if I could give it to you, or even would, but I might want to know what it is. And so then it's

01:41:11.980 up to the other person to think, okay, obviously I want something. What is it? And that's annoying,

01:41:19.180 because what your partner will inevitably say

01:41:21.560 is something like,

01:41:22.600 if you love me, you don't know.

01:41:25.260 And that's like,

01:41:26.840 see, everyone's heard that.

01:41:28.540 Everyone's heard that.

01:41:30.060 And what that really means is 0.98

01:41:32.040 shut up and leave me alone. 0.98

01:41:34.140 That's what that means. 0.96

01:41:35.220 I don't want to think about it.

01:41:37.100 It's like, no.

01:41:37.980 It's like, I would like to give you what you want, maybe,

01:41:42.000 if I knew what it was.

01:41:44.120 And so that's a worthwhile exercise.

01:41:46.460 It's like if you're angry with each other,

01:41:48.460 you're going to try to fight and win, and that's not a good idea.

01:41:52.480 But you could sit there and think, okay, if this situation turned out the way I would want it to,

01:42:00.840 you know, if I was treating myself right, and I wanted my marriage to work,

01:42:04.020 and I wanted to treat my wife right, what would that look like?

01:42:08.680 And you'll get that answer, because your vision falls into alignment with your aim.

01:42:14.800 And then if your partner will tell you,

01:42:18.620 then you can say the words they want to hear.

01:42:21.240 But then there's rules about that too.

01:42:22.840 It's like, here's the rule.

01:42:24.280 It's like, okay, I'm going to try to give you what you need,

01:42:26.680 but I'm not very good at it. 0.99

01:42:28.220 I'm not good at it because I'm stupid, 0.96

01:42:30.040 which is why I didn't know what you needed to begin with. 0.98

01:42:33.200 And I'm going to do it badly the first time I do it.

01:42:36.960 And awkwardly and maybe somewhat falsely

01:42:40.000 because she's going to think,

01:42:41.260 well, if I have to tell you what to say, then it's not real. It's like, well, it's not perfect,

01:42:49.460 but maybe the 50th time I do it all have practiced enough, so I got it right. I'm dead serious about

01:42:54.760 that. You know what I mean? It's like, I used to have people who were having trouble in their

01:42:59.400 marriage in my clinical practice, and I'd say, well, when was the last time you guys went on a

01:43:04.060 date? And they'd just like roll their eyes, and like, that was, they thought, I was a stupid 1.00

01:43:09.360 therapist. That's what they both agree on. This is a stupid therapist. That's one thing we could 1.00

01:43:15.000 agree on. And then often they begrudgingly agree to go have a date. And the whole plan was to go

01:43:21.020 have like the worst date in the world so they could come back and triumphantly report how miserable 1.00

01:43:26.420 the date was to prove that they had the stupidest therapist in the world. And, you know, and I can 1.00

01:43:34.840 understand that because they're all frustrated because they hadn't had like a good date for like

01:43:38.660 10 years and so they're

01:43:40.800 really pretty frustrated and

01:43:42.820 unwilling even to hope

01:43:45.020 but

01:43:45.780 you know

01:43:48.760 if you haven't been getting along very well

01:43:50.780 and you go to try to have a date

01:43:52.140 if it isn't a complete bloody catastrophe

01:43:54.500 it might be a step forward

01:43:56.100 and maybe if you do it 30 times

01:43:58.800 you'll be

01:44:00.440 it'll sort of be 20% enjoyable

01:44:02.880 which is a lot more than zero

01:44:04.720 and if you did it 100 times

01:44:06.900 maybe it'd be like

01:44:07.540 80% enjoyable, and maybe you could get good at it, and maybe because

01:44:13.400 it's worth doing some mathematics, so for example, let's say

01:44:18.160 we'll get right to the heart of the matter, let's say that you're going to make love with your partner

01:44:23.040 twice a week for the next 40 years, so let's say

01:44:27.240 if you're lucky, and

01:44:29.320 really, so that's 100 times 40

01:44:35.560 that's 4,000 times

01:44:38.220 okay so

01:44:40.160 now you have to let each other know what you want

01:44:43.120 and that's going to be awkward

01:44:44.920 like for a hundred times

01:44:46.240 that's a lot of awkwardness

01:44:48.400 but that's you got 3,900 times left

01:44:51.640 I'm dead serious

01:44:54.020 so you know let your partner know 0.60

01:44:56.860 what the hell you want

01:44:58.040 and what you could jointly conjure up a vision

01:45:01.680 of what the perfect romantic

01:45:04.980 episode would look like.

01:45:08.140 Like, why not do that?

01:45:09.980 You just sit and think about it.

01:45:11.340 It's like, if I could have what I wanted,

01:45:13.180 even once,

01:45:14.800 what would that look like?

01:45:19.520 What would that look like?

01:45:21.300 And then, you know,

01:45:22.000 you could ask your partner the same thing.

01:45:23.620 If we had, like, a perfect date,

01:45:25.260 what would that look like?

01:45:27.040 And there's going to be

01:45:27.660 some difference in opinion.

01:45:29.360 And then you could, like,

01:45:30.700 have a chat and think about

01:45:32.120 how you could meld your visions together. 1.00

01:45:34.340 and then you could go practice that stupidly a hundred times. 0.99

01:45:38.720 And at the end of it, you'd be a hell of a lot better than you were at the beginning of it. 0.98

01:45:42.120 And then you got 3,900 more times to get it right.

01:45:46.100 And so try that.

01:45:47.860 Try that with your partner once you're married.

01:46:02.800 Yeah, yeah, okay.

01:46:04.340 Are we done? I guess we're done. Well, that's a high note, Dan Dawn. All right, everybody.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - September 21, 2026

Why Listening Beats Every Argument

Episode Stats

Transcript