Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society!

we know the couples have lived together before the marriage actually increases the probability that the relationship will fail and the reason for that is very straightforward and talking of things that risk harming relationships subject we've never spoke about before is oh yeah and that's a huge reason sex has disappeared people need to stop doing that Jordan Peterson the psychology Professor people love or love to hate he's undeniably one of the greatest intellectual phenomenons on the planet and many view him as the ultimate Father Figure welcome back Mr Peterson we're built for maximal Challenge and that

isn't the way we view ourselves in the modern world we view ourselves as built for consumption and pleasure for example watching pornography but what are the downstream consequences of that well first of all it's easy to get what sexual gratification but does it matter oh it's a catastrophe you're not desperate anymore and if you're going to have the true adventure of your life you're going to need love shame guilt desperation and pain like it's hard but now people take the easy Road like avoiding Conflict for example and I spent a lot of time studying evil

it arises when good men hold their tongue now you may suffer some consequences of speaking but retreating one step at a time defensively that it makes you sick of yourself there's nothing worse that can happen to you you want your life to be unbearably entertaining and maybe all the sorrow and catastrophe has to be part of it because otherwise there's there's nothing about it that's glorious this has always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show so could I ask you for a

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your book comes at a really interesting time in my life personally your book is called we who wrestle with God and it's my belief and suspicion that there's a lot of people wrestling with God at the moment and when I say the word God I don't necessarily mean some man in the sky with a beard what I really mean is a greater meaning a greater sense of meaning um the world feels like and you speak to this in the book that it's gotten more and more individualistic and there's consequence to that fractionated is another way

of thinking about it right because you can think about it as individualistic and that's a positive spin so to speak but alienated isolated and fractionated is the what would you say is the accompaniment to that see I think I think I think the case is is that the liberal experiment in individualism only works when the conservative Foundation is in place right if you aggregate people together and they share enough fundamental values especially of a particular sort then you can concentrate on the individual and individual freedom but there's a lot of preconditions for that and you

know the Scottish liberals so the ones who really established Western liberalism as a philosophical and political movement they knew that you know it was individual liberty judeo-christian substructure and that was an assumption now the problem with modern liberalism is that that underlying Foundation has become extremely shaky and everyone feels it that's what the culture wars about fundamentally and that fact is invalidating the fractionated liberal experiment partly see it's partly because we have the wrong conception of identity fundamentally identity is a hierarchical structure so we kind of think that you end at your boundaries as an

IND individual but you don't because well you're probably not not going to want to be alone so then let's say you're married okay so now your identity as a husband that's a social identity and then you're you have an identity as a father that's a social identity then you have an identity as a member of your community and a member of your city and a member of your state and a member of your nation and then you're involved in a metaphysical Endeavor that constitutes the foundation for the nation let's say that's would be one nation

under God that's one way of thinking about it or you could think about it as the self-evident truths that underly the state your identity exists at all those levels and then your mental health isn't something you carry around in your head it's the harmony that exists or doesn't exist between all those levels and that isn't how liberal individualists think about identity at all and that's because they were for a long time fortunate enough so all those other strata were in place so where do we find ourselves now if we don't have that hierarchy and we

aren't held in place by all those layers and sort of Social and I guess family identities a drift in a storm alone so look here's here's an interesting fact so Psych ologists who are statistically minded they're called psychometricians they're psychologists who are obsessed research psychologists who are obsessed with measurement and concept definition spent a lot of time aggregating Concepts these were in some ways what they were doing was equivalent to the development of early large language models so psychologists were at the Forefront of that on the statistical side words that we use to describe people

Clump together so for example if you're extroverted you're social and you're happy you're enthusiastic okay so those Clump together if you're anxious you're also you also tend to be frustrated disappointed grief stricken and in pain all the negative emotions Clump words associated with your empathy aggregate words associated with your dutifulness Aggregate and so do words associated with creativity those are the five fundamental dimensions of temperament one of the words that clumps with negative emotion is self-consciousness which means that self-consciousness is so tightly associated with suffering that they're not conceptually distinguishable which means literally the more

you think about yourself the more miserable you are and it it it makes sense when you understand how social people are we're so social that you can take the most antisocial human beings imaginable so Psychopathic criminals and you can punish them by putting them in solitary confinement that's how social human beings are and so your mental health is way more dependent on your nesting within a social structure than than on your say the internal coherence of your belief systems in fact I think it's hardly at all dependent on the internal consistency of your coherence of

your belief systems it's more like does anyone like you do you have any friends do you have anyone that loves you or more or maybe even more profoundly are there people for whom you make sacrifices right that's a very that's it's relevant to the topic of this book obviously because the relationship with the Divine in the stories that I'm detailing in this book most of them are Old Testament Stories the relationship with the Divine is a sacrificial relationship the Divine is that to which sacrifice is directed well if you get married it's a sacrificial offering

because you sacrifice your potential relationship with all other women to that woman what does one dra an individual level if they find themselves in such a society where individualism has taken hold um and they can't necessarily easily change the society are there daytoday week to week choices that I'm making that are pushing me away from that meaning and purpose and sort of uh Collective I guess sense of responsibility like the individual listening to this now that completely agrees with you finds himself as being a lonely person and goes what do I do about this Jordan

well one of the things you do with disagreeable people who are more inclined by temperament to be competitive and attain victory for themselves is one of the exercises you can do with disagreeable people if you're a disagreeable extrovert you tend to be narcissistic and the problem with that technically is that you alienate people and the problem with that is while you're no doubt learned this more as you become successful it's like you need a team and right and the more and the more tightly knit it is and the more you're all working in the same

direction the better everything works well you it's not useful to be a narcissist because maybe you get what you want right now this time but as a propagating strategy across time it's a degenerating game okay so what do you do well instead of thinking about what you want or even thinking about how to strategize in relationship to your goals you might think about what you could do to for other people or you could think about what you would do if you only did what was true and right those are very different orientations right and the

religious orientation fundamentally is the orientation towards what is true and right and you might say well I don't know what's true and right it's like yeah kind of because our knowledge is bounded and we're ignorant so do we understand the nature of the highest good well no but it's a very rare person who doesn't know some of the time when they're doing something wrong and it's also a non-existent person who doesn't have some concept of the good because you can't act without a concept of the good because you act towards a goal you deem desirable

so that's up I mean unless you're trying to make your life worse and people do do that from time to time but believe that as an exception I mean you have to you have to have descended into Hell in a way before you're in a situation where you're actively working to make your own life worse that can happen but assuming that you're relatively well embedded in the realm of the normal then you're moving towards something better always because otherwise there's no motivation we we know this technically this isn't even disputable so the positive emotion systems

that make you enthusiastic so that fill you with the desire to move towards a goal independent of fear say you know because you could move towards a safety goal because you're afraid but imagine you're trying to accomplish something you have a goal the positive emotion systems operate to track progress to the goal positive emotion is a consequence of evidence of movement towards the desired goal okay so now you have a proximal goal you know like our proximal goal right now might be just to like in the most micro level possible might be to display facial

signs of interest in the conversation right it's very micro goal but then that's nested in our desire to have an interest in conversation on the topic we're having right now and then inside the podcast as a whole and then as part of the podcast Enterprise that you're involved in as part of the book Enterprise let's say that I'm involved in that's nested inside our view of the world right so you see there there are nestings of the good that have no upper limit that's Jacob's Ladder by the way and at the top of that is

the good itself which is the Divine for all intents and purposes Divine what do you mean by that that's a definition that that's what I mean is that in the hierarchy of what's good the Divine is the peak the top okay right now you don't know what that is that's also an insistence in the biblical texts by the way in the final analysis the Divine is ineffable it's not definable and it's beyond you and that's partly because it's there's a practical reason for that even you know this as well as you move towards a goal

let's say you attain a goal okay now you've accomplished well are you done it's like no a new potential goal emerges a new Pinnacle and then maybe you'll accomplish that but then a new one exists and so you could say that the the domain of the the domain of opportunity is Limitless right because the thing that's at the Pinnacle recedes as you approach it and that's a you could say that's a technical definition of God which is accurate that is a technical definition of God God is the good towards which all Goods Point these are

definitions again remember they're not proclamations of Faith they're definitions so we obviously all believe that all good things share something in common because otherwise we wouldn't have the category good and then we all believe that there are rank orders of good because otherwise everything good would be equally worth pursuing No One Believes that so there's a rank order well if there's a rank orders towards some end or some Pinnacle you can also think about it as a foundation depends on which metaphorical landscape you want to inhabit then the question becomes well how do you characterize

that which is the ultimate aim that which is is and should be the ultimate aim well the the stories on which our culture is predicated characterize that in story do you think many people have an ultimate aim in their mind they they do whether they know it or not how what do you mean by that so like the average person listening to this now do they are they conscious at all of what they're no but it's implicit okay one of the things the psychoanalytic thinkers insisted on Carl Young in particular was that everybody acts out

a story sometimes it's a tragic story sometimes it's the story of hell like you're trapped in a story one way or another now do you know the Contours of your story not necessarily I mean people are often very bad at describing themselves they don't know what they're up to that doesn't mean they're not up to something and you could also think about them as the Battleground between Waring stories that also happens that just means they're fractionated in their psyche you know they're being pulled in many directions at the same time someone said to me actually

yesterday they said an interesting way to understand your self narrative or your self story is to answer the question if you were a character a fictional character who would you be and in that you figure out whether you have this sort of heroized story or if you're a victim so I ask you that question yeah right absolutely which fictional character would you be bugs bud bu Bugs Bunny's a trickster character right so yeah more serious answer do you ever read the idiot no yeah well I'm probably half idiot and half rol nikov that's another way

of looking at it why' you say that the um character of the idiot in dov's novel is a holy fool it's a strange combination a person who's doing things right in a manner that's I suppose not obvious that looks that can easily be confused with naivity or foolishness playfulness even I suppose is that how you characterize yourself someone that's doing things right but in a way that others perceive as foolishness or naivity or or even malevolence at times you know I mean that's partly why people have gone after my reputation does it does it ever

bother you people going after your reputation or them P sure I mean sometimes it's like it's been very distressing very distressing the battles I've had with the College of psychologists in Ontario those are no joke it's very very stressful and unconscionable so expensive hundreds of thousands of dollars years it's been 10 years of legal battles um calumny in the Press they're they're attempting to undermine my professional credibility with some degree of success you know because when you're professional profal College goes after you people have to make a choice it's either the professional colleg is corrupt

and wrong or the individual being targeted is corrupt and wrong it's way easier to draw the second conclusion and under most circumstances in a valid State that's the correct conclusion so and it was very stressful to find myself embattled at the university University of Toronto I liked working there that place had its problems but it was pretty functional and and I likeed being there I I I enjoyed my career as a professor I had great relationships with the undergraduates and my graduate students I love doing my research which has also disappeared um so now those

are the serious disputes that I've had reputationally let's say um there's a lot of casual reputation savaging that I don't really care about from journalists and so forth although sometimes that's been pretty brutal because whenever that happened especially when things just started to be developing around me let's say on the public stage when it when I encountered a particularly Psychopathic journalist which happened quite often particularly in the UK um it was completely a toss up which way it was going to go like it could have just finished me and my family that that was definitely

the case three or four five times maybe more than that so yes it's very bothersome now now and really for a long time all of that takes place within a much broader context all the interactions I have with people in my actual life are ridiculously positive and what would you say positive and gratifying you know so that's a form of suffering in a way and everybody goes through suffering and because you've been through that have you been able to develop a a strategy or a some kind of anchoring that helps you when the wind blows

like that well yeah oh definitely I mean uh I had very strong relationships when all of this started to develop around me and that's just become more the case a very tightly knit family and a very tightly knit group of friends now I lost some more peripheral friends but you know that's unfortunate but s so there's that now is that a strategy um well it's not exactly a strategy because I didn't design it towards an end it was more like an end in itself right I mean I had kids not as a strategic move but

because I like kids so and I particularly like my kids so that's not a strategy and I really have a great relationship with my wife and like I've known her for 52 years it's a very long time and uh she's definitely my best friend and probably has been for 52 years and so that's really helpful that that and that refers back to this issue of identity that we were discussing you know my identity is well structured in in the social sense and then in terms of strategy yeah I mean I have a meta strategy I

suppose I just say what I think right now is that a strategy it depends on how you define strategy it's not a strategy that's designed to serve my ends not not in a individualistic way so I'm just trying to see what happens if I say what I think that's a way of navigating in the world right it's an adventurous way of navigating in the world because you don't know what's going to happen you have to let go of that and then there's a element of faith in that right there's faith in everything you do you

know the the empiricist types the scientific reductionists they say well you can move forward in the world without faith that's complete bloody rubbish there isn't anything you ever do that's important that you don't do in light of Faith it's like if you get married you do that on the basis of the evidence do you what bloody evidence do you have you're 23 years old you don't know a damn thing you know maybe you're in love with the person that you want to marry but you have no evidence whatsoever about how your life is going to

go none you have to LEAP into the unknown like you do with everything that's important that's all Faith predicated now the question is Faith in what well if you decide that you're just going to say what you think then you have faith in the truth at least in so far as you have access to the truth is it true to say that if you hadn't have said what you think publicly then you would have experienced less suffering than you have no really I don't think so so if you had said if you had stayed in

your practice you know as a clinicaly because I would have had to not I would have had to bite my tongue and you think that's more I know it it's not a matter of thinking I know it I know it uh absolutely 100% I spent a lot of time studying evil a lot of time and I know how it arises it arises when good men hold their tongue you don't want that there's nothing worse that can happen to you now you may suffer some consequences of speaking for sure but all things considered which is the

right attitude if you're wise there's nothing worse that can happen to you than to falsify your speech is saying nothing a form of falsifying spee it is when you have something to say yeah definitely because there's a lot of people probably listening now that have a lot they want to say yeah but if they say it they're going to lose their job or they're there's going to be immediate consequences which might mean they can't feed their family yeah it might mean that but it also might mean that if they bite their tongue and pretend to

be something other than they are they'll be a weak model for children and you know is that better than having some Financial instability Maybe here's a counter proposition if your job requires you to lie maybe you should find another job now look I also understand that there are strategic considerations in such a decision there's no sense martyring yourself stupidly and if you're going to say what you believe to be the case then you need to put yourself in a position where doing so won't be instantly catastrophic in a way you can't fix because that's not

a good that's not wise now when things blew up around me I had three sources of income that wasn't accidental now you know people say well you are fortunate it's like yeah and careful mhm so I didn't want have all my eggs in one basket and that turned out well I knew that it's like you have no autonomy if you have all your eggs in one basket so if you're going to think strategically if you're going to think like someone who's at war let's say then you don't leave your you don't leave a mortal flank

exposed and so if you know here's a rule if you find yourself in a position where you're unable to speak you haven't fortified your territory properly right so then you have to think about that it's like you think okay why can't I say what I believe to be the case where am I vulnerable and you can say well that's inevitable it's like no it's not it's not inevitable that doesn't mean it isn't difficult to to fortify and to put yourself in a position where you're on the offense successfully that's hard but retreating One Step at

a Time defensively for your whole life and shrinking while you do it that's also not very that's also difficult it's just the kind of difficult that wears you down and makes you sick of yourself that's not a good that's not a good plan that's a bad plan and did you see this when you were in your clinical practice did you see it in people oh constantly how does it show up on the surface what are the words that they say to articulate that this sort of slow diminishing retraction oh you see that in people's marriages

all the time when marriages deteriorate a marriage ends in divorce when there's 10,000 fights that haven't been had and I really I'm I'm not just guessing at that number it's like let's say your marriage isn't going very well and so you have five uncomfortable quasi disputes a day mhm just to pick a number maybe it's 50 maybe it's three whatever five will do well that's 1500 a year okay now you just aggregate that over let's say the 10 years it takes your marriage to collapse well you've got something approximating 10,000 fights you didn't have that's

10,000 times you remain silent when you had something to say and they all Aggregate and then every time once you've collected the first 5,000 then every time you have a dispute all 5,000 are lurking behind that dispute and the fact of their existence makes it much less likely that you'll say what you have to say that's the reemergence of the Dragon of chaos as a consequence of fleeing from your fate that's exactly right last time we spoke you said something which stayed with me and I've actually forwarded it to a few of my friends on

this particular subject you said to me you're going to have to sit and spend 90 minutes a week speaking to your partner yeah so annoying it's so annoying it's so annoying but it's so important and so many of my friends that are in have relationship difficulties I send them just a little four minute clip I have on my phone of you saying that because the 90 minute no it might be 95 minutes it might be 85 minutes but the concept of you need to sit down and create a space where she or he or whatever

can tell you what they've noticed why they don't like you exactly yeah yeah yeah well it's especially I think I don't think that you can really establish the kind of relationship with a woman that you want with anything in the road like it's hard for women to give themselves to men and no wonder it's amazing they ever do it they have a lot on the line what are the preconditions for that offering uh peace and security you can tell if if it's if the territory is being cleared because play emerges right right play emerges and

play is a very fragile motivational state it can be disrupted by almost anything so if there are impediments to understanding play will not arise and then you don't have the romantic adventure that you want it's grudging right you don't have a voluntary partner and that's a very hard thing to attain right that full voluntary partnership that means that you're in sync with each other MH you can't expect that to be easy you can't even be in sync with yourself like it's hard and you need to keep each other up to date you need to know

what's going on you need to iron out the sources of discomfort or distrust and that there's a lot of Dante's Inferno what's that that well Dante's Inferno is a characterization of Hell by by Dante by it's one of the most famous poems ever written and it's it's you could think about it as what you have to do to get to the bottom of things so let's say that you have a dispute with your wife and it's a recurring dispute right it's an issue you have an issue well do you want to address the issue it's

like do you want want to do surgery without anesthetic like it's the same question addressing an issue is a journey into the abyss Dante placed Satan at the bottom of hell right so that's the figure of malevolence itself encased in ice and Frozen so immobile surrounded by those who betray that's the lowest level of hell why well it's often the case that if you journey into an issue spiral down to the bottom you'll find betrayal right cuz maybe your partner doesn't trust you because she was betrayed highly probable highly probable or her grandmother was betrayed

like you know there's bad blood between men and women can you have a solve for that so if I'm in a situation where my partner doesn't trust me because she was betrayed whether it's something I did or whatever how do you ever get rid of the devil at the bottom of the Spiral well you have to you have to find out that it's there okay that's a hard question you both have to want to that's the first thing because that's the setting of the aim what do we want we want to play Forever in God's

Heavenly Garden how about that that's a metaphorical representation right but that's a wall Garden that's the human environment the walls are the walls of your house the garden is nature displaying itself in its beauty within boundaries that's a place that play can take place that's what you want you got to think about it what do you want okay so now we might ask what do you mean want okay if you were taking care of yourself and you could have what was good for you what would that be now that's a hard question right you're going

to have to think about that for a long time what would satisfy something as someone as miserable and resentful and useless as me right if I could have it now people will they don't even want to address that issue be because part of the problem with making your aim clear is you know when you're failing and people would rather keep the evidence of their failure obscured from themselves even if it meant continued failure but now let's say you decide not to do that you're going to think okay I'm going to aim high I'm going to

take care of myself okay now your wife's on Lord with that now that's a hell of that's a that's really what the marital vow is in the final analysis most deeply is that willingness to participate in that game now you have to tell each other the truth what the hell do you want well she doesn't know and neither do you not really so you got to start digging finding out and you and noticing it's like now and then you'll see that you're happy with each other and maybe it'll happen kind of randomly you'll be out

in some I don't know maybe you're at a restaurant or you're gone for a walk or who knows and you'll notice oh this is going well it's like oh yeah this is going well what are we doing right could we take that little episode and could we start to expand it you know because one of the things you can do in our marriage is you can notice when things are going well and then you can have a chat with each other and say look I don't know what we did during this period of time but

let's see if we can figure it out see if we could do like 10% more of that next week or one % more and then just make that expand you can do that too by you know hypothetically at some point if you're married at some point you were in love with your wife you can remember that you have to remember that you have to practice remembering that you have to practice bringing it to mind and occupying that because when you first fall in love it kind of happens to you right that's a gift but you

have to in order for that to last you have to become an expert at you have to become an expert at it you have to take it on as a responsibility it's offered as a gift but then you have to take it on as a responsibility then you have to practice it's like oh yes I love this person and if you don't at the moment you have to think well I did and I could so why don't I is it me that's probably it's you might be them too but you might as well start with

you I mean you got lots of flaws you could start with those what if you just made a bad decision as in like the person you picked you think they're not compatible well you stand a tough one a because you're not really compatible with anyone you know people think well I'll find the right person it's like first of all no you won't second if you found the right person and they ever saw you they just run away screaming so it's just the whole conceptual scheme is wrong I when I was on tour there was one

three-day period where the same question emerged from the audience because I do a Q&A three nights in a row how do I find the person that's right for me and I I tried answering it and by the third night I thought oh I know why I can't answer this question it's because it's a stupid question it's badly formulated like profoundly badly formulated fatally badly formulated it's not the right question the right question is how could I learn to offer something to someone else that would make me eminently desirable that's a way different question like it's

so they're not even in the same conceptual universe and it's the right question because you can build yourself into a person that people would line up to be with how how well have you done it to some well you told me not you're very successful right you you're increasingly successful your book warns against narcissism Jordan so yeah there's there's a difference between narcissism and giving the devil is Du you've look okay let let's pull back a little bit what have you done right I have focused on myself for a long time and okay what does

that mean it means I fortified myself financially okay so that I'm I'm you know I can support others I can support a family so that's not exactly focusing on yourself right okay that's focusing on getting your act together and I'm being very picky about the words because focus on yourself that has a narcissistic connotation but that that isn't what you're talking about you said you fortified yourself financially okay so now you're you you you you have Foundation under your feet financially okay okay good what else I go to the gym so I'm strong physically strong

okay um which is useful um I've learned a lot okay a lot of learning about myself about how I show up in the world right so you're trying to learn yes I've learned skills so well so there's three things that are pretty good yeah you've got a firm Financial Foundation you've you're work you're you're maintaining yourself physically or even improving yourself and you're doing the same thing say spiritually and and intellectually okay well that attract a fair number of people just those three right and maybe you're increasing the probability that will attract the sort of

person that you would like to attract that is very much the story of my life like I think don't think people realize this but I've actually been on I think four dates in my entire life I'm 32 and I took this really counter sort of seems counterintuitive approach to myself which was as an 18-year-old I basically couldn't attract anybody I was also not on dating apps I wasn't doing so my for 10 years I basically focused on myself and you know 27 years old someone messaged me and I went on it and this is how

I am like if I'm going to go on a date it's going to be I'm going to go all in it was a three-day date that I planned in an Excel document I've been with that person for six years so I feel like I didn't date I didn't go to bars and try and like you know that's worth taking apart I'm I like I like to do arithmetic with my clients like people hate arithmetic and it's no wonder because it's so sad aage so I'll give you an example so 15 years ago I counted the

number of times I would see my parents it's like 20 times so then I knew that right 20 isn't very many right how many people do you get to try on in your life five if you're lucky if you're attractive and fortunate you get five cracks at the p five isn't very many and people think well it's a there's plenty of fish in the sea it's like that doesn't mean they're going to swarm around you buddy right it's and maybe it's even worse for women because their time frame is is very short you know like

if a woman isn't in a relationship family relationship by 30 then it's starting to get pretty damn rough and that's almost independent of how attractive she is it's like you don't have much time better get yourself prepared when you say pretty damn rough what you mean well to find a mate or to have a child or both both well we know now that at the present time in the west half of women 30 and younger don't have a child okay now we also know that couples 30 one in three couples at 30 already have trouble

conceiving and that definition of trouble is one year of attempt with no success okay so fertility goes off a cliff at 35 so 30 you're pushing your luck at 30 at 35 you are seriously pushing your luck I worked for 10 years with a strata of the highest achieving women likely in Canada I had as part of my clinical practice a offering that we made to consulting firms and law firms and the offer was send us your best people and we'll work for them but the consequence of that is that they'll be even more productive

so in the typical Law Firm for example there's people who don't do well then there's people who are good lawyers then there are people who are good lawyers that bring in business there's like none of them they're super valuable and if a law firm has someone like that they want to keep them and they're often women half the time let's say um and those were the women I worked with a bunch of men too but all concentrated on the women here those were the women I was working with and they were generally extremely attractive extremely

intelligent very hardworking and very focused on Career Development and they were they' done very well in junior high school and high school then they you know aced college and their lsats and then when they were articling the firms snapped them up quickly and then they rocketed up towards partnership and then then they were 30 and they all thought what the hell am I doing working 70 hours a week with a bunch of insanely competitive men right and that is the question it's like what are you doing exactly and then even if you're radically successful let's

say in your law school career if you get run over by a bus on the way to work the waters just close over you at the firm and the firm continues on it's not like anyone cares not really so now I'm I'm not saying that people shouldn't pursue a career I'm not saying that but I would say even in my case and I'm male so that makes a big difference because men are also oriented towards status competition victory in a way that women just aren't not at least not in the career domain and the reason

for that it's very straightforward and the the thing that makes men by default most attractive to women is their comparative success in the hierarchy of men it's a walloping predictor and it's irrelevant to men like men don't care at all whether women are successful in their career it's not a determinant of their attractiveness in fact it's often the contrary well these women that I'm talking about they were often alone why well they're beautiful so that like intimidated 90% of men right there they're smart so that's another 90% of the remaining 10% they're accomplished and Wealthy

well like first of all who's going to approach them and second who are they going to accept because women are hypergamous right is that does that mean that men are insecure and sort of emasculated by a strong successful woman sure yeah well but there's reason for that like it's not weakness on the part of men exactly it's the desire of the woman to find someone who brings a benefit to the relationship and why well she because a woman will make herself vulnerable when she has a child and so she's looking for a man who be

helpful compared to her okay so if the woman is like full of ability well then her standards for a guy who's going to be helpful get very high and that's hard on her because it decreases the pool of available candidates radically so like there's a negative relationship between IQ and women and the probability of being married so it's harsh now is it are men intimidated well yes obviously are men intimidated by beautiful women well you can answer that especially if you're young why the probability that any given beautiful woman is going to reject you when

you're a young man is like it's basically 100% now it's not exactly 100% And there are exceptions but the default response is rejection and beautiful women get hit on you know a fair bit some of the it's interesting because there's a bunch of stats which I find quite interesting one of them is that sexlessness is increas is increasing people having less and less yeah that's fascinating it's that's fascinating does it matter oh it's a catastrophe and and why are we having less sex what is the complex web of factors that have brought us to this

place I know something like well one of them I would say is that me in a in a free and easy mating environment women don't trust men and no wonder well here here here's a terrible thing to know so imagine that there are men who are oriented towards short-term relationships and there are men who are oriented towards long-term relationships committed relationships right okay so that would be the men who want love long with sex let's say love and commitment then there's the party today because we're all dead tomorrow sort of guys and there's some women

like that too although few are women because they pay a much higher price for sexual impropriety so the pool of short-term maters has more men in it okay what do they like well the personality Studies have already been done they're aelan which means they use their language to manipulate they're narcissistic which means they want unearned social status they're Psychopathic which makes them predatory parasites and they're sadistic okay so now you open up the mating market so that shortterm deanes are acceptable you throw all the women into the hands of the Psychopaths well that's a bad

strategy and it's no wonder that it decimates the mating Market because women are thinking well are those men trustworthy and the answer is no and sex is costly like we have this immature delusion that we can free sex from like the grip of the oppressive patriarchy let's say it's like no you can't obviously you can't there's it emotional entanglements are an inevitable consequence of intimate physical relationships there's that then there's the issue of abortion and pregnancy that actually con dutes a problem and then there's sexually transmitted disease and that's just like the first of a

very long list of potential problems with sex so there's no simple sexual landscape and there are diluted people who think they're there is a simple landscape and that there should be but most they tilt hard in the psychopathic Direction because they're manipulative do you believe in no sex before marriage as a concept as an ideal yeah yeah yeah that's right and and why would that result in better relationships and a better Society more broadly well here's one way of looking at it so let's say you take the alternative approach okay um you're going to try

your partner on for size so you live together well first of all we know that couples who live together are more likely to get divorced rather than less we know that the probability of cheating is proportionate to the number of Partners before the marriage or the committed relationship well well partly that's just self-evidence like the best predictor of future behavior is past Behavior right so if you had a lot of Partners you're the sort of person who's likely to have a lot of Partners and then the there's also a conceptual problem it's like is are

you shopping for a car it's like you're going to take it out for a test drive and see how it goes okay that's not the right metaphor and then here's another problem I'm going to see what it's like to be married by living with this person it's like no you're not because you don't know what it's like to be married until you're married whatever you're doing when you live together that's not a model for what you're going to do when you're married because being married is different it's permanent so you're saying don't live together before

you well I know the stats on living together it's like you live with someone and and then you marry them you're more likely to get divorced it doesn't work like the the the theory was you try it out and if it works you go ahead with it yeah yeah well the theory was wrong because that isn't that isn't what happens it actually increases the probability that the relationship will fail it's also partly you got to ask yourself what the message is I know what the message is when you live with someone it's pretty straightforward you'll

do unless someone better comes along and I'll Grant you the same opportunity but Jesus that that's a hell of a foundation for a mar for a like long-term relationship so you saying go go from single to married and living together straight away without the like Tri on period Well I don't know exactly what the trial period should be I mean people have dated and I'm also not saying that this is simple it's not simp why would it be simple it's not there isn't anything more difficult that you do in your entire life than find a

partner and establish a family it's like it's going to hard how to do it optimally well I can tell you in my own experience you know like I I've known my wife since she was eight and we were friends good friends and we kind of departed from each other during adolescence um I was a year younger than everyone in my class and she matured faster women do anyways and so that kind of split us apart and we didn't get married till I think we were about 27 something like that 28 but it would have been

better to do it earlier so get married Al you yeah it's just time I didn't have with her what case would you make to me for marriage versus because I'm I'll be honest I'm wrestling with marriage not just God um I'm trying to understand what the what the point of marriage is versus the relationship we have now is but I can have children in the relationship I have now yeah the general rule of thumb for life is that you should do what other people have done forever unless you have a really good reason not to

don't deviate from the straight narrow path like you are already deviating in all sorts of ways you're very entrepreneurial MH right so your life has a variety of adventurous Pathways you're going to want to put Firm Foundation wherever you can that'll actually free you up to do more adventurous things children are a multigenerational commitment because it's children and grandchildren and so the the marriage is a signifier of that and in order to stay with someone optimally over the longest period of time possible it has to be serious and for something to be serious you have

to throw everything at it you know and you might say well love is enough it's like that's a very naive view of the world because there'll be times because that's kind of like saying well as long as we love each other and we're happy we'll be together it's like well if you're talking 40 years there's going to be plenty of years in there where you're not happy and you probably don't love each other so what then you're going to just is it just going to dissolve or are you going to say we're in this you

know come hell or high water which is the vow come hell or high and hell in high water they're coming and then you got to ask yourself you know is this the person you want in the boat with you when hell and high water come and that's not going to be fun that's for sure you want to do it alone or you think that when everything falls apart around you you're going to be in a better position to find someone better I don't think so it's a long and then you know you you take the

marital vow in a religious sense and you do it in front of a community right so it's it signifies commitment and you need that because like you think you can maintain all that commitment on your own maybe you can I doubt it generally people can't like no one we need to fortify ourselves in all sorts of ways to get through the things in life that are most difficult but the traditional marriage agreement one that's a legal agreement yeah does it need to be can can I not take my partner have a wedding in front of

our friends and family sign a contract maybe even do it in a sort of relig religious context without having it to be a Rel like a legal document that the government are involved in well you could but is it not the same bond to you there you're talking about a multitude of different bonds right fundamentally right you're the the one that you're prioritizing is the bond that's voluntary and predicated on what the love of the moment I mean we want to be precise here right that so I think that's a reasonably reasonable way of conceptualizing

it and it is a romantic view that that should Prevail and it's a romantic view that that should be sufficient I don't think it there's it's often the case that it doesn't Prevail and it's generally the the case that it's not sufficient and so then you might say well maybe you want to add a legal element to that and you want to add a metaphysical element to it because those are all fortifications MH and they're indications even to yourself that you're serious it's not like we understand ourselves you know like people are just as mysterious

to themselves as someone else is mysterious to them you go ask yourself it's like okay well what processes what do I have to put in place to sure that I'm doing the right thing well when you're embarking on something difficult like marriage then you better have everything necessary in place if you and Tammy hadn't got married yeah and you were just in a relationship like I am with my partner how do you think your life would be different and do you think you I don't think it would have lasted you don't think your life would

have lasted oh well relation that's that that's undoubtedly true I mean both of us just about died in the last 5 years and I don't mean by a little bit I mean like it was touch and go for a long time so it was a good thing everything was in place through that I mean the the waters were pretty high for the last three years four years socially professionally physically the what are you wrestling with exactly like in this issue you know I mean you're it seems like you're trying to sort out the relationship between

the emotional attachment and the personal attachment and the social structures that say surround marriage it's it's complicated because even any answer I might give you is if you go down that spiral you might find something at the bottom of it that's not what I'm saying so what I mean by that is definitely just as you asked that question I just got a glimpse of I just had a bit of a flash toct my issues with commitment and how I watched okay so what you fantasy no I just I just remember recalling feeling like my dad

was in prison when he was in in his relationship so I think that's still so now I can tell you what to do with that so you bring those images to mind right so you've got this question in mind you just you just found out something you said that there's something at the bottom of this okay now if you watch your fantasies they'll shed light on this descent into the abyss so to speak now you had a flash of memory okay that memory is associated with all sorts of things you can bring that to mind

and let it play itself out right and it'll explore the Contours of the problem that you're now you put your finger on a very important problem you said that you saw in your father someone who's trapped in his marriage yeah well it's no bloody wonder you're leery of that right so now you okay so now the question would be what was the nature of that entrapment what evidence did you have that that was in fact the case how much of that was him how much of that was her and what is it that they did

wrong and right you need to know all of that and you need to know how it affected you that's a great obser see that's so cool because that very frequently happens to people when they ask a question that's like a revelation so you ask a question that's like a prayer the question is is there something at the bottom of my the trouble I'm having conceptualizing marriage okay now you want to know that's the first precondition okay then you'll get memory images like that and then people shy away it's like I don't want to go there

it's like yeah that's for sure you bloody well don't want to go there but you do because if it's there you will go there right it'll plague you and it'll plague your life it'll it'll show its head continually in your relationship or you can get to the bottom of it which is people will fight their whole life with their partner to avoid getting to the bottom of something that's how terrifying it is to get to the bottom of something right but if you do get to the bottom of it then you don't have to fight

for 30 years so that's very much worthwhile and it'll Enlighten you as well you know because you're you have a real issue it's like how can marriage not be a trap Yeah well yeah right definitely that's a very good question and and an important one how can marriage be a trap how can not being married be a trap how can being alone being a trap be a trap how can being deluded Ed about what holds people together be a trap there's traps everywhere man there's traps everywhere and so there's no risk-free mo pathway forward there's

just risk everywhere okay so that's a really useful thing to know then the question would shift to something like well if I wanted to construct a relationship that had that was optimized that's what you have to ask yourself it's like and your and your and your partner it's like what we doing here what do we want Tammy and I decided for example when we first got married we I well I mentioned this to her right away when we decided that we were going to take things seriously it was like we're going to tell each other

the truth so that was part of the vision like no matter what no matter what yeah no matter what she's been very good at that I would say better than me I've been good at it but she's been really quite remarkably good at it she really threw herself into it and I mean that's that causes an complete transformation but there's plenty of skeletons in the closet to be revealed God that's for sure talking of things that risk harming relationships one of the things I wanted to ask you about subject we've never spoke about before but

it ties into the themes of relationships marriage and um and sex is pornography and generally oh another reason that sex has disappeared yeah right right you talk about headism in your book um we who wrestle with God pornography is this a bad thing is a terrible thing yeah it's a terrible thing everything about it is terrible really well first of all it's addictive and no wonder I mean any 13-year-old boy can now look at more beautiful naked women in one day than the greatest King who ever lived managed in his whole life right so it's

like wow that's not and talk me through the downstream consequences of such a possibility easy it's easy yeah it's easy to get what sexual gratification that's not good it's not supposed to be easy and it's easy so how desperate do you have to be to get married not desperate at all it's like yeah right what do you know you don't know anything I'm married just because I'm in love you're an idiot God to to to to put you in a position where you're going to have the romantic adventure of your life the true romantic adventure

of your life you're going to need love and Desperation buddy you're going to need everything working on your side love desperation Terror shame guilt everything working for you and so you take the easy Road pornography sure you're not desperate anymore so people that consume pornography do you think they're less motivated to attack life and to well they're definitely less motivated to pursue sexual relationships with women by way of that are they then less likely to then want to go to the gym or have a career definitely it's an interesting idea how much how much of

what men do do they do to impress women a lot like yeah like all of it all of it I mean the status battles that men back to the law firms for example so the the men I worked with they're very concerned with their bonuses and their and their you know their end of the year performance reports why well part of it was the money most of them had lots of money it's like I'd asked them they say well that's the money is how we keep score well what does that mean well it's money is

the way that men in those competitive Enterprises say they they compare themselves to one another and why do they want to be at the top cuz women peel from the top so men are trying to impress women all the time and they'll do it in positive ways and in pathological ways the window for sexual representation started to open in the 1920s let's say but it really got going with Playboy then Penthouse came out right after that and Penthouse was like full frontal nudity display and then Hustler came out and Hustler was sort of well whatever

Penthouse didn't show you Hustler will show and it got pretty low brow like it was a rough low class magazine it didn't it just shed all the pretentions that Playboy and Penthouse had and then the net came along it's like all those Engineers who couldn't establish a relationship with an actual woman exchanging pornography what 25% of internet traffic something like that that desire to exchange pornography was that what created the net yeah was a huge part of it what's that done well as you pointed out I think 30% now of Japanese men and women under

30 are virgins it's about the same in Korea relationships between men and women are falling apart in the in the rest of the West in the same sort of way now can you attribute that to pornography certainly part like if I was a young woman and I was looking at the pornography World online I'd think yeah maybe not one of the interesting things we noticed when we're doing some research on this was what the top Google search around this subject matter is how do I quit and I think like the third one is how do

I quit and and that it's in such high quantity of people searching Google for how to quit pornography that it feels desperate like it feels desperate well why wouldn't it it be addictive like and why doesn't pornography feel good to people that's a good question that's a good question well there's nothing heroic about it that's for sure it's like it's it's obviously nothing to be proud of that's a different issue than whether or not it's wrong right it's certainly not an accomplishment yeah I mean I don't think anyone would disagree about that it's not an

accomplishment well maybe sex is supposed to be an accomplishment maybe you violate the spirit of sex uality itself when it's not an accomplishment you certainly do that if you rape mhm right so is it an accomplishment probably so what if your accomplishment is false well then are what are you betraying well if it's associated with sex maybe you're betraying the most fundamental possible thing certainly Poss like what there's life and sex that's pretty much that right you're alive and you reproduce from a biological perspective and so you're violating the spirit of what you're maybe you're

violating the spirit of relationship maybe you're violating the spirit of Adventure the spirit of Romance the spirit of reproduction the spirit of Life likely it's it's so interesting that people seem to be a lot of people seem to be angry at it they they seem to be angry with what it's done to should angry they should be angry even on an individual level people seem in the comment section of these episodes that we've done about the subject matter people seem to be angry about its existence and what it's done to them they should be angry

they should be outraged it's outrageous it's outrageous would you ban it if you were in charge of the world I don't know how to answer that I think any policy that policies that require Force rather than voluntary compliance are generally bad policies there are restrictions that should be placed on its distribution but I would have to spend a lot of time thinking through what those were from a policy perspective I think it's wrong no I don't think I know it's wrong that doesn't mean I know how that should be dealt with at the level of

policy it's complicated I do understand why young men and young women are angry about it it's like where are the adults where are the adults where have they gone they're not protecting like 11-year-old kids from what you can see on the net you know I remember when I was a kid I I I got a hold of some of these underground comics from the 1960s and a lot of the underground com comic artists were they are pretty pathological creatures like Robert crumb's a good example Crum led a pretty good life for someone as demented as

he is and there's a very famous documentary made about the crumb brothers and Robert crumb was the establisher he was one of the people who established the genre of graphic novel really back in the 60s in heid Ashbury in San Francisco and his imagination goes places that you don't want to you don't want to be along for the ride seriously like seriously and I read some of that material when I was like 11 you know I never forgot it it was shocking as hell and like typical 11-year-old now it's like there are things that he

is going to see that he'll never forget it's not good and the brain is still forming at that age isn't it so it's oh definitely interesting way to shock the bra well we also don't know well that's right we have no idea whatsoever what a diet of pornography exposure does to somebody who's you know making their way through puberty what would you say to the those individuals then that have been Googling that like how to quit because I imagine if we thought about percentages I'd say what 90% of people that are listening right now watch

pornography at least I don't know what the numbers are but but it's a lot of lot of people it's the vast majority write down write down what it's doing to you write down what it's doing to write down every exhaustively everything you think it might be doing to you write it down everything don't don't worry about whether you're right or not like maybe it's not doing some of the things you think it might be doing but make an exhaustive list then start thinking through is like is that what you want is that what you want

and then write down what you want instead that'll help because if you're going to look any hedonistic Endeavor is rewarding in the moment obviously the problem is is the price you pay for it in the medium to long run right that's the problem it's the contradiction between those two things that's the problem okay now if you want to quit doing something that's gratifying in the short term you need to know why right because otherwise you won't have the willpower you won't have the the part of you that thinks well what the hell will win what

the hell which is what people think when they do something they shouldn't do and they should notice what they say to themselves when when they're making that rationalization because what the hell refers to hell and you the reason to stop doing things that are self-destructive is because they're self destructive I mean is that the sort of person you want to be is that the model you'd like to have for your son for example is that the way you would imagine that someone you admire would act these are good questions to ask yourself no are you

the sort of person that is acting out a pattern that you think is admirable I don't think pornography masturbation fits into the ideal of heroic masculinity I don't think anybody thinks that it's there's something furtive about it and second rate obviously like OB it's ridiculous in a sense that we even have to have this discussion because obviously well these things creep in don't they to society and they become first they creep then they Rampage we almost can't remember a time if you're a young person when there wasn't pornography you you definitely can't remember you open

up an app and you get absolutely 100% oh and it's going to get way worse wait till there are AI equipped adjustable pornographic succu by then we're really going to have fun cuz we're already at a at the point now where with a decent chatbot a really alienated young man can have a better conversation with a decent chatbot than with anybody he's ever talked to in his entire life right now they're going to get a lot smarter and soon they're going to have like well you can all there's already Services of this sort available they'll

be fully fleshed out two-dimensional women they're not women simulacra of women right so yeah it's interesting because with my head in design your own girlfriend she w't call she give you she don't argue with you she won't do the 90 minutes a week yeah right right she'll give you everything you want but that's not true she'll give the worst part of you everything it wants Jesus that's not good the worst weakest part of you will get get exactly what it wants that's not good that's Ser that's seriously not good I mean that's what pornography is

kind of doing right definitely yeah well and there's an edge to it too right because one of the pleasure is enhanced by novelty right so so that that brings up an issue with regards to marriage you know I talked to Bill Maher Bill's alone and he's my age you know and that's painful but he said to me you know in his Hollywood hedonistic manner that he really couldn't imagine being with the same woman you know for any length of time it's a novelty issue it's like well are you restricted by the woman or are you

restricted by the limits of your own imagination this is an important question like I would say if you establish the optimized relationship with someone you they're inexhaustible that doesn't mean novelty isn't important it's important that's part of play so yeah a lot of people struggle with that got a lot of friends that struggle with this idea of being with the same person forever um the same person the problem well but that's really no look I I understand like I know that novelty enhances pleasure so the question is how do you keep your relationship alive that

means novel you play it's interesting because actually what I actually think is happening there is it's not that they are miserable with the same person forever it's actually the thought that's kind of what I said the thought of being with the same that's part that trap yeah well okay so that's very good observation because what see because that thought is going to have a story attached to it the story is going to be something like well I'm with this person we both become unattractive quite rapidly we get alienated from one another there's no sexual dynamism

or romance or excitement and then we just sit you know and eat like cold eggs while looking at each other harshly over the table at breakfast for 40 years yeah well yeah that's dismal so you know maybe don't do that yeah yeah there's an element of control to it on this point of headism as well I was thinking because we're talk about pornography but there's many types of headism in my life whether it's you know eating the the cookie this is a I don't actually do this but it's a metaphor of eating the cookie from

the mini bar in my hotel room here in New York at 1:00 a.m. in the morning when I know tomorrow I'm going to regret it there's all these forms of headism like scrolling on Tik Tok or whatever it might be and headism shows up in my life in these little uncontrolled like oh gosh [ __ ] made a mistake of course and it sometimes shows up when I'm disabled in some way emotionally disabled and so it's almost it feels like it's a form of medicine now I I could write down on this page who I

want to be I could say I don't want to be the person eats the cookie I don't want to be on Tik Tok I don't want to watch pornography all those kinds of things but then staving off that moment where you know you're you're weakened in some way and I use that word maybe you're weakened in some way by something tired or whatever sticking to those principles when in that moment when it's hard is that just again a case of just being clear on what I want in the long ter well that helps it helps

practice helps um surrounding yourself with people who have the same aim and that keep you um responsible MH accountable that helps oh yeah you need all of that because that battle the battle between immediate gratification and medium to long-term investment that's a real battle you know like the the right amount of pleasure in the moment isn't zero yeah okay I want to live a life of misery so well right right and you can't you don't want to be the joy grind for whom everything is tomorrow yeah right it's very hard to because what you're trying

to do is you're trying to optimize emotion and strategy over all time frames and you don't know how long that time frame is well that that's also a problem exactly exactly might have one day left or right so I don't need to well we also know you know when people are say off to a battle in Wartime they party like there's no tomorrow well because maybe there isn't so definitely the the religious insistence is that you should live in the light of Eternity right is that you should attempt to conduct yourself in a manner that

is best All Things Considered over the longest possible conceivable span of time now does that mean don't have the desert no no because no it doesn't mean that because look in the biblical text for example there is an insistence that uh the spirit of the Divine wants the provision of life more abundant that's the language the the idea of a fruitful Garden an Earthly Garden of delights even that's part and parcel of a vision of paradise it's not joyless it's it's harmoniously balanced I think best way to think about it is likely musically you know

in in a musical piece that's great every know has its place every note has its proper place in relationship to the whole right but every note is also worthwhile well that's what you want is you want to balance your concentration on the present with your apprehension of the medium to long run so I'll give you an example that so I did I did a course for Peterson Academy called It's On The Sermon on the Mount And The Sermon on the Mount is the longest record we have of Christ's Direct utterances let's say and it constitutes

the core of Christian ethics it's a set of instructions and the instructions are very specific so essentially the instruction is to aim at every moment at what's highest okay so this something you have to practice okay so the idea is that at each moment you're bringing to Bear a certain attitude and the attitude is I'm going to do what's best okay all things considered for me now for me now in a way that works tomorrow for me now in a way that works tomorrow and next week and next month and next year and five years

from now and 10 years from now in relationship to my wife in relationship to my kids to my parents to my community right it's that whole identity you're optimizing that now you might not know how but that's your aim okay so that's that's the injunction to put the love of God above all else to aim at what's highest now you don't exactly know how to do that but that doesn't matter you can specify your aim right now no doubt you do something like that with your podcast right that's why it's successful yeah okay you agree

with that yeah why because it's it's difficult isn't it there's just immense pressure when you're a podcaster um to aim at something else and you have to me and Jack talk about this a lot you have to have like a certain set of principles that are unnegotiable but whatever principles you choose and believe in they come at a great cost okay what are the principles so see this is worth delving into because You' be very successful as aast one of my principles is I will I try not to judge the people I'm speaking to and

I try not to come in with um preconceptions I take them as I meet them I I try not to I'm in such of genuine curiosity in them or some kind of answer or truth right so there's a surch in it yeah it's that's a quest so you know an adventure story is a quest did I answer that question yeah yeah yeah there there's only one thing I would take issue with you said that you don't judge see I would say probably you don't condemn you have to judge because you have to listen and you

have to separate wheat from chaff you have to evaluate but you can do that without careless condemn condemnation or a priori what would you say like a tyrannical is insistence that what you know now is sufficient okay exactly yeah yeah you want to not people say I'm not judgmental it's like that's not a virtue you want to be you want to use judgment all the time but that's not to con like I could judge you so I don't ever have to listen to you about anything yeah judgment might happen in my head but it's then

about how I treat the person based on that judgment I don't want to treat them based I don't want to have some like higher um egotistical values I'm I'm correct and that yeah yeah that's that's right that's exactly it that's a hypocritical moralizing it's the moralizing it's like I think I'm better than you because that's exactly exactly that's right you don't want to you definitely don't want to do that in the podcast journalists the pathological journalists they that's all they do all they're doing is establishing moral superiority on the flimsiest possible grounds at the least

possible cost in the most spectacular way yeah it's really not it's hard being a podcaster especially in this particular moment where there's been such a focus on podcasting because of what's happened in this election cycle yeah you really have to be clear on what you believe in because the winds are going to blow like that the world is going to try and sway you they're going to say you can't speak to this person you have to speak to this person don't do that don't do this this is wrong and you go okay so how do

I weather such a storm when when I know the storm is coming I have to look to Rogan to go yeah look at what you know Rogan The Arc of Rogan and if I'm if I'm also a podcaster just keep asking stupid questions yeah well that but you know that is that Quest that and and what people want in a discussion is a quest they want to see blood hounds on the trail towards some truth that's what they're after they want to participate in that same with the public lectures I do I'm always trying to

answer a question I don't know what the answer is when I go on stage it's a real question do you think Joe has Joe Rogan I've never actually met him but do you think he's just has great faith in humans and there because there's obviously been a lot of pressure on on him so how he survived that is he just has faith in who he is he has faith in his own ignorance okay and that those watching which is a lot of people watching Rogan will understand yeah yeah yeah yeah Joe's on a quest he's

trying to be smarter than he is that's what Joe does it's curiosity that's driving him this is what musk said too about himself and he said that's to me when I interviewed him he said that was how he reconciled he had a terrible existential crisis when he was like 13 you know and he reconciled that essentially with the quest he decided that he could just pursue truth pursue knowledge pursue understanding and that that would that's meaningful intrinsically and valuable intrinsically and that's the beginnings of a religious orientation or more than the beginnings even because the

quest is a religious Pursuit it's pursuit of the truth it's pursuit of the treasure that the dragon guards right and so treasures and Dragons they're always in the same place it's very annoying it's a good thing to know though because if a dragon shows up you can always ask yourself where the treasure is might be close it's there so okay so back to The Sermon on the Mount because we're talking about orientation so aim up assume that other people have the same value as you do and that that value is associated with whatever is divine

and and then concentrate on the moment mhm right so it's the the most distant possible upward aim with the most intense possible concentration on the moment right you're good at that that's what that's I can't say that's what's made you successful but it's certainly part of it because you pay attention see that's that's what paying attention means because you want your your your intent to be focused because otherwise your attention is fragmented so you want your attention to be focused now your attention is focused on something now we we we pulled it apart a little

bit you said that you're you know you have these principles and that you're trying to learn and so your attention is pretty focused and then you bring all that to bear in the moment right and then people find that compelling because they're on they're they're along for the ride they're long for the adventure and that is Meaningful it's the essence of meaningful and so so so what we were trying to address was the relationship between Hedonism and and say intelligent long-term pro-social strategy you can you want the both you want you want there's a optimized

solution that delivers both far better than any other solution this is the pearl of great price that Christ speaks about that anyone wise and Wealthy would sell everything they own to purchase there isn't anything better than that for the for the person listening right now that is struggling with this concept of like we talked about headism discipline like they're just so far from it because there's a scale of people that are you know able to stay focused on the long term for the people at the very other end of the scale who just look at

their lives and go I just I hear what he's saying for some reason it's not working like I can't get out of this situation y you meet maybe you can't start on the porn side then you know like my this is how a good behavior analyst approaches problems of that sort it's like okay is there something in your life that you know is not right that you could improve that you would improve any step whatsoever well generally you can just ask yourself that question it's like it's a contemplative exercise sit on the edge of your

bed and think okay where is my life off-kilter is so then then you have a variety of ideas about how yeah okay okay I'm on my mom's bed I'm me I've got no relationship my job's crap I hate it okay then I'd say zero in on one of those yeah and find some small thing that you could fix that you would fix why a small thing well because look at you you're completely godamn useless you you better find something small that you can do now if you can find a big thing good but obviously you

haven't been able to CU all these problems exist so see one of the emphasis in the religious realm let's say is humility one of the things that's emphasized well what's humility what's the opposite of Pride well humility is starting where you are that's what humility is and it's annoying because you know like if your life is a mess then you have to see that you're the person in that mess then you have to understand that your first attempt to redress the mess might not be something you're particularly proud of you know I mean I saw

this Lots in my clinical practice where people would the first steps they had to take to put things in order were pretty embarrassing it's like really that's all I can do hey man uphill is better than downhill and there's a Doctrine in the gospels that Christ puts forward which is very interesting he says uh it's the Matthew principle it's called to those who have everything more will be given from those who have nothing everything will be taken okay so it it lays out a view of the world progress regression that's one model here's another one

progress regression this is the right model so even if you have to start small you incre you ACR success in um exponentially you acre defeat exponentially too that's the abyss that is hell you start going downhill you go downhill faster and faster start going uphill you go uphill faster and faster so even if you have to start small or even painfully small which is highly probable especially if you're trying to tackle something that's really plagued you doesn't really matter house small take I would say take the step that you can take that you will take

that actually feels like some accomplishment imagine you're dealing with a three-year-old kid and you want to encourage him okay you want to set him a task that he you don't want him to say Dad I could do that when I was two right but you don't want to set him a task that there's not a chance he'll manage you want to set him a task that will stretch him Beyond where he is that has a reasonable probability of success right why why stretch him from where he is well because you want to grow I mean

look if you love a child you love the child for who he is and who he could be and you want to indicate your love for both of those I think if you're a father you tilt even more towards love for who the child could be what is self-belief in this context because people people everyone's looking so many people are in search of two words I think that's three words but self-belief and confidence idence yeah and in this context of that small task how is that building my self-belief or confidence yeah because you watch yourself

do it and that does work to well well look if you see someone a friend who is continually incrementally improving you're going to well maybe you'll be jealous and resentful and bitter and miserable and try to undermine them but assuming you're not like completely encapsulated by dark Forces you'll think oh that's admirable well you you see the same thing in yourself you have to act you have to develop an opinion of yourself the same way you would develop an opinion of someone else so now and I'm not hypothesizing about this by the way we know

this clinically if I want to truly help you build your confidence rather than merely readjusting the words you say about yourself which which would be something like self-esteem which is something that doesn't even exist by the way it's just a pathological concept altogether you want confidence okay more to the point you want the confidence that's based in competence otherwise it's narcissistic okay so how do you develop that well you watch yourself exceed your limits and then you think oh look at that there's something in me that can exceed my limits that's your true self that's

a good way of thinking about it and in doing so you actually realize that limits exist and you imposed one on yourself in the first place well you that's one of the things you can realize certainly that that also you don't exactly know where the limits are it's like oh I exceeded that it's like okay well now what what's the upward limit to exceed what's the upward Arc of exceeding limits that's Jacob's lad I would say this is the promise of the kingdom of God that's one way of thinking about it there's no upward limit

there's no limit how bad things can get no one would deny that who has any sense so that means in a way that hell exists you can find your way there with no problem in terms of energy there are so many reasons why I'm a big matcha fan if you don't already know by now and so much so that I actually invested in the UK's leading matcha company called perfect Ted and one of my favorite perfect Ted products is these delicious matcha pouches that come in every flavor from salted caramel to Peach flavor to mint

flavor to Berry flavor one of my favorites is this vanilla flavor which I'm going to make in just two seconds you just take this mixer here get a little bit of the powder pop it on top of the shaker like that put the lid on shake shake shake delicious if you haven't tried this yet you can find perfect Ted at Tesco and Holland Barrett stores or online where you can get 40% off with my code diary 40 head to perfect.com and put in code diary 40 to try this delicious multi-flavored match now highly recommend and

if you do it please tag me send me a message online it's interesting what's going on with young men in particular at the moment because it does appear and I don't have the stats on this in front of me but it does appear that young men are more and more in search of some type of religion yeah definitely I think I think Islam I think I read Islam's On The Rise amongst young men or it's the the dominant religion that young men are being drawn to but in the context of what we've described that person

who sat on the edge of their bed do they need religion and I'm being intentional not to say God I'm saying religion well it's these are hard things to do on your own right I mean you only have the span of your life and the probability that you can figure out how to live merely as a consequence of Consulting your own limited experience is zero it's too complicated so the religion might be your societ it might be your friends your family in in this context is that's part of it that that would be the more

structured part the more traditional part you need the traditional stories that's why I wrote this book is to indicate well at least in part well what the stories are and also what what they mean it's not only that it's not only what they mean it's how knowing what they mean changes your life so for example in the story of Abraham God comes to AB Abraham okay now questions emerge from that statement what do you mean God and how does he come to Abraham what the hell does that mean well the story lays that out the

god that comes to Abraham is the voice of Adventure it's a definition this is a good thing to know God is the voice of Adventure okay so now think let's think about this a little bit so the god that's the voice of Adventure is the god of the forefathers of Abraham the father he's a patriarchal Spirit okay if you're a good father you speak with the voice of Adventure to your sons obviously you know you're encouraging them it's like get the hell out there you know make something of yourself why do you do that because

you have this little kid and you think get at it man let's see what you can be and so that's that voice of the benevolent father and that's the spirit of the ancestors and behind that there's the god who's the voice of Adventure if you pursue the spirit of Adventure there will be things you have to give up right you know that I mean you know you you're taking steps we'd even stay that steps forward in your life what do you mean forward what do you mean steps well there are Little Adventures you have that

transform you and transform your circumstances okay you have that adventure and you have to change as a consequence of it you have to give up your immaturity so that you can take advantage of this new opportunity okay and that changes you now you're a slightly different person now A New Horizon of opportunity opens up you have to make a sacrifice it's like okay looks like if I'm going to do this I can no longer afford this well Abraham changes so dramatically that he gets a new name he starts as Abraham and he ends is Abraham

Abraham is the father of Nations so what's the moral if you pursue the spirit of Adventure and make the proper sacrifices you become the father of Nations right that's true there's a really interesting I I grew up as religious until I was 18 I say religious because terms difficult to Define to me but um my my mother's was believed in God she was Christian my father's Christian and at about 18 I started reading of Richard Dawkins books and other people's books and I got to this place where I think I was atheist by the definition

of I didn't think there was necessarily a God and now I find myself in this place of being agnostic now when I think about the Bible as a compass or as a as a guide the the part of my brain that's like rooted in this like I need evidence for everything goes is this just a book that a bunch of men wrote thousands of years ago when they were sat around a campfire or whatever and if if it is then it's just one person's opinion as much as any as much much as any self-help book

on a shelf is one person's opinion well okay let's take that claim apart I mean yes it is stories that people came up with thousands of years ago but no definitely not one person's opinion definitely 100% not because these stories have been transmitted over Millennia and organized and edited and transformed by a very large number of people so it's at minimum it's a massive Collective effort and it's a collective under effort undertak by arguably the most literate and intelligent people there are and that'd be the Jews why would I listen to the Bible more than

I'd listen to something Socrates wrote or any philosopher oh there's a huge overlap between the the Greco the Greek philosophical tradition and and the Christian tradition I mean Western culture is the amalgamation of Greece Jerusalem and Rome so and the early Christians saw tremendous parallels between Christian Theology and Greek philosophy where do you think we we come from you know you've got the like Darwinism evolutionary theory of we've evolved Etc then there's the more religious view that you know if you really think about the the first testament and um the early Testament and the stories

of the you know creation people think you know maybe we were just popped out of nowhere but where do where do we youth believe that we come from do you believe a God put us here or do you believe that do you believe evolution is true do you believe both are true you have to read the book but I want I want to I know and fair but but I I'm not trying to be a a smart alic in in that response it's a complicated answer yeah right it's a complicated answer I think that we're

Guided by the spirit of meaning okay I think that's also our deepest Instinct that's somewhat D wiium well I had a rule for this book is I didn't make any claims about the biblical stories that I couldn't justify scientifically I don't think there's a conflict I I think that viewing the biblical stories as an amalgam of superstitious protos scientific theories is absurd I don't think there's any evidence for that at all these are stories So Stories and scientific hypotheses aren't the same thing the Lord of the Rings is not a scientific hypothesis but that doesn't

mean it's not true do you believe my great great great great Granddad was a an amoeba well if you go you were a sperm at one point I mean it's not that implausible we all come from single celled organisms this is I'm asking these questions because I'm genuinely it's like I'm genuinely wrestling with a bunch of big existential questions that I've actually only been wrestling with maybe for like I'd say a year yeah so it's very fresh for me and it's funny my arc here is religious Christian up until maybe 18 yeah like staunch atheist

for two years to the point that it was like my identity yeah and then like yeah let go of that drifted for a couple of years and find myself it's really interesting point where I'm like back at the door of like okay let's re look at some of these answers again yeah well that's exactly why I wrote this book because I know that that's the time and it's not just the time for you that's the time that we're in yeah it's the time we're in 100% oh definitely definitely well it's partly because the enlightenment has

exhausted itself partly because it was wrong it's failed us the individual I think exhausted is a better word because it wasn't like the enlightenment was without its benefits technological progress the the hypothet the materialist reductionism of the atheist scientist okay it's not right factually they were wrong their theory of perception was wrong they're wrong we see the world through a story we do not see the world as a collection of facts they're wrong you see the postmodernists figured this out and that's why the postmodernist had a walloping influence on culture now I'm no fan of

the postmodernist for a variety of reasons but their insistence that we see the world through a story that they're right that's right I agree I mean if you if you obviously read the book sapiens um by novel Harari and his central point is that what bound us as humans and stop us being these scattered chimps with stories they bind us together so I completely understand that we need a story it's how everything money governments Etc function but what that story is now I can I can agree that a story of voluntary sacrifice 100% agree that

humans need that there's no chance that we'd be here otherwise and it's a set of values and principles now those values and principles are often found in religion but do they and and a belief in a God but do they have to be could they be found in could I theoretically make a new religion where me and my friends all unite against a set of values sacrifice give that's a great question well this is what n basically presupposed in some ways so when when n observed that God had died say in 1850 or thereabouts his

medication for that his warning was we'll descend into nihilism and communist totalitarianism and that was exactly right maybe a Mindless Hedonism in there too dovi concentrated more on that nche said we'll have to create our own values we'll have to become that's what the Superman is the nian Superman the man who creates his own values mhm try see what happens you can't do it you can't create your own values because values are real they're not arbitrary they're not relativistic so imagine this imagine there's a very large number of games that could be played like an

infinitely large number but there's a very small number of games that people want to play then there's even a smaller number of games that sustain themselves and improve as you play them okay so that's like a landscape you could think about it as a landscape of potential patterns of interaction you could even think about it as a landscape of potential tribal affiliations right the rules of those games would be the principles of the society okay now the question your question is could we come up with our own set of rules and the answer to that

is no why because the sustainable abundant playability of a game is not arbitrary so for example if you want to get along with your wife she has to want to play the game you're playing mhm okay now there's lots of games you could play that aren't going to fit that criteria yeah now then imagine it's even worse though because to get along with your wife you she has to want to play the game you want to play but both of you have to play a game that works today and tomorrow and next week next month

next year right and then you have to play it with your kids and your parents and a bunch of other people so can I ask then so is it the case that humans are designed in such a way where there's a certain set of values and stories that are most conducive with their reproductive survival and so if that's true and I completely agree understand why that would be true because this true true for all species like there's a set of stories and narratives probably in my dog if you go back to a 100 years from

when his ancestors were in the wild that he needed to subscribe to to reproduce to be a dog and to survive as a dog but so the question then becomes where do those values come from are they innate within us because of our environmental factors so I need to be this way because of the environment I live in so that I can have sex with somebody and reproduce because of I have two arms two legs Etc I'm this Advanced chimp or do they come from above somewhere and they're granted down to me because if I

look at every animal not or and oh and okay yeah yeah it's the same thing it it's you're looking at the same problem from two different perspectives it's and yes they're handed down from on high yes their instincts so who they handed down from well the the the religious do you struggle with this question well it's a complicated question question but you struggle with the answer I I struggle with making the answer simple enough to offer rapidly are you clear yourself on it not as clear as I could be what is it you wrestle with

I've said well Clarity is part of it I mean we we want to make things as clear as possible breadth of Co coverage right I mean I'm people ask me what I believe and say well I'm not hiding what I believe I'm like I lecture about it I podcast about it I write about it it's like that's what I believe there it is is there obfuscation in that well some partly things are complicated so it's it's very difficult to give short answers to complex questions they you tend to give if you give short answers to

complex questions the answers tend to be symbolic yeah you have to say something like where do they come from it's like well they come from God now is that a useful answer well it's a short answer so it's useful in that it's short it begs the question what do you mean by God we could return to that in the story of Abraham these are definitions because if you're going to talk about what's properly put in the highest place you have to know what you're talking about okay in the story of Abraham the voice of Adventure

is to be put in the highest place and if you follow that then you become the father of Nations that's reproductive success UC mhm right so that means the idea is that there's an alignment between the Instinct that calls you to Adventure and the probability that you'll be attractive to women in the manner that ensures the survival of your descendants and is that environmental it's both is it's both it's both it's emerges as a consequence of the constraints of social interaction let's say like there's constraints for example on what makes a man desirable to a

woman yeah right that has nothing to do with you those constraints those are there right they're there in the Society of women they're Eternal they're not no woman she might vary in her opinion to some degree but she partakes of the pattern so it's there now it's also built into you because you're a social creature and so your physiology indicates to you the nature of that pattern so does my dog have a different religion to me does he have a different God to some degree it's it's there's an overlap because you can communic the dog

your dog understands you and vice versa so there's there's that's a good question social mammals understand each other right so there's an overlap in their deepest instincts or their highest impulses you can think about that both ways I was I was going through my head and thinking about like the Venus fly trap and my my do my French Bulldog Pablo and they all need a different set of behaviors and principles and values to Survive and Thrive and be happy well you you could think about that as sure sure I was thinking then does that mean

that they all have a different yeah they have a different intrinsic nature that's another way of thinking about it yeah because of the environment and the factors that they face as that species so then Pablo's God might be slightly different to my God if we're talking about cuz I'm trying to understand if like this idea of God is a set of evolutionary motivations yes that it is and it is that you can think about it as rising up from the material world or descending from on Heaven it doesn't matter it doesn't matter fundamentally it's the

same it doesn't matter there those are different ways of looking at the same problem when I say evolutionary motivations it doesn't feel so Divine it doesn't feel like a place a reason to gather in a church it feels like like I'm just kind of a a robot that's being steered by these motivations of don't do that do this this feels good if you're with your friends and family you feel good so do that more and if you're with your friends and family you're safer so you're more likely to have kids or is it this sort

of divine thing that we we Society have told us God is where we should worship and we should thank you so much and go to a church and get on our knees and pray because if there have two very different things one is like practical and pragmatic and the other one is this divine okay here's one way of thinking about it so I mentioned that in the story of Abraham God is the Call to Adventure okay so that's a definition now the the the Divine that's put forward in these library of stories has multiple characteristics

he's characterized in many ways but there's an insistence that that reflects an underlying Unity now the unity is incomprehensible in its essence okay so you have to accept that as the initial starting point you're you're not going to get the answer yeah okay you can you can see something complex from a variety of different perspectives okay in the story of Noah God is the impulse that comes to the wise to prepare when trouble's Brewing yeah okay now now okay so now you can think of that as an instinct you can think about it as got

Instinct intuition negative emot anxiety but but it's more than that because it's you can be afraid of something that isn't real yeah okay now you might have to ask yourself okay what are the preconditions for your fear what are the preconditions to the validity of your fear so you're afraid and you should be well let's say that's a characteristic of someone who's wise okay so then the question is well what's the essence of the wisdom that makes your fear valid Noah is described in the story of Noah as a man wise in his Generations so

that means that by the moral standards of his time he's an upstanding human being okay so now you can imagine that means he exists in harmonious relationship with his present self and his future self okay that makes him mature but then he also does that in a way that serves his wife and his family and his community MH so his self is is balanced and optimized across those parameters that makes him secure in his foundation and properly oriented if you're secure in your foundation and properly oriented upward then there's no difference between the voice of

the Divine and the Instinct for the Instinct that preserves you in times of trouble but you see you can't exactly get there by the mere bottomup materialistic notion because you could think of about the fear that guides Noah as an instinct but the instinct is pathological unless it exists in this wider moral framework because then you could have the fear of a coward well that's not helpful The Wider moral framework could that wider moral framework just be I'm in My DNA I'm hardwired to want to reproduce because yeah but rep even reproduction isn't see this

is I think where Dawkins went dreadfully wrong sex and reproduction aren't the same thing for people not anymore certainly well not at all because we're High investment reproducers sex just gets the ball rolling so so here's a question how would you have to act to maximally ensure the survival of your Offspring okay so now what do you mean survival do you mean that your son lives do you mean that your grandson lives do you mean that 20 Generations down the road from you the pattern that you represented is still propagating itself successfully does it mean

that the people that you produce are able to take on all Challengers because of the manner in which they conduct themselves that's a lot more complicated than just sex like way more complicated so the pattern that Abraham so Abraham is the father of Nations right the there's an insistence in the story that the manner in which he conducts himself as a hero establishes the pattern that makes his descendants successful eternally I I just can't figure out whether this is um whether like what what order things happened in in terms of is the Bible just a

consequence of people trying to figure out our evolutionary motivations and turn them into these stories that guide us why just okay we can remove the word just well but that's an important removal it's an important removal because it's you know because it's it has bound is the Bible in part the story of human beings coming to Consciousness yes yeah yes okay yeah does it reflect a deeper underlying reality yes yeah how deep is that underlying well let's say okay it's a story about the psyche and then that say well no it's a story about the

psyche in Society okay so well no it's a story about the psyche in society in the natural world mhm okay well what's underneath that the source of nature society and the psyche this is an an interesting question it's very direct one but I would love just an answer that I because I haven't got Clarity on this what is it you believe what what God is it that you believe in I've I heard you talk about this sort of substrate idea and such but in a simple way that I can understand do you believe in man

in the sky God do you believe in it's a well that's not as that's not as primitive a conceptualization as the atheists would have you believe what is it you believe well there isn't anything more complex in the known universe than a human brain MH so if you want a model for reality as such like proclaiming that it has something akin to the structure of the human psyche is not an absurd claim given that that is the most complex Thing by far that we know of by far so what is it you believe well I've

been explaining it but I mean I I did say I mentioned something which we skipped over very quickly because I introduced it too rapidly the postmodernists figured out that we live in a story but then they Le to a faulty conclusion of two forms well three there's no uniting story that was one of their conclusions in fact the definition of postmodernism is skepticism of meta narratives there's no uniting story it's like well that's a stupid Theory because it there's no Union so what there's just diversity well we worship diversity now in this utterly foolish manner

there's no difference between diversity and War without a uniting narrative there's nothing but War so no that's not going to work wrong hedonistic self-gratification there's Michelle Fuko for you to a T it's like why is that wrong why can't people just do what they want with whoever they want all the time because it defeats itself and quickly it's not a sustainable game if it's all about you and your whims I don't want to be anywhere near you and that won't be so good for you that's not going to work power that's really where the postmodernists

landed with their what would you say temptation to turn towards marks it's all about power it's like first of all that's probably a confession if that's what you believe and second no it's not try tyrannizing your wife and see how well that works for you try tyrannizing yourself and see how successful you are power is not the game okay what's the game what's the story I mentioned earlier it's voluntary self-sacrifice right you offer yourself up in the service of something higher That's the basis of society That's the basis of psychological stability the Christian insistence is

that That's the basis of the world I'm gonna ask you again because I I want to be I want to be clear is what what is what is it you what is the god you believe in I think that the claim that Christ is the embodiment of the prophet and the laws I think that's true okay yeah that that's complicated it's very very complicated but I think it's true so you believe that Jesus was God God yeah I I think I think if you understand what that means that it's indisputable I I'll give you I'll

give you a brief explanation of why Christ takes the sins of the world onto himself so that means all the problems that there are are his problems right okay so the the idea there is that there's no difference between making that assumption and then actually beginning to address those problems and there's no difference between that which best addresses the problems of mankind that and the Divine those are the same thing and I can't see how that can be otherwise because the contrary hypothesis would be that you would adapt best to your life by avoiding things

that are difficult and terrifying and No One Believes that and so the pattern of the passion this is the voluntary self-sacrifice issue taken to its extreme the pattern of the passion is the decision to voluntarily confront and welcome anything that happens to you no matter what it is and that's a terrible thing to ask or Endeavor to undertake but well the alternative is to shrink away well the spirit of shrinking away is the Divine it's like I don't think so that that's preposterous the spirit of unlimited courage well that's not a bad start for a

definition of what constitutes the Divine the highest possible value has your belief in God religion been shaken at all oh yes definitely because you've been constantly over the last year and a half two years you've been through a particularly difficult time with losing people in your life that are um were foundational to you Tammy as well oh yeah well and I was in extreme pain for three years right I went through three years where every minute of my life was worse than any minute I had ever had previous to that it was terrible and did

I lose faith was it questioned challenged absolutely absolutely um it it just became absurd it was absurd so many things had gone off the rails in my wife was dying my daughter was ill I was things had blown up around me in 50 different ways and I was like seriously in pain was terrible I was walking like 12 miles a day because I couldn't sit I did that for months winter rain whenever I had a friend who walked with me was terrible and yeah I mean I thought what was the desperation it wasn't even the

pain it was the fact that I was in such terrible shape that I felt that I was a felt I believed that I was a burden to everyone around me and that that was only likely to get get worse and I thought what's the sense in this what's the possible significance of this so yes everyone's faith is challenged I mean Christ himself cries in despair out to God on the cross and the story wouldn't be believable without that like if you're going to live you're going to be pushed past your limit right if you're going

to live so so but who knows what you discover when you're pushed past your limit in that moment you know I've been in my relationship for some time now and I genuinely think I'd rather I'd rather die myself than my partner die uhuh and you were there as Tammy was struggling with her health yeah which is not something I've heard you actually talk about before in what I've observed she was she was dying is that harder to take for you than your own pain and struggle I think generally if you love someone it's worse to

see them suffer than to suffer yourself you certainly figure that out when you have kids and this all happens at the same moment the same couple of years of your life is there anything to you know people always search for Silver Linings and things is there anything we're both alive my family is thriving the my adventure is expanding life isn't fair is it doesn't appear to be very fair because I mean this is how your story ended it in that regard but it could I don't know if an adventure is fair I don't even know

if that's what we want like this is something I really came to understand more deeply when writing this book what are we built for we're built for maximal Challenge and that isn't the way we view ourselves in the modern world we we view ourselves as built for pleasure you know pornography we we view ourselves as built for consumption or for safety or for or for for maybe for egotistical self-aggrandisement and fame those are look many all of those things are better than their absence let's say you know I think part of the reason that Andrew

Tate is so popular among young men because it it's better to be a successful reprobate than a useless scer seriously I mean seriously well that's why the villain in stories is often admirable compared to the coward right at least the villain is out there like doing villain things you know but at least he has meaning well and he he's not he's not the villain at least the villain villain has meaning the the villain's on a quest of sorts you know a committed and a committed villain can learn that's another thing too what are we built

for I think we're built for maximal Challenge and that's that's way more interesting I mean one of the things that see I figured out that lies that totalitarian states were a consequence of lies in about 1985 I I really figured it out I'd been reading Sol nits and and Carl Yung i' been reading I was reading a lot I was really obsessed by it I thought oh I see so hell is the Dominion of the LIE okay so what do you do about that while you stop lying that's how you fight it and that means

you do that in your own life you just stop just you practice stopping you practice not doing the things you know you shouldn't do you practice paying attention to your words to see if they're landing solidly and they make you confident instead of weak right you abandon your shortterm desire for control and power understanding that there isn't anything better that can happen to you than what happens if you tell the truth right no matter what it looks like to you in the moment it's a strange thing but I can't see how it could be otherwise

because you'd have to hypothesize that you're going to align yourself with life with nature with Society with god with yourself by lying No One Believes that you might think you can get away with it that's way different right but no one believes that so well so then what happens in consequence of that well I think what happens in consequence of that is what happened to Abraham your life just goes like this just opens and opens and opens and opens and I don't think there's any limit to that and that's ridiculously entertaining like unbearably entertaining there's

what you want in your life you want it to be unbearably entertaining and it's funny you know when you watch people go to movies I mean James Bond right that's an unbearably entertaining life and that's what people want to see when they go to a theater because that's what they want that's what they want and maybe all the sorrow and catastrophe that's part of that has to be part of it because otherwise there's there's nothing about it that's glorious why does that move you so much because life is very wide you know there's the the

Peaks and bellies are very distant from one another and I I don't know maybe as you ascend uphill your understanding of the chasm between the Peaks and valys also increases you know cuz you think maybe as you're successful you're happier well first of all I'm not sure that success and happiness are the same thing I'm not sure that we want them to be the same thing I don't even know what people mean when they say they want to be happy if you investigate it technically you find out that really what people mean when they say

they want to be happy is that they don't want to suffer that's different than the enthusiastic joy that you might think about you know that's part and parsel of a child's laughter you want to be happy what do you want to be laugh laughing all the time is that what you're saying well no that's not what I mean well what do you mean do you mean the gratification that comes along with the cookie at 1: in the morning no that's not what I mean well okay what do you mean well I don't know it's like

yeah you don't know partly what you mean is you don't want pointless suffering fair enough you know fair fair enough but that doesn't mean it's happiness that's your goal there's no I don't think that's your goal I don't think your podcast would be successful if that was your goal I think you would have washed up on the shs of triviality long ago I do well there's something you're doing that's working there's something about the way you're approaching the situation that's of broad appeal there's some archetypal pattern that's you're acting out in your conduct in your

podcast because otherwise it wouldn't have the effect it has it's true I I I agree I don't know what it is but I but well you know some of it we talked about some of it you know you said that you you can you can you can apprehend the outline of some of the principles some of that you probably discovered as you went along rather than you know putting them in place to begin with this seems to work yeah you know so that's a discovery of of a pathway well as a podcaster as well I

don't think you really truly understand your principles until they're tested so and especially when they're tested from both sides so th you know this side's telling you to be more like this and this side's screaming at you to be more like this and you you're faced with a decision when you're you know when I started out as a podcaster there was no one screaming there was no one there right right but at some point in the journey you get immense pressure yeah yeah well then you're also that forces a decision out of you yeah well

you're also in a situation then when you have to start worrying about your reputation which is something you don't have to worry about when no one knows who you are yeah and it's very dangerous to worry about your reputation as soon as you start worrying about your reputation as a part you're going to fail yeah cuz you're not interesting then you'll stop taking risks yeah so then you know another question emerges you got people yelling at you from this side and this side well how do you know what's right well it isn't partly it's by

listening because you want to pay attention to your audience but there's something guiding you if you do what you're doing properly that has nothing to do with the clamor yeah yeah it's funny because actually it links back to some of the other principles we talked about today it's one of one of the things I've learned is having a good relationship like good friendships and a good part relationship with my wife is actually the foundation for me to be able to navigate the scream people screaming at me from both sides yeah why because it just anchors

me in it's like an anchor of like knowing who I actually am irrespective of the the like the crowd telling you who you are yeah yeah well that's a good that's a very good illustration of distributed identity yeah yeah yeah it's like you are your wife and your friends and your family yeah right there's no fundamentally there's there cannot be any separation there that's yeah and and well you you said you've you experienced that it's like that's what gives you that's part of what gives you a foundation it's like yeah that's not a losery and

it's nice because as you said like when I go out into the world everyone is very nice to me it's just if you spend too long on the internet people scream at you from both sides they say do it more like this do it like this where are the CEOs this is called D we want more of these kind of guess you should talk about this politics Trump Cala Trump and the middle of that you going [ __ ] hell and that's where you have to take some time to really like tune into yourself and

go who am I and why am I doing this and what are my principles and irrespective of the principles I Choose Or I believe in that there's going to be suffering and there's going to be sacrifice and there's going to be great Advent as well MH and the good one thing I really like that helps me for some bizarre reason is the knowledge that I will die someday why does that help it just it's a good question why does it help it helps because if I think it's focusing in me on what actually matters yeah

in a way that I wouldn't be it wouldn't be as easy to otherwise what it saying is it's just a reminder of okay if I'm going to die someday then actually this person's screaming at me to be more like this is obviously doesn't matter like it obviously doesn't matter in the in the context of my other priorities well it might be that death is what makes things matter scarcity always makes the value something well right but but then we're talking about a kind of ultimate scarcity and like you can ask yourself one of the fundamental

questions you can ask yourself is what is the nature of the real right and I think death makes things real I agree yeah that's why it's an important I don't know seems like a weird thing to say but it reminds me that what's trivial and what's not um in the context of a finite amount of resources time attention that I can commit it's it's foolish to commit some of them to some of the things that I find myself committing them to sometimes when I remind myself of that death how do you pick your guests curiosity

yeah that's I pick people I want to talk to yeah it's like I'd like to hear what that person has to say yeah and it's something that I'm trying to alert so it's typically when I when I'd seen you wrote a book called who we who wrestle with God that's the word Israel hey that's what Israel means uhhuh yeah yeah and that's the chosen people of God Israel I didn't know that yeah but I thought this is a subject that I'm curious about so I would like to talk to Jordan to see if he can

help me you know fill in this sort of jigsaw puzzle in my brain of subject matters that relate to this and I evolve I'm probably going to have kids soon and when I have my kids I'm going to be curious about Parenthood and I'm going to speak to you know guests that can help me with that that's been my framework and it's worked in terms of I still like doing this well there's no reason so when I'm on stage lecturing I'm on a journey it's a real journey yeah it's not an act like I pose

a question to myself before I go on stage it's a question I want the answer to and I don't have and I go on stage and I try to move towards the answer and people come along and I want to go there and they want to come along it's a good deal and the podcasts are like that if you're doing them honestly it's like I want to talk to this person that's a really nice way of thinking about it moving towards an answer yeah not even sure what the answer is but well and it'll change

as you approach it move towards the answer right the questions and the answers change as you move towards it that's okay that's fine we touched on this earlier but it's something that I wanted to touch on because one of the themes of this podcast is often the subject of grief and I read that you lost both your parents within sort of six months of each other what do what does that moment teach you about priorities about life about what matters about anything that you could pass down to me that's important things last way less Long

than you think so you should be aware of that and not take things for granted no and so and I don't think I took my parents for granted now did I do that perfectly well we don't do things perfectly but it was pretty good it was pretty good I learned when my I watched my wife's family go through the death of their mother and one of the consequences of that was that my wife and her siblings and her father pulled closer together in during that time and that really it was like a wound healing you

know mhm and so I saw that and I saw that that worked so for example Tammy has a stronger relationship with her older brother than she did before her father also died so we lost her father and my father and my mother this year basically it isn't that her brother substituted for her father but it was that there was more there than she had made use of and so when her father father Departed the possibility of expanding that relationship with her brother was on the table and I did the same thing with my sister and

my brother and that's helpful it's helpful so there's opportunity everywhere even in grief there's opportunity is that one lesson that your father taught you that stay pay attention he was good at that he was good at he taught that very well and it wasn't a good idea to not pay attention on my father he uh he had a he wasn't he wasn't I wouldn't describe him as an easy person he had high standards and he was rather unforgiving and that's I don't know do you forgive the people that you love for not being everything they

they could be that's a hard question it's okay dear it's like is it now I think we have a lot of that in our culture it's okay I like you just like you are do you forgive him yeah yes I don't think they're my dad and I sorted out our differences a long time ago you know when I left home our relationship was somewhat fractious from the time I was 13 till the time I left home he developed quite a severe depression which ran in my family and that made him harder to understand than had

been the case previously it also made the probability that if there were events in the household that they would be they'd have more reverberation than they would have otherwise and that was confusing to me I understood why that happened later not much later and it wasn't very long after I left home that whatever differences I had with my father were irrelevant so we didn't really have unresolved issues I wouldn't say what about your mother what's the one lesson my mom was great what's the lesson if any she left with you my mother was a very

hospitable person and in the in the Old Testament accounts hospitality is a cardinal virtue and she was very good at making people welcome when my the day my mother died I I I I thought about her most of the day that day memories came to mind and one of the things I realized about my mother was that uh I don't have a single negative memory of my mother it's really quite something to know someone for 62 years and really I really don't have a negative memory of my mother I don't remember any time where she

acted she was a good person my mother um I could always make her laugh she had a very good sense of humor I appreciated that a lot and she although she was a very agreeable person and a very feminine person she was tough too and she wasn't a edle type you know she had strong protective instincts but her desire to help her children become independent Trump that for sure Jordan we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they're leaving it for and the

question left for you is how do you feel most misunderstood I don't know if I am misunderstood I think the people who don't like me some of them have me confused with some figment of their imagination some of the people who don't like me they understand me they just don't like what they understand they don't like what it implies and so that's okay with me I I don't feel misunderstood I wouldn't say I I've got nothing to complain about um people who've been listening to me they understand me and as far as I can tell

that's been very good for them and that's unbelievably gratifying for me it's you must experience that I mean your podcast has had a broad effect and I presume a positive effect on people there isn't anything better than that to see that what you're doing has that broadly salutary effect that's great that's another indication of our essentially I would say religious nature you know Jo willing told me this you know Joo said that he could he could have easily been like a gang leader criminal type he's a tough Warrior character you know and he said when

he went into the military he discovered that being the leader of a team and moving people in a positive direction there wasn't anything better than that and so that just straightened him out you know and I feel exactly the same way there isn't anything better than that and so I'm able to do that and I see the evidence of that all the time and whatever misunderstandings there might be about me necessary or unnecessary are so trivial compared to that that they're not they don't even really register what a privilege Jord that's for sure Jordan thank

you so much it's a privilege we share because doing this for me is a great privilege and the fact that it positively impacts anyone is everything you've just said and I see that in your work but also I see it when we have these conversations in the immense Avalanche of people who profess that you've changed their life in some positive way and moved them in a better Direction and that's a refutable and no one can you know I mean there's as I say there's no greater privilege so Jordan thank you so much for your time

I appreciate it thank you thanks for the invitation again it's always a pleasure talking to you thank you isn't this cool every single conversation I have here on the D of a CE at the very end of it you'll know I asked the guest to leave a question in the Diary of a CEO and what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home so you've got every guest we've ever had their question and on the back of it if

you scan that QR code you get to watch the person who answered that question we're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question the brand new version 2 updated conversation cards are out right now at Theon conversation cards.com they've sold out twice instantaneously so if you are interested getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards I really really recommend acting quickly [Music] [Music]