#1208 - Jordan Peterson

November 29, 2018

Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist and tenured professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL_f53ZEJxp8TtlOkHwMV9Q All Dr. Peterson’s self-improvement writing programs at https://www.understandmyself.com/ 20% off for Rogan listeners. Code: ROGAN

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my guess today is one of my favorite people to talk to I think he's one of the most misrepresented and misunderstood people and all of Pop Culture today he's a brilliant man he is my friend please give it up for Jordan Peterson

The Joe Rogan Experience

Pedro hello Jordan how are you doing man I'm doing great you have the schedule that you have the amount of energy and enthusiasm you maintain with the schedule it is very remarkable cuz you're not stopping you're not slowing down I mean you've had your foot on the gas for like 2 solid years now I guess I was wrong it is that how you feel about it when you have an opportunity that's completely Preposterous you're a fool to take it for granted I guess that's Tammy and I are being 200 cities since January so everywhere you know and part of what keeps us going well first of all I have a really good crew you know like to see a guy's they're really good Live Nation spin really good they make sure the theaters or smooth and and we've had no problems at all

and then I have lots of people who are helping me with my scheduling and Tammy troubles with me and then the lectures themselves well I really like doing them party cuz I do a different picture every night and so that keeps me sharp and it make sure that I'm thinking about new things all the time and trying to formulate my thoughts more precisely and they're all so unbelievably positive so that's also that. That's also something that makes it a lot easier to do because you know why I go to a city and there's 1500 to 2000 people waiting for me there which is like to stay wherever I go and they're all they're listening intently and and it's it's a sophisticated discussion or at least as sophisticated as I can make it and I'm communicating directly with the audience and all the people were there to try to get their life together and so the the the feeling in the in the hall is really really positive and then I usually talk to about a hundred and fifty people afterwards and you know it

they all of them all of them while many of them you know they just say hi and they're polite and we have a photograph and all that but lots of them have stories about how they be putting their lives together and they're thrilled to death about it that they're out of the hole they were in or they've started a new business or they sold a new business or they just decided to get married or they're going to have some kids or they fixed up the relationship with her parents or they quit drinking or and they're they're not predicted I talked to one guy in Europe he stopped he was he was addicted I don't remember what too but it wasn't something that wasn't good he said he'd stop for 9 months ago none of his friends to quit too so it's just like bouncing you know he's so damn happy that his life is better and not only that that he had this additional positive effect on other people so that it's so fun because I have these conversations with people there Bri but they're very personal and they're very intense you know because they you think people have to trust you to tell you that their lives weren't going so well and then they have to trust you even more

tell you that they're going better now because of course what you want when you tell someone that things are going better as you want real encouragement and real sense from the person you're talking to that they're happy for you and I'm absolutely thrilled to hear these things like I was in Whole Foods this morning I will I went down near where I'm staying and Independence and they both been reading my books and watching my lectures and one of them said he had a 7 year old son he really wanted to do right by him he was looking for ethical and moral guidance and you know he found the books really helpful and that it was helping him put his life together and and so card guy at the car rental place last night told me the same thing and it's so it's so exciting so ridiculously exciting to go everywhere around the world and to go into airport to the walk down the street and have people come up and say I'll be watching you on YouTube day off to mention you listen to what you say I've been

vision for my life it's really help me out a lot thanks a lot you know Time After Time day after day all over the place that's just absolutely it makes going to a hundred cities like

continually energizing cuz it's so positive and so and then there's all this weird crap in the Press you know about my dangerous followers and all this alright nonsense and it's so ridiculous you know I talked to 250,000 people in it in in 7 months we haven't had one incident that was negative in that entire time not one nothing no misbehavior on anyone's part with one Heckler who was obviously not a fan of mine given that he was a Heckler that was it other than that the audience is behave perfectly they all dress up they come in suits which is really cool lot of young guys they dress up so they have a little suit competition with me which is quite fun so that's an additional bonus and yeah it's it's pretty damn good Joe I think it's really fantastic and I think what's going on is it makes me very optimistic because I think that one of the things that New Media has provided as these new avenues for information

out there and these new things like these lecture circuits when was the last time you saw public lecture circuits that were popular to the tune of thousands and thousands of people I saw the ones of you and Sam Harris Ted on YouTube and you know Sam's doing them with a lot of other people as well you're doing them with a bottle of desire to understand in New Paths of behavior and patterns of thinking and that these are corrective pass and patterns that can lead you to a more fulfilled and happy your life and recognize the pitfalls of certain types of behavior that people just fall into it and I think often times the difference between someone who lives a fulfilled life and someone who lives a life filled with disaster is following in correct pattern and not knowing what the correct ones are so there's a lot of good people out there that live shitty lives and they don't do it because they're they're just dumb or because they're bad

do it because they've been influenced by certain patterns they falling into patterns with us because of the people that they surround themselves with or the neighborhood I grew up the people that are around them have this way of being and they kind of fall into that or it's drugs or alcohol or whatever it is but then they find a new one and then they can slide right into that new one and all sudden they feel energized when I wake up in the morning instead of hung over to getting exercise and eating healthy starting to think about things correctly and do good things in the momentum of them doing those good things lead them to feel good about themselves and energized and they said these are all things that you promote and I think are genuinely really significant really important willingly kids but the thing is it gets maligned it gets you get pushed into this but we were talking about before the podcast by a small select group of people it's a very small but vocal minority that wants to misrepresent you and then there

the periphery that listen to the small group and then they should have parrot those words out without any real thinking about what you said realized in the last couple of weeks was the you know people often accuse me and they say well most of the people that listen to You Were Meant and I think your automatic responses while you wouldn't be accused if you weren't doing something wrong you must be something wrong about that was like why isn't it 50% women and so I said things like well you know 80% of the people who watch YouTube videos or man and so the fact that 80% of the people who watch my videos are men isn't that surprising given that face right but then about 3 weeks ago I started thinking what the hell am I doing it's like that actually a problem it's like I'm trying to I'm trying it I mean that I didn't set out to do that specifically but if that's the way it's working out and there is a majority of men coming to my shows say then

why is that all of a sudden supposed to be a bad thing I'm asking men to you know to be more honest and especially in their speech and they're thinking and to be more responsible for themselves and for their family and for the community and to grow up and to shoulder their burden and to live a responsible and meaningful life and putting those two things together conceptually it's like and then there's an accusation about that is if there's something wrong and I thought why am I even playing into this it's like fine I'm talking to man I'm encouraging them and I am absolutely thrilled like every time someone comes up to me and that's happening I maybe be a hundred times a week or something like that and tells me one of these stories about how they put their life together it's like I'm absolutely thrilled about that and so I don't see it's just a sign of how pathological are times of becoming some sense that there would have been any guilt about that to begin with. So how is that not a good thing man it's weird I think a lot of

has to do with this concept that men are running everything and that men have this massive Advantage there's a white male advantage and privilege that we all enjoy and share and that men have this Advantage financially the disparity in terms of the the gender gap and pay it you know and then an income and that if you were really a good person you would be looking out he would be trying to balance that out that you wouldn't be trying to pump up the winning team this is like where the Kilt in The Fault well if there has to be losers and the reason that they're all losers is because there's winners and that's complete bloody nonsense because as far as I'm concerned it and I really believe this is that every single person sets out to put themselves together ethically is a net-positive everyone around up there is no downside that my book is being criticized by people who read it very poorly especially chapter that I'm somehow

putting the idea that power in a hierarchy is the right way to be and there's absolutely nothing but I've written it suggests that at all like I'm suggesting that human hierarchies are very complex and then the way you win in the human hierarchy is by being competent and reciprocal and so and so I mean for example even if you're selfish let's say you got to think very carefully about what that would mean if you are selfish and awake because you have to work to take care of yourself and what you want say in this moment but then there's you tomorrow and there's you next week and there's you next month next year in 10 years from now when you're old so because you're self-conscious and because you're aware of the future you're actually a community unto yourself and if you are selfish and impulsive all that means is that you're serving the person you are right now you know in that impulsive but not the person you're going to be so that's not a good ground

there's no difference between not serving your family properly and serving your community property to those things are kind of a harmonious effective in the store is a discussion about that idea and its relationship between the relationship between that and meaning and responsibilities because one of the things that strikes the audience at silent constantly cuz I'm always listening to them to see you know when when the attention is Max me focused is whenever I point out to people that to the meaninglessness of their life and the suffering and the malevolence that they might be displaying because they're resentful and bitter about how things have turned out that antidote to that is to take on more responsibility for themselves and for other people and if that's aspirational which is kind of cool you know the conservative types the duty types and I'm not complaining about them you know that they're always basically saying well this is how you should act because in some sense that's your duty

right that's how a good citizen would act and that's a reasonable argument but the case that I'd be making is more that well there is a there is value distinctions between things some things are worth doing some things aren't and you can turn a discover what that is for yourself and then you should aim at the things that are most worth doing and what you'll find if you watch carefully is that the things that you find worth doing are almost always associated with an increase in responsibility cuz if you think about the people you admire for example you spontaneously admire people and that's a manifestation of the instinct to imitate can people are very imitative you don't admire people who don't take care of themselves like unless there's something wrong with you you at least want an admirable person to be accountable for them self and then if they've got something left over so they can be accountable for their family well then that's a plus obviously that someone you think is solid and then maybe they take care of some more people they have a business or they're involved in the community and some positive way

you see well that's a person whose pattern of being is worth imitating and so and that's all associated with responsibility and it's so interesting because it's as if it's as if everybody knows this but did it hasn't crystallized it's like well you should be responsible because that's what a good citizen is it's not you should be responsible because you need to have a deep meaning in your life to offset the suffering so you don't get bitter and the way you do that is to bury a heavy load now off to get yourself in and check for you now and for you in the future and then to do the same for your family and your community and if there's real no more the other thing that I've been suggesting to people and I also believe that if you don't get your act together and you let yourself slide then what kind of moves into take the place of what you could have being is something that's really not good at all so it's not only that if your

like a dissolute life that you're not aiming at anything positive and so you don't have any real meaning in your sub soon by anxiety and all of that hopelessness but something kind of hellish moves in there to talk by that place and so then you end up making things worse and wouldn't you know one of the things I learned about studying totalitarian systems whether they were on the right or the left was that part of the reason the totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century manifested themselves was because average people didn't take on the proper responsibility they shut their eyes when they're I should have been open even though they knew it and they didn't said things they knew they shouldn't have done and said and that was what support of those horrible systems so you know if you don't get your act together then you leave a little space for hell and I really believe that don't you think when things are happening like something like Nazi Germany I would imagine that during that time to people that were not in support of it felt helpless with that you're you're in Germany you're apart of this

country is country is turning towards this horrible situation where Jewish people are being put in trains and the people that didn't speak out in that I don't necessarily know if it's a lack of discipline or just complete fear and paralysis and an onion it's a for sure no knowledge of how to deal with it or what to do and wanting to protect your family as well and not wanting to step out of line if you're going to take the higher the price you pay for it but isn't it so it's hard to take that jump early because you're not exactly sure where it's going and that's true. All you make a mistake on Twitter or even something that isn't a mistake and you know you can pay at what feels to be a pretty high price

fictional you know what you're so hard to do to get your to get a grasp on exactly what's going on what's it it's also your comprehension of what what is the your emotional reaction to people that you don't know being mean to you like this is like what it what is that price and people some people want to dismiss that as being not just nothing it's not not that big a deal but it is a big deal what causes people to commit suicide and made it it has absolutely bullying online has caused many people to commit suicide to react to a negative Twitter comment as if it's someone sitting across from me talking to me that I know now it's not and I don't even know if the person is real because the accounts are often Anonymous rights yeah person isn't really real but your emotional response is still well someone's going out of their way to be harshly critical to you

your day-to-day life and so you know if you're a reasonable person you're very sensitive to criticism because it's rare and because you might be wrong especially if there's a lot of people criticizing you cuz you kind of have to be Psychopathic in order just a brush that off you know it's like a hundred people think I'm wrong there's nothing to that it's like well if it's a hundred people out of a hundred million but you can't tell on Twitter right then it's irrelevant but if it's a more of a hundred people that show up outside your house which is quite, what Twitter feels like then you think what God you know I must have done something wrong because otherwise why would all these people be here right I think that's why so many people are driven to apologize you know when they when they do something on Twitter and or do something and then the Twitter mobs go after them they think of God I must have done something wrong I should I should you know do some soul-searching and that's not even fair it's more like in a sense of morality that's misplaced because of our inability to calibrate

the social messaging mean I've stopped almost completely stopped reading Twitter comments in the last month and I'm definitely better for your right just it's too much it's too crazy crazy want your number up to now the number of followers going to be I'm still following people in reading the comments I'm just I'm just not worth it all limit facilitates angry impulsive responding for his shows and try to get people to respond to you but the alternative is Facebook where you have these long posts that are just rambling first drafts that people put out electric when it get good start ranting about politics or what-have-you I had cats can't get involved

and then people jump in and comment on them and often their comments are massive as well it's just too verbose whereas the good thing about Twitter is it makes you boil down what you're trying to say very succinct thing although I do enjoy when someone has a good Twitter thread like there was a really good Twitter thread was that Channel's name respectable lawyer

respectable law he wrote a long history of the sentinelese people that that you know this that uncontacted tribe in the Indian see where they this this gentleman went there to try to condition a Christian in a shot of boleros yeah and he wrote this long history of these people and what would the cat what they've had to endure with being you know in a few people going to them and doing some awful thought things and diseases and stuff like that you know a lot of it is just people just trying to get a reaction what's the reaction they can get by pissing you off it's like the best one hand soap to my Twitter and it might be the fundamental motivation for Twitter responses anger

psychologically maybe Twitter is skewed 90% towards people who are impulsively angry at that moment you know at least I do and and it talked in a situation less you rather than a personality flaw on the part of the other driver even though it's easy to assume that but you responded possibly mean God only knows how how much of our social media networks are set up to differentially reward impulsive behavior and it's not that easy to hold people accountable in some sense

and then maybe there's some utility to that but with Anonymous accounts and all that the anonymity is also

problematic enables people to allow their worst to manifest themselves especially if they're resentful and angry so the only benefit that I can see to anonymity is it gives you the opportunity to explore controversial ideas without Blow by true true true but most things it's had it has its advantages and it's disadvantage like most things it's not entirely negative so there's this old idea you know that you have to rescue your father from the belly of the whale right from some monster that's deep in the abyss you see that Pinocchio for example but it's very common idea and I figured out why that is I think so imagine that we already know from a clinical perspective that you know if you set out a pass towards a goal which you want to do because you need to

call when you need a pass cuz that provides you with positive emotion right so you can you set up something is valuable a hierarchy that's kind of a sacrifice cuz you're sacrificing everything else to pursue that and then you experience a fair bit of positive emotion and meaning as you watch yourself move towards the goal and so the implication of that is the better the gold the more full and Rich your experience is going to be when you pursue it so that's one of the reasons of that's one of the reasons for developing of vision and for flashing yourself out philosophically because you want to meet at the high school that you can manage okay so you do that and then what you'll find is that as you move towards the goal there certain things that that that you have to accomplish that frighten you have to learn to be a better speaker better writer a better thinker you have to be better to people around you or Jeff learn some new skills and you're afraid of that whatever cuz it's going to stretch you if you if you pursue a goal

you up against challenges okay so all the clinical data indicates safe spaces as Jonathan something that someone is avoiding that they need to do because they're afraid you have them voluntarily voluntarily confronted and so you break it down what you try to do if your behavior therapist as you break down the thing they were avoiding into smaller and smaller pieces until you find a piece that small enough so they'll do it it doesn't really matter as long as they started you know then they can put the next piece on the next piece and what happens is they don't get less afraid exactly to get braver they get there it's like there's more of them you can. Here's why so magic you do something new

that's informative right there's information in the action and then you can incorporate that information and turn it into a skill and turn it into a transformation of your perception so there's more to you because you tried something new that's one thing but the second thing is there's good biological evidence for this now that if you put yourself in a new situation then new jeans code for new proteins and build new neural structures and new nervous system structures same thing happens to some degree when you work out right cuz your your muscles are responding to the load but you're nervous system does that too so you imagine that there's a lot of potential you locked in your genetic code and then if you put yourself in a new situation then then the stress that's the situational stress that's produced by that particular situation unlock those jeans and then Bills new parts of you so that's very cool cuz who knows how much there is locked inside of you okay so now here's the idea

so let's assume that that scales as you take on heavier and heavier loads and more and more of you you get more more informed because you're doing more and more difficult things but more and more of you gets unlocked

and so then what that would imply is that if you got to the point where you could look at the darkest thing so that would be the abyss right that would be the deepest Abyss if you could look at the harshest things like the most brutal parts of the suffering of the world in the malevolence of people in society you could look that look at that straight and indirectly that that would turn you on maximally so that's the idea of rescuing your father because imagine that you're like the potential composite of all your all the ancestral wisdom that's locked inside of you biologically but that's not going to come out at all unless you stress yourself unless you unless you challenge yourself and a bigger the challenge you take on the more that's going to turn on and so that has you take on a broader broader range of challenges and you push yourself harder than more and more of what you could be turns on and that's equivalent to transform yourself into their ancestral father into

because you're you're like so what would you call it you're the consequence of all these living beings that have come before you and that's all part of your biological potentiality and then if you can push yourself than all that kicks on and that turns you into who you could be that's and that's the real representation of that positive ancestral father that's why you rescue your father from the belly of the Beast so you think that this ultimate goal of sat of sacrifice and of risking your life in order to save someone who's truly important to you that this somehow or another maximize your potential as a human being in the Christian story for example you have Christ does two things that are meant Miss Ionic one is takes the suffering of the world unto himself cuz that's a weird idea okay so what does that mean let's think about it maybe it means that

that's your job is the world's full of suffering and you should accept that is your responsibility past present and future you're supposed to do something about that as much as you can about it and maybe you start with your own localized Shop Rincon put yourself together but then you expand that outward and you decide that it's you're not a victim of that even though you know your parcel of it but you're you're the potential solution to that until you accept that as a responsibility so that's part of taking on load that's part of bearing a cross you could look at it that way across the sort of the symbol of the place of maximal suffer K so you accept that as a challenge not as a not as something that your victimized by maybe you accept that as the price of being responsibility or responsible for addressing the suffering in the world have to give you some meeting seems to me then the next thing is there's a story of course the Christ method devil in the desert and so that's the encounter with malevolence

because the two major problems that people face obviously are suffering tragedy and malevolence it so that's the other thing that you're responsible for is that you're supposed to look at the capacity for humans evil as clearly as you possibly can to very terrifying fake and all that causes post-traumatic stress disorder and people that aren't accustomed to it in in the myth ology that's associated with the encounter with evil it's almost always the case that the entity that does the encountering even if it doesn't voluntarily is is is hurt by it so the Egyptian god Horus for example who's the eye and the Falcon the thing that can see in pay attention when he encounters is evil Uncle Seth was the precursor of Satan he loses and I cuz it's no joke to encounter you know what you can really shake you but the idea would be that if you can face the malevolence and you can face the suffering then that maximally that opens the door to your Mac

potential optimistic part of that is that this is this is why it's so useful to Pier into the darkness let's say the optimistic part of that is his that although the suffering is great and the malevolence is is deep Your Capacity to transcend it is stronger

so what you get out of the most negative Viewpoint is the most positive possible consequence because one of the things you'd like to know if you wanted to know something deep about yourself is that you could face the worst that there wasn't Prevail and I believe that I believe that I believe that that people are capable of that I think that despite how tragic life is and how malevolent things are that fundamentally our spirit that has the capacity to confront that and to fix it I like psychologically 222 confronted courageously to be able to Bear up under that if you do it voluntarily but also to address it. Only to deal with it psychologically but to deal with it practically and then we can make things much better there's always a striving towards Utopia right like this is the ultimate goal that is if you use ask people would you like out of civilization wide like everyone to be happy and I want to get along and there would be no war nothing no suffering no anything but

in order to really truly learn about yourself and about life you have to overcome adversity you have to experience things and I firmly believe that in order to truly appreciate love you have to understand I really have felt hate and to really appreciate camaraderie you have to feel loneliness so this is just a part of being a person for whatever reason I'd like to see you know it isn't in the in the biblical stories in abrahamic stories for example Abraham basically hangs around his eyes it feels to launch your father's tetanus just community in his and his country which is what he commanded to do and then he goes out and has an adventure but you know the first thing he encounters is a famine in Indiantown is a tyranny and then he encounters

people in the tyrannical state that want to take his wife and so you can imagine that Abraham's response to that is like it was a hell of a lot better sitting in my dad's $10 when I was doing the lectures on it last year was that that was a call to Adventure because because I think because of what you just laid out if you need that polarity you know and people need a load and we need adversity and we need difficulty we need all of that so maybe what you want is an adventure The Greatest Adventure that you could have and that would involve you know something to push against when he wrote Notes from Underground which I would highly recommend to everyone who's listening it's a great book and it's a very short book

he criticized socialist Utopia back in like 1860 wait wait before it became the sort of widespread idea that that it is now and what he said was that while human beings are these very peculiar creatures and if you gave us our Utopia so that we have nothing to do but eat cake and busy ourself with a continuation of the species that was that was his line that the first thing we do is Smash It All tube it's just so that something unexpected and and and Troublesome would happen because we're built for adventure and not fur peace and happiness what were designed to overcome the natural world the natural world is filled with that natural world is filled with things trying to eat things this is just everywhere you look that's all you observe observe predators and prey and animals eating vegetables and that's it and I think that this this concept of overcoming adversity so it's so humid it's so a part of what we are that I want to bring it back to you because one of the things that I've been considering

that I've said this many times and I just had a conversation with my good friend Steve rinella the other day where he brought it up independently he said I think Jordan Peterson is the most misunderstood or misinterpreted guy in the world he's like people always like not just missed her butt but miss stating what you believe in me stating what you say this opposition to you this I mean like we were talking about this GQ interview which I thought was I thought that one was far more intelligent than the and her approach was far better and far more reasoned and well-thought-out than some of the other attacks on you before so they're bringing in the varsity level players on say it but I think this is important I think this is part of what what forges this message is that you are and you were in the swing of things that I Eric Weinstein and II dad said about you is that you're essentially that the Hoist Gracie of the intellectual dark web have you don't know what that means

the early days at UFC no one knew what the best martial art was in the idea was like they was all these martial arts of the running around independently and then they were all claiming that they are the best technique and let's see what happens and hoist Gracie was the one who represented Jujitsu and went out there and beat all these people is superior technique and Superior strategy South American launch this Brazilian gin his family lost his Brazilian jiu-jitsu Empire that has since taking over the world of martial arts but will you are the one who's consistently engaging in these people you're the one who's involved these Valley tudo events where you're debating these people were coming at you hostile with notes and I think is is uncomfortable as those moments are like who was the woman that said so what you're trying to say is

I think you underestimate I think she misinterpreted who you are and she thought that she could come at you with this straw man sort of article and argument rather and frame your position very unflattering wedge didn't work it just was it was like the early days of hoist Gracie guys would come out I'm flailing how to get him in our bar and they tap out and then go fuck that's kind of what happened with you but now this woman who you had this conversation with in GQ she was much more skill better verbally she she seemed more reasonable. She was able to think on your feet quicker but still these are really important conversations hotel room she was hostile to be the second I walked into the room really really kind of put me off so

no not so many words that I just threw the coldness to her and a distaste for me that was sort of radiating from her she was possessed from the union perspective that's the right direction so like I was the embodiment of all the things that she found distasteful and that's who she was showing there was no there was no

willingness to consider on her part that I could be different than her preconceptions all right and so she was she was hostile to me in the way that you would be if you were prejudiced against someone right from the beginning and so by the time it was uncomfortable in the room and by the time there was a photo shoot it so by the time the conversation started I was more impatient than I would normally be because one of the things that I do expect from journalist and Kathy Newman was like this by the way in and so some of the other people that go on that have gone out for me at least they have the professionalism to be civil before the interview started right because there's a certain amount of politeness I would say that not that I'm old but that someone you're interviewing is old yes they come out of their way to go talk to you it's like she's human decency real conflict until you have this conflict

Hello nice to meet you and see each other while we're both here to do a job and I've agreed to come but but no sticky there was palpable enmity in the air right to begin with and you know what I actually thought at the end of that interview I thought you know maybe I maybe have done enough interviews because I found it I was more impatient than I would have liked to have been now luckily it doesn't seem to have gone overboard cuz I've been watching the comments on that GQ interview and I think it's got about four and a half million views some ridiculous no Matthews people have said that I was impatient and a little harsher than usual which I think is true and I thought God you know maybe I'm starting to run out of patience which isn't good right now to patients because then it will flavor the message that you're putting out there

people will take it in the wrong way and they'll take it in with that bitterness for example like there's no resentment for me cuz you think while this is you might think this is a lot of work and I've been running around like mad and you know what it takes a lot of organization it's quite demanding and all of that and that's all true and that. None of that is a complaint and I decided with Tammy right at the beginning that well first of all that this was going to be working on a vacation because we're not stupid we got everything at the same time if you have any sense you're lucky if you get some things that are good at once you know I was going to continue to do this as long as I was thrilled to be in front of the audience and then when I meet people afterwards that I'm not looking at the end of the line to see when you don't because I want to be sure that every single person that comes to me

present present for absolute because I am I am thrilled grateful grass pattern of some of these people you don't like I was in there coming from all over the place you know people fly in from Australia to Europe that it's lots of Eastern Europeans came to England to get through Russia to come to Finland to watch the talk there you don't want and I'm not just a few people like that people are really cool way to hell out of their way and then they line up and it's not that it's not an expensive because these venues are expensive and it all of that and I'm

well I'm I'm doing and it's the same with the damn interviews just like I'm doing my best to not take any of this for granted and not get annoyed about it and that goes for the conflict too it's like well

you know I tried to have my agent screen out maybe the more egregious interviews you know the ones that would just be nothing but combat because they're find them quite stressful the way I wouldn't say I'm hiding from them but you don't know to begin with how many interviews going to go and I could just say well I'm done having interviews for a while but I can't help but see that the conflict is a necessary part of this even though I don't find a pleasant like people think they accused me of being a provocateur of enjoying the conflict and it's actually not true at all I don't enjoy the golf can usually takes me about 3 Days To recover from a like for particularly contentious interview you know cuz I find it I find conflict interpersonal conflict quite stressful on everyone. Yes and to pretend you don't know you were there a sociopath or you're a liar

but I think they still afterwards feel it and if they read the comments and people are against them it just did that. It carries yeah I mean I'm being fortunate because although you know I've had a bit of negative press coverage the comments on YouTube in particular which is where the bulk of the bar and I would say among the general public have been overwhelmingly positive I don't know what the hell it would be like to be in a world where that was reversed where is the majority of people are against you I've seen it I've seen it happen with gas that I've had on the show where I've met them afterwards and you see a physical effect on them you see them beating down like Jesus Christ as comments are so mean like you can't read those yeah I can't read those and you see how it's affecting them like they can't sleep they read it now I fucks with them they'll stay up for nights and it's not good it's it's you're you're you're taking in all of these opinions of

hundreds if not thousands of people that you don't even know you know if they're coming from a healthy place and and most of those opinions they would not express it that way they were talking to me like they can get the same message across I think you were ignorant to these facts I think you are biased in your perceptions even if they had an opinion that was unflattering the way there to express it to you they be considerate about you and your your feelings as a human being and if they weren't you wouldn't take any consideration what they're saying because like these guys just an asshole in type we just see print it just doesn't it just it it it could be a smart person that could be a psycho it could be a fool it could be anything it's just words because the negative comments that are part of social media seem to be just as potent as negative comments in real life but the positive comments don't seem to be as positive as the positive comments in real life yes like his real

go to be more sensitive to threaten to negative emotion because well because where we can be hurt what salsa healthy to to not stroke your ego too much if you just like concentrating only on the like it is something just tasteful if you go to someone's page and they just retweet all the positive things that people say to them cuz I as a sorcerer reinforcing site engage in this world of Commerce you know like you say something positive day retweet you and that's that's a little too little to stroking right now I guess yeah I guess the danger that is that but possibility of of that eagle insulation job of avoiding those Waters cuz this is a new list for a guy who's in his 50s who becomes famous out of nowhere and doesn't just becomes famous just just become famous but becomes this

culturally significant the sort of lightning rod I mean that that's how I view you and a lot of these talks you're doing a lot of these these debates like you're having with this woman at G2 or some of your interviews what you're doing is you're expressing yourself in a brave but very controversial way and a lot of people paying attention this but then you're backing it up with your research or backing it up with real science you're backing up with a tremendous amount of history of of of the the human race and of religion and of the scientific studies that have been done that show correlation between different types of behaviors and human beings and all this is Rich it's it's a very it's very rewarding if you could take it all in but when it goes against what people have the preconceived notions or their own set of beliefs that they're bringing it to your conversations into your debates then it creates this hostile Wheels Battle where what you're saying is

is is very contrary to what the way they've been living a life or the things I went to Stockholm twice and also twice in Helsinki twice and and and Copenhagen once in the last month and I spent quite a bit of a lot of interviews a lot of discussion about the so-called gender Paradox that's very interesting thing cuz it's really put their tails into not in Scandinavia and and that makes sense because the Scandinavians are going to have to deal with this first because they've gone the farthest down the road for like making their society gender-equal explain the quality that you might pursue one would be equality of opportunity and so that would mean that you know there's a wide range of talent across people regardless of their type

whatever that might be sex gender race ethnicity there's just telling distributed everywhere and it's kind of a truism and I would say it true is the name of the West in the deepest sense that each of the individuals within those groups should be put in a position where their talents are there in courage to manifest those tell it's partly because that would be good for them spiritually and psychologically but also because that would be of obvious benefit to the community right it's rare which people don't understand there's lots of different kinds of talent but it's but in each domain it's rare and so it's to everyone's benefit to exploit talented people to the maximum possible degree so even if you're just selfish you want to push for equality of opportunity because the more talented people there are out there the more cool stuff you get to have and hopefully the the more diverse and interest in your life is so so you can pursue equality of opportunity policies and the Scandinavians have

especially trying to knock down barriers for women in the workplace and by all accounts

by all standard series the Scandinavian countries and places like but like Halo like the Netherlands Canada to do a slightly lesser degree have done a I've gone farther than any other countries in pursuing those policies

okay and sand part of the consequence of that is that some of the differences between men and women have been minimized so obviously there's far more women in the workplace in there were 40 years ago and made many occupations there's actually dominance by women there's dominance and universities there's dominance in the healthcare field since so women have poured into the workplace and hypothetically there's problems with that because it's put a lot of stress on family structure but hypothetically that's for the best and because it gives people a broader range of choices and it gives everyone access to more Talent so and then also if you look around the world you see that one of the best predictors of the probability of economic development in developing countries is there attitude is the attitude in those countries towards equal rights for women and it looks causal the more positively the country is predisposed to female rights the more likely they are to develop economically and maybe that's because that indicates that they're open to new ideas or something like that are open to transformation so

okay so that's one kind of equality open up the playing field so that everybody has a chance to compete and cooperate in Lent and land where they will but then the other kind of equality is equality of outcome so and that's often described as equity in today's language in so the ultimate Equity Utopia would be take every job every conceivable kind of job and then stratify that by every conceivable level of authority within every job and then ensure that every single category of person is represented in precise proportion to their

to their prevalence in the population so every job should be 50% women and 50% man and say 13% non-western ethnic minority and whatever that happens to me and then you could break that down and so and otherwise there's evidence of systemic Prejudice okay now

first thing to say about that is that's impossible and the reason it's impossible is because there's no limit to the number of ways that you can categorize people into groups so you know you know about sex and the Stingrays maybe those are the obvious ones but now you have gender and then you have ethnicity and you know and then there's attractiveness and intelligence and temperament and and then the height and age and socioeconomic background and I mean let's say there's 20 but there's a lot more than that there's no possible way that you could ever regulated Society so tightly that every single one of those groups was equally represented in every single one of those occupations at every single level of the hierarchy who's to say those are the significant ones that's the other thing. It isn't even obviously if they are because I would say that like a more significant one is cognitive ability cuz that's a boy

so I don't even think that we necessarily identified the canonical groups we've just decided that gender and race are the maybe they're the most obvious but isn't there a problem is if people don't but they don't do they don't take in it in terms of cognitive ability they don't get on a team they don't get on like there's people that are sexist but there's it's very rare that someone is elitist in terms of their cognitive ability hard to say Joe I mean I think one of the reasons the oceans Elite is prejudiced is better word I don't know it's like if you hear something that's going to actually was thinking about if course they are most Working Class People that are far more irritated with the intellectual Elite than they are with the wealthy Elite

and that's because they think they could become wealthy and they could but they don't think they could become part of the intellectually late and it is not obvious to me that the intellectual related so those would be the liberal left-leaning types that are particularly positive in their in their attitudes towards the typical working class person I think they're Prejudiced and elitist I do believe that that's the case and I think they're also what would you call it patronising and I think that the typical working class person say who voted for Trump is very very sensitive to that and so they're much more concerned with the 1% who are the cognitive Elite than they are the 1% who are the economic Elite because at least they think that's a game they could play so anyways also because his caricatures right of the the 1% of the economically you just think of people that are in his lofty positions that are in control the financial institutions put the 1% of the intellectually

you think of in terms of like some of the more Preposterous things you're hearing out of universities now and safe spaces and yeah the intellectual Elite for the pathologies of rational of rationalism there's nothing stupider than a smart person who I seen this in my clients you know frequently like if I have a particularly smart client whose particularly disordered in their personality that's so difficult? What is your approach to handling some like that who's the super intelligent but yet completely their life is in disarray I usually take a very practical approach like you know we try to identify cuz why I start always in my therapy practice always start with behavioral principles was like okay but let's see if we can identify a few areas

negotiation that are really causing you grief in misery and don't like what's what's wrong with your life as far as you're concerned and sold that often takes a lot of discussion and then we might try to figure out what's causing that and that's often very difficult to figure out to cuz it might be she's a might be something physical you know you might be sick and some way cuz depression is lots of depression is autoimmune related and anxiety can be a side effect of all sorts of physiological disorders are eating improperly sleeping badly ER or not exercising you know enough to keep yourself regulated you try to figure out what some possible solution that we could both tests and then with the with the with a more intelligent once you know often they can come up with all sorts of reasons why none of this is going to work or or a thousand reasons why yeah well usually a thousand reasons why none of this is going to work and then with people like that sometimes it's useful to turn to their dreams if if they dream because one of the things that's cool about

is that even though they're hard to interpret they never lie and so sometimes you can take someone is hyper-rational to have a dream and they'll tell you the dream and then you can work through an interpretation which is a tricky business and adrenal tell him something and there's just no denying it's like well it's a statement from nature so what you going to do you going to pretend that that's not the case and also so that's that's often extremely useful so so so well back to the equality issues psychologist have come to a pretty decent agreement about standard personality models right so there's extraversion eroticism agreeableness open us and conscientiousness and they look very stable cross-culturally and that was all done by asking thousands of people hundreds and hundreds of questions and then grouping them statistically so it was a theoretical basically took computational power in statistics

to find out the Deezer how traits group so people are sociable and happy and neurotic people experience a fair bit of negative emotion so that's a positive negative emotion Dimensions agreeable people are maternal and disagreeable people are competitive and there's a fair bit of male female difference there conscientious people are beautiful and industrious and orderly and the open people are creative and so those are your basic 5 Dimensions okay so that's been established and everyone more or less degrees on it now maybe they're seven dimensions and we we've got a questionnaire that that that breaks the five down into 10s called understand myself

but basically there's good there's good consensus consent consensus on the five okay so now soon as you have the five basic traits you can ask some questions like why do men and women differ that's what you do is you just give the question are you can either fill it out yourself or have other people fill it out on your behalf so and it could be a teacher could be a parent you know and then that's all be done and what you find is there are systemic differences between men and women in the biggest differences are that women experience more negative emotion and it and if they're more agreeable than man show and that's born out by the psychiatric evidence because higher levels of negative emotion are manifested in depression and anxiety and women are diagnosed with higher levels of depression and anxiety all around the world and with agreeable that's that's also born out by the clinical literature and some sense the medical literature social medical literature because disagreeable people are more likely to be incarcerated cuz it's the best

predictor of being incarcerated even though it's not a very good predictor and men are incarcerated at about a 10 to 1 rate compared to women are more likely to be antisocial and conduct disorder so the personality differences are mirrored in the social medical literature but then there's a question are those difference is a consequence of socialisation or they have biological and answer that is tricky because how much something is social and how much it is biological actually depends on the social circumstances so while here's an example if you have a society where no one has enough to eat and people are starving then there's a huge cultural effect on people's intelligence let's say it's mediated by economic factors even though it's got a biological origin does the starvation so the relationship between biology and cultures actually partly culturally dependent so it makes it complicated but in any case

here's how the scientists decided to address this they thought well why don't we rank order countries by how egalitarian their social policies are wish you could do with a fair degree of reliability you know you put the countries where women are second-class citizens at the bottom and you put Scandinavian countries at the top you can get good reliability across Raiders for how you write those countries and then look at the magnitude of the differences between men and women by the gala Therrien social policies and so then you'll find out if the differences between men and women are primary primary social then as cultures become more egalitarian men and women will become more alike

that's not what happened the opposite happened to the more egalitarian the society and it turns out the Richer the society because that's also been discovered now the board different men and women because

and so the differences are not huge so with agreeableness for example if you took the average man took a typical man and a typical woman out of the population just randomly and you had to be that the woman was more aggressive than the man you'd be wrong

60% of the time so there's quite a bit of overlap right cuz you be right 40% of the time but the problem is is that a lot of selection takes place at the extremes baby rolly concerned about disagreeable people when they become violent and maybe it's only the one in 50 most disagreeable person who's Violet and they're all men so you can have quite a bit of similarity at the average level and big difference is at the extremes and the extremes is where people do things like like employment selection show the biggest difference that's been discovered between men and women and this is the one that gets biggest in the Scandinavian countries is interest

many more interested in things and women are more interested in people and it's a big difference it's one. Deviation so what that means is that if you are a man

you would have to be more interested in people than 85% of men to be as interested in people as the 50th percentile woman

I need to have to be more interested in things than 85% of women to be as interested in things as the typical man and what do you need to find things objects okay don't know Nana but thinks cars are at Ya tools technology party the fewer women go into the stem Fields the fewer relevant issue politically because it means that you cannot have equality of opportunity and equality of outcome at the same time it's not possible because as you make your Society more egalitarian and you open up the opportunity for equality of outcome

you increase how different men and women are are and that changes their occupational choice so if men are more interested in things which they are by a substantial margin than way more of them are going to be Engineers wouldn't that possibly support this idea that enforced

model of of of equality would allow people to be themselves more I mean it's is almost what you're saying but because they're so bright is the Swedish foreign minister told me to go Crock-Pot climb back under the rock that I came out from under when I was in Scandinavia because I was describing this these this the science I read that but I'm not exactly sure why he regards me as misogynist because I think that there are because I think because I've been putting forward the evidence that there are genuine differences between men and women but she should be held accountable for that because I said so flipping thing to say like you you should have especially in a position of power like she's in you should have a very specific argument saying leader to have such a a base thing to say such a crude dumb thing to say crawl back under the rock that you came from

so I guess they do the girls have better rock that was not a very interesting thing in the GQ thing where the woman was challenging you on your neurobiology you're hardly any psychologists I understand that serotonin is associated with hierarchies it's like a truism it's been known for 30 years so we need ever get back there but I am very curious about this this idea of enforce to Quality right and ensuring that there is such a high emphasis played are placed on a koala quality that you have the equal amount of men equal matter women in the opportunities are absolutely available as much to women as they are doing man this is in Forest that this

create an environment where there's less resistance environment where there's less resistance perhaps women don't feel as compelled to say I'll show you that that is what this is. Here's an example so there are fewer women mathematicians in the end the higher Echelon it's okay but here's something interesting about mathematical ability first of all it's very rare so that's the first thing to keep in mind that looks like if you look in junior high that mathematically gifted men and males and females are approximately is common now there's a little bit of debate about that because there is some evidence that maybe at the very upper extremes there's a male Advantage just like there's a male disadvantage at the low end cuz the mail so that's the greater married male variability hypothesis

actually quite common in the animal kingdom for a variety Fennimore expandable high-risk high-return so you can look at it either way and it's certainly possible in any case the man the males in junior high who happen to be mathematically gifted are less likely to also be verbally gifted where's that doesn't seem to be the case for the females and male math nerd then math is a pretty logical pathway for you because you don't have as many other options where is if your female massnger do you have other options because you're all you're less likely you're more likely to also be verbally gifted and so that's enough to at least in principle account for some of the reason why there are fewer women mathematicians than men mathematicians there's lots of complex reasons like this and so we have this reflexive idea and this is very much the

this is like the core idea among the feminist neo-marxist types is that if there's differences and outcome that's that's proof of prejudice and that's support for the idea of the patriarchal tyranny and that's like the core Axiom of the radical left is the patriarchal tyranny as far as I'm concerned that's that's God for them the patriarchal tyranny it's like well if it turns out that many of these differences in outcome between men and women aren't a consequence of the patriarchal tyranny in fact even get bigger when you reduce the tyrannical aspect of the patriarch and even the patriarchal aspect to it makes that Siri not only but opposite of the truth which is the worst kind of wrong and so you know if men are more likely to pursue pursue careers in the stem fields which seems to be the case under conditions of optimal freedom for men and women then that's going to drive income disparities because the stem Fields pay more and they pay more

because they're scalable like it's really hard to scale care for people you don't like if you work in a daycare you going to care for three infants you not going to care for 50 cuz you can't it's not scalable but if you were like a software designer it's infinitely scalable and so there's there's a much wider range of possible a possibility for generating much larger

much larger income pools and much larger pools of wealth you know when men are also more likely to work longer hours and you work 10% longer hours to make 40% more money does a nonlinear return on that's a good thing for everybody was listening to know you have a job you want to be the guy or the woman was working that extra 10% because the return on that is nonlinear so that's a really useful thing to know men are more likely to work outside they're more likely to work in dangerous businesses there more likely to run full-time businesses rather than part-time businesses and they're more likely to move in pursuit of their career goals and that all contribute to differences in an onion in my Uber drivers there they make 7% more money cuz they drive faster so and so anyways it's not good though I return issue writs of pattern mail common

there's no return as long as you don't get her the problem seems to be when discussing these things it in anyway romanticizing or glorifying male Behavior or putting any emphasis whatsoever on there being a a positive aspect to a lot of things that we think of as being negative like aggression or ambition or or or competition yeah well the competition amongst man is fine competition with men against women is often thought of as cruel because obviously physical competition is easy for that the border on cruel this is why I wish we were talking before the show that instead of calling people men and women when referring to like there's just very disturbing in my opinion trend of transgender women entering into these competitions now with women who are biologically

and dominating them and that instead of calling people men and women let's dispense with that I just said yes so it's your choice if you have an XY chromosome so you're an XY person or an XX person then if you're an x x / 6y person you don't get to engage in physical combat with an X Y person Texas house that maybe they can't run in car running contest against them and maybe they can play tennis again and maybe that's just reasonable that is reasonably certain that is reasonable but if you talk about that especially someone like you who was you were against this bill that was going to enforce these pronouns and the compelling use these pronouns

that your thought to be transphobic person because you feel like there may be should be some rational discussion about the physical limitations of certain body structures cuz that's what it is if you're talking about my field of business you're talking about Combat Sports right I've been involved in Combat Sports my whole life and there is a difference and it's not to say that females aren't aren't confident and I mean I had Miriam Nakamoto on yesterday she's a good friend of mine she's an eight-time world but she doesn't fight against men and she shouldn't fight against men although she's probably could beat a bunch of them right it's not she shouldn't have to and she certainly is a variety of yes that's the problem that's the reality that is definitely you know people don't like to hear these things and they don't they they did want to pretend that you can even out the playing field with hormones know you can even add a little

there's certain things like I've always said you if you gave Brock Lesnar a sex change and put them in a dress he's going to run through every woman that's ever lived in the history of women there's not a single woman is going to be able to deal with that bone structure and that that mine that that guy has had with testosterone pumping through it for 39 years you just you just have to have the discussion it's so so absolutely ridiculous the one thing that I was attacked on more than anything in my entire life is saying that I think it's ridiculous to have a trans woman compete against women and mixed martial arts I was like you want to have them do it in chess you want to have to do it in something that's non-physical sure you want them to be a woman yes okay you wanted to be recognized as a woman you sure but it's miss your compelling people that's going up lately if you don't want to date a trans woman then you are some sort of a bigot but if you're a man do either of you want family

current Inn in Brave New World in huxley's book it was considered immoral to reject anyone sexual advances because it was prejudicial oh yeah it is prejudicial that's the thing that makes the question even more interesting because the the question is at what point do you have the right to your prejudices and what one of the things that we seem to clean too and I would say rightly is that we are allowed to be Prejudice when it comes to who we interact with sexually and then and who we choose his friends and that's right that's the right to Association and you know you say we're only up to a certain point this is it because it's this this new logic is kind of leaking into an sexual preference like if you have a problem with someone being overweight then you your your sizes or something like that I like what is that

discourse any preferences in terms of like what you like to eat or what kind of what kind of books you read these preferences comes to what you're sexually attracted to there's new emphasis now trying to draw that line and and say it right but it's Preposterous people that are pushing this and I are almost everybody's pushing back but I find it interesting when these days I'll talk to all these other things that have been happening because that is where the rubber hits the road it's like you know when I went well I I've seen this and in debates that I've had publicly where people you know talk about Prejudice and I've pointed out to them that they have prejudicial attitudes with regards to their sexual preferences cuz they don't just sleep with anyone who asks them so it's like how is that not a prejudice

well of course it's a prejudiced well then the question is under what circumstances are prejudice is justifiable and that's a conversation we don't like to have because we believe that there are no circumstances whatsoever under which produces are are acceptable there's a big difference between prejudice and discrimination I think those to get conflated yes there is a big difference between prejudice and discrimination right and also discrimination has to do with setting your standards in relationship to the task at hand station frats that's like intelligence sure everything is everything isn't the same about everything all the time so you discriminate you rank order things and you need to rank order them even to pursue things that are valuable this is one of the problems with the people who are so anti hierarchy like the like the radical leftists weather shouldn't be High Rockies it's like okay then why do something what does that that argument is so foolhardy

that it's it's difficult to take seriously but you do have to engage in it and I think when you engage in it it's really fascinating to watch because there's it's like you're playing a game of chess with someone only has a couple pieces they have this strong that they do but you've got all these other pieces let's just keep this game going until this comes as a logical conclusion which is Checkmate this look there's hierarchies all throughout nature it doesn't mean people should ship suppress people doesn't mean people shouldn't have rights it doesn't mean people should enforce themselves or Force themselves on other folks that's not what I mean it also doesn't mean that the High Rockies especially if they're human hierarchy is good for the postmodern types especially people like some coke is there insistence that all hierarchical structures are predicated on Power and if there's nothing other than power in it's completely Preposterous mean

samples of plumbers in my lectures more recently cuz it's rather comical so I qua on what basis do you hire a plumber so imagine how can you say well what makes plumbers successful the power Siri would would imply that there are roving bands of mafioso plumbers who died come pounding on your door at 3 in the morning and tell you that if you don't get their particular policy to fix your pipes leaking or not they're going to come and burn down your house when you go to hire someone like a plumber while the first thing you want to know his reputation can they actually fix a pipe because you actually want your pipe fixed and then you want to know what I'll do the deal with you fairly and part of their employees business function properly

every Enterprise in the west is like that because I keep wondering where the hell is this patriarchal tyranny like is it massage therapists is it nurses like most nurses are female if you get females organized into a hierarchy which you do a nursing is that all the sudden is that part of the patriarchal tyranny or is it the the fact that know all those people are women does that mean it's no longer but still hierarchy is it no longer tyranny is it no longer patriarchal like it's only because there's stuff is so incoherent that it just all you have to do is think about it and then and that hasn't been done to any great degree and it just dissolves in your head yes that's what I'm saying if you're entering into a job straight out of college you leave University and now you're entering into you know that your first year in the workplace it's it's just a natural fact of life that there's going to be people that are further ahead in this rain

send you your cuz they're better at what they do better as they have more experience and more education migraine that this is a game this is some sort of a competition you're going to have hierarchies in competitions going to have people who win who do better so we can look at it this way as soon as you let's assume people have problems everybody can agree on that then we can assume that people would like solutions to those problems so we can agree on that and then we can say well then if you implement the solution socially so with other people then you're going to cooperate and compete in relationship to the solution and that's instantly going to produce a hierarchy because no matter what the problem is some people are going to be better at solving it that others and then if you have any sense you put the people who are good at solving it at the Forefront because then they solve it faster and cheaper and better and then everybody benefits can you get a higher

bright the people who saw those problems get financial incentive to solve a problem this is what people who are good at solving the problems to keep solving in the midst of what we're trying to do is to reward them so that they'll keep doing it even if it's difficult to look at the people that have that the head of giant industries of the CEOs of super successful companies they're the ones with the giant yachts in the big houses and this is the incentive for people to try to get to that position and the idea that there's no incentive and it should be no incentive but yet you're still going to have all this Innovation is ridiculous it's not how it works is that a human beings work if human beings are going to work really hard there has to be some sort of reward and it can't be equal reward that would be roughly speaking a conservative position and then you can take a left wing position that's reasonable and you can say yes

girl High Rockies but we have to stay awake because they candy generate into power-hungry tyranny so that it's it's political machination and game playing on tyranny that that produce the positional the positional differentiation and then we also have to be careful because when you do set up a hierarchy that's the necessary consequence of a few people collecting at the top and so then you have to be concerned about those people at the bar and so there's a variety of things that you would do to express that concern is one you might want to have a lot of hierarchies so that people have different talents could play different games and complex societies pretty good at that but you're still going to have people who stack up at the bottom of all hierarchies right there's going to be people who are sick mentally and physically and maybe people who are cognitively impaired or Xperia

some kind of catastrophe in their life and then you you want to set up your system so that those people don't suffer unduly partly cuz that's bad and particles that destabilize is your whole society so you can say well that's the left place is to speak for the speak on behalf of the unjustly dispossessed and the right position is to stabilize and maintain functional hierarchies and encourage competition competition benefit to the whole discussion between the left and the right side and and well and that's for me that's also the fundamental reason for the necessity of free speech because that's the only way to discuss this is the only things of value socially going to produce hierarchies

Adam necessary and it's also I have a giant issue with the concept that these things are mutually exclusive that you can't have competition and also have a good social environment I think that's a good idea what is the things I really like about the psychologist John Piaget why would say the world's foremost expert on games is that he did a very careful analysis of say competitive games Okay so let's take hockey or soccer doesn't matter same example K you say well because people now that they have kids play these games and don't keep score which of course the kids keep score cuz they're not stupid like the adults but you know why we can't have it be competitive okay so let's take it apart it's like what is hockey a competitive game or a Cooperative game okay well so first of all

everyone's trying to do the same thing that's Cooperative it's not like half the people are playing chess and another you know what there is a brought a basketball and two of them are boxing in a while sometimes they do in hockey boxing in a corner but everyone's trying to do the same thing that's Cooperative okay everyone plays their position that's Cooperative they all follow the same rules that's Cooperative right so there's competition but it's nested inside a fundamental structure of cooperation and the corporation is the corporation is the basis of the game itself let's all arbitrarily agree that it's important to put this black disc in the neck which is to get your name right and then let's cooperate within our teams to do that because we're going to pass and we're going to we're going to past each other and we're also going to work so that each of us is a good player but so that we all work for the betterment of our team because we want to win games across multiple games so that's also cooperative and then you want to interact with your

your enemies let's say the other team in a way that's indicative of good sportsmanship so that the entire Lincoln flourish and to think of that is competitive is absolutely it's so that there's no other way of describing it then stupid that's what it is it's it's it's an ignorant unit dimensional analysis it's put forward by someone who is reflexively opposed to anything that smacks of competition and who isn't thinking it through at all they're denying the benefits of competition in the fact they reap those very benefits of competition by enjoying the products that are created by these corporations yes that is very hypocritical that's for sure that's called a performative contradiction it's like well I'd like to I like to complain about left-wing issues on my iPhone right just a little gratitude for the fact that you've got your iPhone to complain about an organization so as corporations are unbelievably competitive

competition start start stop being an issue because of the system so yes and you know that the issue with men I think with young man and this is one of the things I've been trying to address is that if your fundamental pre supposition is that our culture is a patriarchal tyranny which is an appalling presupposition along with the idea that the best way of looking at history is that it was the oppression the continual oppression of women by men which is also something that I regard as well. Absolutely reprehensible Doctrine okay so it's a patriarchal tyranny but but that but in their defense that did exist there has been continued oppression of women it's just not the only thing that's happened there has been women that have been the Revere there's been women that have been celebrated is Ben women that have accomplished great things but there's been a lot of depression so they concentrate primarily on that oppression and that's the main point of study and that's the thing they want to talk about all the time they kind of have a

in the fact that if you're looking at all the events that have ever taken place there's a significant number of them that have been women being a press that's that's a real thing

women who've been depressed than men who feel depressed very good point so I would say that the entire history of you look at it this way as we press ourselves personally with our own malevolence and stupidity and then we're all oppressed by the kind of crushing hand of the social world that Moses in one way and not in another and then of course nature is doing her best all the time to give birth to us but also to kill us and take us out and so there's this endless like there's an endless what would you call a vulnerability that characterizes our existence psychological and social naturally and I would say 150 years ago that was even more intense than it was now you know because the typical person in the west lived on less than a dollar a day before 1895 and so the way I think that we should view the history of the world is that men and women labored under virtually impossible conditions for the entire bulk of human evolution and they did their best to cooperate

fun to compete but to cooperate so that they had some modicum some possibility of a modicum of security and satisfaction and if that's the right frame work and then within that of course there's power games that are played by people who are corrupt yeah within that is horrible events that are taking place but there's a there's a massive amount of hypocritical thinking when you are criticizing the actions of so many people talking about how many people are complicit in these things while you're carrying around a phone it's made by someone who gets a dollar a day

journalist in Slovenia and not a very sophisticated one and she was talking about the 1% and I said well you know that if you make more than $32,000 a year that you're part of the 1% she said what what do you mean I said well that's the worldwide statistic it's like so you're part of the 1% while she didn't first of all she said well I don't believe that statistic and I thought your self but what was so interesting was the for her that characterization the 1% victimizers was only relevant within the confines of her National border right right soon as I said well no is all you have to do is expand that out a little bit and you're the problem not the solution then that was that was completely untenable for her herself in the population of victimizers even though you know she lives in a western country and she's a well-paid journalist and she's lived a very privileged life so to speak by historical and World stamps in the someone living in the Congo or something

Guatemala entire history of course of course yes it's definitely the only reason is because it doesn't fit what you've come into the argument with it doesn't it doesn't fit you or pre the priest predisposed notion that you have those your idea that you're it's so rigid this idea that you are not one of the ones that system with that laptop and all these different things that you enjoy that are created by these corporations that you you support them financially but yet they're the ones that are destroying this Earth these are the ones that you're rallying against these the ones you hate against

what are the things I wrote forward for the new version of Associates in school like archipelago The Abridged version that came out November 1st and I was trying to figure out why the Russian Revolution went wrong so rapidly I remember this part right anyways he said when you're interrogating a member of the bourgeoisie

to decide whether they do you know whether they constitute an Enemy of the State you don't give any credibility to such an assault niceties as individual guilt or innocence all you care about is their group and their background in their economic status and if they're in the wrong group the bourgeoisie then that's it that's the end of wealth and lots this was eventually executed by Stalin somebody wrote me and just told me that after I wrote the forward but one of the things I figured out was this and this is really were thinking about men so the intersectional claim is that you know each person have more than one group identity so fundamentally if you're going to calculate their victim status then you have to calculate it across all the different groups that they might be victims and so you know maybe who knows a Native American is one form of victim in this line of thinking but a Native American victim is what female is

it's like twice the victim or however you would calculate that mathematically okay and maybe you have maybe you can be put into six different groups we already talked about that a little bit but here's the bloody rub

if I put you in six groups in one of those groups your victimizer you can bloody well bet on it and then here's the next rule if you're a victim eyes are among a possible dimension of analysis then it's the gulag for you

and so that's the fundamental danger of that group identity victimizer victim net narrative is that you fragment your identity of multiple Dimensions you'll find out that your victimizer and then everyone then everyone's a criminal and everyone's guilty that's exactly what happened in Russia and then you think we'll wait a minute through a bunch of people who are really compassionate about the poor but that's a just for the sake of argument that at the beginning of the Russian Revolution the 20% of the Communists were really concerned about the poor

maybe we can say 50% just to be arbitrary about it the other 50% were jealous and resentful about anyone who anything more than they did all right now that you put those two groups head-to-head in the battle for 4 years and see you standing at the end even if you are one of those utopian to actually cares for the dispossessed when the revolution comes you can bloody well be sure that your head's going to be first on the chopping block because the people who are motivated by hate are going to be a lot more vicious and their attempts to eradicate then you're going to be what would you call it effective in your in your attempts to save that whole game that he is dangerous beyond belief that it's it's predicated fundamentally on resentment and and the desire to devolve people back into a tribal antagonism I think it's so important to talk about it this way and I think it's really interesting when I see the resistance do you talk about it this way and how many people are unwilling to look at it as this multi-level historical sort of record that you could look at

see how this played out and you can look and see what's going on right now with these control games that people are playing socially and that they are enforcing certain types of behavior in certain ways of thinking and then trying to rain in earnings and end ROT Rally against capitalism and support communism and socialism and doing so in the sort of weird trendy way without understanding the full scope of the historical implications when it's been tried in the past that it's not as simple as like you know you got this and Ryan thing doing you're looking at this world of capitalism and socialism it's good people who care about folks versus people are ruthless it's not that by the people they manage than the people they manage your stress by their managers and think about it right just think about that for a minute it's like you're an employee and you have a manager and the manager

but there's 20 of you you're kind of 120 is suppressed by the manager but now you're the manager and you're managing 20 people and you're responsible for them and we're assuming that you're not a psychopath you probably not because you probably wouldn't be able to get to be a manager if you were psychopath because Psycho-Pass generally aren't very successful and they have to keep moving as people figure out who they are so the idea that like Psychopathic power is a good route to power in a function organization is the stupid Siri there are some organizations that are pathological enough so that works but they don't last very long either so you're the manager and you're a decent human being and you got 20 people who are dependent on you want at least two of those people are real trouble but they're serious trouble and their there they're your concern all the time and so you see this is in his people move up the corporate hierarchy big while they are more and more power it's like yeah but not really they have more and more responsibility and their behavior is actually monitored

with increasing severity it's like you're quite constrained in most high level positions of authority in complex organizations like you have to behave pretty damn careful you're going to get yourself in trouble very very quickly will start so today I think that that wasn't necessarily the case a decade ago or two decades ago it was pretty but even so like you don't even know

like if you didn't treat your customers properly carefully reciprocally in long-term relationships you were going to be a failure in any Corporation any value I mean the production is one thing so you have to be confident that the production you have to be in constant communication with your with your buyers and Foster those relationships personally because there's intense competition and if those personal relationships aren't of high-quality your business fails what are the things I really learned because I spend a lot of time with business people as well as business people do a tremendous amount of socialization compared to academics each other's work more less on the basis of its scientific Merit and so they don't have to establish personal relationships to the same degree but business people are always wondering what can I trust you can we enter into a reciprocal relationship that's going to be

capable of reciprocating honestly over some decade say then you're going to screw things up and I know absolutely horrible way it's one of the reasons why they like to use golf as a men's golf is two things 1 you get to see how someone handles competition you get to see if they cheat sheet and golf it was an interesting story a good friend of mine his his dad was playing golf with this man and his wife was there as well and the wife saw the dad move the aura saw this man that he's playing golf with move the ball and she said do not go into business with this man I do not trust this man he's a cheater you cheated at golf and he thought it was not that big a deal so I can start the game of golf so you know this is a big deal just took a while to find out and he want to do a lot of other things how you do some things is often times how you do everything

this is again why I'm such an admirer of Piaget because he knew very well that game is a microcosm of reality that's why we have an explanation for why people like games talking about this a lot my lectures to is you think you know any game like it competitive game soccer is a good example it's basically a hunting game because you're firing a projectile at a Target okay so the targets the gold in the projectiles the ball but it doesn't matter is it so you have a you have teams that are figuring out how to properly then you think well. Property you have to put the ball in the net as many times as you possibly can so and so you are going to lose yourself in the hierarchy to facilitate that but then that's that's not the whole story cuz you tell your kids

doesn't matter whether you win or lose it matters how you play the game

and the kids all freaked out about that because he doesn't know what you mean and he says what what you mean. I'm trying supposed to try to win and you say I don't know what I mean but it's it's still true but here's what you mean is that if you're in a league you're not trying to win the soccer game

you trying to win the soccer championship and to win the championship you have to win a whole bunch of games and the rules to win a whole bunch of games aren't the same as the rules to win one game you know like you could go flat out as the prima donna and bend the rules and cut corners and exhaust everyone and win the game and then lose the next 3 because that's a stupid medium to long-term strategy or you could be like the Superstar and hug the ball all the time and never give your teammates a chance to develop but then you're injured your team is out so those about to stupid strategy to so do you think well what you have to do to win the championship is that you have to organize your team so that the best players lead but that everybody gets developed and that you play the medium-to-long-term game in a Fairway in a fairly decent way okay so you think that's how you win a championship back and he said one of the things he did to select athletes was to watch what happened when they scored a goal

and if they were celebrating on their own you know it's sort of an egotistical way then that wasn't such a good sign but if they scored a goal or touchdown or whatever it was and their whole entire team came in and bought them and then like lifting them up on the shoulders and he thought that guy is an athlete cuz not only can he put the Gola put the ball in the net but he does it anyway that benefits the entire team and that's the person you want around for the long run so then the goal isn't just to put the ball in the goal the goal is to put the ball in the goal the largest number of times while simultaneously benefiting as many as your of your fellow players as you can I don't think that's necessarily the meaning of it doesn't matter if you win or lose it's how you play the game I think what I don't think people think of it in terms of like a long-term strategy for Championship leagues when they're saying it doesn't matter whether you win or lose it's how you play the game meaning don't cheat do your best and learn from you

how to handle failure learn how to handle Victory will also learn from the experience itself like if you make a mistake and you you're trying your hardest but you make an error because someone has a counter to that that is how you play the game and you win just because you got lucky that's not as good as playing intelligently and it's doing your best and losing Superior and then you learn from the fact that they figured out a way to have solutions to all the problems you prevent facial one of the things that you're pointing out is that while you're playing you want to be expanding your range of skills that you get better at playing the next game but then you think well even the soccer championship isn't the whole game because your life is a whole series of games of the Championships of different types of championships will come if you continue to Excel and get excellent yes and yes

so there's things so that's the goal right the goal isn't to put the ball in the net the goal is to get excellent and to be invited to play and the mechanism is that you put the ball in golf not make sense see that helps explain why people find competitive Sports so unbelievably compelling because you can be cynical about it you can say will look this 50,000 people there watching you know somebody kick off a spheroid object into a net who the hell cares but that's not the issue what your what you are in fact doing is you're going there to watch people develop expertise and to learn to play reciprocally in a noble and ethical Manner and all of that sport when it's done properly is a direct physical incarnation of that ethic and so it's not surprising that that's why people get so excited when they see and actually do something majan the best thing that you can see at a sports event is someone who does something

Shirley in the spirit of fair play and in a manner that is unbelievably excellent rent Wayne Gretzky was very good at that right cuz he was an excellent excellent Sportsman and also unbelievably skill until people loved him and that's that's perfect because he was he was a player who played the game like it was more important to plant properly then to win and he was on the top of his game at the same time and that's what you want to be enlightened cut Corners that's right there's no cutting corners and so that's very cool and you see a very high order if you want to be the kind of player that everybody kind of wrote about that into the rules for life when you know it's part of my advice and roll 5 was not to let your kids do anything that makes you dislike them and that's part of the idea there is that you know if you're really on the side of your children to help them develop in a manner that makes them eminently desirable to other children and capable of interacting property with adults because then the whole world opens up to them not to really and then you do that the thing that's

about that too is that this is what makes the postmodern and the Marxist type so wrong is that your best strategy for success in life isn't the exercise raw power it's a pretty counterproductive strategy don't even work very well for advanced animals your best strategy is skill and reciprocity

so there's a real high or dress it cannot not have nothing to do so the idea that are hiring fees are predicated on Power and they're corrupt because of that in the whole world is a Battleground between hierarchies of no different Power hierarchies a winner-take-all and the devil take the hindmost that's just that's completely inappropriate very rarely find people who excel in competition and who have benefited from competition who are against competition and you very rarely find people who have no skill in competition at all and who was never engaged if shot away from if their whole life that support it and and and believe that it's an important part of our culture I think people want

they want to believe and they want to support things that reinforce their idea of how they're living the life correctly and if the if they shy away from competition if it makes him nervous if they've never excelled at it if it doesn't feel right to them if it makes them uncomfortable they want to feel like there's some better way and this is one of the things at Leeds young sensitive kind compassionate people towards socialism and this concept that capitalism and in any form of competition at all ultimate is ultimately is going to lead to a few people hugging up all the well and Dominic and all the people said about that is that

no matter what system you set up that doubt come if you look at the Frito distribution so if that's the distribution of wealth you find that in every society that we know of whether it's capitalist or socialist or communist for that matter a small proportion of the people have a disproportionate amount of the resources so so so the other thing that I've been trying to explain in my lectures is that if you were really concerned about the dispossessed and the poor you wouldn't put hierarchical dispossession at the feet of capitalism cuz it's a way worse problem than that you don't cuz the Marxist types they think well if we didn't have capitalism there wouldn't be hierarchies in there wouldn't be dispossession and that's complete bloody rubbish because the problem of hierarchy in the problem dispossession is way deeper than the problem of capitalism so like if you look at Neolithic gravesites way before there was capitalism you see that small number of people are buried with all the gold

show the the the fact of of dis dis unequal distribution of resources that's as old as that's that's as old as hierarchies are old it's unbelievably warm and so for the leftists to take an anti-capitalist position and assume that that's going to be a benefit to the dispossessed is an idea that's at least a hundred and forty five years out of date as far as I'm concerned but we do want to discourage tyranny we do want to keep that we do want to keep someone from accumulating so much well that they dominate the world and have a disproportionate effect on culture and do things that are detrimental that could be in fact that your mouth for decades and decades to come I mean look to this day was like the fact that you can't characterize the West as a patriarchal tyranny doesn't mean that hierarchies don't become tyrannical sometimes they do and yet and we have to be

too bad I'm not be known for a very long time so is it fair to say that the West has some aspects of a high rocker hierarchical tyranid course show like the way that Society is represented in our deep narrative structures is always to fold their is a wise King in a tyrannical King and their pitted against each other and your job is to amplify the wise King and keep the Tyrant under control that's the evil advisor to the king you know like Scar in The Lion King right so he is always this shadowy figure in the background it's malevolent in Psychopathic and power obsessed it's attempting to take over the hierarchy bye-bye ill-gotten meets that did not that's that's that's evil itself and some sense it's the archetype of evil that has to be taken into consideration but the problem with the Viewpoint that so prevalent in our society right now is that that's the patriarchal tyranny view point is that it's only the evil King

I did not particularly hard on young man because if you believe that all of our her keys are predicated on nothing but arbitrary power and then bad some natural consequence of masculinity then whenever you see anyone who's masculine manifest anything that's associated with confidence or confidence or or or or or let's say competitiveness or or you know heaven forbid aggression can you meet me soon if that's nothing but a manifestation of tyrannical power and that you discourage it or or or you certainly failed to encourage it and I think that that's a dreadful mistake because that'll. Masculine energy characteristic of women or men because that's something that should be integrated and celebrated and the way you do that that's partly why mechanisms like competitive sports or so necessary is that you want to take kids let's say boys the more competitive an aggressive boys just for this example you want to take them if you want to socialize

intensely so that they take that aggressive competitive impulse and they're capable of manifesting it inside a social structure like a game so that it's a benefit to everyone and then you can do that it's not a problem you know you do you teach an aggressive kid that it's beneath his dignity to bully someone weaker so you can attach that right to the competitiveness is like you're a loser you bully someone weaker than you you're a loser that's pathetic so I can add it speaks right to that competitive drives off of martial arts are so critical mean that's one of the major tenets of martial arts you know this is it is a huge part of what's taught in traditional martial arts academies is there's a very clear way of Behaving and you're you're never supposed to do anything remotely like the great and you're supposed to have

senior master you literally called him a master in almost all martial arts they referred to spend some way that cuz the left his critics look at a hurricane they think every position is up looking down right but what you're saying what you're pointing out is knowing a functional hierarchy there's plenty of respect going up so it's not only it's not just power it's like its power it's it's it's Authority and subordination at the same time voluntary subordination you should be you should be properly subordinate to the people who are better at what you're doing that happens naturally and the other thing that happens to an end the radical leftist never take this into account as far as I'm concerned is one of the things I've learned about people who run successful organizations were their academic or business is that they really love me

it's an intrinsic pleasure cuz you know you think while it's in for the evil capitalist it's it's it's winner-take-all and and and to hell with everyone else and that's an unbelievably cynical view of human nature really really applies to people who are genuinely Psychopathic and they're very rare and so most of the people I know that if he's hyper successful are absolutely thrilled if they can find a young person and they don't care generally speaking about sex or Creed or color any of that crap they care about competence they want to find a confident young person who's going to lot of possibility and then open up all sorts of doors of opportunity for them in to see how they can help them develop and if they can do that with 20 or 30 people then like my graduate's my graduate supervisor had his he's getting old and he had his retirement party about 2 years ago in about 30 of the people that he trained it into becoming scientist came to his party and they talked nonstop about the beneficial effect that he had on their life you know he found

you know they were young and smart but didn't remember all that properly oriented in the world and he picked them out and give them opportunities and he certainly did this for me is open all sorts of doors for me and there was a huge source of pleasure in his life I think maybe the primary source and a family as well and obviously his family was of primary importance but in his professional career and wasn't his name on papers in his you know his his name in the mark it was all these young people whose careers you can foster a never-ending source of satisfaction yeah I think that's a critical aspect of being a successful person that you have to realize that there's a there's a great personal benefit and helping other people and that you feel this is not just like something that looks good on paper you and you can show some young person is coming up the way you're 10 years ahead of them and you can say these are the mistakes that I make sure I can help you get through this and then you see them flourish there's a great deal of personal satisfaction and it's got to be some sort of evolutionary benefit

that's the thing as we are evolved for reciprocity in really are we not evolve for power this is what so deeply wrong about the in the Marxist is it that isn't what human first of all power is not the best strategy to attain success it's simply not it doesn't even work for chimpanzees because the more the chimps you know the ones that that rule. As a consequence of force as soon as they weaken to subordinates that are reciprocally engaged so that have a friendship tear them into pieces so I don't care how strong you are three guys that are like 2/3 your strengths are going to take you out so so you're much better situated and in society and in your life if you if you're in an interactive network of reciprocally beneficial relationships that works in games but it also works in life and to reduce that and it and if you're confident so there's that there's big the killer combination

hyper confidence and the capacity for genuine reciprocity that makes you Unstoppable why is there this lack of understanding and appreciating this Nuance in people that oppose these IDs

like what is the what's the willingness to be ignorant about all the variabilities especially when you consider the bulk of the research doing very well then it's really easy to think that the game is rigged it's also easy to be resentful about people who seem to have more than you have especially if you're not thinking about it very clearly you know that's another thing that I've been trying to lecture to people about is that you should be very careful about assuming that someone else has more than you do I mean one of the best predictors of whether someone has money is how old they are

show me people are richer than young people obviously right because they had their whole life to accrue wealth it's like well who's got it better

you want to be rich and older young and poor

you know what I mean you can't buy used with money

so it isn't obvious who's better off in a situation like that it's been fact I think most people who were old and Rich would trade it for young and poor fairly damn quickly will that's why people really get angry when I know that's just too much to Ben Young Rich famous rapper like what's up fellas 17 year old Lil pump about that

famous 17 who have that that sort of let's call it good fortune you know independent of of their talent you don't have to scratch beneath the surface very far even in successful people's lives until you find a pretty decent vein of tragedy

you know when so that jealousy of of of the successful is also based on the reading unit dimensional view of exactly what constitutes success you know you see the trappings whatever they might be let's say it's a yacht and more money than you know what to do with and you assume all that's going to put that person at the Pinnacle of a satisfying life but there's no shortage of dreads stop being addicted celebrities and it isn't obvious always that more money is good for people you know I mean you say oh well that's a problem I'd like to have it's like look fair enough and there are worse problems but

celebrity and fame and fortune are also not that easy to deal with and they come with their own pitfalls plus there's lots of things they don't protect you against people still get divorced and they still get sick and they still die in their parents still get Alzheimer's and all of that like the the fundamental tragic Elements of Life or still in place what are the interesting things about people that are jealous of other people that are extremely successful is that you are missing one of the core lessons of competition one of the core lessons of competition is to be inspired by those were more successful and not to try to ship them down and take away their accomplishments because they don't make you feel good you have two people that are piss-poor competition are always the ones that are trying to diminish the accomplishments of those are extremely successful you see this and sports fans if you see a loser fat sports fan talking about what a piece of shit LeBron James is cuz he dropped the ball or a missed a shot like this the extreme reaction that they

have to someone whose extraordinary successful is almost always in direct proportion to how much of a failure they are and their own life and that's one of the reasons why in contrast it look so ridiculous you know that's part of the danger I would say that's part of the danger of the entire identity politics movement is that you know is that that reasonable care for the dispossessed which we already talked about is easily contaminated by hatred for people who are not always successful but who are the most annoying person who successful is the person who deserves it. The person who doesn't deserve it cuz you can write the person doesn't deserve it off like the lottery winner you can say he was going to rock this my XP like you're you're useless Lee wasting your life away that's the sort of person that you really don't like because they cast you in a very dim light this is where competition is so important because the person that has a

background competition has been involved the competition sees a person whose bust their ass and and become something really extraordinary and it's incredibly inspiration and you look to those people and you want to read their biography rest and you want to watch documentaries on them because it literally gives you fuel where is the person have shied away from competition is afraid of their own insecurities and failures and really has never tested themselves those are the ones that find these people extremely distasteful because when they put themselves in comparison to these incredible people they they come up short every ideal is a judge what's the answer to that no ideals that's a stupid so I think it speaks to what you were talking about earlier that we need adversity that we need adversity we need difficult do we need struggle you need you need to wait to carry and if you don't have any of this

you do not advance in your own perception of who you are in this world and how you how you engage with all the other people around you is it seems to be that voluntary acceptance of the adversity pick up your cross and stumble uphill and that's really what that means is that you know you said you were you set your eyes on some high-level Vision the city of God on the hill whatever that happens to be and then you take the burden whatever burden you're capable of lifting which is obviously going to be a burden of suffering at least to some degree and you carry that voluntarily that's the trick is that and then you say well you need a purpose in your life it's like well look there's a lot of problems around you in the world you have some problems some problems even that bother you write personally they seem to call out to you those problem maybe those are your problems those are the

you should so I know what I think are the Call to Adventure like there's a problem if Uggs be okay do something about it that is your problem there's a certain amount that you can tolerate I mean I think it's like weight training there's a certain amount where becomes detrimental where you over-train your body is breaking down that are extremely beneficial because these problems sorting them out you you build your spirit you build your character and if you don't accomplish anything and you never encounter any problems you you are this gelatinous soft atrophied soul and you don't have the intestinal fortitude or the spirit or the human potential is not been developed to the point where you can overcome adversity the only way to overcome adversity Has Two Faces show Dad that you were talking about so I've really been interested in the neurophysiology of the of the sense of meaning girl astrology

because the meaning the feeling of meaning is an instinct it's not a secondary consequence of rational processes it's way deeper than that is something that drives rationality itself so you were just very amongst people as far as I can imagine as you said that there's an optimal load and you see that muscle you hurry or you'll hurt yourself you can injure yourself very bad yourself out for the count you have to find that spinach

where you're confident of what you're doing but you're pushing yourself that's going to be where meaning lies that's what meaning tells people it says you're on the edge where you're confident and and out of undue danger but pushing yourself enough so that you're continually developing that's the instinctive meaning and that looks to me like it's a consequence of the interaction between the right and left hemispheres and a consequence of the interaction between the negative emotion systems anxiety and pain that regulate you that protect you from harm and the Exploratorium Play Systems to drive you forward you want the Exploratorium Play Systems to drive you forward but then are regulated by these negative emotions so you don't hurt yourself and if you get that off to me right then that's the maximal that's the point of maximal Challenge and that makes you really alone cuz you're positive emotion is functioning that's what's driving you forward this is worth doing and your negative emotions are alert to said yeah but be awake and be careful and you know what that's like in the weight room you know you're listening

go to spotter you want to push and you can barely do it and you want to make sure that you're not going to like pull your arm down and rip the hell out of your muscle but you're right on that and that's the place of Maximum and that sense of meaning that's what puts you on the border between Chaos and Order right cuz too much order means you just practicing what you already know and then you and then you spell defiance techniques too much chaos means you better look out cuz you're going to hurt yourself you're pushing yourself beyond your limits you stay right on that edge that's where there's maximal meaning I want to know where is push it push it push yourself beyond your limits of Tolerance in your twenties to find out where it is how much can you work how disciplined can you become a can you work 12 hours a day can you work 8 hours a day can you work 3 hours a day like flat-out where's your limit

and how much how much work can you do and how much socialisation you should find out push yourself past and then back off to that point where it's oftenly sustainable that's what a lot of people do is that they mean they party too much 120 is the make a lot of mistakes what they're doing and I would say in sort of a haphazard way right cuz it's more it's not as self-conscious as it might be it's good to know that there's it's good to think about that as a goal it's like you're trying to discover what your limitations are when you're when you're in your 20s so that you can hit that edge so you can sustain yourself across the decades and so yeah cuz you don't you don't want to you don't have too much fun

I too much fun takes you out you don't want to be the oldest guy at the Disco you know it's not it's not fun being a 40 year old at the singles bar precisely so you want to make sure that what you're doing is age appropriate and you want to push yourself in every direction that you can but you should be doing that with the name in mind it's like you're trying to make yourself into a better and more competent person and so some discipline along with the fun is a good idea so take care of yourself and the people around you that's one of the things I recommended to people and I've had quite a few people actually tell me that they've done this interesting enough I said was one thing you could a mat if you had any sense when you were young has to be the most worth you could be the most reliable person at your father's funeral

and so I think that's a good challenge and I had a bunch of people come up to me in this last tour and tell me that that's exactly what they did these were often young guys who don't like before 20 said my dad died suddenly or are you know he died after years you'll listen to it's just taking me out and no wonder you know he said they said I was listening to lectures you said you want to be the most reliable person at the funeral cuz everyone else is grieving and what the hell else you going to do he said that's what they tried to do and not gotten through it show

call that's part of that picking up that load as far as I'm concerned you get a little self-respect out of that too and real sense right because you know you're the sort of sad suffering creature that's capable of a fair bit of malevolence but if you find out that you can carry a heavy load and take care of yourself and have a little left over for some other people then you can wake up at 3 in the morning and take well I could be worse and this is not a political perspective this is a positive constructive way of looking at how to navigate the world but when you break down the sort of behavior types Larissa people that generally support Socialism or socialist ideas or their anti-competition versus people that are pro pushing yourself they fall into these right-wing left-wing sort of paradigms and it's really weird way that I mean

doing the radical and who are collectivist in their fundamental orientation you know and they're they're trying to take credit for their racial ancestry world or what I would say with the with a political issue is that I think that you can build decent responsible people who are on the middle right of the spectrum and the middle left you know because I think that you can have left-wing political beliefs that are genuinely aimed at Aid to the dispossessed without being resentful of the hierarchies and without contaminating it with jealousy for the successful it's hard right that was the Socialist Party in Canada delete some of the leaders were people like that

I like a lot of that low-level party functionary types they were the activist types that you still see today and they're mostly resentful I did like them at all but some of the leaders were genuinely genuine advocates for the working class you know when they say other flaws obviously but but there they put their money where their mouth was and they were trying to ensure that the higher keys were open to advancement for the common person so to speak the person who stocked up at the bottom or for their children which might even be more important you know so that the higher fees remain open to genuine competition based on competence would you be a perfectly reasonable thing for the left to insist on right is that lets bloody well make sure that it's a fair game and so that people don't get locked out of movement forward because of arbitrary positions of power right now that's that's a reasonable that's a reasonable part of the discussion so I think if you build better people you can build better people on the left and on the right and people that are going to appreciate that rules to the

are better for everyone there better for the people that win the better for the people that are coming up there better forever if you have real structure and real rules and that you're better off being a guy like Wayne Gretzky better off the guy who's respected who plays the game correctly and just does his best and really truly become a champion and loved by all because of it this is the antidote tomorrow relativism okay so the first thing is is that there are real problems and and hierarchical organization can offer real solutions socially on person you can confront the problems courageously and you can solve that's real ameliorate suffering and limits malevolence and so does nothing morally relative about that the second is that sense of meaning that we discussed that's not some philosophical second-order consequence of thinking it's way deeper than that that sense of meaning tells you when you're the god Skeeters Russian psychologist called that the

zone of proximal development which I believe is where the phrase The Zone came from and so in the zone of proximal development this is what adults do with children little kids that are learning to talk I don't automatically talk to little children who are learning to talk at a level it's slightly exceeds their current vocabulary they do that without even knowing it and that puts those kids in the zone right cuz if you just talk baby talk to kids then all they learned is baby talk and if you just talk like an adult and they don't understand a word you're saying so you find is happy medium in between where the kid mostly understands what you're talking about a man that you're pulling them forward that puts them in the zone not some meaningful Zone and so you can feel the operation of that zone in your life that's what the Dow was Sauron about because they say will you dial was the way right and that's the pathway between chaos and that's meaning and you can feel that your life when you're deeply engaged in something like we have deeply engage in conversations okay which is part of the reason that we keep having them and I think why they're popular and we're not panic

the clock is ticking or how time is Flowing or even to the fact that we're doing what we're doing we're just having a conversation and it's meaningful it's engaged it keeps our eyes focused in her senses concentrated on what's Happening and the reason for that is that there's enough information flowing between us so that we're being slightly transformed as a consequence of the discussion right so we're both comfortable we trust each other we trust that the conversation is aimed at something that's a mutual benefit we trust each other to tell the truth to the degree that we're capable of doing that exchange of information and to the degree that it's breaking you down a little bit and building you up in a different way that's a little death and rebirth there's constant little dancing rebirths in a meaningful conversation then not keeps you alive and functioning and that that focuses you like that that speaks to you so deeply that that Focus happens without any Consciousness and that's meaning and that's not Long Beach

Chaos and Order and that's real and I would say here's another thing that's cool so that line between Chaos and Order that's the same thing that's happening when you're playing a game property right because you're in the game and you're you're exercising your skill but you're pushing it but you're pushing it away that's also a benefit to your teammates and to the progression of the game as such and to being a better General player you doing all that at the same time and your evolved with enough natural intelligence so that the sum total output of your nervous system says to you you're in the right place at the right time doing the right thing and that's what makes your life meaningful and that's real and I think it's more real than anything else I think it's more real than suffering I think it's more real than the level it's because it's the antidote to both of those and so the whole moral route moral relativism issue for me is a non-starter it's just wrong

there's lots of ways of interpreting the world but there aren't very many ways of interpreting it optimally and you can feel when you're doing that it makes you stronger and then the people that come to me after my talks and say well you know I'd be putting my life together I developed division I've been trying to be more responsible I've been trying to be more honest and put my relationships together they're all sparkly eyed because of this or crying sometimes because it's really had an impact out the month on the metal deep level to think oh wow this actually works it's like yeah it's actually works it's real it's real and I would say as well that that's associated with the idea the Deep Western idea of the logos which is meaning in action in speech so you know if we have a conversation that's meaningful then that's a manifestation of the spirit of the logos and that's the thing that destroys and and and recreate at the same time cuz you learn something it destroy something destroy a little pre supposition that you had that was erroneous and replaces it with something that's healthier and every time you have

meaningful conversation that happens it's like a little tweak that wasn't quite right here that moves and something new takes its place so and that's a little death and rebirth instead of the catastrophic that you might have to have if you weren't paying attention so that's all tied together at all tied together with that phenomena meaning and that's the same as the adoption of responsibility that all ties together so not so nicely did the concept of meaning like what is important that is so it's so huge to people but so fleeting it's so difficult to like what is meaning while you know there's a simple ones right like family and loved ones and companionship and community and it finding something that you enjoy doing that you know you can do that too seems bigger than you or bigger than yourself but but meaning like I'm the meaning of life what is meaning this is one of the things that gives people so much existential angst and I think is the cause of a lot of Despair because there's no real answer question yes

the dangers of rationality is that the Egyptians Associated the Catholics did this to some degree to they Associated rash rationality with a proclivity to malevolence party because rationality tends to fall in love with its own Productions intelligence has this like in build arrogance and the Egyptians in particular were really insightful they tried to replace the idea of intelligence has the highest virtue with the idea of attention as the highest virtue something Elvis Huxley knew he wrote a book called island island was an island that was populated by a lot of birds on it and the birds to talk and all they did was say pay attention to remind everybody on the island to pay attention all the time but you can undermine your sense of meaning and you can question it but the best thing to do is to actually pay attention to when it manifests itself because it's a it's a phenomenon like like color or like or like love or like Beauty it exists it isn't something you created something that you

discover can you can Discover it you just have to watch it like you're ignorant about yourself you think okay well I'm going to act like you don't know who you are and notice when you're doing something that you're engaged yet so I can see it maybe it's only 10 minutes because your life is pretty out of Bella's but you'll see that full man I was engaged in something there for 10 minutes like why what was what did you do that was right that engaged you you were in the right place at the right time doing the right thing for a few minutes what was it what were the preconditions there in the New Testament Christ says the kingdom of God is spread across the Earth but men do not see it

and that's what it refers to is that you you wander into Paradise now and then when you're engaged and you're deeply engaged in something but you don't notice it you don't think oh look I'm in the right place and everything's working out right now it means I got it right somehow and then I need to practice being there more and more and more which is

well that's the appropriate thing to try to practice and that's to make that's to come to some negotiated what would you call it it's do it is to come to a negotiation with that intrinsic sensor meeting and to realize it as a fact rather than than that just has an opinion or or something that secondary such an alien concept for people to be so aware of who they are and what they're doing. So when they do feel that feeling of meaning that they could figure out a way to get back into that state and what were all the extenuating circumstances and where is my head at what caused me to have this this feeling like things were right it's like someone gives you a gift and you have to figure out what it was that you did to deserve it so down the fair bit of careful reflection but it also requires that ignorant says you have to think why I don't know who I am

I'm going to find some things meaningful what are they they might not even be things you want to find meaningful they might be things that you might even be ashamed of you know cuz sometimes people are interested in things that they don't think that they should be interested in like maybe you'll have a guy who is who is is kind of a cliche but who is socialized to be real tough guy and he finds out that he's kind of interested in art or aesthetic just like shame do that because maybe it's too feminine or whatever well it doesn't matter because that's actually speaking that that's actually something that speaking to him from the core of his genuine being he's going to have to pursue that for you might find you know that someone who's really agreeable and kind of a pushover stands up to someone

just once at work says what they really think then they realize afterwards wow you know that was exactly right then they think oh my God you know I decided when I was a little kid maybe that a harsh father and they decided they were for never going to be angry my whole life for something wrong with aggression so they're going out of their way their whole life to be free of conflict then they find out the one day they stand up for themselves that hold domain that they'd first off is inappropriate is actually contains exactly what they need to put themselves together or do you find what you need where you least want to look at the old alchemical dictum in sterquilinus inventory right I'll talk to you about activists cuz it's something that you brought up earlier saying that you you you know you find them on a peeling I want to know what you think the motivation of a lot of these like particularly radical left-wing activist they want to shut down lectures and scream people down and you know these auditoriums what do you think the motivation of these

and what do you what do you think is the root of it

well I think that it's a quick route to moral virtue

you don't like it's actually really hard to put yourself together and you have to do that in ways that you can't trumpet you know because most of the things that are wrong with you are kind of low what would you call it second-rate and embarrassing your all your stupid little habits in your proclivity to procrastinate all the things that you're mine early ashamed of and then you have to work on those slowly because the probability that you going to be able to fix them quickly is slow and you can't really brag about it because it's so embarrassing just to admit that the exist to begin with it you can hardly brag about it then it's sort of painstaking private work you don't get a lot of social you don't get a lot of quick social status for it it Stafford full and bear singing tumbling and difficult and then you can do something like being activists and you get all that public a claim for being on the good side with no effort whatsoever

it's so it's a do you think that there's any motivation at all to try to make the world a better place yes it's flavored by this desire to broadcast your virtue you know that's the thing is no I mean impulse that's another thing that was documented by Piaget that there's a stage you know I'm late adolescence where you want to make the world a better place I would say that's probably part of the impulse to establish a permanent relationship and have a family in Denton take care of people and to take on some of the burden of life it's it's that psychological precursor to that and it's reasonable for smart young people to be concerned about

broader philosophical issues if they tilt in that direction as well but it's all too easy for that to be pathologized into resentment for those who seem to have more unfairly and also to take the easy route out and there aren't easy routes there are only difficult routes to doing useful things and it's better just to do that so I think that there's some impulse to know there's some wish that things could be less unfair and that fewer people could suffer but it's kind of a low-level virtue that that reflects of compassion

I'm not saying it's what is without Merit because it's the that compassion is the basis for the ability to take care of a people who are Ellen and an infection through things are complicated it's hard to it's hard to make complicated systems work better and it's really what about to shut down certain speakers like someone who's my opinion fairly innocuous mean in terms of the here's one Christina Hoff Sommers I don't see a good argument for shutting her down she's so polite she's a feminist she's well-read she's a really nice person it just doesn't make sense that people would shut her down yet they do you say horrible things about it mischaracterize her in a really brutal way that it completely invalidates their argument or

opposition to hurt anyone is paying attention to what she said or who she is very strange way it's it's it's part of our doubt I suppose about Authority at about it's an art our willingness to assume that all authority is contaminated by power is so it's almost like you're doing a play or musical or your Sing a Song Sing out what that person's an asshole but you're espousing an opinion and that person decide to scream out and they they do so under the guise of moral virtue then there it gets tolerated power yes you know when it's no wonder that concentrate on power everything's about power well then it's okay if they use power as part of their means of expression so I can

you're just playing power games it's perfectly reasonable even appropriate for me to play power games because you know I'm oppressed compared to you if everything's power than everybody gets to yell and there's no I realized about about recently as well as that there isn't a debate about Free Speech exactly not the way that we think about it you know you know because the there's a classical defense of free speech so the classical defensive free speech is that

it's better for both of us if we're able to exchange our opinions because I have the opportunity to learn from you and you have the opportunity to learn from me and you have the opportunity to learn from your own mistakes and social feedback and so do I and negotiation beats War okay so that's kind of the classical now but that's predicated on some assumptions and those are you are you capable of formulating an opinion that that's actually you need to you and that in dialogue we can mutually modify each other's unique opinions in a way that produces a mutually harmonious and beneficial outcome that's all the predicate that's the people who are opposed to free speech is different than theirs exactly it's that they're opposed to the idea that Free Speech exists it's a way deeper problem because at the bottom of the postmodernist mess is the fall

well there's no

there's no one way of interacting with the world that's preferable to any other way and so what people do is organize themselves into hierarchies of power and then struggle for dominance within the hierarchy and in the hierarchy struggle between each other so it's a landscape of Warring hierarchies that's all it is and you think that you're a person and that you have an opinion but you're not you're just the mouthpiece of your privileged hierarchy and so am I and so and it's incommensurate if we're from different hierarchies there isn't that you talkin to a me that can come to an agreement there's just you acting as a mouthpiece for your power and me acting as a mouthpiece for my power and so since I'm part of my group and I want to win because it's all about power and why the hell would I ever want you to talk like everything to learn from you or even at learning as possible or even there are two people having a discussion there's nothing but the mouthpiece of power there's two mouth pieces of pie

Rory and so why should I listen to you I just shut you down cuz then I went and it is free speech debate isn't about who's whose opinion should be allowed within you know what an overarching framework for free speeches it's a real thing it's a debate about whether there's such a thing as free speech at all the the radical postmodernist types they did not even that there such a thing as an autonomous individual in any way you're just you're just the Nexus of economic forces economic and social forces you're entirely socially constructed there's no you these are deep criticisms like we made this case before that the postmodern types in it although they have to Ally themselves with the Marxist for for reasons that we don't have to go into they are going after things that are so fundamental you can't believe it they don't there is no

autonomous individual in the postmodern world

that's it that's a modernist turn the light Matthew Point that's or a Christian Viewpoint or a judeo Christian Viewpoint or maybe an abrahamic religion Viewpoint who the hell knows it might be that deep your the Nexus of sociological forces there's no integrated self you don't have ideas or opinions and there's no dialogue between us that doesn't exist there's your group your identity your struggle for power and that's all this your interpretation of it is a serving of espoused this is this is the fundamental essence of post-modernism especially especially true in the format espoused by dehradun Fuko Fuko everything's about power everything's about power and Dara that was definitely that's why he criticized the idea of logocentrism logos is that ability of the individual to engage in dialogue root for dialogue is logos or logic that's all criticize that's all gone the identity politics players

serious the people who are serious about this philosophically they don't believe in the idea of individual that's gone

so it's not like they're playing a game within you know you think this is a game

role playing a game where we agree on some things and then we're just disagreeing about the details it's like oh no no no no do you want to make that mistake this this critique is way way deeper than that which is why Derrida was posted the idea of logocentrism he didn't believe in the idea of an individual that didn't exist that's just a fiction set up by those who have used the idea of the autonomous individual to advance their power maneuvering within the confines of the colonialist

the colonialist west and what's the rationalization for that perspective is this to enhance their argument to try to push for their ideas in a less less debatable way like what why why I think the motivation is hatred for confidence hatred for competent wow I really believe that I think that's because I can understand the motivation otherwise it's like what why are you tearing these things down while it's on the bay so you know we have sympathy for the oppressed it's like

well why like wearing your hair in your conceptualization does that idea of Sympathy for the oppressed come from you don't even have the idea of the individual in your conceptualization it's like that that's just a

I don't I don't I don't buy any of that pie I think it's Cain and Abel are all the way down do you think that when you talking about the Scandinavian model where they've made it incredibly equal and through this massive effort to take away any opportunity or two to two rather open up every possible opportunity for women that men also have and you seen these these differences in gender is actually accentuate because of this do you think that maybe

what we're seeing also even in terms of the postmodernist and they're the radical leftist vs. people in the right the same sort of competition aspect of it is also problematic because it's one of the reasons why there's so much debate in the first place and that if we if we had maybe more middle ground and more opportunity there would be less of an argument there would be less of a reason to have these these these extreme Polar Opposites that may be embracing of more there's certain socialist aspects of our society that we just accept bright like a fire department right Universal more emphasized in that direction but it gears towards privatize schools for people with higher incomes which gets away more from socialism and sort of

reinforces capitalism or right but I think things like maybe perhaps even Universal basic income or certainly Universal Health Care with you got you what you guys have in Canada which we don't have here and definitely higher education making higher education far more accessible and far less costly stop subsidizing the student loan stop making student loan something that you can never Escape part of the internal debate right because we've already talked about the utility of hierarchies and the necessity of putting those who can in charge but the consequence of that which is an unequal distribution of resources well you don't want that to get so steep that people stack up at the bottom cuz you're right side he starts to destabilize and so you have to have a continual discussion between the left and the right to see how you stop the bottom from suffering from from hitting 0 0 is not good you can't play when you hit 0 and that's not good and so I don't think there is a universal soul

Lucian to that problem because the problem keeps manifesting itself think about a deciliter no problem there's a set of problems that will never go away what the problems are change but the fact that there are problems never go away okay the fact that you have to produce hierarchies to solve those problems never goes away the fact that the hierarchies dispossess never goes away but the detail shift all the time and so the whole reason that you need the political discussion is to take a look at the particulars of the hierarchies and the particulars of the dispossession and say okay well now we need to shim it up here and now we need to shim it up here and now we need to adjust this and now we need to adjust this because you can't come up with a final solution to those problems I think that's partly why you have Consciousness itself you know because if you could automate the solution imagine it was a permanent solution what is a permanent solution to breathing

you have a part of your brain that just breathe you don't think about it you don't adjust it while you do a bit when you're talking but you get my point it's like problem taken care of well there's other problems that are so fluid like the return of problems but they're still fluid in their detail that you need awareness and linguistic capacity to address them and I would say the problem of hierarchy and disposition fit exactly into the category is that we're going to organize ourselves hierarchic lie because Talent is unequally distributed

it doesn't matter like as soon as you invent basketball and instantly you know there's 1% of the population who are super great at basketball

doesn't matter soon as you set up an arbitrary value structural hierarchy then there's the whole slugs at the bottom that can't put a ball in the hoop to save their lives and that's an internal problem that's what it says in the New Testament that the poor will be with us always a very pessimistic and there's two lines like that one is

to those who have everything more will be given in from those who have nothing everything will be taken that's a rough line and the second is the poor will be with us always okay so why it's a reflection of what we just described is that you're going to get hierarchical structures in there going to dispossess okay so then what we want to do is we want to use Mercy say justice gives you what you deserve

stats on the competitive and you get what you deserve but there's this old idea and old religious idea that's a good idea God rules with two hands right hand is Justice in the left and his Mercy Justice Means you get what you deserve the world can survive that way because people are flawed and make mistakes and if you only got exactly what you deserved it would be a hell of a world right cuz you'd be punished every single mistake you make you know you be held accountable in a way that would be unbearable so that has to be tempered with mercy and and so maybe the left is the is the end of the distribution that tempers with Mercy when it's functioning properly but it can be generated into that came like resentment of the of the successful and that's a danger on the right you have the opposite danger which is well you know you advance because of your confidence but then that can ossify and so you want to hang on to that that position even though you're no longer just

why is it you start to use the advantages of your position to accrue benefits for yourself that you did not earn and that's the proclivity of the of the hierarchy to become blind and that's 10 Eternal probably the Egyptians had to go in for that Osiris Osiris was the god of hierarchies and he was always threatened by Seth who is his evil brother and his evil brother was always conspiring to overcome him and that's the problem with higher key says that they tilt towards tearing and there was a reasonable left says that watched the higher Keys cuz they tilt towards it's like yes it's true

but that doesn't mean that the idea of hierarchy itself is flawed and that doesn't mean that all hierarchies are tyrannical way too far do you think that the Scandinavian model that has revealed that when you do make things more equal you will find that people generally tend to gravitate more towards traditional gender roles that does this do you think that this makes people happier has it been observed at this is a a happier results that's a good question the auction are pretty high in Scandinavia but I don't know if anybody has done an analysis that would indicate whether the the sexual sorting is a contributor to that is a good question I mean the general idea has been that the Scandinavians are happier because their societies are more egalitarian but but they're not more yellow

in the sense that men and women are also more different so

men and women are more different but the opportunities are more egalitarian homogeneous right and more homogeneous societies tend to be more peaceful and happier not more diverse societies and they're also small countries so they're somewhat easier to govern and they tend to be wealthy show those so it would be hard to parse out all those contributors right to figure out what it is that's making the Scandinavians relatively content is it's almost like a super tribe versus our country this this model that we could perhaps bring to the United States or to Canada and maybe mitigate some of the issues that we have between the right and the left like maybe there's

some sort of a compromised that'll lead to less less debate and dispute

the states are doing real well actually personally I mean you know your your system of checks and balances seems to work out pretty well there's a fair bit of let's say left domination right now of the mainstream media at the moment so that's not a bad balance and then in the last election I mean maybe you could make a case perhaps good things head tilted little too far to the Republican side but that.dot dot balance out because the Democrats took the house again and it seems like they were more moderate Democrats that seems to be the scuttlebutt so you know it isn't obvious to me that your system isn't functioning well I think that's one of the things that's happening

it's making things look more contentious than they are is that the mainstream media is under such a salt Buy

up-and-coming media forms coating people like you that as their financial models deteriorate and as their journalistic standards take a hit and as they lose their fact-checkers and their time to be careful with the stories they concentrate more on exaggerating the extremes to attract attention there was an article published months ago showing that depends now you calculate these things but that the radical leftist and the radical right-wingers are only about 5% of the population on each side and then the majority of Americans consider themselves something approximating the relatively silent majority and so

I don't think that things are polarized is as badly as they seem and it is also the case right now that if you pull people and ask them about the conditions of their life in the United States they tend to say that they're doing quite well but that other people aren't

so I think maybe I don't know this for sure but but I think maybe that the technological pressure that's being put on the mainstream media is driving extreme political views as a means of gathering the attention of a shrinking market share

that's that's a very interesting take on and I wonder how detrimental that is to us as a whole because we are constantly dealing with this clickbait nonsense headline you know in every every Everything is a dispute everything is a war everything season 25 years ago although I've been heavily involved in the last 2 years cuz I noticed that most of what passed for news wasn't cuz my sense was well if it isn't important in a month if it is important of months from now it was never important and almost everything that's news is like right now so I tried to stay away from that it was better for my peace of mind and I often recommended to my clinical clients who were depressed and anxious but they Shield themselves from the news this much as possible but now there's the news is everywhere right it's everywhere it's Twitter it's Facebook it's YouTube it's like we're just inundated by it it's like CNN on steroids it's 20

4 hour news cycle in is produced by everyone whether they were informed or not and it's really high emotion and I think that that is making things look a lot worse to us than they actually are I think it's also similar to what we were talking about earlier when it comes to reading comments on Instagram or Twitter I just think there's just an amount of data that's incomprehensible I don't think you can handle it I'll take you to navigate that you can't navigate that many relationships when is the reason why we have this dunbar's number in our head if you're dealing with a hundreds of thousands of people in your case a million followers that are constantly interacting with you it's going to fucking drive you mad? Certainly I know one limitation which is that having it drive me insane is probably not a good outcome for anyone

this is a personal thing right because they're responding and there they said dimensions are to you personally but in a lesser way perhaps but it is still all so overwhelming is just a cheer amount of information that's available constantly about everything there's there's a million stories every day about every single thing that's going on why are everywhere on the end where was how are you supposed to navigate that are we supposed to get through life and concentrate on things that are truly meaningful for you in the present moment without being completely detached from the outside world it's this balance that people try to find that is so elusive it's so hard to figure out how much to watch and how much of this political process do I pay attention to that well that's the big technological challenge yes you know I mean we saw it when I was a kid we saw it Oh my God you know kids are sitting in front of the television 4 hours a night it's like well you ain't seen nothing yet right now it's all day long and all day long

yeah and the phones are so much more powerful than television that their looks like a typewriter compared to a computer but it's even worse than that because as soon as you adjust to the degree that you do with the technology changes on you Brian so in that direction I mean you know I see this especially with parents who have teenage kids it's like they know the phones aren't lately about about maybe these are kids that are getting bullied on social media so I got think well when I was 14 you know it's kind of rough time of life and you go to school and you got your friends and you got your enemies and then you come home and your friends aren't there and neither are your enemies outside there's an outside of that but now on social media there's no outside

had moved schools finish doing quite well in the new one but the people from the person to old-school are still after them on social media so you know and I'll just use your phone it's like yeah yeah you tell that to your teenager can you try not using your phone for a whole day. Nobody can manage the phone it's not just teenagers my middle daughter's 10 years old and all of her friends are phone is like two of her friends that don't have phone and they come over the house and we have a router house can't use a phone like once you get inside the house there's no phone so you have friends come over the house they want to lick constantly be on the phone in and we still like you can't do that this is my life yeah yeah my life is my phone they want to make Twitter posts and Instagram and they want to do Facebook and they want to they want to Snapchat with each other with bunny ears on and then these kids are just doing this

all day long and they are mastering the technology has the other thing it's not surprising that they're trying to adapt to it but but it's happening at a really early age if you're giving your kid a phone you're not putting any parental filters on it you're allowing that kid to have full access to Google in the world wide web and they're just going to if you give your kid a phone and you don't think they'll know how to use the phone better than you within a year you're a fool going to have that thing figured out in ways that you haven't even imagine so out of control it is a very extraordinary Li unprecedented time to sort of navigate this world and I don't think any does not have been accepted civilizations of a deal with worse things right in town of violence disease but I don't think anyone's had to deal with such a a radically transformative medium like the internet

yeah they made in 5 years is just absolutely staggering I bet they smell like sulfur and they don't even know I bet you bring out some new development that worked on cold neural link and that this is some radical new way of accentuating bandwidth between human beings and information and yes increasing the access to it and he was very vague about it yeah he said he was going to come out within you know x amount of months that would scientists have already computer monkeys for example to move a robotic arm and so and I suspect that you know you can you can learn to control single neurons in your face my suspicions are that will build developed technology

it'll be wearable that won't have to be neural implants that you'll be able to communicate with Neroli and that's not very far down the road and the probability that we're going to build

you know what you know about. What's his name kurzweil's idea of the singularity in the rest well that's a wild idea and it seems somewhat improbable had a friend who wants told me that if something is impossible then it won't happen to know to be something that will come up to stop at that you won't expect and maybe the singularity is one of those things but you know I know a lot of guys who were in The high-end competition world and a lot of them are convinced that there within a decade of a machine this is powerful is the human brain and I know people have been saying that for a long time but Jesus you know computers are getting good at emotion-recognition they're getting really good at sacia recognition they can communicate with one another they can imitate those Boston Dynamic robots are pretty damn impressive and they're mostly autonomous we've got all sorts of things that can navigate on the road like these autonomous cars like all these things are

they're coming together real fast as you ever watch Black Mirror on Netflix to know the one where everything you do is Raiden trying to write The Social Network one right right right I was talking about the one I think it's called heavy metal it's about autonomous robots that seek out people and tell him and do these artificial intelligence people that are making these Boston Dynamic robots and you know that the scariest one that I read about was DARPA one called the eater robot eater it operates on uses as a fuel uses biological material as fuel which means if they are so this is going to be able to eat dead bodies in the field

theoretically and use it as fuel to develop an army of robotic arms artificially intelligent things corpse eaters eat corpses in order to have fuel to continue to kill us even though I'm doing what I'm doing with regards to these lectures as you know I think that were in a time of unparalleled possibility and for evil and that the more people that there are out there without the Rocks together the better the probability that we're going to be able to manage it because we've all got some pretty hard decisions to make coming up real fast you know when these guys that are working on these AI systems I'm hoping that the ones that are more ethically oriented in a proper directional be the ones that have the upper hand I'm really hoping that so yeah collectively and what's the matter was looking into that came up

or that it's abrasive Geneva conventions if they actually dead bodies you can't do that yeah whatever window yeah I know I couldn't agree with you more and I think personally this is important collectively it's very important that I mean I just think it's I think what you wrote 12 rules to like we need rules we need rules to be able to figure out how to navigate this thing you know that like every time someone comes up and talks to me and says look you know I was in a dark place and I got my life together in this is how it's going I think that tilts the scales nontrivially towards a good outcome

people that that's happening to the batter and I don't think there's a more effective way of doing it then to concentrate on the individual. I don't think it was either and it's happening a lot I hear it everyday I hear it everyday when people that find you and find a lot of other inspirational people online and just Jocko and there's just so many of them there's so many and there's so much fuel now for inspirational so much inspiration could become popular it's crazy you saw this coming one of the things that is how little encouragement people need and it's so touching constantly in the state of like being overwhelmed but even with what happened this morning when I went to Whole Foods you know cuz it's overwhelming to have people come up and if they share these really intimate pieces of their life with you in 20 seconds like you're an old friend you know and here's what my life was like it's dark you know it's dark and there's a bunch of good things that are happening it's like this little blast

the person who is the 22nd but everytime that happens as far as I'm concerned it to Victory

well every little bit helps you know that's it's early does Anna by the way if you meet me and you have one of those stories and I don't know how to react this is how it is and now I go wow that's amazing and awesome I'm super happy for you I'm a genuinely happy for you but I still don't know how to react I don't know I never will learn to keep doing it that's all I can ever say it it always feels flat I mean like what they'd said is so mind-blowing and I'm saying terrific but it is true we just didn't have 3 hours gone thanks sir always a pleasure to see you at your piercing your good man thanks very much

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but yet I have not seen the man loses debate on these these people freak out and freak out to him in person seems to have the answers you know they're talking about even if you disagree with him he is well pump you don't appreciate you folks much love to everyone bye

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