https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Fo9ZGh0lzfA

I love chaos and I love… I enjoy that and I enjoy… When there’s a real crisis, it’s when I’m at my best and when we don’t know what’s going to happen next, I love chaos. I remember my partner, I was going to… I was getting a flight and I was on the way to the airport. He said, where are you going? And I said, I’m not sure. I’m either going to Singapore or New York. I’ve got tickets to both. He said, but you’re in the car on the way to the airport. So I know they both go at the same time. So when are you going to decide? So I decide when I get there. And most people don’t like that degree of indecision and chaos in life. But I had a rucksack and I could go to either, but that’s where I thrive. Well, that’s OK. So that’s interesting too, that you are able to… It seems to me that the fact that you’re able to do that is associated with this default presupposition that your parents helped instill and support in you, which is that, well, you can do it. You know, because one way of limiting anxiety is to limit choice. Zero choice, generally speaking, zero anxiety, because there’s no conflict. But another way of dealing with anxiety is to presume that if the situation shifts on you, you can manage it. That’s why people like to watch jugglers, for example, or acrobats, because they’re in a situation that’s dynamically unstable and yet they can continue their complex operations. And everyone loves that. And it’s because it’s a reflection of that spirit that’s able to juggle. And so now how did it come about that you had tickets to Singapore and New York simultaneously? I had meetings in both places, but I wasn’t sure what was going to be the most important. Until I made a final phone call, I had to just assess which was the best place to be at that particular time. Right, and so you were leaving it till… …to the last minute. …where you’d have the most information. Yeah, I’ll come back to that. I can deal with that now, actually, in a way about decision-making. It’s not quite in the relevant place in my career. But often people spend a lot of time focusing on what’s the right decision to make, but they neglect a very important question. And this is in my life as a litigator, really. Or even in life generally. They neglect the important question of when is the right time to make the decision. And so they just think, should I do this or that? But they don’t think, when do I have to decide? Because… Or when should I do it? And that’s often neglected in a simplistic approach to decision-making in my experience. Well, people also assume… You know, I watched my colleagues, for example, in graduate school, try to figure out which city they should live in if they had competing job offers from different universities. And they might be completely on different sides of the continent or in different countries. And so you might say, well, this is a really crucial decision. And the truth of the matter is, it’s actually not that crucial a decision, because if you’re in a good university, in a large city, you have way more opportunity than you’ll ever be able to make use of in both places. So the first thing you have to realize is, both of those decisions, in principle, could be good. And the right city isn’t even an appropriate category, because it’s not like a city is one thing. A city is 50 billion things. And so the real question in a situation like that is, could I land in my feet and start to operate properly, regardless of which of these places that I’m in? And the answer to that should be yes. And if it’s yes, then you think, well, either choice is good. And then you can start thinking, well, now maybe I’ll go to city one and talk to the people there and see how I get along, and I’ll go to city two and start to find my way. But people often are under the misapprehension that they come to these important inflection points in their life, like which city, and that’s going to determine the entire course of their life. And it does insofar as geographical locale is one thing rather than another. But if it’s a choice between immensely productive options, then there’s no sacrifice in the choice. There’s just a choice between different banquets. That’s a good way of thinking about it. But even if there is a sacrifice, you’d have to ask yourself, when do I have to make this decision? Is it now? Because people feel the pressure of saying, well, I don’t have to decide until the 31st of March. Between now and then, I’ll just think about it, and then I’ll decide. That’s what I’m saying. But people often force themselves to make decisions before they have to. People who work with me or for me get frustrated because they say, are we doing this or that? And I say, when do I have to decide? And often, because I leave things up in the air, like the juggler, you’re talking about, it gets very frustrating. People like to have an audit. They’d like to know what they’re going to do, but I like to leave things… You don’t mind the uncertainty. Well, you know, I used to tell that many undergraduates who, for example, they didn’t know whether they wanted to go to medicine or to clinical psychology. And so I’d say, well, apply to both. Make 20 applications to both. And maybe you don’t even have a choice because you get accepted to psychology and not medicine. End of problem. Or the problem will become more acute when you actually realise that you didn’t get into medicine and that’s what you wanted, but that’ll snap into focus. But you can pursue it. But then let’s say, well, now you have three offers from a clinical programme and three offers from the medical programme. It’s like, OK, now you have six decisions to make. And now you can go to each of these places and investigate them and you’re going to gather way more information. And then by the time you need to make the decision, which could be as late as possible, you’re going to be much more informed. And so that’s another problem with making a premature decision, is that my advice to my students and my clients was always, don’t close the door before it’s necessary to close the door because you’re not maximally informed at that point. And also, you don’t have to accept that temptation to prematurely foreclose, right, to deal with that anxiety. It’s not a good way of dealing with it. It’s the options on the table. It is a temptation for people to make decisions before they need to because they want to have order, but they close doors. They don’t need to. And that’s hard psychology. I don’t know why it’s hard. Well, it’s a lack of… I do believe it’s associated with a lack of faith of the sort that we’ve been describing, is that people aren’t… They don’t have enough faith in their own ability to dance and to juggle. And so they want to specify the narrower pathway as soon as possible to get things… You know, unnecessary chaos isn’t helpful. And I don’t think you want to distribute mayhem and catastrophe wherever you go. Yeah, and in fairness, sometimes I might leave it to the last minute, and it’s not the last minute. I mean, you pushed it too far and you should have made it a bit… Yeah, well, that’s another mistake you can make, but the thing is there are mistakes everywhere. OK, so now you’re in the Jesuit schools. And are your academic interests starting to make themselves known, and what are they? There are two things. I was very interested in science. I missed one thing out that was important in my formative years, which I’ve just realised and talking to you now. It’s when I was about 13, I went to visit my family in Montreal, and my uncle Joseph is a teacher there, a professor of philosophy. And philosophy means lots of things to different people, obviously. He did what’s called in England European philosophy, because the English philosophy or Anglo-American philosophy tends to be quite dry and logical and to do with, you know, Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, which I also like. So he did Sartre and other people. And at the age of 13, he spoke to me a lot and really influenced me and persuaded me to read Descartes’ Meditations and Discourse, which is a really important thing for me. As you probably know, they’re about scepticism and what you can know for certain. And he challenges all the assumptions you have, and that really started… That was an important thing for me. Why?