https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1GSUG_B-new
everyone is spring. So a couple of you who are out there maybe you can just send me a quick text and tell me if this is working. Yes, excellent. Can you hear me? Mad Matt, I work at Mars in Toronto. Can you share your thoughts on why it hasn’t worked? Wow, that’s a complicated question. Let’s get to that a little bit later. You guys can hear me? Excellent. Let’s go. So this is what I’m going to do. I want to talk to you first about Patreon and then I’m going to take some questions that people have sent. I’ve got this new thing called Pigeon Hall and that’s enabled people to vote up questions and then I’m also going to take some of the questions that are streaming in. So hopefully that’ll all work. See if I’m in focus. Not too bad. All right, there we go. Consider the overwhelming success of the Patreon account and the money rebel. What will you be doing with the contributions? Well, that’s great. All right, so I’ve got a couple of things to say about that. So the first one is, you know, I would say a number of people have been attempting and not an overwhelming number, but a number of people have been attempting to take me to task for the fact that my Patreon support has been, let’s call it overwhelmingly successful. And so I’ll tell you how I formulate my response to that. The first is, I’m generating almost all of my content and making it completely publicly accessible. So it’s free, right? And so that way I’m bringing, I think, awareness of psychological issues to a very large number of people. And so far at the moment, my view count on YouTube is up to 13 million. And I did a little bit of calculations last week to try to figure out what the total view count was for the cuts of my lectures that have been appearing on YouTube and then the political material as well. And I think it’s upward of 50 million. And so I’m making psychological and political content available to 50 million people. And so, you know, that seems like a reasonable thing to do. And now people who don’t agree with what I’m saying might differ, but I think that could be separated from the educational content as well. So and then with regards to the Patreon subscribers, every single person who’s doing that is doing it entirely voluntarily. And I also set up that Patreon account long before any of this political material emerged. So and my sense with the Patreon viewers, and you guys can clue me in if I’m wrong about this, is that there’s two things happening. One is it enables people who are not very happy about the current political situation in the West to contribute to something that might be, at least to some degree, attempting to stem the tide of such things as toxic political correctness. And second, that it enables people to support my endeavours to bring general education to a wider audience. And that seems like a good deal for everyone. And you know, you might say, well, it’s a particularly good deal for me. And I’m certainly not complaining about what’s happening. But I would also point out that it hasn’t exactly been a straightforward thing. And so so I guess if anyone else wants to try it, they’re more than welcome to now having said that. I would also say that the real issue here, and I think this is the fact that this isn’t self evident is also a commentary on the toxicity of our culture at the moment is that it actually isn’t the issue. The issue isn’t really how much money you have. I think that that’s a resentful and and relatively vicious way of judging someone else. I think the issue is what you do with the money when you have it. And you know, I’m not a particularly hedonistic person. And I’m not 25 years old, you know, I’m 55 years old, and I’m going to be a grandfather in a couple of months, you know, thank God for that. And what I want to do with that money is to do the best things I can possibly think of to do with it. And one of the things I’m thinking about, I started this biblical series, and a lot of that’s helped, thankful, thanks to you guys on Patreon, because that enabled me to generate the capital that was necessary to rent the theater because for 12 lectures, that was a 8,000 for the for the camera work. And that had to be basically dealt with upfront. So it was a reasonable financial risk. Now I’ve been crazily fortunate in that the theater tickets have also sold out. So it looks like the biblical series will pay for itself with some extra leftover. And so you know, I’m pretty happy about that, because that gives me some more working capital. And then you might say, well, what am I going to do with the capital? Well, I’m going to continue doing the sorts of things that I’m already doing. I want to do a series on the 100 greatest books of the Western canon, for example, I want to move genuine humanities education out of the universities where it isn’t being taught anyways, as far as I can tell, online where people can access it freely. I’m talking to a wide variety of people right now about trying to do that in a more formal sense so that the possibility for widespread university education can be made universally accessible. And one of the things we’re trying to crack is the problem of how to teach people to write because that’s a real troublesome thing. And by the way, you know, you guys, if you go onto my website, Jordan peterson.com, and you go into courses, and you go into psychology 430, if you look carefully there, you’ll see that there’s an essay rubric that tells people how to write. And actually, that’s become quite popular. And so if you’re interested in how to learn to write, I’ve written something about that already. And we’re going to make a piece of software that’s going to help people learn to write. And so I’ve got plans for how to make writing education broadly accessible to people. So I would like to make humanities education of the highest order broadly accessible to people. And I also want to teach them how to write and I’m going to try to crack the online university accreditation problem. And so part of the money that or a substantial proportion of the money that is being donated to me, let’s say or is being offered to me by my monthly supporters. So that’s all of you people is going to be going to projects exactly like that. And the reason for that is, is that what the hell else would I do with the money? You know, I mean, to me, money is a tool. It’s not it’s not the means whereby you develop a luxurious lifestyle and spend your time burning yourself half to death in the sun in the Caribbean snorting cocaine and chasing hookers, you know, it’s just that’s just not in the cards for me. And, and so I want to devote it towards the sorts of things that I’ve already been pursuing, except on a broader scale. And so, you know, and I think of people like Elon Musk to not that I’m comparing myself to Elon Musk, but I mean, he has plenty of money. And I mean, you really somebody’s got to have the damn money. It might as well be people who have the kind of vision that people like he does have, because maybe they’ll do something good for the world. I mean, I hope is giga factories produce batteries like mad so that we can start to make alternative energy sources economically viable and maybe reduce our dependence on oil and maybe get ourselves out from underneath the thumb of the Saudi Arabs. That would be a good thing. So the monetary issue, it’s quite interesting. It’s like it is not that you have the money, it’s what you do with it. And so anyways, those are some of my plans. And that isn’t all of them, because I’m going to come up with a bunch more plans and I’m going to try to implement them as rapidly as I possibly can. I’ve put my clinical practice on hiatus for the next three months so that I have a chance to think and I’ve requested that the university advance my sabbatical by one year. So I should have about a year to think about what I should be doing with YouTube and how I can be promoting broad scale public education of the highest quality. And that’s a really fun problem to solve. And the fact that I’m being supported by all of you people on Patreon makes the probability that I’ll be able to devote my time to that much higher. So that’s what I’m going to do with it. I’m going to do the best things I can possibly think of to do with it. And hopefully that’ll work. And so far it seems to be going well. So yeah, I mean, I’ve been taken aback quite a bit by the… I mean, it’s not surprising that, you know, the people who’ve been trying to take me down, let’s say, are squawking and bitching because I happen to be generating a fairly reasonable income from this. Although I don’t think about it as an income, as I already said. I think about it as a toolkit for pursuing more interesting things. It’s like, if that’s the best they can do with regards to continuing to tarnish my name, well then let them go right ahead about that. And I think the proof is in the outcome. And like the biblical series, and that’s a direct consequence of the Patreon support, that seems to be going like mad. I think, you know, about 500,000 people have watched the video so far with another, who knows, tens of thousands of people listening to the podcasts. And that’s just a bloody miracle that that many people would be interested in what I consider the fundamental foundation for any true humanities education. So great, we’ll build from there. And so that’s what I’m going to do with the money. So, and if people don’t like that, then they don’t have to donate, or they don’t have to subscribe. It’s hardly like it’s mandatory. So anyways, I’ll stop with that and I’ll get to another question, or a question, another question. Here’s one that got 264 votes so far. Is the belief in something more than experienced reality unreasonable? Okay, so I want to address that question, technically, to begin with. Because one of the things that you want to do when someone asks you a question is that you want to take a look at the question. Because the question boxes you in in a certain way. And if you’re going to answer the question, you have to make sure that you’ve properly processed the structure of the question. So let’s look at this one. Is the belief in something more than experienced reality unreasonable? And so then I’m going to go Socratic on this and say, well, it depends on what you mean by belief, experienced reality, something more and unreasonable. And, and see, the problem is, you can’t really answer a question like that unless you delve into the definitions. So let’s say, well, what do you mean by experienced reality? Do you mean that which is directly grippable by the senses? Well, then I would say, well, do you believe in numbers? Because numbers aren’t directly experienceable. But obviously, they’re real, if you define reality as the use of concepts that give you grip and power in the world. And I think because I’m a pragmatist in part, I mean, part of the way that I define something as real is whether or not it has functional, operative status in the world. And so the belief in something more than experienced reality is obviously clearly reasonable, if you regard abstractions as something more than experienced reality. And that brings up another issue. And the issue is whether or not abstractions are even more real than experienced reality. And I would say often they are because otherwise abstraction wouldn’t work. So it’s definitely not unreasonable. And then you do you mean, merely subjectively experienced reality? Or do you mean the kind of reality that can be experienced by multiple people at the same time? Because that’s also different that the latter is more in the domain of scientific inquiry. And I think the problem with belief in subjectively experienced reality is not so much that what you experience subjectively isn’t real is that you can get the categories wrong. You know, dreams are real, but they’re not the same kind of real as things in the outside world that other people can experience. And to conflate the two or to failure failed to distinguish between them is a form of insanity. But that doesn’t mean that both of them aren’t real. So the simple answer to the question is the belief is the belief in something more than experienced reality unreasonable is no, but it depends on it depends on your specific definitions of all those terms and those sorts of things really matter. Okay, Bob Asbury says, I’m a 58 year old American redneck who never went to college a day in his life. But I feel like I’m getting a world class education every day. Thank you, Dr. Peterson. You are very cool. Well, thank you. I don’t know how cool I am exactly. But I’m I tell you, man, and this is the dead truth. I am absolutely thrilled that I have the opportunity to provide educational resources to people all over the world. It’s a dream, you know, really, I mean, it’s an absolute privilege. So when I get letters from people like you, very, very frequently from all over the world, you know, and the fact that now we have the technology to allow people in principle to have a world class university education is mind boggling. And here’s something I think is absolutely comical. And I’ve been pursuing this with a group of people that I’ve been discussing. I’ve been having intense discussions with some in Silicon Valley and some in Montreal and some in Toronto. You know, here’s the university situation in many ways. Number one, they’re putting students in debt in a tremendous way in the United States over because of overpriced education. They don’t let the students declare bankruptcy because of the debt. And so it’s basically indentured servitude. And so then students come out of university indebted heavily at the time of their life when they should be relatively free of financial burdens so that they can be creative and entrepreneurial because you’re going to do that when you’re young, generally speaking. Then the universities have become administratively top heavy and and stultified because of that. Then they’ve abandoned their commitment to the humanities, right? Then they’re not utilizing modern technology to extend their reach as broadly as they possibly could. Then they’ve they’ve in some sense abandoned their responsibility to do accrediting properly and devalued the value of the degree because they treat their students like consumers and inflate the grade currency. So to me, that’s a perfect storm of error. And so I see an opportunity emerging right now where the intellectual property that’s related to the true humanities, and that would be at least in part the Western cultural canon, could just be taken out of the university’s grip and provided to people in high quality form online. And if I can crack how to teach people to write and then also to figure out the accreditation problem, which I don’t think is a it’s not an overwhelmingly complex problem. It’s complex, but not overwhelmingly. Then there’s no reason that the university can’t move to can’t move online. And I would say the true university exists where people are pursuing education because they bloody well want to get educated, because they know that being sharp and articulate and historically informed and philosophically wise and all of that makes their lives better, makes them better citizens, makes them more responsible. And so I want to follow the university where it goes. And as far as I’m concerned, the university is where people want to listen to wisdom. And I’m going to try to dispense wisdom to the degree that I’m fortunate enough to have access to it. So anyways, Bob, like I’m thrilled that I can be of service to you. And it’s a real privilege. And so and we’re going to do more of that. So. All right. So another question. Am I feeling all right? How is my health? Well, that’s a good question. I’ve had I’ve had a history of depression, as some of you may know, and it’s a plague in my family. It goes back many generations and also has afflicted one of my children quite badly. But we are figuring this out. And I’m actually feeling pretty good right now. For the first time in about seven or eight months, I’m really looking forward to the future again. And I’m getting my energy back. And when I have energy, I have a lot of energy. And so and because I put my clinical practice on hiatus and because I’ve applied for sabbatical and I’m going to have some time and because of this massive construction project that I’ve been engaged in in my house, because I put a basically a Native American longhouse on the ceiling of my house, believe it or not. Maybe one day I’ll walk you through that if you’d be interested. I’m going to have a lot of time and I’m finishing a book. It’s due on June 5. It’s called 12 Rules for Life, an Antidote for Chaos. And that’s just about done. And it’ll be out January 9, I think 2018. Then, you know, that’s going to clear up an awful lot of time for me. And so my health is good. I’ve lost about 50 pounds because I’ve stopped eating carbohydrates almost completely. And so that’s bloody unbelievable. I’m back down to the weight I was when I was 30. And I think that I’m going to get on top of my health problems. And my daughter, who’s had extraordinarily serious health problems, including two hip, like a hip replacement when she was 16 and an ankle replacement when she was also 16, she walked around on two broken legs for a whole year in excruciating agony. Like she’s figured a lot of this out and she’s off her anti or her immune suppressant medication and all sorts of other things. So it’s a painstaking process. And I’ve been eating nothing, literally nothing but beef, chicken and salad for a whole month trying to figure out where my dietary sensitivities are. But so anyways, that’s a long answer to your question. But I’m feeling pretty damn good. And if I can got a few more administrative matters that are chasing me around, but I think I can get on top of them. And then, man, I’m going to be back at it. And that’s going to be real fun. So, okay, let’s see what else we got for live questions here. What would I say the male to female ratio is in my classrooms currently? Oh, yeah, there’s no men, man. It’s like 80% women in my psychology classes. And in 10 years, there won’t be a man left in the humanities, unless they go online, in which case maybe it’ll only be men. Because, you know, I don’t think so. But most of the people who are watching my videos are men. It’s about 90 91%, actually. So, yeah, the men are bailing out of university, like, it’s just unbelievable. And that’s been happening for about 30 years. So, it might if things don’t change, and if the present linear trends continue, then yeah, it’ll be all women by by 2025. And that’s really not good. Not that it’s good, not good, because there’s so many women. It’s not good because there aren’t any men. And obviously, that’s not good for the women either, because I don’t know where they’re going to find their men. So, all right. What are your thoughts on the book of Revelation in the Bible? It freaked me out when I was a kid. Yeah, well, I should say so, man. If you’re an adult and you read it, it should freak you out. What are my thoughts on it? I think it’s an I think it’s the account of a hallucinogenic trip, probably, probably what would you call caused by psilocybin mushrooms, maybe, maybe emanate a muscaria, which were was identified by a guy named the last song, about 25, 30 years ago, maybe even more as the Soma of the ancient Hindus. So, yeah, I think it’s a hallucinogenic. I think it’s an account of an extremely profound hallucinogenic trip. That’s what I think. I mean, what it means, that’s a whole different issue. And I’m going to try to address that when and if I get to the book of Revelations in my biblical series, but that’s going to be probably a couple of years in the future at the rate I’m going because it’s taken me three weeks to get through Genesis one. So, all right, Violet Irwin says, I look great. Well, Violet, your avatar looks great, too. And well, thank you. Part of the reason I look great, I think, to the degree that I do is that I have a very good camera that my son helped me purchase. And so it makes me look a hell of a lot better than I actually do look. So anyways, I appreciate the sentiment. All right. Do I see any downside to a child being raised by its father in the first three years while the mother is working full time? Are there psychological consequences for the child to be expected? I think that depends very much on the individual situation in the family. I’m not convinced that the art of infant care is something that a tremendous number of males are highly specialized for. I think you have to have a feminine temperament and that would mean to do it, to do infant care properly. And that would mean that you have to be at least very agreeable. And maybe you also have to be relatively high in neuroticism so that you respond rapidly enough to the distress cries of the child. And I also think that in order to bond the way that you have to bond when you’re a mother who’s taking care of an infant, let’s say under nine months, I think some of the biochemical transformations that accompany pregnancy, childbirth and lactation probably set up the proper biochemical, underlying biochemical and psychological milieu that makes the kind of bonding that increases the probability of high level care possible in those few months. That doesn’t mean that men can’t do it. But I would also say in my experience that it’s kind of hard on men. It’s a complicated issue, but one of the things I experienced, and I really like kids, I love kids and they generally respond really well to me. Babies, they’re a different matter because I don’t really feel fully qualified to give a baby what it needs. And I guess that’s partly because breastfeeding at least so far is firmly in the domain of women. In fact, it’s one of the ways by which you could define women if we were actually into that sort of thing. So I think that there are circumstances under which that’s a good thing to do. And actually, I had a business partner, have a business partner who’s helped me develop the self-authoring suite, very smart guy named Daniel Higgins, who is a MIT engineer and also has a PhD in psychology from Harvard. And he spent a lot of his time taking care of his kids when they were little. His wife was going to medical school and he’s a pretty masculine guy. And it was hard on him, man, like it just about killed him. And I mean, they didn’t have a lot of money and she was going through medical school and they had two and then three little kids. And so, you know, that’s a very busy time of life. But he did it and he did a great job and he has wonderful kids and he paid a hell of a lot of attention to them. But it was not easy. It was not easy for him. And you know, my wife, when I watched her with our little kids, when they were infants in particular, she had an affinity and a proclivity for that sort of thing. And my wife is actually a pretty tough cookie. And I wouldn’t say overwhelmingly feminine by temperament. She’s kind of disagreeable and quite emotionally stable rather than being agreeable and high in neuroticism, which is a more typical set of feminine traits. She was so damn good with infants. It was just unbelievable. You know, and I do think that the biochemical transformations that accompany pregnancy and so forth do facilitate that. I’ve also seen that with my sister, who is quite a masculine woman and very adventurous man. She smuggled Mercedes trucks across the Sahara desert in the 1980s from France down through the whole Sahara into Niger and babysat orphan gorillas in the Congo and ran safaris through Africa. Like she’s a very adventurous person and she took a lot after my father, who’s quite a tough guy. But you know, she had kids when she was 40, luckily for her. And man, she turned into my mother overnight. And I really like my mother, you know, like that’s no insult, believe me. She’s a really great person, very, very caring, very kind, probably to her own detriment. But to see my sister transform into this tough, masculine person, who I respected a lot for exactly those virtues into mom was really quite remarkable. And to think that there’s nothing biochemical about that is really, I think, quite naive and pointless. Because of course, there’s something biochemical about birth and child care, for God’s sake, has been going on ever since sexual dimorphism emerged on the evolutionary landscape. So that’s that. Do you think that boys in our society are in need of a concrete transition to manhood, like a modern-day initiation ritual? It probably doesn’t matter whether they’re in need of it. They’re not going to get it because you can’t really just invent something like that, right? It has to be. It’s something that evolves over a very long period of time. I do think that what they need, and I’ve really observed this, interestingly enough, in the response that young men have had to my public talks, and probably on YouTube as well, with regards to what I’ve been saying. Because young people have been fed this pablum since the 1960s, that the pathway to happiness and freedom in life, first of all, that those are the things that you’re really supposed to be after, especially happiness, and that they’re to be found in rights and untrammeled freedom. And that’s completely one-sided because for every right there is a corresponding responsibility. Freedom can be chaos just as much as it can be blissful lack of responsibility and the ability to make hedonic choices one after another. I’ve been speaking to young men in particular, and they’re the ones who keep coming to my talks, by the way, about truth in action and responsibility. They’re eating that up. I can see their eyes light up, which is so cool. I’ve been talking to the people who ran for the Conservative leadership in Canada about the fact that when I go talk to male audiences, especially young men, that they’re unbelievably enthralled by any discussion of genuine responsibility and truth. And so the Conservatives have something to offer young men, and I would say that’s roughly akin to an initiation. You know, the idea is that at some point you have to tell young men, look, grow the hell up, take on some responsibility, straighten yourself out, act honestly, make yourself into an admirable and powerful character, not because you’re domesticated like a bloody puppy or a sheep, but because that’s the way to genuine authority and influence and the capacity to do great good in the world. And that’s like an exciting call to adventure. And I think that that’s a modern, sophisticated, intellectual equivalent to something like an initiation ritual. And so I hope to be promoting that message more and more. I was speaking to a member of, one of the leaders of the Indigenous communities in Canada today about maybe getting the high school version of the Future Authoring program. That Future Authoring program, I’ve talked about that a bit before on Patreon. You know, it’s a program at selfauthoring.com that enables people to generate a vision for their lives and also to detail out that vision and make a plan of it. I think most of you Patreon subscribers have got links to that already and usernames and passwords and has a really remarkably positive effect on young men who are disenfranchised, who tend to be ethnic minorities. And so initiating them into the idea that they need to take control of their own destiny and that that’s the proper pathway to authority and stature and not self-esteem, but self-respect, which is a completely different thing, I think is a reasonable modern equivalent to initiation ritual. Okay, so let’s take another live question here. Brennan B says, I’m halfway finished cleaning my disaster of a room. Well, I’ve got something terrible to admit, people, because at the moment I’m sitting in my room and it isn’t clean. The back behind here where you can see is clean, but because the events of the last seven months have been so overwhelming, I would say that there’s a certain amount of chaos that has invaded my immediate environment. But I have plans to get this place sorted out in a serious way over the next few months from bottom of the house to the top. So halfway Brennan, that’s a good deal. And there’s real psychological consequences to that, you know, because if you’re interested in this, everyone, here’s a really sophisticated book you could read. You could take a look at Carl Jung’s last book, which was called Mysterium Conjunctionis, so that it’s Latin. Now, the first part of that book is really kind of like a dictionary of symbolism. He wrote it, I think, in his 80s, and I think he was trying to get down as much as he could of what he knew as fast as he could. So the first part is a dictionary of symbolism, and it’s very difficult to read unless you’ve read a lot of his other writing. But the second part of the book, which I think is an absolute work of genius, Jung makes a couple of propositions about higher order moral development. And so I’m going to run through them really quickly and describe their symbolism. So he said the first thing that you want to do if you’re going to get your act together, and this is like an extension of the Piagetian notion of stages of moral development. He said, you know, you have an intellect and you have a set of emotions and motivations, and you can conceptualize the intellect symbolically as masculine and the emotions and motivations symbolically as feminine. And so the first conjunction, which is the bringing together of the masculine and feminine to make a complete being, would be the union of the intellect with the emotions and motivations so that you’re not fighting your deeper motivations with your thought. You know, that they’re all moving in the same direction. And so that would be conjunction number one. And so then that makes you united in terms of your capability for subjective experience. You’re all pointing in, all of that’s pointing in the same direction. And it’s one of the things that can make you unstoppable because you’re not at war with yourself then. And so the next conjunction, as far as he was concerned, was also expressed symbolically. So now you have the masculine union of intellect, emotion, and motivation. And then you have the body, which you can now conceptualize as feminine. So then you bring those together in a creative union. And so that means that you start to act out what you think and feel so that there’s no paradoxical relationship or enacted lie, they call that a performative contradiction, between what you think and feel and what you do. And so because part of being honest is that you act out what you believe. And so that’s great. So that’s the next conjunction. And so that makes you integrated in mind and emotion and motivation and in enacted in act and routine and body. Great. So that’s another way of bringing yourself together. But the third conjunction is the one that’s most interesting. And it’s also the one that’s most difficult to understand. And that conjunction occurs when you take this unified mind body continuum, let’s say, and you think, well, wait a second, there’s an element of that missing. And that’s my experience, my experience of the world that’s hypothetically outside of me, or that’s hypothetically not me. Now, you know, your experience of the world outside, that’s not you, is a very strange experience, because it isn’t self evident, for example, to me that my wife is not me. We spend so much time together. She’s in my experience so much. We have a joint past and a present and a joint future. The same with my kids and the people who are close to me. It isn’t obvious to me that my wife is less valuable to me than I am to me. She’s certainly more valuable to me than some arbitrary body part like an arm or a leg, you know, and people are perfectly capable of making gestures of physical self sacrifice in order to rescue people that they love. And so just exactly who you are and just exactly who the external world is not clear at all. And so the last conjunction for Jung was the eradication of the distinction between your subjective experience as you and your objective experience as you, which is to say, for example, that if I’m walking down the street and I encounter someone in trouble, and that trouble calls to me as something that I could conceivably do something about, the fact that that trouble isn’t set right in the world is actually, is actually, because it’s part of my experience, is actually my problem. Now that doesn’t mean that it’s my fault, although it might be, might not be, perhaps it isn’t, but it might be. But it’s still my responsibility and it’s reasonable to consider the disruption in my experiential field than encountering someone who is in trouble produces as an actual disturbance in my being. And then to act as if it’s my responsibility to rectify that disturbance. Now the problem, of course, comes in that you don’t know how. So if you run across a street alcoholic, for example, in the middle of the day and they’re stumbling wrong blindly and maybe they’re schizophrenic to boot and mumbling terrible things, you know, it’s going to disturb you and it would be good if you could set it right, but you don’t know how. So you can’t, you have to avoid it. But that doesn’t mean that that isn’t you because it’s also you. And I think that’s why in the story of the Buddha, for example, like the Buddha was basically offered when he became enlightened the chance to remain in nirvana, right, as a uniquely enlightened singular individual. And he actually regret, rejected that offer because it was his deepest conviction that it was, it was not possible for one person to be enlightened and to be in a state of nirvana if everyone wasn’t in that state at the same time. And so he had to move himself out of that utopian experience of nirvana and come back to the normal world, let’s say, and to try to raise the consciousness of people around him because he regarded that as unfinished business that was his personally. And so now I don’t remember who was I. Oh yes, that’s all about cleaning your room. Yes, exactly. So well, the thing is, is that your room isn’t not you. It’s actually you. And so there’s no difference between the chaos that’s outside of you in a place that you spend as much time as you spend in your room and the chaos that’s internal psychologically. And, you know, one of the things I often do when I’m first dealing with my clients as a simple exercise in setting themselves right psychologically is to have them start to clean up their external environment because people know how to do that. And there’s no difference between that and putting yourself straight psychologically, as you know, when you do something as serious as starting to clean up your room. And so, Brendan, the other thing I would say is like finish cleaning your room and then see if you can make it beautiful, because that’s also unbelievably useful, man, because it teaches you about beauty. And so then you can make one room in your house beautiful and then it’s organized and together and beautiful. And so once you do that with one room, like you’re way wiser than you were before, and you’ve actually accomplished something concrete that’s solid and incontrovertible that you can point to that strengthens your character. And then maybe you can do the same thing with your whole house. And then maybe you can do that with more with the world around you. And believe me, if you start doing that, you’re not going to be sitting around wondering what the meaning of life is, because you’re going to find it in that. So, all right. So let’s see. Max Amok says, thoughts on the Jews. Well, that’s complicated. Most of my friends are Jews, which is pretty interesting, you know, and when I grew up in northern Alberta and there were no Jews up there at all. So coming out to eastern Canada, especially in Montreal, there were lots of Jewish people there. And I made friends with lots of them. And then in Toronto, like, and I think part of the reason that so many of my friends have been Jewish is because the Jews have, you know, and I’m obviously speaking in a very general sense, is they have a rich intellectual life and tremendous respect for intellectual pursuits. And so we have a natural affinity. And so, you know, more power to them as far as I’m concerned. There’s a fairer bit of evidence, especially with regards to the Ashkenazi Jews, that their average IQs are about 15 points higher than the general population, which accounts in part for the radical over-representation among Nobel Prize winners, for example, and also in positions of, let’s say, authority and responsibility in many different domains. And it’s like, man, I’m not unhappy about successful people. It’s like, as I said, it’s the same in relationship to money. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not that you have a position of authority, and I’m not going to say power, because power and authority aren’t the same thing. But if you have a position of authority, what matters is what you do with it. And so if competent people occupy positions of authority, then more power to them. That’s lucky for the rest of us, I’ll tell you that. And I think, you know, I’ve often thought this about the Jews too, is that if you’re going to be a minority, you should at least have the decency to fail. And I think that part of the reason, because, you know, then, well, you’re around and you’re annoying because you’re a minority, and, you know, because people are fundamentally ethnocentric, and all human beings are like that. But if a minority fails, then, well, you can say, well, at least they failed, and, you know, that maybe allows you not to hate them quite as much. But the Jews have this annoying proclivity, where they go as a minority to become extremely successful. And of course, nobody can stand that. And so that’s a huge part of what accounts for anti-Semitism, which I regard as an absolutely, I know, abysmal and, and, and what would you call it, reprehensible, a priori stance, you know, so that’s some of my thoughts about them anyways. All right, next. How did I meet my wife and why did you marry her? Well, I’ll tell you one of the earliest memories I have of my wife, because it kind of tells me what she’s like. So she lived across the street from me in this little town that we grew up in called Fairview, Alberta. And I think I fell in love with her the moment that I saw her. And although I don’t think the feeling was necessarily mutual. And so I was about like seven, I think something like that. So I’ve known her for like 48 years. And here’s one memory, because this is the two memories I’ll tell you. So one of them was when I was in grade five, I got glasses. And I was pretty proud of these glasses. They were horn rimmed glasses, you know, and I was pretty proud of them. And I went out and I, she came out onto the street and she looked at my glasses. I said, what do you think of those? And she says, I think you look really funny in those. And then she pointed at me and ran into her house. And it was like 20 years later that she finally told me that she had always wanted to have glasses and she was jealous about it. But you know, she decided she’d give me a good teasing and a good poke. And so that, and then we used to play croquet together. And one of the great delights she would take is, I don’t know if you’ve ever played croquet, but you know, you’re sometimes the one person’s ball that they’re hitting and another person’s will come together. And then you can stand on your ball and you can nail it with the croquet mallet and like knock the other person’s croquet ball halfway down the block. And she used to think that was pretty damn amusing when she did it to me. So, and let’s see, what else can I remember about her? That was, but yeah, I mean, I told my dad when I was in grade five, I was sitting with her on this big armchair in our living room and she was sitting beside me on the armchair, which I was pretty damn thrilled about. And she was being chased around by all the boys in the school at that point, even though she, that was in the elementary school, you know, so she was very hot property, let’s say among the elementary school boys. And so I was pretty happy to have her sit by me. And so anyway, she left and I told my dad that I was going to marry her. And I remember that. And he told that story at our wedding, which was quite cute. And then I’ll tell you one more story, which I really think is funny. This is so funny. So we, we were friends when we were kids and then, you know, girls mature faster than boys and she’s a year older than me because I skipped a grade in school. We were in the same grade in school. And so, you know, when she had about 13 or so, we kind of went our separate ways a little bit, although we still remain friends. And she had a paper route and I took her paper route over when she hit 13 or so. And I like quadrupled the damn thing, I think, which I think is pretty funny. But I also delivered paper to her house. And one day she was there with another of her friends and who’s kind of a cute chick too. And I liked her quite a bit. And they were sitting around talking about, like talking about how they were feminists, roughly speaking. And they were talking when I walked in about the fact that neither of them were going to take their husband’s last name when they got married. And Tammy, my wife, I think said to her friend, well, that really means I’m going to have to find some wimp and marry him. And she turned around and looked at me and smiled evilly and said, Hey, Jordan, do you want to get married? And of course, I’d heard the whole conversation and you know, she knew I liked her obviously. And so that was a nice little comical dig. She has a very vicious sense of humor. And you know, I kind of laughed and I thought, ha ha ha, okay, yeah, okay, so funny. So then when we were, I was like 28 and she had come to see me in Montreal. And we were talking about getting married. And she said, we were talking about what that would mean. And then we started talking about what the name would be. And I said, Hey, I’ve got a story for you. Remember when you were 13 and I was delivering papers to your house? And because I suggested that she take my last name and she wasn’t so sure about that. And I said, well, you remember that little story that little episode that we had when you were 13 and I came over to your house and you told me that you weren’t going to take your husband’s name and that you’re going to have to marry some wimp? Said, okay, well, you know, here I am. But you know, if we’re going to get married, you’re going to take my name. And that’s the end of that argument. And so, you know, she had the good graces to go along with that. But that was actually, you know, extraordinarily comical and ridiculous. So, so yeah, so that’s a good one. What’s my advice to young men seeking a woman for marriage and family? Yeah. Well, okay, fine. That’s the same quest. Second question. That’s that’s pretty straightforward, man. I mean, you can’t eliminate the necessity of being attracted to one another. That’s important. And that’s mysterious, you know. So, for example, here’s a funny thing. If you one of the things we know that attracts people to one another is bilateral symmetry. And so if you take men and you rank them by the symmetry of their faces, and then you give the asymmetrical men t-shirts to wear clean t-shirts for a day and the symmetrical men clean t-shirts to wear for a day, and then you give the t-shirts to women and you have them rate the odor, the women rate the odor of the symmetrical men as more attractive than the odor of the asymmetrical men. And then, and there are other factors that determine sexual attractiveness that are based on biological factors that are so that deeply embedded in terms of smell, for example. So women also tend to not be sexually attracted to the to the scent of men who’s who have, if I remember correctly, it’s our age factors that would make for potential trouble in childbirth. And the often the reason that the women give for not preferring the scent of those men is that they smell too much like their brother, something like that. So there’s weird mysterious things that determine whether or not people are sexually and physically attracted to each other. And I think it’s very important that that’s part of a marital relationship. The next most important thing is trust, man. It’s like there’s no marriage that’s successful without trust. You guys, you’ve got to tell each other the truth. And one of the reasons that Jung believed that marriage as an oath and a carljung as a bond was necessary. It’s really wise. It’s like, you know, telling the truth to someone is no simple thing, because there’s a bunch of things about all of us that are terrible and weak and reprehensible and shameful and all of those things. And they kind of have to be brought out into the open and dealt with. And you’re not going to tell the truth about yourself to someone who can run away screaming when you reveal who you are. And so the marriage bond is something like, OK, here’s the deal. I’m going to handcuff myself to you and you’re going to handcuff yourself to me. And then we’re going to tell each other the truth. And neither of us are going to get to run away. And so once we know the truth, then we’re either going to live together in mutual torment or we’re going to try to deal with that truth and straighten ourselves out and straighten ourselves out jointly. And that’s going to make us more powerful and more resilient and more and deeper and wiser as we progress together through life. And I think that’s absolutely brilliant, because if you leave the back door open, man, you’re going to use it. That’s for sure. And the oath is there. And this was Jung’s commentary on the spiritualization of the human pair born by Christian marriage, for example, which emphasized the the what would you call it, the subordination of both members of the marital union to a higher order personality that was embodied in the figure of the logos. So the idea is that in the Christian marriage, for example, the man isn’t the boss and the woman isn’t the boss. The boss is the mutual personality composed by the seeking of truth in both of them. And that’s conceptualized as their joint subjugation to the logos. And that is absolutely dead on, man. It’s like the ruler of your marital life should be your vow to tell each other the truth. Because like in hard times during your life, when you’ve done something stupid and idiotic that might take you down and you don’t have anybody that you can turn to, you know, if you have a partner that you can trust, you can go say, hey, you know, I made a big financial mistake, man, and it’s really torturing me and I feel like a complete idiot and it’s really dangerous. And the person there is going to help you figure out what to do about it. And they’re going to know that when they make a stupid mistake and they’re bloody well going to, that they can come and talk to you and that you guys are going to work your way through it. And that’s a big deal. And there’s a couple of things our culture gets really wrong. And one is it devalues marriage. That’s really a very bad idea because marriage is marriage is like a third of your life and maybe more. And kids are a third of your life. And your life outside of marriage and kids is a third of your life, you know, approximately speaking. And to miss any of that is a massive, massive mistake. Now, having said that, I will also say that for some people, missing one or more of those is necessary because they have a reason. You know, maybe they’re brilliantly creative artists and they need to devote themselves entirely to their career or they’re outstanding in some way. And so they need, they can justify the sacrifice of one part of that try out of being to another part. But for, but generally speaking, it’s a very dangerous thing and it shouldn’t be done. And also kids get an absolutely terrible rap, you know, because kids are delightful. If they’re well behaved. One of the chapters in my new book is called Don’t Let Your Children Do Anything That Makes You Dislike Them. And you can do that, especially if you discuss it thoroughly with your spouse. You’re the person that’s helping you discipline the kids. And children are the best company because they’re really enthusiastic about everything. They love doing new things. They really love you. So they’re happy that you’re around. All you have to do is make sure they’re not too hot and they’re not too cold and they’ve had something to eat and they’re not too tired and you don’t expect them to stay engaged in something for longer than they can manage. Because we used to take our kids when they were little out to restaurants, for example, and they could sit there no problem and behave really nicely when they were two and three. But they couldn’t do it for more than about 45 minutes. You can’t push your luck. But I also noticed with little kids is that they got antsy and unreasonable about five to 10 minutes before the adults did too. It’s just the adults were too stupid to notice. The kids would notice right away. So back to marriage. Well you look for someone that you’re attracted to, that you love, and then you look for someone that you can bloody well trust. And then you tell them the truth. And that way maybe you can get through life and you can have someone to weave the rope of your being with and together to make your joint rope stronger. And you can have some continuity in your narrative. And you can have children and then you can have grandchildren. Like you can have a life, man. And there’s nothing. You’re so fortunate if you can manage that. And so, okay, so there’s that one. So what’s my advice to young men seeking a woman for marriage and family? Yeah, well. And also, you know, marry someone you think would be a good mother and that has enough sense generally speaking to know that she wants children. Now some women don’t want children. And fair enough. And some women perhaps shouldn’t have children. That’s also possible. But the general rule of thumb is especially once a woman’s, you know, in her mid-20s, if she doesn’t know that she wants children or won’t admit it unless she has a viciously important reason, then she’s not oriented properly psychologically. She doesn’t know what’s important in life. Now that might also be the case with you. And it probably is. But as a rule of thumb, that’s a really good one. So, okay, another more spontaneous one here. All right. On the other hand, what’s your advice to high achieving females for finding a man? That’s a tough one. Do I want to answer that question? See, the problem that high achieving women have, and I’ve dealt with a lot of them, you know, because one of the first of all, I have a clinical practice, as most of you may know, and I also had a consulting practice. And one of the things they were kind of mixed. But one of the things I did for a long time was I served as a consultant to people who were spectacularly successful in their careers because I worked with an agency whose sales pitch basically to the companies or the law firms, because it was mostly law firms, was give us your really high achieving people and we’ll help them sort out their lives even more and make them even more productive and valuable than they already are. You don’t need much of an increment in the value of someone who’s high achieving to justify that from an economic perspective. So I worked with a lot of high achieving people for like 15 years and I still do it to some degree. And a lot of them were women and a lot of them were female lawyers and they were very interesting to work with because most of them were extremely attractive and they were very, very smart and they were tough. And, you know, they were very demanding when it came to a mate because women do tend to mate across and up dominance hierarchies. And if you’re like very attractive and you’re very intelligent and you make a lot of money and you’re very competent, it’s like, there’s not a lot that’s across and there’s even less that’s up. And so that’s hard on women. And it actually, the way that that actually works out is that, especially with regards to IQ for women, is that the higher the IQ that a woman has, the less likely it is that she’s going to find a partner. And the effect is actually quite pronounced. And so that’s pretty rough. What’s my advice? Well, the first piece of advice probably would be don’t pretend that it’s not important, because it is important. And the next piece of advice I would say is, and you know, this is practically speaking, is it’s a lot easier now for people to find at least a potential partner than it was 20 years ago because you have this tremendous technology that’s available with regards to opening up the dating market. And I would say finding the right mate is like finding the next good career move. I know that’s not a great analogy, but a huge part of that is just persistence. You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince. You know, I suppose that’s one way of thinking about it. And then I guess I would also say, that’s really about the best I can do, man. It’s a really complicated question. Look for someone that loves you and that wants to take care of you and that is oriented to some degree towards the same things that you are. That’s also helpful. But apart from the earlier things I said about attractiveness and truth, you know, that’s about the best I can do. It’s a very complicated question. Okay, Kenny Lauderdale. Yeah, this is a good one. How do I get over my fear of driving? I’m an adult and have no driver’s license and it’s crippling me. Man, that’s a really important question. A lot of young adults, and I don’t know if you’re young or not, don’t have their driver’s license and I think that’s a catastrophe because it’s a real, first of all, it’s economically suicidal because it makes it very difficult. Not if you live in New York City or somewhere like that, but you know, if you live anywhere else, you sacrifice your autonomy by not being able to drive. Look, Kenny, I would say take a driver’s course and do it badly. Who cares if you have to do it five times? You know, go sit in a car for a while and pretend to drive like you’re a kid and then have them drive you around the block and like take it slow. Maybe it’s something that’ll take you a whole year to learn, but you’re actually in a really good situation to advance yourself psychologically because you know that there’s something you should do that’s learned to drive, right? That’s challenging and you know that it’s interfering with you. So you have a great opportunity right there to overcome that and to improve your psychological functioning. And I would say this is associated with the tarot card, the fool. If you look up that card, you’ll see that the fool is often a young man who’s about, in a sunny day, who’s about to step off a cliff. You think, well, is that a good card or a bad card? It’s like the symbolic meaning of that card is that in order to make progress, you have to be a fool. And you know, you’ve already admitted you’re a fool. You’re afraid and you don’t know how to drive. Like, you know, how pathetic. Ha ha ha. Yeah, OK. The thing is, you accept that is you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re going to be a fool while you’re doing it. And but you’re nowhere near as much of a fool doing it as a fool than you are as a fool avoiding it. So I would say go find someone professionally that can teach you how to drive. Find someone that’s patient. Tell them that you’re nervous about it. Start in a parking lot that’s empty on an early Sunday morning, you know, where you’re not going to kill anybody and get your damn driver’s license. It’ll do you an unbelievably it’ll do you it’ll do you a tremendous amount of good. So so great. You know, you say there’s this old alchemical saying that Carl Jung was very fond of, which is insterquiline is in the tour, which means something like in filth that will be found. Or it means what you most want is where you to be found, where you least want to look. And you know where you least want to look, man, you don’t want to look at your ability as a driver. So go fix that and it’ll really help you out, man. Tanner Spell, any suggestions for someone about to start university? Yeah. See if you can find some professors, they’re going to be often going to be older people and often older guys who still know what the classic scholars knew, and stay away from the bloody postmodernists. Like you might want to take a course just so you know what that sort of thing is about. But see if you can find people who are literate, really literate, and who can teach you. And so what you do is you shop around, go to classes more than more classes than you can take, at least in the first couple of weeks of university, listen to the professors, and find out the ones that are telling you something that you really need to know, and then follow them and stick with them. So you have to search out your own path to be educated in university. The other thing I would say is make a schedule, treat university like it’s a full-time job. Make a schedule the first week of classes, put in your exams like in Google Calendar, put in your assignments, make a plan to get the assignments done. Start early because lots of kids end up by Thanksgiving their first semester and they get so damn far behind they can’t believe it because there’s a lot of work in university, a lot of reading, and then they bail out. Don’t make that mistake, man. It’s like it’s a full-time job and then you can go have fun at night, you know, and more power to you. Go have fun. Figure out what your responsibilities are, lay them out, and make a plan, and then stay on top of them, and then you’ll do yourself a great favour. With the majority of your audience being men, how would you characterize the few women that are generally interested in your videos? Does it mean their masculine side might be preeminent? I don’t know the answer to that. I mean, the thing, it’s a tough one because it turns out that my primary audience is on YouTube and YouTube seems to be a place that’s where men are hanging out more than women. Now, I don’t know why that is. It might be because men are slightly more interested in non-fiction and in ideas per se than women who are more interested in aesthetics and fiction. That’s what the personality data reveals. And so it might be that because YouTube is has kind of an emphasis on ideas per se and non-fiction ideas that men more gravitate towards it. Although that is a guess, believe me, because I don’t really understand it. Are the women who are watching me more masculine in their orientation? It’s possible. It’s possible. It’s not self-evident to me why that should be the case, though, because I also spend a lot of time talking about symbolic issues and aesthetics, which you’d think would be attractive to women. So I actually don’t know the answer to that. So what should I do if every time I voluntarily confront my problems, I get too overwhelmed with stress to make progress solving them? Oh, that’s a good one, man. Okay, so the first thing is take your problems. Like, let’s say that, let’s take the driving example. I’m too afraid to drive. Okay. Then you think, well, what exactly does driving consist of? Well, the first thing is, is that you have to establish some kind of relationship with a car. So you might think, well, you’re not too afraid to go online and do a little investigation into what cars are like, like what’s a good car and how do they work? And, you know, familiarize yourself with the car. And then that makes you a little less afraid. And then you think, well, maybe I’ll just go sit out in a car and put my hands on the steering wheel and, you know, just kind of accustom myself to the idea of being in the car and accustom myself in my imagination to drive around in the car. Maybe I’ll try some driving simulators online. And then the next thing is, well, maybe I can find someone I can trust to train me. And what we’ll do is, as I mentioned earlier, is we’ll go out to an empty parking lot on a Sunday morning and I’ll drive 15 feet and then stop and that’ll be good enough for the day. So what you want to do if you’re overwhelmed with your problems is you want to break the problems down. And you, and you do this by thinking strategically, you want to break the problems down into units that are small enough so that you can confront them and master them with a high degree of probability. And, you know, you can decompose almost every stressful problem into, so imagine that you have a stack of paper on your desk and there’s a bunch of monsters inside it that you don’t want to face, you know, like homework you haven’t done or taxes that you haven’t finished or, or, you know, trouble you’re having with a bureaucratic enterprise that you’d rather avoid. It’s like one of the things you can do is just the first day you might think, okay, Jesus, I want to avoid that. All right, well, would I be willing to take the papers downstairs and put them on the table and spend no more than 10 minutes just looking at them and organizing them? And you might add, then you ask yourself, well, would I do that? And if the answer is yes, you think, okay, that’ll be good enough for today. And then the thing is you’ve knocked on the dragon’s door, you know, and, and you’ve, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve eliminated the first part of the avoidance. And so then you’re on your way. And the next day you might think, well, you know, could I deal with the first page of that problem? And you think, well, I could at least look at it. And the trick is, and this is what behavioral psychologists do all the time, is identify the fear, break it down into its subcomponents, lay out a schedule for confronting the subcomponents, and don’t burden yourself more than you can tolerate. And man, you can make unbelievable progress that way. But you know, you have to be willing to give yourself credit for small achievements. And that’s fine, because consistent, small achievements add up incrementally across time into absolutely remarkable progress, because it starts to, you start to get like compound interest in it, on it. So yeah, so that’s what you should do. And look, if that doesn’t work, and you’re so overwhelmed that you’re just absolutely in stasis, then one of the things that you should consider is that maybe you have an anxiety disorder, maybe you’re depressed, like maybe things have just really collapsed in on you, and you have terrible problems, like, you know, maybe you’re sick, and you’re, you have an ill relative, and you’re in real financial trouble, and you’re unemployed. It’s like, that’s just too much. And so at that point, maybe you need to go talk to someone, and maybe you need to consider something like temporary anti-anxiety medication or antidepressant medication, and to sit down and strategize with someone about how you’re going to put your life back on track. And I would say also, if you’re in a situation like that, and you can’t find a therapist, then try the self-authoring program, because that’s what we designed it for. So, okay, another live one. Let’s see here. Um, I saw someone called the green bastard. I wanted to answer that question, but it flashed by real quick. So is that a reference to Bubbles wrestling persona? Just out of curiosity, I’m wondering if you’re a fellow Trailer Park Boys fan, because I, you know, I love the Trailer Park Boys, and because of my Western Canadian upbringing, I suppose. And so, but I missed your question, but I like your handle. So, okay, let’s see. Oh, Mohammed Hanif says, re-Islam, can I send you names of U.S. Canadian scholars who are grounded in Western culture and traditional Islam? You should reach out to them before I.N. Hersey. Sure, do it, man. Send it. Jordan.Peterson at utoronto.ca. I already talked to I.N. Hersey, Ali, by the way, and I’m going to post my discussion with her very soon, but I am, I’m interested in engaging in as broad a series of dialogues as possible. And so, if you’ve got some people you think are good and articulate and willing to talk, man, yeah, send their names, okay? Jordan.Peterson at utoronto.ca. Let’s see. Dr. Peterson, I was wondering if you have any advice for figuring out whether vengeance is ever a good thing or is it always bad? Oh, that’s a good one, man. Look, I have clients very frequently who have been seriously wronged by someone in their life, and maybe the wrongdoing is ongoing, and so, like, they’re often possessed by the desire for revenge, sometimes to homicidal levels. Okay, so then you’ve got to think about that really carefully, because, you know, you say, well, you should forgive people. It’s like, well, no, you should forgive people that repent, and you should forgive people because carrying the burden of the demand for vengeance with you and being resentful about that is really hard on you, and it can cripple you, and so it’s not a great move psychologically. But having said that, like, it’s not easy to distinguish the demand, the desire for vengeance, from the desire for justice, and part of the reason that we have a justice system is so that you can outsource your desire for vengeance to a system that alleviates your moral responsibility for going head-to-head with someone that’s wronged you. So it’s a really complicated question, and I would say I can’t answer it on a generic level. I’d have to say it depends on the particulars of your situation, but vengeance, the problem with vengeance, generally speaking, is that it produces feuds, like it spirals out of control. You know, I hit you, you hit me twice, I hit you four times, you stab me, you know, I kill your brother, you kill my family, you know, and then soon the whole world’s at war, and it’s something I think that the story of Cain and Abel really warns against, and I think part of the reason that we have a justice system is actually to stop people from taking vengeance on each other. So, you know, the demand… Remember years ago, Michael Dukakis, I think that was his name, he ran for president, and one of the things he did that was really wrong is that when he was governor of Massachusetts, he released this guy, I think his name was Willie, if I remember correctly, and once he was released he went out and raped someone, if I’ve got the story right, and Dukakis was asked on national TV, you know, how he would respond to something like that if someone had raped his wife, like someone who was released and raped his wife, you know, and the right response to that question is, you know, I’d like to rip the guy’s lungs out, and you know, maybe I’d stalk his house until I had the opportunity to do that, that’s what I would want to do, but because I’m a civilized person, and I understand the danger of that, I would cooperate with the justice system and do everything I could to ensure that the person was brought to justice, and then I would do my best to reconcile myself with that outcome, even though every cell in my body would be crying out for vengeance, that’s the right answer, but well, so I’ll leave the answer to that, I’ll leave it at that, so yeah, yeah, okay, let’s see, I’d like to take a good big five test, I’ve noticed there are many online, where can I find the most accurate test to take? Well, I would say wait three weeks or a month, because we’re going to release our version of the big five aspect scale, which is a scale that a student of mine, Colin DeYoung, developed while he was working in my lab, and it was partly generated by an idea that I had with another, my business partner, I mentioned earlier, Daniel Higgins, because we had talked for years about the necessity of developing a more differentiated higher resolution version of the big five, which had been attempted by the people who developed the NeoPIR, which has, what did they call them, facets, but they weren’t empirically derived, so if you wait a month, you’ll be able to take the big five aspect scale test, and it’ll give you 10 dimensions of personality output, and I think it’s a really good test, we’ve used it a lot, and it’s being used very widely in the relevant scientific domains, the paper’s been very highly cited, I think it’s been cited like 600 times or something like that, so keep an eye out, and that should be coming real soon. So, if psychedelics increase openness and openness is correlated with intelligence, can psychedelics increase intelligence? Good question, I doubt it. Most things don’t increase fluid intelligence, really hard to get an increase in fluid intelligence. You know those brain training games like Lumosity, even if you play a lot of those games, and they’re very complex cognitive games, you don’t tend to experience an increase in general intelligence. You get better at each game domain specifically, but it doesn’t seem to generalize across intelligence per se, so I doubt that psychedelics increase intelligence, and openness, the personality dimension… See, it’s a good question, because it might be that psychedelic use would increase something like divergent thinking associated with tests like the Torrance tests of creativity, but I don’t think anybody’s ever tested that, and you could consider that a form of intelligence, but I think the probability that it would increase non-verbal intelligence is low, and that’s partly because there are elements to openness that aren’t reducible to psychometric intelligence, so I doubt it. It’d be wonderful if we could find something that would increase intelligence, but that’s turned out to be something unbelievably difficult. Okay, to what extent do you believe that discourse with moderate Muslims can lead to reform of the ideology such that the gap between Islamic and Western beliefs can be bridged? Well, I guess we’re going to find out about that, because that’s one of the things I want to do over the next couple of years. You know, I said this before, but I think it’s worth saying again, as far as I can tell, there’s only three states of being. There is tyranny, there’s slavery, and there’s negotiation, and you know, tyranny and slavery are forms of war, so we either enter into discourse, and hopefully with the moderate Muslims, or we’re the tyrants, or they’re the tyrants, and we’re the slaves, or they’re the slaves, and then there’s war, and so we bloody well better have discourse, because war is what happens when discourse fails, and you know, we actually, in some ways, we can’t really go to war anymore, because we’re so armed, and increasingly that’s also the case in the Muslim world. I mean, look at Pakistan, it’s developing a pretty decent nuclear armament, a nuclear deterrent, let’s say, which is quite terrifying, because Pakistan is one unstable and dangerous place, but I mean, what are you going to do? You’re going to go to war with people, have hydrogen bombs, it’s like, that’s not going to work out very well, so we bloody well better learn to talk, and so I’m hoping, you know, I’m doing this biblical series, which some of you maybe know about, because you’re also helping to ensure that it happened, and again, thank you very much, but in parallel with that, I’m doing, I want to do a very long series of discussions with moderate Muslims, theological, philosophical, political, practical, to see if the gap between Islamic and Western beliefs can be bridged. I’d better be able to be bridged, because we’re on the same planet, man, and there’s lots of both of us, so capitulation on either side isn’t going to work, and like blind ignorance of the dangers, mutual dangers that our societies pose to one another, I mean, by that I mean, you know, to the degree that Islamic societies are functional traditional societies, they’re threatened in that functional traditionalism by radical Western technological and philosophical revolution, just like we’re threatened as Westerners ourselves by our own technological and philosophical revolutionary nature, discourse, truthful discourse, man, that’s the hope for the salvation of the world, and so hopefully we’ll put it into practice. I’ve met a number of moderate Muslims already in Canada who are extremely interested in this sort of thing, and some in the US as well, and so I think that, well, you know, it’s worth a try, man, so, okay, another live one. Just tuned in says, Logic Bombs, how many times should I clean my room? Clean your room until when you go in there, you start doing things that are good for you, so, because cleaning it isn’t just it’s not just making sure that it’s not messy, man, it’s organizing it so that it’s a place where your being can properly manifest itself, it’s a place that should invite you to do the things that are good for you in the world, and so you should be thinking when you have a room, if you’re fortunate and I have to have a room, you think, okay, I want to organize this room so that the probability that I’ll do the things that I know I should do is maximally heightened, you know, get yourself a good desk if you need a desk, get yourself a good bed that you like, like set the bloody place up so that when you walk in there you think, Jesus, a civilized human being could really live in here, and then every time you walk in there your room will remind you that the proper way to behave in there is to behave as a civilized being, responsible, intelligent, forward-looking, articulate, concerned about doing what’s good in the most courageous and responsible possible way, you know, not as a two-bit do-gooder who’s trying to look good in front of the world, but as someone who’s tough and able and caring and reliable and all of that, and that’s what your room should tell you, so set the damn thing up until that’s what it screams at you when you walk in there. So, okay, what is my IQ? It’s less than it used to be because it declines as you age, you know, quite a lot, so you start getting stupider from an IQ perspective at about 22 or 23, so, and the best way to regulate that is to engage in physical exercise, just so you all know, so both weightlifting and cardiovascular exercise are really good for the maintenance of intelligence. I don’t know what my IQ is. I had it tested at one point. It’s in excess of 150, but I don’t know exactly where it lands. Now, I should, I should, uh, what, qualify that to some degree, you know, as your intelligence increases, the scatter between the different subtypes of intelligence, such as there are increases, so you might say that there’s only one way to be stupid, but there’s many ways to be intelligent, and so I’m not overwhelmingly intelligent from a quantitative perspective. You know, I think my GRE scores for, on the quantitative end of things, were about 70, 75th percentile, which isn’t too bad, given that, you know, you’re competing against other people who are going into graduate school, but there’s a big difference between 75th percentile and 99th percentile, and I think that’s where it was verbally, something like that. So, I can certainly see that I have gaps in my intelligence when I’m discussing things with people who have real, who are really quantitatively brilliant. My business partner, Daniel Higgins, is quantitatively brilliant. I’ve got an edge on him verbally, but he’s definitely got an edge on me quantitatively, and I’ve had students like that, too, who like could pick up statistics. I had one student who was a little on the autistic side, that, that she was a woman, man, that woman, she was so damn smart, she learned how to write, moved from, you know, credible writer to an excellent writer in about four months, which was stellar, and she moved from not knowing a damn thing about statistics to being able to teach it to Harvard undergraduates at an award-winning level within a year. It’s like, that just made my jaw drop. Now, she had a hell of a time presenting herself properly in public when she was doing public presentations, so, you know, she had other gaps in her ability, but, you know, I can hold my own verbally, and I’m rarely in a situation where I feel like I’m at a disadvantage verbally, but that’s certainly not the case quantitatively. I feel at a disadvantage very frequently, quantitatively. So, I would love to hear you do a lecture series on raising children properly. Is that something you would consider? Yeah, we’ll see, you know, I’m really curious to see what sort of response this book I’m going to publish gets, especially this chapter on don’t let your children do anything that makes you dislike them, because in some sense, I would say that the propositions I put forth aren’t exactly what you would normally hear, surprise, surprise, in the cultural milieu that surrounds children right now, because everybody and their dog is afraid of disciplining children, and that’s really stupid, because, yeah, stupid is right, it’s the right word, because undisciplined children are terrified, and the reason they’re terrified is they, sorry, got to change the battery in my camera. Okay. So so and hopefully we’re back. Let’s see. Okay. Mr. Cuban says, why is it so important to have kids if the world has an overpopulation problem? Well, who says the world has an overpopulation problem? I don’t buy that. So it depends on whether you think that human brains are the kind of resource that figures out how to do more with less, and that is what I think. I mean, there’s been a huge argument for years between the economists and the biologists. You know, the biologists often are pessimistic, and they basically adopt a Malthusian perspective, and that is that we’ll continue to breed until we exhaust the planet, and do in all of our resources, and the economists always counter that by saying, hey, don’t be forgetting that we can constantly figure out how to do more with less, and that we’re pretty damn smart, and I’m afraid I’m on the side of the economists, but even more to the point, you know, the projections right now indicate that we’ll probably peak somewhere around nine or ten billion, something sometimes by the middle of the 21st century, and then our population will start to decline pretty precipitously, and I think there’s every reason to assume, especially at our current rate of technological progress progression, and our increasing willingness to take broader responsibility for the large-scale health of the planet, that we’ll be able to manage that without too much problem. We can certainly grow enough food to do it if we put a little bit of effort into that. We’re going to squeeze out a lot of other animals on the way, I’m afraid, especially some of the big predators, and mammals that are of approximately our size, and that’s, you know, there’s a price to be paid for that. I think there’s more tigers now in Texas, just in case you’re wondering, than there is in the wild in the rest of the world, and so, but you know, tigers tend to eat children, and so it’s kind of rough having them around, but in any case, I’m not worried that we’re going to overpopulate the planet and destroy everything, and I think that that’s thinking that basically hasn’t advanced since the 1960s, because we are making tremendous progress in pulling people out of the lower echelons of poverty, and there’s a lot of terrible resource misuse at the lower echelons of the poverty distribution, so for example, when people have to cook with wood, you know, that produces a tremendous amount of deforestation, for example, and that kind of thing, and I think we’ll get our act together, if we’re fortunate, we’ll peak around nine billion, that we’ll be worrying about depopulation by the time some of the young, you younger people are old, and besides, you have kids, because that’s part of life, so and it’s, the two things aren’t related in some sense, as far as I’m concerned, so the trick is to have kids that are more good than harm, you know what I mean, because people aren’t only consumers, they’re also producers, it’s kind of appalling that we regard ourselves as consumers, so you know, if you’re going to have kids, have good kids, make them smart, make them tough, help them be tough, you don’t really make them, help them be tough, help them be smart, help them be responsible, and then, you know, maybe they’ll do good, and that’ll be good for the world and people, and like, I’m pro people, man, and so I’m not worried about that, so you know, I heard a university professor once, who I also thought was completely reprehensible, who was lecturing to a group of 18-year-old kids about how he and his wife had only decided to have one child, because, you know, they didn’t want to overpopulate the world, and I thought that if he’d only managed to reproduce one genetic copy of him, that was probably for the best, but then he told the whole room full of 18-year-olds that they should really think seriously about whether they have kids, and if they have any, they should just have one, and I thought, you son of a bitch, you know, you’re such a, you’re so dedicated to the destruction of humanity, and so rife with hatred for the human race, that you dare to stand in front of kids who are just beginning their lives and say, well, you’re such a, you’re a member of such a reprehensible species that the last thing you should do is multiply, it’s like, no, sorry, I don’t see any wisdom in that at all, and I don’t think the world does have an overpopulation problem, and I don’t think that there’s any evidence that it does, now that doesn’t mean that we’re managing everything that we should manage properly, like we’re really wreaking havoc on the oceans, but Boyan Slat, who’s definitely worth looking up, Boyan, I think it’s B-O-Y-A-N, and S-L-A-A-T, Dutch kid, has figured out, he thinks, how to get rid of half the plastic in the oceans in the next five years, so you could go support him, that’d be a hell of a thing to do, he’s a real genius, and there’s lots of ways that the burden that we’re placing on our planetary resources is going to be lifted, and the trick is to get out there and do something about it, you know, like Elon Musk is a good example, it’s like, okay, well, maybe we’re burning too many fossil fuels, and maybe not, because I think the dangers of carbon dioxide are actually somewhat overstated, and I think there’s some decent evidence for that too, but it’s hard to sort it out, because so much of the climate change argument is predicated on an underlying philosophy, such that if you’re anti-capitalist, you believe that we’re going to burn up the planet, and that’s just not helpful, because I can’t tell if your science is right, or if you’re just anti-western and anti-capitalist, so, and like, I spent three years working on a UN committee, the secretary general’s high level panel on economic sustainability, I think it was called, and it produced a report in 2013, and I spent about three years reading everything I could get my hands on, on economic development and environmental sustainability, and the state of the planet is far less dismal than the doomsayers would have you believe, I do think that the one thing that we’re doing is, like, we’re fishing out the oceans, like, idiotically, it’s really, really awful, and trawling is a very damaging process, and I think that, like, if we left the damn oceans alone for about 15 years, they’d recover, not the great, not the huge fish like tuna, because they take a long time to develop, but oceans would come back really quickly, and, you know, but I think we’ll get smart enough to do that sort of thing over the next 50 years, because, you know, human beings aren’t stupid, and we’ve actually only been worried about the planet, let’s say, since about 1960, it was only a hundred years ago that it was more or less self-evident that the natural world was inexhaustible in comparison to the puny efforts of humanity, and, you know, we only figured out that there was enough of us to cause trouble by about 1960, for Christ’s sake, how long do you expect us to, how long do you expect it to take us to figure out how to take care of a whole planet, you know? We’re doing a pretty good job for people who only stumble onto the idea that there might be a problem, something like 60 years ago, so I think we’ll get it right, especially if more and more people start to act responsibly and truthfully in all of that, which, and start working for the betterment of things instead of trying to, you know, undermine and hurt, and, you know, engage in identity politics and all that sort of reprehensible reprehensible activity. Okay, let’s see, what are your thoughts on using psychedelics to help people overcome traumatic experiences? Hey, be careful because psychedelics can cause traumatic experiences, like those things are no joke, man. I don’t think we know enough about them yet to make useful generalizations about their hypothetical clinical utility. There’s some decent studies indicating with psilocybin, for example, that it might have utility in the treatment of depression. It looks like it’s a really effective smoking cessation medication, which is really cool. But I think what happened was that when the psychedelics burst onto the scene in the 1960s, they terrified us so much that, like, we all recoiled at their very existence and then decided not to exactly try to figure out what they were. And I can understand that, man, because those things are seriously weird. Like, they’re incomprehensibly strange. I don’t think we understand them at all. I don’t think we understand them any more than we understand consciousness. I think that they may have great therapeutic utility, but, you know, they’re viciously powerful medications and weapons, and so you use them at your own peril. Something, too, that Carl Jung said, which I really like, because he talked about psychedelic use a little bit, although he was pretty old by the time the psychedelics burst on the scene. You know, he said, beware of unearned wisdom. And I really like that, because even if the psychedelics can open the gates of perception and flood you momentarily with, you know, with information of genuine cosmic significance, that doesn’t mean that you’re the sort of character, you’re not the sort of vessel that can tolerate being filled with that kind of divine fluid. You know, it might just break and crack you. So I would say, you know, approach those things with trepidation. You should have the same attitude towards psychedelics that the ancient Israelites had towards the Ark of the Covenant, which was that, you know, God was in there, but if you touched it accidentally, you would die. That’s a pretty good general attitude to have with regards to any serious encounter with psychedelics. Those things require respect. They’re not toys. They’re not games. They’re not fun. We don’t understand what they are, but, you know, they’re worth treating with tremendous respect. Oh, if we have betrayed or let people down in the past, how does one move on without guilt turning pathological? Oh, well, that’s actually fairly straightforward. The first thing I would say is you could try using the past authoring program in the self-authoring sequence because it’s actually designed to help people do that. But here’s the issue, man. It’s like you did something wrong and it’s hurting you. Fair enough. That hurts people. And what you have to do is you have to figure out what it was that you did wrong. You have to figure out how it was that you got there. You have to figure out how to change your life so that you won’t go there anymore. You have to make amends for what you’ve done. Not necessarily precisely to the people that you did it to because maybe you can’t, but you need to start to live your life in a way that makes amends for what you’ve done. And then you have to let it go because people make mistakes and torturing yourself to death because you did something reprehensible and stupid isn’t as useful as using the experience to transform yourself into someone moral and useful. So now, you know, that’s easier said than done, obviously. And I’m not in the least taking it lightly. I know that, you know, you can do things in your life that are very bad and that are very hard to get over. But adding your own misery to the misery of the world when you could be out there doing good is probably not the best way to atone for your past sins. So, you know, and people make mistakes. The trick is once you’ve made it to admit that you made it, to learn why you made it, to transform yourself so you don’t make it anymore, and then to go out there and start acting like a proper person. And it’s one of the reasons I’m also kind of attracted to some of the more fundamental elements of the Christian doctrine because there is a doctrine of universal forgiveness that’s embedded in that system. And the idea there basically is that, well, people are fellible in a profound way, but if they atone, they can be redeemed. And if they’re penitent, I mean, that’s where the word penitentiary comes from, by the way. If they’re penitent, if they go over their conscience, if they confess to what they’ve done to themselves, to God in society, let’s say, and they attempt to strike out on a better path. And that’s all genuine. It’s like the idea as well. If you don’t allow people who’ve made mistakes to move on, then you just have to dispense with everyone because everyone’s made mistakes. Now, having said that, I know there’s difference between categories of mistakes, but you know, forgiveness after repentance is a good moral axiom. As a female, I never had a great inclination to start a family. After watching your material, I’m struggling with how much of that drive is my own brainwashing, is my own versus brainwashing versus third wave feminists. How do I parse that out? That’s a good question. How would you parse that out? Well, I would, I would start two things. I would start by watching your dreams and your fantasies because they can tell you things that you, first of all, might not want to know, but also that you don’t know. But I would also say, try making a case for both sides, you know, like a really intelligent case. So imagine that, so you’re trying to figure this out. So the first thing you do is formulate an argument where the proposition is that you’ve been brainwashed by third wave feminists and make the strongest possible argument you can in support of that. And then put that aside and then do the reverse and make the strongest argument you possibly can in favor of the idea that you’re, that this is your own idea and that for whatever reason, you’re not inclined to start a family. You could even do the third thing, which is to do another argument writing about why you should have a family. And really like that’s thinking, right? You got three arguments there. You want to make each one of them as strong as you possibly can, like really sweat over it. And then having made the arguments, allow yourself to contemplate them for as much time as you need and it’ll start to become clear to you. So that’s what I would recommend. So, I follow your daughter’s food blog where she has recently talked about her pregnancy. What are your thoughts on becoming a grandfather? Well, lucky me, man. I love kids. And so, and I get along really well with my kids. So that’s so great. I just can’t believe it. And they live near me in Toronto. And now there’ll be another kid and that’ll be great for my wife because she loves babies and my daughter will like that too. And, you know, as I said already about babies, you know, they’re not exactly, I don’t regard myself as a baby expert, but once the kid is like nine months old and older than that, especially between like two and 11 and teenagers too, because I like teenagers, it’s like hooray. I love kids. And so it’s wonderful. And I lived long enough to become a big grandfather. And, you know, I’m not three quarters dead yet or anything like that. And so hooray. It’s great. And hopefully it’ll happen some more. So, okay. If dominance hierarchies select for heroes and breed them, why then is Christ a celibate man? Isn’t celibacy an excuse for cowardice? That’s a good one. Well, the first thing that’s kind of odd about Christ as an archetypal figure, and this is something Jung commented on, is he died pretty young. He was only 32, you know. So, and Jung actually attributed the obsession in our culture with youth to the fact that our divine figure never became mature. Although, you know, we have the divine figure of God the Father, which I suppose would fill out the archetype to some degree. Why is Christ a celibate man? Well, I guess maybe you would say, if you’re in a situation where you can sacrifice yourself for the redemption of all of mankind, maybe adding the responsibility of an individual family to that is just a bit too much. I mean, I know that’s a bit of a glib answer in some sense, but there’s something about it that’s the case. You know, I mentioned earlier that now and then people have a calling of some sort that supersedes other callings that they could follow. And I would say in the archetypal representation of Christ, that that’s something that could definitely be, that case could be made. I don’t think that’s a sufficient answer though. And I hope that when I get to the point in the biblical series that I plan to run until I get through the whole Bible, if I can manage it, that’ll probably take a couple of years. That’s the sort of question I’ll be able to address more fully. Okay, so let’s go back to a live question here. Oh, Zoltan, Zoltar FTW. I’m a BA in political science concentration political theory. I haven’t had any job offers and anything other than retail or all commission sales in over a year. What should I be applying for? Well, what I would say is take the best job you can find. That could be retail. And I know retail jobs can be pretty miserable, but they may be better than no job at all. If you have a job, you’re in a better position to find your next job because people would rather hire someone employed than someone who isn’t employed. And then you’re also employed and you have some structure in your life. And then I would also say, don’t underestimate the possibility of moving up in a retail job. You can, if you’re smart and hardworking and you’re with a company that’s smart enough to bloody well recognize someone like that, the probability for advancement in that kind of corporate structure can be really great. And so I would say if you’re going to take a retail job, take the damn thing seriously and don’t feel like it’s beneath you because every circumstance that you find yourself in as a human being is rich enough so that there’s much that you can bring to it in terms of useful commitment. You know, like in a retail job, well, you have the opportunity to learn how to interact with customers. You have the opportunity to learn how to sell. These are big bloody skills if you can get them right. You know, you have the opportunity to learn how to be grateful that you’re not starving to death in a ditch, you know, and it’s not such a bad thing to start at the bottom because then you learn what the bottom is like and you learn how to move forward. So I would say take the best job you can find and then continue to look for other jobs. But do the job right. Do it properly. And one of the things, and I’ve had lots of, what would you say, I don’t like to call them low end jobs, but they’re working class jobs. I’ve had lots of working class jobs in my life, like dozens of them really. And they’re not trivial. You can learn a lot in a working class job and you can learn how to get along with your peers. You can learn how to get along with your supervisors and be useful to them and maybe be drawn to their attention if they have any sense. And I mean, if you have a retail job and it’s they’re treating you like a miserable slave and if you’re doing a good job and you get no credit for it, it’s like get the hell out of there as fast as you can. But you want to find somewhere where if you work hard and you’re a reasonable person, that people are going to notice that and open up doors of opportunity for you. That’s kind of the definition of a healthy company. And you can find that virtually anywhere. So don’t be thinking that the retail jobs are necessarily, you’re not going to be there forever, you know. And with a BA, you often have to start at the bottom, but that doesn’t mean that that’s where you’re going to end up. So don’t feel too dismal about that. It’s a start, man. And that’s something. And you could go into the retail job and you could think, okay, like if I was really smart about this and I was really regarding this as an opportunity, how could I knock this out of the park? And that’s a good thing to think about. And it beats the hell out of, you know, sitting there. And I’m not saying that you’re necessarily doing this, but feeling sorry for yourself, because, you know, you’ve got a degree and the world isn’t opening itself up to you. It’s like, maybe it is. Maybe the retail job is opening itself up to you. So and then you work hard on developing your career once you’ve got a toehold in there. And I know that’s maybe you might regard that as naively optimistic, but that beats naively pessimistic. And I, but I also do believe, and I’ve seen this happen many times, is that you can, if, if your attitude is, if you have yourself put together properly, let’s say sorted out properly, you can make a hell of a positive impact on the world in a relatively low level position, you know, because you could make the person who walks into the store, your retail operation, you could make the next 10 minutes of their life a hell of a lot more pleasant than they might be if you were miserable and resentful. And you know, maybe they’ll come back again, and maybe the store will thrive. That’s especially true if you start working for a smaller business, man, you can have a big effect on a small business. So don’t be thinking that there’s no opportunity there. You know, it might be your inability to construe that as opportunity. That’s the, it’s what’s interfering with it. And believe me, I know that especially chain retail jobs, and especially if you have a dismal, authoritarian manager, that those jobs can just be hell. But so I wouldn’t recommend staying in a job that’s hell. And that where there’s no further movement, but don’t necessarily think that you’re not being an offer offered an opportunity if you can take any job at all, you got to start somewhere, man. And, and, and the bottom, like I said, the bottom is not a bad place to start, because you learn down there. And someone who gets really good at business across time, let’s say, knows whatever enterprise they’re in from the bottom up. And that’s what makes them competent. So and they don’t say, Oh, well, the things at the bottom are too, they’re not good enough for me, because the things at the bottom are really what the business rests on. And you need to know how those things work. And then you also have some sympathy for the people who are maybe stuck in those positions forever, which you wouldn’t be, you know, you won’t be. So okay. Um, let’s see here. What time is it? 902. And we started at 730. Let’s go to 930. That’s probably good enough. So that’s about 20 more minutes. Fabio Bollinger advice for a breakup after four years, it’s been 1.5 years, and I still believe she’s the one. Well, I would say she’s a one. And look, some people really pair bond hard, you know, to put it in in crass biological terms. But if she’s moved on, and that’s serious, you know, then I would say, start, start going out with other people, you know, really, and start. Just because she’s the one doesn’t necessarily mean she’s the only one, you know, and one and a half years, that’s long enough so that you should be starting to, to act as if you’re getting over it. And if you’re having real trouble with that, then I think you should probably find someone to talk to and talk that out and figure out what your strategy is. But I would say get the hell back into life, man. Now, if you know, maybe there’s part of you that still thinks that there’s some possibility of rekindling the relationship. And for all I know, maybe that’s possible. It seems unlikely, because I don’t think that you would. I don’t think that you would be asking that question if you thought that was a possibility, but I would say, go and go find some other people, man, and, and, and admit to the possibility that there might be someone else out there that will work with you and get on with your life, because you’re going to be old a lot faster than you think. And you don’t want to be stuck in stasis any longer than necessary, because then you’ve lost the woman, and you’ve lost your time. And I think and losing the woman is bad enough, but losing the woman and your time, that’s really not good at all. So let’s see. How do you get over hiding something because of the fear that people will think of you differently or treat you worse, especially for family members and others close to you? Quentin Goodwin. You know, Quentin, I don’t know what to say about that, because it depends on what you’re, it depends on what you’re hiding, you know. So I’d like to answer that question, but it’s not detailed enough. The devil, with questions like that, man, the devil is often really seriously in the details. And I just, if you think that you’re hiding it because of cowardice, that’s one thing, but like you might have a real problem, you know, when you’re hiding something that really would cause serious repercussions in your social circumstances and in your family, in which case, you know, it’s a hell of a tough thing to deal with. And I would say you need to find someone that you can talk to, that you trust, that’s wise. And maybe that’ll be a professional. Or I would say the same thing that I mentioned earlier to someone who had a similar question about strategy is like, write down a strategy. And then the other thing you could do too, that’s useful is imagine the worst, okay? Imagine you reveal whatever this is and the worst happens. Lay out the worst so you understand it. You know, be realistic about it and then figure out how you would handle it. You know, like you could imagine, well, everyone now hates me so much, I have to move to a new town. Well, maybe you could do that, you know? And once you know that you could do that, then maybe you wouldn’t be so afraid about it. So it’s often the case that people are terrified about the terrible things that might happen is because they won’t really think through what the terrible things are and what they would do. And so think it through, think the catastrophe through, and think about how you would cope with it if it happened. And that should encourage you to some degree. So Benjamin Wood, question, what’s wrong with Maslow’s hierarchy? What’s wrong with Maslow’s hierarchy in my… I was just writing about that yesterday, day before, in my new book, by the way. Maslow presumes that you have to meet your material needs before you can meet your spiritual needs and that’s wrong. That’s just not right. It’s not wise. And I would say read Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. That’s a good antidote to that. And also, again, I would say read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, especially volume two, because Solzhenitsyn has done a tremendous job of dispelling the idea that material security and comfort is a prerequisite to higher order psychological and spiritual being. So I think what’s wrong with Maslow’s hierarchy, the idea of Maslow’s hierarchy, is that it’s far too materialistic in its fundamental orientation. Now, having said that, you know, that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing useful in Maslow’s thinking. I think that his discussions of self-actualized persons are actually very interesting. And the idea that, you know, there are higher levels of human psychological and spiritual development, and he was thinking about it more secularly, I think is also extremely useful. But I think the idea of the manner in which you progress through the hierarchy is wrong. I also think it’s a socialist idea in some sense, and a utopian idea, because the idea is the way that you bring about the perfect human society is by making sure that everyone’s material well-being is established. And look, I know people need to eat, and I know that they need security and all of that. I understand that. But assuming that that’s a prerequisite for spiritual development is an error, and assuming that it’s a necessary prerequisite is even a more egregious error, I would say. So, can you further explain your disapproval of Ayn Rand? I don’t really disapprove of Ayn Rand. I liked reading her novels, you know, and I think it’s funny because I was given Ayn Rand’s novels by a woman named Rachel Notley, who is the mother, was the mother of, because unfortunately she’s deceased, of the current socialist premier of Alberta, Rachel Notley, who was a friend of mine when I was a kid. And it was her mother who was an avowed socialist of the of the pro-working class classical type, who gave me Ayn Rand, as well as George Orwell and Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Eldis Huxley, a whole raft of really high quality literary books. And she wanted to expose me to that philosophy. And like I found Ayn Rand’s books, I really liked reading them. They’re really romantic. They’re interesting adventure stories, I would say. And you know, Ayn Rand had a point. I mean, she had a hell, her family had a hell of a time with the communists in the Soviet Union. Like, she had reasons for doing what she was doing. But the problem with Ayn Rand as a literary figure is that all her heroes are the same people, and they’re completely heroic. And all her villains are the same people, the same person, just in different bodies. And they’re all almost completely reprehensible. And so, you know, one of the hallmarks of high quality literature is that the battle between good and evil isn’t just fought out between the good guys and the bad guys, like at a cultural level, that would be an identity politics issue, say. And that it’s not the good guy as an individual who’s like the next messiah in Ayn Rand, that would be the capitalist messiah, and then the evil reprehensible satanic figure. And, you know, all of the good traits are embodied in one and all of the bad traits in the other. In really sophisticated literature, I would say that even the villains have good qualities. Like, villains are way more interesting when they’re also interestingly good. And, you know, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment is a good example of that. And all of Dostoevsky’s villains, for that matter, because they have deeply admirable qualities. Like Ivan, for example, who’s not exactly a villain, but he’s certainly atheistic, which put him at odds with Dostoevsky. In the Brothers Karamazov, I mean, Ivan has everything going for him. He’s good looking, he’s dashing, he’s young, he’s brave, he’s got military training, like he’s clear-headed. He’s a hell of a villain. He’s a great villain, man. And Ayn Rand, it’s just too formulaic in my estimation. And so it starts to verge on the ideological. And she was primarily motivated by making a political point rather than by writing literature, in my estimation. So that’s all. I mean, and having said that, I would also say I got great pleasure in reading Ayn Rand’s book. So I’m not, I don’t precisely disapprove of her. She isn’t, she just isn’t a top-rate philosopher, and she’s also not a top-rate literary figure. And those are the reasons. She’s a little bit too propagandistic, and her characters are too unidimensional. So, yeah, that’s why. Okay, let’s see here. Fresh Sweet says, Jordan is a mental midget. Well, I’m tall, so at least I’m also, I’ve got some elements of me that aren’t entirely midget-like. So let’s see. So what else do I have to say about that? Well, it’s conceivable that Fresh Sweet is a mental giant by comparison, but I doubt if he or she would have used that insult if that happened to be the case. So let’s see. Someone said, please can I say their name? And the answer to that is no, because I’ve lost your question. So I read your question, but I’m not going to say your name. So, well, that’s ironic, I suppose. Oh, Shopgirl seeks, are there evil persons with no redeeming qualities? No. That would be just too simple, man. Yep, it’d be nice if that was the case. You know what I mean, not exactly nice, but no, that just isn’t how life works, man. As Solzhenitsyn said, even in the best person, there’s still some un-uprooted corner of evil. And even in the person who’s gone as far down the rabbit hole as you could possibly go, there’s some still shining element of the divine quality of humanity that could be communicated with. So at least that’s how it looks to me. Okay. How do you make time to read for leisure? Right now I don’t. In fact, I don’t make enough time to read, period. But I hope to rectify that soon. Mostly I’m editing the things that I’m writing and mostly I’m writing. But when I do read, mostly I’ve read before I go to bed. I go to bed and I read for half an hour, an hour, or something like that. So I’m 23, wheelchair-bound, I can’t afford college and don’t have the services to get me through it. And I’m glad I found you online. My favorite subject is psychology. I’m very intrigued by it. Great. That’s NATO the Wise. Hey, so good, man. Watch the lectures and then go take a look at my reading list at jordanbpeterson.com and get those books. You can get most of them used online for next to nothing. And even the ones you have to buy, man, it’s worth it. Or get them from the library, something like that. And you can educate yourself to a large degree. I’m going to expand that reading list to maybe 100 books or something like that because, geez, especially what’s really funny about books too is the better the book, the cheaper it is. It’s so funny because you can buy penguin classics, for example, literature classics for like one cent plus shipping. What a deal, you know? So and some of them you can just get for free now because the copyrights have expired and you can download them on your Kindle and they don’t cost you a cent. So what do I do for fun? What do I do for fun? I build things in the backyard. I like doing that. I play ping pong with my son, except I taught him how to play ping pong and now he’s way better than me. He just stomps me and he laughs a lot about that. So that’s very annoying. I spend time with my wife, although not enough, especially in the last seven months because I’ve been completely overwhelmed by all of this. What else do I do for fun? Snack on social justice warriors. That’s kind of entertaining. Spend time with my family. That’s probably the biggest thing. Talk with my friends, you know, standard sorts of things like that. I find most of what I do in my life extraordinarily engaging and entertaining. So except when I’m overwhelmed by it and that’s been that’s happened to me partly because of the mood issues I talked about, but also partly because like the last seven or eight months has really been both surreal and overwhelming. I’m usually so engaged in what I’m doing that I wouldn’t say I’m not looking for fun exactly. It’s that I have a bunch of it already. Kyle Mitchell says, what should I do if my girlfriend isn’t satisfying me sexually? How do I get her to progress with me? Oh well that’s a place you can usually use really use both discourse and reward. It’s like okay well what do you want? That’s the first question. Could you make your wants known and are there ways that you can express the fact that you’re happy about that that would be compatible with the person’s desires? A lot of that is often lack of communication, but you could also do what Skinner did when he was training rats, which is watch your partner during sexual encounters and otherwise and when they do something that you really like and really want them to keep doing, let them know. That’s intelligent use of reward, but a lot of it is just discussion. It’s like first of all figure out what you want and discuss with the person what you want and find out why they’re objecting and do some negotiation. And if you can’t talk, here’s a good rule of thumb I think for especially for young people who are engaging in new relationships is don’t do anything sexually with anyone that you couldn’t talk to them about before you did it. I think that’s a funny one. And I think it’s true too. Okay Jordan, what are your thoughts on George Orwell? Brilliant. George Orwell man, more power to him. He was really something like he was a major influence on me and you know he was beating, he was clanging the warning bell about communism. You know a good 30 years before the corrupt French intellectuals woke up and admitted that they’d been worshipping a, you know, a murderous tyrant for the last almost century really. Go George Orwell man and he’s such a clear writer, great essayist, like a real example for anyone who wants to learn to write. That’s Orwell. Like Hemingway, you know, although I think that Orwell was a greater figure than Hemingway all things considered. Hemingway could really write a tight sentence man and he could he could say a lot with with very few words and that’s really something worth taking a look at too. Okay TJF, advice for aspiring academics, specifically philosophy graduate students. Read every goddamn thing you can get your hands on man. Read all the great philosophers and make notes and write about them as well till you understand them, till you have them under your belt and so and do that at the same time while you’re going through getting your degree. You know because a lot of the education that you get in university at graduate level isn’t going to be very good. The courses are generally not very good in my experience but man read. There’s great people to read so start at the beginning you know go back to Socrates and read everything you can get your hands on and do the work necessary so that you understand the philosophers and you can start like I found a real useful way to start introducing yourself to philosophers is pick up and this is good for everyone else who’s out there too pick up like um a Plato for dummies or or Nietzsche for dummies or you know one of those illustrated introductions. Christ it’s a good start. You start slow and and start building up your expertise and move towards the the actual you know the actual difficult writings themselves. So how do you motivate yourself to do something that you do not enjoy but you deem important like studying for exams? Good question. Ask yourself what would motivate you? You know first of all don’t be studying eight hours a day because that isn’t going to work and you’re not going to do it anyways. You know would you start studying five minutes a day seriously? Would you could you bring it up to 10 minutes a day? What would you have to do for yourself to get yourself to sit down for half an hour a day and and study intently? Like maybe you’d have to I don’t know what you’d have to do like have a beer at six o’clock at night or something or maybe you’d have to go for a walk in the park or go out for coffee. It’s like imagine that you’re sitting down with a stupid undisciplined child who and you’re trying to get that child to do something useful and you say okay look I want you to do x it’s necessary but you can pick how much of it you’re going to do and I’ll give you what you want if you do it. Well ask yourself that and see what happens. So don’t try to tyrannize yourself you know try to negotiate with yourself and use some reward and see how that works and start slow you know maybe maybe you’re not very disciplined and the best you can do is half an hour of studying it a day. Well start with half an hour increase that five minutes a week you know if you do that that’s a lot if you if you do that for a year then you’ll by the end of the year you’ll be studying four hours a day. So you could that’s that’s just with five that’s just with five minutes a week right because that’s 250 minutes in a year. So start ridiculously pathetically study for five minutes a day for a week and then move it to 10. You’ll be able to do that and don’t cheat you know because one of the things people do is they make a deal with themselves like that I’m all I’m going to study for 10 minutes a day each day and then they they get into it they think wow this is going really good so they study for two hours and then they’ve broken the contract with themselves and they don’t trust themselves anymore and then they don’t study for a whole year or well maybe not for a month so but set your contract ask yourself you know what could I do to move myself forward to my goal that I would do and then how could I improve that incrementally so that’s the right way of going about that. So okay what do you think about the line that’s often fed to young people to do what you love and follow your dreams? Well you know there’s something to be said for doing what grips you but you know you have to ally that with discipline that’s the thing and you have to ally it with responsibility and so and and I would also say that that advice say which which I think has been most popularly associated with Joseph Campbell was actually to some degree something that was at least initiated by Jung but one of the things Jung said was more like follow what grips and compels you and it will take you into the underworld where you will encounter your shadow and the dragon and and when when you put it that way it’s a lot more realistic it it it’s just too naive and and and and too good to be true to be a good doctrine although I think there’s some there’s an element of truth in it you do want to follow your dreams but not if your dream changes every 30 seconds you know like with the future authoring program one of the things we get people to do is to detail out a vision for the future if you could have the future that you dreamed of having what would what would that dream be that’s really useful but then the next part of the exercise is okay how are you going to do the hard discipline multi-year work necessary to bring that dream into reality and how are you going to make that realistic and implementable on a day-to-day level so you got to bring your dream down to earth man and and and act it out and you have to be disciplined to do that and so that’s that’s the part that’s missing there is do what you love and discipline yourself that’s a good combination that’s a good combination what are your thoughts on sleep paralysis that happens to me all the time so it exists i mean it’s it’s i often have it happened to me this weekend for example it’s quite it’s quite comical so if i go to sleep on my back sometimes i will dream that i’m trying to wake up but i can’t and so i am trying to wake up but i’m asleep and i’m still paralyzed because you get paralyzed when you’re rem sleep so you don’t run around and act out your dreams and smash your nose into a wall like cats do if you take that part of their brain out and so i often dream that i’m kind of semi comatose and i know i can’t wake up and i’m like grabbing at my daughter’s sleeve to and saying throw cold water on me or shake me or something or push me out of bed because i can’t wake up and then she’ll ignore me and then i’ll try to get my wife to do it in my dream and it like it seems like it lasts an hour and then finally i’ll shake myself awake and i’m often end up when i wake up like that i’m often annoyed because i’ve been telling my family members as far as i’m concerned for like half an hour desperately to wake me up and they’ve been ignoring me of course it’s probably only taken five minutes and they don’t have any idea what’s going on but it often i think it has something to do with serotonergic malfunction and it’s that might be related to this mood disorder that i described but but it’s also much more likely to occur if you lay on your back and sleep on your back and also if you do it in the afternoon so and people can have quite horrifying experiences with sleep paralysis there’s a good book called the the terror that comes in the night about sleep paralysis and nightmares and it’s quite an interesting investigation into that phenomena so oh your essay writing guidance has proven invaluable well thank you that that refers to that thing that that writing exercise that you can find on my psychology psychology 430 website i’ll try to find a better place to put it um maybe i’ll tweet about it again i’m glad it’s invaluable it’s taken a long time to figure out how to write it do you have any guidance around taking notes from books and lectures yeah yeah no problem like don’t be taking notes during the lecture exactly because then you’re not listening to the lecture it’s like listen to the lecture and then take notes afterwards now that doesn’t work for every discipline but but it certainly works for disciplines like students in my lectures i always tell them don’t take notes during the lecture listen to the damn lecture you can take notes afterwards because what that does is force you to practice remembering and then with regards to books it’s like read don’t highlight don’t underline like that i think that that’s just rubbish i think it’s pseudo work read a couple of paragraphs or maybe an essay something like that depending on the density of the book close the book think about it write down what you’re thinking write down what you remember but but but in the context of what you’re thinking about because that instantiates it into your memory and give and puts it at hand like people ask me for example how it is that i can remember all the things that i talk about extemporaneously when i’m lecturing and the reason for that is because i’ve thought them through you know i read them and i think oh okay well that’s an interesting idea how does it relate to all these other ideas that i know like what is its significance for this idea and what’s its significance for this idea and do i believe it and how might i criticize it so it’s kind of like i’m i’m attaching little memory hooks to it in in five different ways and then i’ve got it it’s it’s part of me and that seems to be part of recall rather than so rather than recognition and recall is the spontaneous act of remembering something complex and when you recall something you’re actually practicing remembering it and that’s what you need to do if you want that to be part of you so i would say separate out the function of reading and note taking so read think write or read write think because the last two things are quite similar but don’t like read the book and then read a sentence and then write down that sentence that’s not helpful you could read the sentence close the book and then reformulate the sentence so that now it’s your sentence man then you’ll remember it then you’ll understand it that works really well what a post-modernists have right there is an infinite number of ways to perceive the world that’s what they had right and that’s bloody major discovery it was the same discovery that blew the slats out of artificial intelligence in its early instantiation in the 1960s so the idea that the world is so complex that there is in principle an infinite number of ways to perceive it is correct but the idea that there’s no order of rank difference between those modes of perception that’s just that’s that’s where the post-modernists went completely off the rails so they just they they got the problem right but they didn’t take their thinking about it nearly far enough so okay let’s say you mentioned switching to a paleo diet some time ago and from the way your physical appearance seems to improved i would say it’s working quite well could we have more details into your diet yeah you could for a year and a half i basically haven’t eaten any carbohydrates so i wouldn’t recommend it though because it’s really not it it’s hard and it also makes you unpopular i can’t really go to restaurants it’s very difficult for me to go to other people’s places to eat it makes traveling a real pain but i’ll tell you if you want to lose weight man and that is really why i did this by the way but if you want to lose weight if you cut carbohydrates out of your diet and go on a paleo light diet heavy protein and greens and that sort of thing and you can eat a lot of that so you don’t have to be hungry my experience has been and you know it’s not the same with everyone but i also know other people who’ve tried this my brother-in-law who’s actually quite a great genius has he’s 60 now and he’s in better shape than he was when he was in 45 45 he’s a bloody monster that guy really tough really physically put together super smart and he’s followed a paleo diet for about 15 years and like he doesn’t have an ounce of fat on him so if you want to lose weight drop the carbs and you’ll lose weight so fast you won’t believe it and you don’t have to be hungry so i don’t want to go into it in more depth because it’s jesus christ i’ve spent so much time talking about my bloody diet over the last year that it’s just bored me to death it’s so funny because it’s so funny because just before last september when i made those first videos i was sitting around with my family and we’d been talking about diet god non-stop because partly because of my daughter’s health problems and also mine it’s like every day it’s a discussion about diet and it was just paralyzing me and i thought god i hope i wish that we could find something else to talk about it’s like well that sure happened so what is your advice for people that aren’t very social and have a hard time making friends get the hell out there and practice man i had a client very introverted very introverted person very badly served by her parents not very well socialized extremely socially anxious awkward in her social interactions as well so not skilled she did and also alone she didn’t have an intimate relationship or really any family so quite quite isolated person and terrified of social interactions like she couldn’t even go out and have a coffee with me as her therapist as a practice exercise when we first met and man she’s made progress like you wouldn’t believe like terry unbelievable progress you know doing public doing public appearances on stage even go go take go to toast masters do some public speaking join meetup.com ask people questions you know that’s a really good thing if you’re not very social and and you get self-conscious you start thinking about yourself and how stupid you are that’s a really bad idea you should be paying attention to the other person so if you get nervous it isn’t that you have to stop being nervous because that isn’t going to work what you have to do is start paying more attention to the other person you have to force your attention outward and you know you can ask people questions listen to them and when they say something interesting or they say something you don’t understand ask them a question and people love that man because they know you’re listening to them and people love being listened to so if you’re nervous learn to listen better and learn to ask questions and and there’s no stupid questions if you’re paying attention right and so you don’t have to worry about that if you don’t know something if you don’t know something and you ask an honest question and someone treats you badly because of it then you should just go away from that person because they don’t have a clue so get out there forget about trying to not be nervous because you’re going to be nervous but when you’re nervous pay more attention to other people listen to them carefully watch them because then your natural social abilities will kick in and ask them questions and you know you’ll assume it’ll take you three or four years to get decently good at it and that you’ll really have to work at it but it’s worth it man so so just go out there and do it and and you’ll you’ll figure it out you’ll figure it out so all right guys and girls and and assorted others it’s 9 30 and uh well that was fun i hope it was fun for you and i would like to say in closing two things number one thank you very much for the not just for the monetary support you know although i hope to put that to good use and that is definitely my plan but also the public support i’ve received has been extremely practically and psychologically useful to me you know because there was a lot of stress in the last year and and my job was definitely in danger at the university of toronto and certainly my autonomy as a professor was and the fact that i received all this public support was extraordinarily useful for me to buttress my sense that i was pursuing the right course of action even though i wasn’t doing it perfectly and it was it was very it helped me protect myself to a great degree practically i mean part of the reason the university had the let’s call it the opportunity to back off in in the face of all the objections that were raised by the social justice warrior types is because there was a counter protest from the general public and so thank you very much for that it’s much appreciated and with regards to the money man like my my plan is to well a to remain very grateful for it and not to take it for granted but b man i’m going to try to do some viciously good things with that so and i’ve freed up my time for the next like year and i want to capitalize on this i want to capitalize on this opportunity and i want to bring classical humanities education to millions of people and jesus that’s such a good deal so um so thanks very much it’s very much appreciated so we’ll talk to you again soon and i hope you enjoyed the q a and good night oh and i’d like to thank my son julian because he’s helped me set up all this technology and that’s been really good of him and and and it worked so hooray for that bye bye now i have to figure out how to shut this off so first blank shot then done bye bye