Q & A 2017 07 July (1EmrMTRj5jc)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1EmrMTRj5jc

Hello everyone. Great. You can see me. Daniel says loud and clear. So excellent. Okay. Well, thanks guys for tuning in and again for offering support for the continued operation of my YouTube channel. So let’s get going. It’s good to see all of you. And so I’ve got a set of questions here. I can see the live stream as well, the live chat. So that’s great. All right. Let’s try this one. What’s an effective way to figure out how to match your career with your temperament? How can you determine if a job is a good fit or a terrible mistake? Let’s start with the first one. What’s a good way of… Uh oh. What’s an effective way to figure out how to match your career with your temperament? Well, the first thing you do obviously that you have to do is to understand your temperament to some degree. And so the best way to deal with that is to get yourself assessed using a good big five instrument. There’s many of them online. We’re going to be setting up a website within the next month that will enable people to do use a tool that my student of mine, Colin DeYoung, who’s now a professor at the University of Minnesota and I and some other co-authors developed back in, I think it was 2007 called the Big Five Aspect Scale. And it breaks the big five down into 10 aspects. And we’ll have a version of that online. I hope by the end of July, that’s the plan that will enable people to get a read of their temperament that will tell them how extroverted they are, how high they are in negative emotion or neuroticism, how agreeable, how conscientious and how open. But it’ll break each of those traits down into two aspects. So extroversion breaks into enthusiasm and assertiveness. Neuroticism breaks into withdrawal and volatility. Agreeableness breaks down into politeness and compassion. Controversy into orderliness and industrious and openness into openness proper, which is something like creativity and interest in ideas. And so the first thing you have to know is what your temperament is. The second thing you should probably know, and we’ll probably add this functionality to the system at some point, is what your intelligence level is, what your IQ is. Because the higher your IQ, the better suited you are for jobs whose demands change rapidly. So those are complex jobs and simple jobs are the jobs where you can learn something and then you can run it as an algorithm. You can just repeat it over and over and those jobs, of course, are becoming more and more scarce. So you need to know what your temperament is and then you need to know the temperamental demands of the job. Now most jobs are mastered with a combination of intelligence and conscientiousness, but the other temperamental factors play a moderating role. So for example, extroverted people tend to be entertainer types and highly social. And so if you’re interested, for example, in if you’re extroverted, then a career in sales is something that you might consider a career that involves a lot of public communication and interaction with groups. Whereas you’re an introvert, you’re going to work, you’re going to want to work a lot more. You’re going to be suited to work in a solitary manner a lot more. If you’re agreeable, you’re going to be suited for taking care of people. If you’re disagreeable, then you’re a tough bargainer and a harsh negotiator and litigators, for example. Lawyers are often low in agreeableness. So if you’re conscientious, well, that tends to be a very good trait for any kind of managerial and administrative job and for simpler jobs as well. It’s a great predictor of military prowess, for example. If you’re high in openness, then you’re going to want a creative career and that might make you an entrepreneur or a musician or an artist or something like that. That’s often very, very difficult to monetize. But one of the funny things about openness is that if you’re high in openness, it’s not that helpful at the bottom of hierarchies because you’re basically expected at the bottom of most hierarchies to act more or less like a functionary, but it becomes of critical importance at the top of hierarchy. So it’s a personality trait whose utility can really kick in in the later stages of your career because in really complex positions where things are changing dynamically, you need to have a high intelligence and you also need to be creative. So how can you determine if a job is a good fit or a terrible mistake? Huh? I would say you can tell if it’s a terrible mistake if you dread going and also if you’re working hard and doing what you’re supposed to and you’re not being rewarded for it or and there’s no chance for advancement. So that those are good reasons to to leave. So alright. Truck plane says just wanted to tell you that you were the first person to actually make me read books. I have a background in math and engineering, lots of formulas and equations. Keep up your work. Well, good work truck plane. There’s some real utility in reading books and I’m glad that you found the I’m glad that you figured out why it’s necessary to do that. So that’s that’s that’s I’m very happy to hear that. Oliver Connor says it’s definitely worth doing the humanities. It gives you a skill set you can apply anywhere. That’s actually worth elaborating on a little bit because I do believe that classical humanities education is at the core of the proper university curriculum and you might say, well, what’s the utility, for example, in studying philosophy and literature, but that’s not exactly the right way to look at it. The the utility of humanities education, at least in principle, is that it teaches you, first of all, how to be civilized and educated so that you become aware of the major cultural works that every educated person needs to be aware of in order to operate properly at a high level of functionality in the world. What you’ll find is that as you get older and you climb hierarchies of competence, that broader and broader educational familiarity is demanded of you. But more importantly, education in the humanities is designed to teach you how to think and to speak and to formulate arguments. And because what you’re doing in complex positions almost always involves the identification of problems and their articulation so that you can frame the problem. Then a description of a potential set of solutions and then the communication of those set of solutions to a wide variety of people in a manner that can help them obtain a consensus and work together. Those skills are absolutely crucial when you’re doing anything that’s a real difficulty. And so the humanities education is extraordinarily important as a consequence of that. Here’s a question. Piaget’s final stage of morality was, he who can create the rules. Would you please provide an example of what that means? Yeah, I can, it says I’m having trouble, I can’t get the rest of it, but can you please provide an example of what that means? Well, look, at a lower stage of Piagetian development, let’s say, where you’re a child and you learn to play a game, you’re going to determine morality on the basis of how well you as a player adhere to the rules. Now, at the point of development above that, you start to understand that, well, the rules were actually a human creation in their original form. And that what that means is that when it’s necessary, the rules can be adjusted. Think about the Harry Potter series. I mean, one of the things that characterizes Harry and his friends is that they’re, and Hermione is a really good example of this, is that they’re sufficiently disciplined. I mean, she happens to be really disciplined and are perfectly capable of following the rules, but also make exceptions when that’s necessary. And it’s the fact that they can step beyond the rules when that becomes necessary that actually makes them the heroes of the adventure, because it’s very difficult to set up a situation where you can always act perfectly only by following the rules, because it’s very difficult to delineate out a rule set that’s sufficiently comprehensive so that it will cover every eventuality. So that’s the upshot on that. Women have a tendency to prefer bad men, higher in dark triad traits. How come the Bible describes a mode of being as associated with nice guy traits, which contradict that? Okay, well, I take issue with both elements of that, actually. I don’t believe that women do have a tendency to prefer bad men, higher in dark triad traits. They may have a tendency to be more erotically attracted to men who are capable of manifesting dominance and aggression. And I think the evidence for that is relatively clear. And I don’t think the Bible at all describes a mode of being as associated with nice guy traits. I don’t know. That may be how it’s classically taught, for example, because Christ is often presented, especially in more simple-minded variants, and I’m not being pejorative about that precisely, as the ultimate in nice guys. But I don’t think that that’s true at all. That’s a reasonable characterization at all, if you read the Gospel accounts, because he was someone who was certainly capable of saying very, very harsh things to people, and was also identified very strongly as a figure who was capable of using judgment and distinguishing between what was positive and what was negative. And that capacity for judgment is something quite different than the mere nice guy compassion that would be associated with high levels of trade agreeableness. So I think that the idea that the ideal that’s put forward in the biblical writings is something like be harmless. I think that’s a real misreading of the text. And I also think that it’s wrong, because harmless and good are not the same thing at all. And in fact, I think one of the best ways of characterizing a higher order morality, and this is something that Nietzsche talked about a fair bit, is that, and Jung as well, with regards to the idea of integration of the shadow, is that someone whose moral has the capability for violence and the capability for aggression built in and at hand, but is also someone who’s perfectly capable of controlling that in a civilized manner. And I think that, you know, I’m speaking off the cuff here, obviously, but I think that the attraction that some women have for the sort of men who are more likely to misbehave, who act in a delinquent manner and so forth, is partly their desire to be associated with men who have the capacity for aggression. Now the best of all possible worlds is when that capacity for aggression is civilized and held under control. But so I would say that one of the things that men should do as they mature is transform themselves into monsters, but also become civilized at the same time. And that’s exactly what you see in stories like Beauty and the Beast, where the ideal man starts out as a beast and ends up civilized. He doesn’t start out as a milk-sop, wimp sort of character who poses no threat to anyone and then becomes the hero. That isn’t how it works, although there are stories of that kind of development. So which is the most accessible of Carl Jung’s books? Oh well, I wouldn’t say any of them are particularly accessible, although Modern Man in Search of a Soul is probably a good one to start with. That’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul. I think Modern Man in Search of His Soul? Anyways, it’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul, I believe. It’s short and it’s to the point, and so that’s a good introduction. Which has been the most impactful to me? Probably Ion, A-I-O-N, which is the second volume of Volume 9 of The Collected Works, which is an absolutely amazing, terrifying book, which contains some of Jung’s writings on the psychology of astrology, which are actually quite interesting, because he regarded astrology as a millennia-long fantasizing on the part of the collective human imagination and spent a lot of time analyzing the content of that. You might think about it as a dream that was projected out into the cosmos. So, what are your personal strategies for consuming the news? Well, you know, it’s funny, for years I haven’t watched television news, for example, and I don’t read newspapers very often either. I try to actually limit my exposure to the news. I read The Economist. I used to read Harper’s Magazine. I used to read the Atlantic Monthly as well. I thought they were good periodicals, although I think both of them have collapsed quite precipitously in recent years. Maybe not so much. How do I walk the line between wanting to be informal, avoiding the danger of cluttering your mind? Well, The Economist helps with that. I think it’s actually gone downhill to some degree over recent years as well. But I definitely tell my clinical clients very frequently, especially if they’re depressed and feeling overwhelmed, to limit their exposure to daily news particularly, because if something’s only relevant the day that it’s published, you could make the case that it’s not relevant at all. And that’s part of the reason why I like The Economist, because it only comes out every week or two weeks depending on your subscription. And so it can only cover things that have enough importance to be relevant over a timeframe that exceeds a day. So all right, so let’s see what we’ve got in the live stream here. How do we revive interest in the good mother archetype? Well, that’s a good question. I think it’s a good question in part because it isn’t really obvious to me that young women in our society are told the truth about what their lives are likely to be like. You know, they’re taught both explicitly and implicitly that their primary interest will be in the pursuit of a dynamic career. And there’s some real problems with that. The first is that the proportion of people who will have a dynamic career in the technical sense is actually quite low, because most people have jobs and not careers. And even in those jobs that might be regarded as careers, much of the work that’s done is job-like. I mean, the reason that people pay you to have a job is often because you’re required to do things that you wouldn’t do if you weren’t being paid. And so we glamorize the role of career and confuse jobs with careers and assume that most people are going to end up with high-end careers. And then we also assume that most people, even those who are qualified to have high-end careers, are actually the sort of people who would like to have high-end careers if they could. And that’s also often not true. So for example, I’ve worked very intensely with a large population of female lawyers, usually partners at large law firms, very, very successful women, usually very attractive, very intelligent, extraordinarily conscientious, and the sort of people who were outstanding in high school and then outstanding as undergraduates and then aced law school and then did their articling perfectly and then became associates and then eventually entered the partner stream in a large law firm and then became partners. And a huge proportion of them wake up around 30, somewhere between 30 and 32, and notice their 65-hour days and the incredibly competitive environment that they happen to be in and the fact that the demands of their career are only going to accelerate as they move forward. I mean, they’re going to make a lot of money, but the demands on their time of their career are only going to accelerate as they move forward and decide quite rapidly that that’s maybe not what they want. And the reason for that is they also would like to have a life. They’d like to have a relationship that they could attend to and they’d like to have children. And the simple truth of the matter is that it’s very, very difficult to have a truly high-end career and have an important relationship and have children, especially if there are two of you trying to pursue that at the same time. It’s very difficult. And it’s difficult to have a high-end career period and it’s also difficult to have a fully functional family. Trying to combine those sorts of things makes people who are… I mean, I’ve seen people do it, but man, they push themselves right to their limits and they usually have limits that exceed the limits of typical people. So one of the things we could do, for example, to revive interest in the good mother archetype is to stop telling lies to young women about what their life is likely to be like, because my experience has been, and you might think I’m old-fashioned, although I don’t really think I am, by the way, I think I’m actually quite current and I pay a lot of attention to what’s going on around me. And my experience has been overwhelmingly that high-calibre women decide in their 30s that relationship and family is the most important thing in their life. And I think the reason that the fact that major law firms, for example, have a really difficult time holding on to their high-performing women, even though they bend over backwards to do that, is actually an indication of exactly that. And this notion that it’s a glass ceiling in some sense that are stopping women from advancing up the corporate ladder, I believe to be truly erroneous as well as dangerous. And I don’t think there’s really any evidence to support that. So all right. Fraser Burns says, highly creative, stupendously low in conscientiousness. Am I doomed? No, you’re not doomed. And I think that openness and conscientiousness are often at odds with one another. It isn’t obvious to me how someone can easily be highly creative and orderly, for example, because to be creative means to make some disorder in the intermediary stages of being a creative person. I would say also that many creative enterprises are not the sort of thing that anybody who was sensible from the perspective of being conscientious would ever pursue, like the lifestyle of a musician, for example. I would say, though, that if you’re low in conscientiousness and really high in openness, is that you’re going to be able to generate a lot of creative ideas, but you’re going to have a hard time implementing them. You won’t have the follow through and you may have to really learn to discipline yourself. And I would say the simplest way to start disciplining yourself is to use something like Google Calendar to establish a schedule and stick to the damn thing, like train yourself to get up at the same time, train yourself to eat at the same time, train yourself to follow a schedule so that you undertake the tasks that you need to undertake each week on a regular basis. But you can leave in that a little bit so that it doesn’t become intolerable by using the schedule to design days that you would want to have instead of just days that you should have. Like a schedule doesn’t have to be a tyrant. The proper use of a schedule enables you to have the maximum amount of freedom while also maintaining the responsibility necessary to stop your life from auguring into the ground. So if you’re high in openness, and in all likelihood you’re fairly intelligent if that happens to be the case, and you’re low in conscientiousness, you might be able to get the best of both worlds by learning to discipline yourself, but it’s going to be a step by step process. And I would also say do something like the Future Authoring Program from SelfAuthoring.com. And even if you do it badly, because one of the things that will help you discipline yourself is to have a plan. And a plan is, and this is something that all of you who are listening should know, I really recommend doing that Future Authoring Program because you will not get what you want unless you figure out what it is. You won’t be of as much use to yourself and to the broader world unless you develop a vision and implement it. And the best way to do that is to do it seriously. And one of the best ways to do something seriously is to write about it. So my goal is to be married and on my way to starting a family within five years. Is this a legitimate goal to have for myself? Well absolutely. I mean absolutely. All of these things can be made conscious. I mean, you know, we have this romantic belief, I suppose, that if you open yourself up to opportunity then it will ferret you out and your dreams will come true. But that’s kind of a naive way of looking at the world. And it’s much more likely to be the case that if you aim at something and you aim carefully that you will orient yourself in a manner that makes you aware of the opportunities that will arise that will put you in that direction. That’s actually how your perceptual systems work. And so part of the reason that it’s so useful to orient yourself with regards to a specific aim is that your perceptual systems then turn on to tell you what’s going to facilitate your movement forward and also what’s going to get in the way. Now you don’t want to be too single-minded about it because you can get obsessive and you also want to maintain enough flexibility in your aim so that you can change them when necessary. But there’s absolutely nothing wrong with deciding not only over what period of, during what time frame you might want to get married and when you might want to have children, but what kind of partner you want to have and what sort of interests you would like to share with them and to really specify your life because it’s much more likely that it’s going to turn out in a positive manner for you and everybody else if you put some intelligent thought into it. Just like it’s the case that almost everything is likely to turn out better if you do that. Do you suggest homeschooling with the state public schools are currently in? No, I don’t suggest it. I think homeschooling is an incredibly difficult thing to pull off properly and I think that the number of people who would do it badly far exceeds the number of people who would do it well. Having said that, it’s not like I think it’s wrong and it’s also not like I think that there isn’t increasing reason for parents to consider that because I do actually think there’s increasing reason for parents to consider that because the postmodern neo-Marxists have got their claws into the education system and I think they’re doing everything they can and you can certainly see that in Canada and Ontario where the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario has published their, I think it’s guideline curriculum, it’s something like that, that’s basically a blueprint for transforming kids into social justice oriented individuals from kindergarten through grade eight so it’s not surprising that people want to do that. But I think that parental rights trump state rights in relationship to children and it has to be that way even though there’s lots of bad parents. The thing about bad parents is that the state as parent is worse. It’s not that there are no bad parents but to assume that the state is going to be a better parent on average than parents who actually love their children is a very bad idea. So why is Jordan Peterson’s webcam a thousand times better than all of my favourite YouTube with millions of subscribers? Because my son Julian who helps me with technical matters bought a DLSR camera for me that happens to work extremely well except the battery runs out about every hour and 15 minutes and I have to change it. And I think it would be nice if I could actually plug it in with an adapter but I think that that changes the category of camera to video camera and then there’s tax implications or something like that. I have the high quality camera and I have to put up with the fact that the battery dies. How do I plan to buffer myself from the deteriorating side effect of success? That’s a really good question actually. I can tell you a bunch of answers to that. The first is that I have a sensible family. A son and a daughter and soon to be a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law as well who I like and who like me and we get along really well and they’re really sensible people and so they help keep me my feet nailed to the ground and so does my wife because my wife is also an extremely sensible person and someone I really deeply trust and I’m also fortunate in that I have parents who play that role with me as well and a sister and a brother-in-law and my brother as well who help me stay attuned to the potential dangers that this widespread public exposure might otherwise produce. But the other issue, so there’s that. I have advisors let’s say who are on my side who tell me the truth and we discuss what I’m doing all the time to make sure that it’s staying more or less on track. The other thing too is though you know I’m not exactly a young man anymore. I’m 55 and I think a lot of the detrimental elements of widespread public exposure are things that would have been a lot more harmful or that are a lot more harmful to people when they’re younger. There’s just a lot of things about being in the public eye that don’t have the same cache to me that they might have when I was a younger person or that they would have to a younger person. I guess I would also say that I don’t really believe that I’m the sort of person to let and I’m not trying to put myself on a higher moral plane or anything with this comment but I don’t think I’m the kind of person to let the sort of thing that’s happened over the last year or so really go to my head and I think part of the reason for that is that I have a fairly pronounced depressive temperament and so that I can see the negative side of myself with plenty painful clarity. And I’m also more concerned about the possibility of making a catastrophic mistake as I present myself publicly than I am in what clambering up some power ladder I suppose and elevating myself to a position at the top. I’m just not that interested in that and so I think and I’m also I think fairly aware of the dangers of let’s say fame to the degree that that’s what’s occurred to me. I know the downside of that and it isn’t something that I’m interested in and I’m actually I know it’s a strange thing to think about but I’m actually also rather private person and although I can’t keep my mouth shut obviously and I’m very talkative that’s from being very high in openness even more than being high in extroversion I think. And but there isn’t anything that comes along with the dark side of fame let’s say that I would find particularly attractive. You know I’m not really interested in partying endlessly although I had my time doing that when I was young. I’m certainly not interested in whatever additional attractiveness to females that my more well-known the fact that I’m more well-known might provide to me that that just doesn’t interest me at all. I’m very happy in my marriage and also very aware of the catastrophes that lie in directions of that sort of temptation. So but also I think of all those explanations the one that’s most relevant is my see I know that I’m walking a tightrope in some sense and that it would be very easy for me to make the kind of error that would sink me and I know that there are many people who don’t approve of what I’m doing who would be very happy about that and so I think also living in a somewhat constant state of existential terror about the probability that this house of cards could collapse is also something that keeps me oriented in the humble direction and dwelling on this a little bit but it really is an interesting question. I am also I believe I also have trained myself so that I orient myself mostly to considering what I’m doing wrong and what I could be doing better than what I’m doing right and so I’m always on the lookout in all of the presentations I make for where I didn’t say things as clearly as I might have and where I could have improved my delivery and so concentrating on where what I have yet to attain is also a good way of keeping whatever ego boost there might be in more widespread public recognition under control. Having said that I’m very it’s not like I’m ungrateful for the fact that all this has happened it’s actually an amazing thrill I mean things happen to me all the time that are that are so overwhelmingly positive that I can’t believe it so last night for example I went to this restaurant called The Keg and I go there because I have a lot of food allergies and they’re actually very careful with people who have food allergies and the waiter showed us to the table and he knew who I was and he said that he had been watching my videos and that he had had four promotions I think that’s what he said he said yeah four promotions in the last four months at The Keg and the reason for that was that he had been watching my lectures and decided that he was going to adopt a more responsible attitude as an employee and also you know start pushing the development of his career at this at this restaurant and that it worked out brilliantly and like it was so positive because you know I thought about it as a true victory on his part because he took the situation that he was actually in so a real situation and decided that he was going to maximize the opportunity that was there for him and you know there’s nothing about that that’s negative it’s all positive and it’s a personal story and he shared it with me and I had some small role in bringing that about and like that’s just an absolute thrill as far as I’m concerned like every time someone writes me and says I’ve been watching your videos and I’ve just decided to sort out my life and to aim higher and that’s working it’s just like it’s such a thrill for me to be able to provide that service for hundreds of thousands of people it’s like it’s a it’s an unbelievable privilege and I hope I can figure out how to do it better and better as I get more and more practiced at it I mean that’s really the aim and with my colleagues Daniel Higgins for example I have two business partners Daniel Higgins and Robert Peel. Peel was my graduate advisor and McGill and Daniel Higgins was one of my graduate students at Harvard and we’ve been working on making psychological interventions accessible to people for about 20 years so they helped me develop the self-authoring suite for example. We have a whole host of psychological tools in development including a future authoring program for high school students that we want to bring to the broader general public and so this public exposure also gives me the opportunity to to make what I know as a clinical psychologist and as someone with some specialization in technology especially through my partnerships make that accessible to perhaps millions of people I mean god that’s that’s just an amazing opportunity and so someone asks how do you find the self-authoring autobiography outline well you go to self-authoring.com it’s available there let’s see someone Annette Adler says I have also done better in a lot of things due to your kicks in the ass yeah well I mean that’s great Annette I’m thrilled to hear that. See part of it you see the thing about disciplining someone let’s say is that when you and I see this very clearly when I’m talking to young people is that I’m really on the side of the person that wants to do something positive with their life to make their own life better because I think that’s where you should start you should start by making maximizing the quality of your own life that’s not a selfish thing or if it is it’s the right kind of selfishness and that you should figure out how to do that in a way that’s of benefit to your friends and your family and your community and you should take that deadly seriously and the reason you should do that is because that just makes life better for everyone and it reduces a fair bit of the misery that would otherwise be part and parcel of life and it makes everything function smoothly and one of the things I’m really curious about is what the world would be like if everybody decided to do that because human beings are really remarkable creatures and we hobble ourselves very badly with deception and resentment and revenge and the desire to make things worse and arrogance and all those all those sins let’s say that that that make us deviate from our true path and our true path should be something like imagine the noblest aim that you can conceptualize and then sacrifice your life to attempting to attain it and there’s nothing in that that isn’t good for everyone and so apart from the fact that it requires a lot of responsibility I just can’t see why everyone wouldn’t do that and when I’m talking to young people and you know shaking my finger and saying you know grow the hell up and get mature and take on some responsibility I’m not saying that because I’m an enemy of the person I’m saying it because I’m the best friend of the part of them that would really like to walk in the light and and it’s an invitation to walk in the light and and it would be remarkable this is what we need to do as far as I’m concerned not only in the west but in the world at large but maybe in the west first is we have to consciously decide that we’re going to do everything we can as individuals to walk in the light and to regard that as a noble and heroic endeavor and to make that first and foremost in our lives and that’s what we should be educating young people to do and they can do that and so I have dozens of people writing to me and and talking to me all the time who are saying the same thing they’re saying look I’ve really been trying to get my act together over the last six months I’ve been trying not to lie which is slightly different than trying to tell the truth right it’s a more humble goal to not lie because you can tell when you’re lying but you can’t necessarily tell when you’re telling the truth and I’ve been coming up with a plan and I’ve been trying to discipline myself and I’ve been cleaning up my room which is like a nice humble act that involves transforming chaos into order and they write and say God things are just working out way better for me it’s like whoa do it man that’s just you keep that up for 15 years and you’ll be unbeatable and that’s what we should be convincing young people to be is to be unbeatable and not because that’s what they should do or because they’re bad if they don’t but because there’s nothing better you can possibly do with your limited and your limited and suffering bound life than to aim high and and sacrifice yourself to the attainment of those goals so that’s uh being a highly creative woman I find myself fearful that having kids will be spiritual suicide hindering my endeavors but I also don’t want to have an unfulfilled life can I have a full life without kids well yes I I suspect you can although it’s risky Maddie because it’s really important for people to have kids because the thing is is that you get older than 40 and our culture is kind of dopey in that regards it’s it’s underdeveloped we live as if we live as if we we only exist when we’re young and we don’t it’s like what are you going to do from the ages of say 45 to 90 or 95 you need a family around you you need to see your children grow you need to have grandchildren it’s a major part maybe the most important part of the last half of life now you said being a highly creative woman I find myself fearful that having kids will be spiritual suicide well that’s the part of your question that I would really address because I would say well don’t let them be spiritual suicide you know it may be that there’s a certain amount of time that you need to take away from the kids and this is the case for parents in general so that you can pursue your own creative endeavors it’s children do not have to devour your life in fact if you let them devour your life then you’ll hate them and you’ll mistreat them and so what you want to do is to set yourself up so that you can have children and have a life and that’s better for the children and it’s better for you like children can be taught encouraged to spend a fair bit of time not when they’re infants obviously but to spend a fair bit of time amusing themselves that’s especially the case if you have more than one child because they’ll mutually amuse one another it’s actually easier in some ways to have more than one child because with one child you’re constantly amusing the child but with two or three then they’re off in their little club especially if you can stop them from developing sibling rivalry that’s too intense and they can monitor themselves so the trick is if you’re a highly creative woman is be disagreeable enough so that you can carve yourself out your own space so that you don’t come to resent your children you’re afraid of that you’re afraid that it looks like you’re afraid that if you if you give yourself to children there’ll be nothing left for you and you know that can happen if you have children who have terrible health problems for example but you can’t protect yourself against those eventualities in life anyways but i would say your best bet is to be a more selfish mother and believe me i’ve had more clients who are ruined by mothers who were too unselfish than i’ve had clients who were ruined by mothers who were too selfish so you need to be there when the kids need you but you shouldn’t be there any more than is necessary so let’s see what’s next adam watt says i feared having kids for the same reason i’m a full-time pro artist you make your own normal said my therapist jp is speaking the truth yeah well that’s the that’s the thing you know don’t be thinking that you can’t organize your life when you have children the thing about modern people is that they’re terrified of children they and this because they think they regard children as if they’re miniature tyrants and they can be of course because anyone will tyrannize over you if you allow them to perhaps not anyone but virtually anyone why not regulate your children’s behavior i wrote a chapter in my new book called uh don’t let your children do anything that makes you dislike them and that’s like really serious advice is like if you allow your children to conduct themselves around you in a manner that makes you dislike them if you’re being honest if you’re paying attention to the shadow side of yourself that can be aggressive and destructive then then you’re if you allow your children to do things that make you dislike them then they’re going to they’re having children is going to mess up your life but you don’t have to do that you’re actually you actually have a tremendous amount of control over the quality of your relationship with your children and also the manner in which you choose to dis disperse your time and i mean you’re you’ve got if you’re willing to think it through and be clear you can be in charge of your household the children don’t have to be in charge and it’s not good for them to be in charge anyways so people are afraid of children and it’s too bad because children are absolutely wonderful i mean you have to be careful with them and they get tired and they get hungry and they get hot and and they don’t have an attention span that’s as long as an adult who has a long attention span but they’re great company and they’re unbelievably comical and they love you and like they they give back far more than they take if you have an ounce of sense when you’re dealing with them so yeah so so don’t be afraid of children man you’re you’re the adult for god’s sake you’ve got the upper hand and and if you have a partner you can rely on well then you know you can both decide how it is that you’re going to run your household so that you’re actually thrilled to death that you have kids and that you have a life so all right let’s see so when am i appearing on h3h3 november i believe november 3rd so i’m looking forward to that um let’s see how do you help someone with borderline personality disorder that’s matthew dotson matthew you know i’d like to answer that question but it’s so damn complicated that i don’t think i can manage it um so instead of doing a bad job even though that’s a very interesting question i’m i’m afraid i’m going to skip that um let’s look back at the pigeonhole panel here um do you con some people have criticized my portrayal of post-modernism in what ways would you claim you are fair or unfair in your assessment of its core principles well um i’ve done my best to to give it an even-handed assessment um and i think i’m unfair in that any rather truncated criticism of a large body of thought is liable to clip a few corners but i would say that i’m attempting to provide a snapshot a relatively accurate but low resolution snapshot of a certain kind of war idea on a war of ideas that’s currently going on in our culture and that’s primarily centered in the universities and i don’t think my assessment of post-modernism and its relationship with neo-marxism is unfair in the least in fact i think that the danger that’s presented by that combination of ideological of ideological presumptions is more dangerous than people are currently aware of and that it poses a larger threat to the integrity of our culture than than i’ve currently stated it’s more widespread than i thought for example when i first started speaking out against post-modernism and neo-marxism i didn’t realize for example that the law schools had turned into it had turned into training grounds for social justice activists i didn’t realize that the legal system the legal training system had become corrupt perhaps not to the same degrees as say the faculties of education or social work but certainly a long ways down that road and so i think i do believe that post-modernism is an intellectually bankrupt school of thought and i believe that its alliance with neo-marxism borders on malevolent and it may even go past the border into actual malevolence because i don’t understand how anybody with an inkling of historical sense can take a look at the 20th century and then dare put forward ideas that are derived from marxism as a as a as a treatment for any of society’s hypothetical disorders and it’s not to say that i don’t believe that there are that there are errors in in in western culture say for for whatever that’s worth i mean individuals make moral errors all the time and groups make moral errors and cultures make moral errors that isn’t the issue the issue is how are we doing compared to any reasonable alternatives what makes you think that it’s it’s appropriate to compare the performance of western societies for example to some hypothetical utopia of your own fictional imagining especially when we’ve seen what sort of utopias have emerged out of out of out of such imaginings and what is it that you are offering people as a concrete alternative and all i see in post-modernism is destruction and nihilism and all i see in neo-marxism is historical ignorance malevolence and misdiagnosis well and ingratitude and arrogance i mean the the list goes on and on so i don’t feel that i’ve misrepresented the post-modernists in the least and i find i regard like i’ve read a fair bit of foucault less of derrida but enough to get a pretty good sense of what he’s on about like foucault is readable but more or less obvious as far as i’m concerned and so he’s a third-rate thinker and derrida is just a troublemaker as far as i’m concerned although a very brilliant one and the idea that the post-modernists had that there’s an infinite number of ways of interpreting any set of data let’s say that’s how actually happens to be a true observation and a very problematic one which is partly why it’s it’s so difficult for example to evolve a system that can that can visually perceive the world and why about half our brain is devoted towards that it’s it’s definitely the case that coming up with a viable interpretation of the world is a very difficult process but but that’s about as far as the validity of the post-modernist claims go after that it’s like well yes there’s a very large number of potential interpretations of the world but there’s a very small number of actually viable interpretations and that’s really what’s relevant and viability is constrained by all sorts of of what would you call them well let’s call them constraints yes you you have to interpret the world in a manner that’s commensurate with the minimization of your own intolerable suffering that puts very tight constraints on which interpretations you’re allowed to bring forward you have to do that in a manner that’s iterable and repeatable across time you have to do that in a way that isn’t too objectionable to other people or even better in a manner that what makes them want to cooperate and compete with you so that you know a rising tide lifts all boats there’s immense constraints on organizing your perceptions in a manner that is simultaneously individually and socially highly functional and the post-modernists just just don’t grapple with that at all they and and they’re they’re biologically ignorant beyond belief and proud of that fact and anyways as you can tell i can hardly say enough things that aren’t good about post-modern neo-marxist there’s there’s apart from the fact that they got the initial observation right which is that there’s a very there’s almost an infinite number of ways of interpreting a finite set of data everything else they’ve done is not only intellectually bankrupt it’s also morally reprehensible and i think they’re corrupting our culture and i think they’re they’re they’re hurting young people and they’re hurting them as well by getting them to pay for being hurt which is really quite a malevolent enterprise so i’ve got no what would you call i have absolutely no regrets about going after the post-modern neo-marxists as hard as i possibly can and i’m certainly not done doing so so one of the things that’s going to happen for example in the next month or so i’ve been working with a programmer who’s who’s volunteered his services and has already produced this he’s he’s produced a website that enables people to enter text that will then classify the text as post-modern or non-post-modern and so you’ll be able to enter course descriptions from universities the course description the professor’s name the discipline and the university it will tell you the degree to which the description is post-modern and then you can decide for yourself whether you want to take that and become a social justice warrior if that’s what you think your education should be about or if you should avoid that like the plague that it truly is and so my goal if i had to set a personal goal and this is the sort of thing maybe that you guys are helping me do with my continued support on patreon is that i’d like to knock enrollment in the post-modern disciplines down by 75 over the next five years i think that i think i’m thinking about it from the perspective of of non-violent warfare it’s that serious to me and that this would be equivalent to cutting off the supply chain it’s like the the the post-modernists need a continual influx of young impressionable minds in order to continue their propagandistic and society devouring efforts and i’m going to do absolutely everything i can to cut that supply chain off at the source hopefully and and reduce their enrollment to the zero that would match their citation rate for their publications so would i end my career as an academic in order to enter politics as a candidate for mp under andrew shear’s leadership uh no i don’t think i would do that i mean i thought for a while i thought at one point of running for the leadership of the liberal party in canada and then i thought at another point in running for the leadership of the conservative party but both times i decided that what i was doing as a academic and i would say as someone who’s a philis philosophy a philosophy a philosophy and science jesus it’s been a long day guys i’m starting to forget how to talk as a philosophically and scientifically minded psychologist was more useful than anything i could likely do practically in the political realm and i haven’t seen any reason to change that opinion as a consequence of the events of the last eight months or so and so although i’ve always been interested in politics as a potential career every time the opportunity has arisen and i’ve had to make a choice between continuing what i’ve been doing and pursuing a political pathway i’ve always decided to continue doing what i am doing and i think that’s probably what i will continue to do i actually think i can have more influence doing what i’m doing than i could by doing anything else and that’s partly because i suppose if i thought there was anything else i could be doing that was more useful i’d be doing that instead so that’s the answer to that what is the role of art in a healthy culture is post-modernism as destructive and in this domain as in politics well let’s let’s that’s michael bamford well what’s the role of art in a healthy culture well the artists articulate the the artists are the people who first articulate the unknown and so the role of artists in a healthy culture is to bring to public awareness elements of being that have not yet entered the the collective consciousness so you could imagine imagine that we’re all living on an island and many of us are in the center of the island far enough away so that maybe we can’t even see the shoreline and we can’t see the ocean that’s that’s where our borders end but we’re we’re distant from the artists are right on the edge and they’re they’re they’re they’re they’re expanding the landscape they’re they’re they’re moving the culture forward that’s where my metaphor fails i guess they’re moving the culture forward into the unknown and they do that by translating what is as of yet unimaginable but sensed into what is at least imaginable and represented represented in image and drama and literature and that’s the precursor to its full formulation in articulated philosophy and thought and that’s what artists do they’re problem solvers they’re problem detectors and problem solvers that’s what true artists do and they’re always trying to solve problems like if you there’s a great documentary that was made about picasso for example a painting unfortunately i can’t remember the name of it i think it was made in 1957 it’s available on youtube and it’s in black and white and picasso is filmed making a painting on a on a on a window so that you can see exactly what it’s doing and you can watch him work with ideas he he paints something in and then he erases it you know he paints over it then he paints again and he paints over he moves the figures around on the canvas it’s a window pane as i said and you can see him working out visual you can see him working out problems and solutions to problems using using his visual imagination and the the artistic product the painting is is the consequence of that rather than the aim of it the aim is to formulate the problems and to work out the solutions and the artistic product the painting is is the byproduct of that not the aim and so artists move us forward into the unknown and you can see them doing that in cities because it’s the open people the artists who go into parts of the cities that are have degenerated to some degree back into chaos and then revitalize them and they civilize them and then the less artistic people who who are more conventional move in and you know that’s when you get gentrification and that sort of thing and that usually chases the artists out and they go somewhere else cheap and interesting and start the renewal process again so the thing about artists and and it’s a hard thing to balance properly in our culture is that artists are unbelievably productive economically but it’s very very hard for them to monetize their productivity so even though what they produce can be of incalculable value it’s very difficult for them to get any of the economic value that they’re produced actually directed towards them it’s a major problem in in it’s a major problem with trade openness as a mode of being in the world so is post-modernism as destructive in this realm as it is in politics post-modernism is perhaps equally destructive in all realms as far as i can tell especially when it’s allied but with neo-marxism and those two things there’s no reason they should go hand in hand you know because if you’re a post-modernist there’s absolutely no reason stemming from your own philosophy that you should ally yourself with the neo-marxist political outlook and the fact that those two things are found together almost inevitably indicates to me that post-modernism is the handmaiden of the neo-marxists rather than the other way around so in in fact post-modernism is the intellectual front that the neo-marxists wear or adopt to hide from themselves and other people their true motivations which are mostly driven by revenge and and resentment and and the desire to destroy and a hatred for quality and a hatred for qualitative distinctions which is dead it’s death i mean with young people you want to say look there’s not much to you’re only 20 and you’re kind of useless but that’s because you’re only 20 you know it’s that doesn’t mean you’re not full of potential that potential needs to manifest itself so that you can turn into something that’s that’s of of like of world beating significance but in order to tell a young person that credibly you have to say look there are true qualitative distinctions between things and you’re just getting started there are heights that you can ascend to that are genuinely high which also means they’re above where you are now but that gives your life the fact that there are those things to pursue gives your life deep meaning and significance and gives your struggle nobility and validity and the post-modernist neo-marxist as far as i’m concerned are absolute enemies of qualitative distinctions and so what they do is destroy everyone’s ambition it’s like we’re all already as valuable as we’re going to get it’s like okay well fine that’s good we don’t have to feel bad about ourselves but what the hell are we going to do what are we going to orient ourselves towards what we want is multiple hierarchies multiple steep hierarchies of competence that are open in in fair competition to everyone and and if we don’t have enough hierarchies of competence for everyone then you know it’s up to the creative people to produce some new ones it’s not like we’ll necessarily run out so all right have you ever had to tell someone that they are best suited to a subservient slash blue collar lifestyle because they don’t have any semblance of brilliance okay well i want to take issue with the formulation of that question although i think it’s a perfectly reasonable question that’s jan swan don’t be thinking that a blue collar lifestyle is necessarily subservient i mean first of all you can be a trades person and that’s a really good career choice as far as i’m concerned it’s it’s very very valuable i mean you know good plumbers are rare and good carpenters are rare and good bricklayers are rare and they’re so useful i mean i do a lot of renovation work i’ve done an awful lot of renovation work on all the places that i’ve i’ve lived in and i’ve learned to do a fair bit of construction and automotive body work and all those sorts of things and i really like doing it and you know there’s their blue collar life is not necessarily subservient at all because you can be master of your trades domain and be unbelievably economically useful and productive and creative and independent and autonomous and so there’s there’s nothing necessarily subservient about that now you know if you’re thinking more about about let’s say life at the low end of a restaurant but even there if you’re a conscientious person and you’re careful and you and you’re awake and you treat the people around you well and you do your job properly there’s also room for advancement in the private sphere there’s no reason to assume whatsoever that merely because you don’t have the intellectual horsepower to work well in the in the in the domain of rapidly shifting abstractions that your life has to be of secondary quality or opportunity i don’t see that at all and and there is endless opportunity in the trades and and like in in toronto for example there’s a chronic shortage of trades people and there’s always a shortage of qualified people for every occupation so if i have to tell someone that they’re best suited to a blue collar lifestyle i wouldn’t feel bad about it i might say to them well look you know you you know let’s assume you’re talking to someone who has an iq of 100 which is the iq of the average high school graduate you might say well look you know unless you’re super conscientious a career in something like law is probably not your best bet because you’re going to be competing with people who have iqs that are like 30 points higher than yours or 25 points higher than yours and if you really work yourself to death you might be able to maintain maintain competitiveness in that domain but you’re going to be working at a powerful disadvantage because the people that you’re competing with for example are going to be way faster than you verbally they’re going to be able to read faster and to reason verbally faster and and all of that and it might be better to pick up an ambition that’s more in keeping with the quality of your temperament and your intelligence to put it bluntly so that you can be but that doesn’t mean that your success has to be limited and it also doesn’t mean that i’m elevating intelligence to to a platform of the ultimate moral ideal because the relationship between intelligence and moral ideal is zero there there’s no relationship between them at all intelligence is a is a capacity let’s say that can be put to ill use just as well as to good use and there’s nothing intrinsically better about smart people they might be more useful for certain things if they’re oriented towards the good but there’s absolutely there’s no shortage of opportunity in the working class end of the end of the world and i can certainly understand often why people might prefer that to to the endless miasma you might say chaotic miasma of complex abstract jobs one of the problems with those sorts of jobs is that you’re never done you never finish there’s always more work than you can possibly do so all right so that’s a good one let’s see here i feel sensitive to meme culture slash irony it seems hard to act out honesty when every facet of human behavior has turned into a meme so i worry people’s natural reaction will be to mock or scoff well you know i’ve been the target of my fair share of memes perhaps more than my fair share and i actually find it extremely i’m really happy about it and part of the reason for that involves some of the elements of our earlier discussion people were saying well how do you plan to keep your feet on the ground say given your newfound public profile and i see the the meme culture as part of the corrective i mean there’s a great role for satire and irony and all of the elements of comedy to to act as a corrective and i mean i’ve been fortunate because most of the memes that have been directed my way have been done with good humor and i’m lucky because for some reason the ratio of positive attention i received from the general public let’s say is compared to the ratio of to the amount of negative uh reactions i’m receiving is very disproportionate i’m receiving almost all positive reactions so you know i’m in the fortunate position of being able to laugh along with it but um i don’t think that there’s any reason to assume that irony and satire have to become cruel and scoffing they they can be done with a light touch and they can be done in a manner that keeps everybody awake and make sure that no one is above of both criticism and and and humor that they’re now that sort of thing can become cynical very rapidly but it degenerates as soon as it becomes cynical you see this with satirical shows you know like i really like the simpsons the first 13 seasons in particular and like it it was one of the very rare true satires on american television and it never degenerated into cynicism in part because although it comedically critiqued almost every element of american life it was also it also had a set of messages that were very positive so for example the simpson family was an extraordinarily coherent nuclear family unit and for whatever homer’s faults might have been and they were myriad he was always there as a reliable and trustworthy uh father to his family despite his you know somewhat limited abilities both ethically and intellectually he was there when it counted and that stopped that show from degenerating into cynicism and i also think the same about the trailer park boys which is a show that i have a fair bit of partiality for despite its its endless profanity and and absurdity it has the same underlying structure is that the characters are bound together by genuine affection and there’s something about that that that makes the satirical message both positive and deeply acceptable as far as i’m concerned so i know lots of laughs jordan watches trailer park boys i don’t just watch it i really like it i really get a kick out of it i don’t know how many of you are trailer park boys aficionados probably not that many because it is a pretty rough show but um the conky episode that’s got to be one of them the high that’s one of the highest that’s the the highest reach of canadian comedy as far as i’m concerned that episode just absolutely floored me it was so it was so surreal and so absurd that um all right let’s see here here what is your advice for someone who lives with chronic pain wow that’s a tough one how can i discipline myself mentally in order to be productive when i feel awful all of the time what coping methods can i use look the first thing i would say this is a question posed by shivers is like if you’re suffering chronic pain one of the things you can do is try not to judge yourself too harshly man that’s really rough and why don’t you start by assuming that if you’re having a hard time disciplining yourself that it’s actually a consequence of the chronic pain rather than a moral fault you know like i’ve dealt with lots of people who’ve had terrible chronic health problems and you know you you you you want to push yourself because you don’t want to end up in a situation where the disease condition is taking more away from you than it absolutely has to so you attempt to impose minimal disciplinary structures on yourself to to push the illness back as much as you can but if you’re in chronic pain i would say um you need to find someone that you can trust to talk to so that they can help you plan and you need to be able to delineate out what your limitations are in a manner that they can understand so that you can jointly focus on how to make productive use and high quality use of the time that you can actually spend outside of merely suffering the other thing that i would ask you about is are you sure that your medication regime regimen is adjusted optimally because antidepressants for example can be very effective long-term medication for chronic pain especially drugs like selexa so i don’t know if you use an antidepressant in your attempts to manage your chronic pain but that’s something i would definitely recommend and there’s a lot of pharmaceutical treatment and you know you may have run the gamut already i know lots of people who have chronic pain have done that but and also stimulants like the adhd medications can also be helpful in the management of pain because stimulant medication has an analgesic property so you might want to consult a number of specialists about your medication regimen to see that you’re medicated to the optimal degree but i would definitely recommend antidepressants and also find and and talking to someone find someone you can trust so that you can talk to them about your genuine limitations and how you might transcend them and and also see if you cannot torture yourself with guilt because you aren’t able to live the productive life that someone who’s free of chronic pain might i mean it can be unbelievably debilitating so mostly well so i’m very sorry to hear that that’s plaguing you and and when you say how can i discipline myself i’m sorry i’m afraid i’ve lost the question you you said how can i discipline myself it’s something like how can i discipline myself when i’m in chronic pain it’s like well i think the a more appropriate question might be how can you ensure you that you treat yourself with the appropriate compassion if you happen to be living with severe chronic pain and maybe the disciplinary element should be secondary it’s something like that so so i’m getting tired guys so i’m probably going to stop at nine i’m going to stop at 9 30 because i’m going to start becoming incoherent if i don’t so just to give you a warning we’re going to we’re going to run this for 50 more minutes so is joining the military a respectable path for my life well i would say it would likely depend on how you conduct yourself as a soldier it and also what your alternatives are but i wouldn’t so i wouldn’t say yes without reservation but i certainly wouldn’t say no without reservation i think joining the military can be a respectable pathway for your life i mean it’s obviously a complex pathway but it’s it’s not like the military isn’t a necessity and so if there’s something in you that tilts you in that direction then perhaps that’s courage in you talking that’s certainly possible so so let’s see let’s go back to the pigeonhole thing here becoming a truthful person involves dealing with the guilt of past lives is it better to come clean about old lies even if they will ruin lives or forgive yourself and focus on living truthfully in the present and future ah that’s a that’s a really good question um i would say that there are telling the truth doesn’t mean saying everything about everything all the time it’s a lot more complicated than that first of all you have a right to privacy and second like here’s an example this is a tricky one but i think it would address your question imagine that you’ve had an affair you have a happy marriage but you had an affair and maybe you had an affair three years ago and maybe it was you know a couple of weeks or a couple of months or maybe it was even only one night and it’s driving you crazy you’re guilty about it and you feel that you should confess and i would say well the first question is have you learned your lesson and the lesson should be you’ve processed what you’ve done and decreased the probability that you will do it again to something as closely approximating zero as possible and then you have to ask yourself what makes you think that you have any right to confess because then what you would do is take the original transgression which was quite severe and hurt someone very badly by revealing it and you might say well you’ll pat yourself on the back for being a truthful person about it but i would say you’ve already sacrificed the right you have to be truthful about that and and i know i’m oversimplifying it because the only way to not oversimplify such a thing is to use a real example and not a hypothetical example but i think many times the moral thing to do is to take your guilty secrets to the grave and maybe you can talk about them with a therapist or you can talk about them with someone that you really trust who will maintain confidentiality but you don’t come clean about old lives you’re not coming clean about old lives generally if that will ruin lives and i don’t think you you forgive yourself precisely and focus on living truthfully in the future you focus on living truthfully in the future and perhaps you don’t forgive yourself exactly that doesn’t mean you pound yourself into the ground with guilt but if you have done things in the past that were reprehensible and that would destroy lives if we’re brought to light then you should i think that generally speaking you should do everything you can to limit the spread of damage as you attempt to move truthfully into the future so you’ve said that a marriage must be based on trust and transparency and being shackled together how and for how long should you get to know someone how to set a foundation oh well you know there’s no there’s no simple answer to that i think that you should know someone well enough so that you can so that you know if you can negotiate with them and so that you have started to formulate a vision of your joint future that you can both look forward to with enthusiasm and confidence so and of course that’s going to depend to some degree on your level of maturity but that means you’ve considered such things as do you have a sufficient number of joint interests and are you oriented in the same direction with regards to how you’re going to handle your joint careers and the possibility of children and the the manner in which you’re going to interact with your in-laws and you you have to start thinking about you have to start considering your life together from the perspective of practicality and economics i would say so it can’t just be that massive erotic attraction that’s associated with with love although i think that’s extraordinarily important and you’re unbelievably fortunate if you have that and you should do everything you can to maintain it which and that takes effort that takes real effort and will but you need to ally that with with maturity and intelligence and the maturity and intelligence is okay we’re going to put our lives together what’s that going to look like at the level of detail how are we going to handle our finances where are we going to live what are our joint plans going to be etc one of the things that my business partners and i plan to do in in what would you say that in as an analog to the self-authoring suite is that we want to develop a an online program to help people negotiate their relationships and and so it would actually provide an answer to this question in a more comprehensive manner is that imagine that if you want to set up a household with someone then there’s a lot of things that you need to get straight and you either do that by bringing your unconscious assumptions to bear on the situation and perhaps clashing where they don’t match or you sit down like a conscious and aware and articulate couple and start to negotiate what your joint responsibilities are going to be and so that would be well who’s responsible for the meals and when and what are you going to eat and who’s going to get groceries and who’s going to pay the bills and who’s going to do which part of what household chores there are to do and how is that going to be laid out fair and so you should get to know you should get to know the person that you’re with well enough so that you can start discussing the real practical issues of life and determine whether or not you’re capable of of negotiating that and i don’t think that necessarily means that you should live together because the evidence is actually quite strong at least the last time i looked that people who live together are more rather than less likely to be divorced now that might be that might have nothing to do with the actual act of living together it might be that people who are more likely to get divorced are also those who are more likely to merely live together but i don’t think that’s a great solution for reasons i won’t get get into now and with regards to being shackled together is that that’s a complicated one and and i learned this at least in part from reading carl jung and the idea there is that unless you’ve really made a commitment to someone like a lifetime commitment and that that’s a serious commitment one that you’re not going to back out of you’re not going to take the relationship with the seriousness that’s necessary to make it of the highest possible quality and sustainability across the course of your life and it’s really important that it is of that high quality and sustainability because the relationship especially when it starts to produce children is a machine let’s say a machine that you jointly operate that adds immensely to the quality of your life and the depth of your life i mean you you have the rope and strand of your life and your partner has the the strands and the rope of his or her life and then those are tied together to make a stronger rope and then that unites you across time and then you undertake massive adventures together and some of that is the establishment of a household and the establishment of joint careers and the maintenance of each other’s mental and physical health and the maintenance of a high quality sexual life and all of that very very challenging to do all of that and then the joint production and and care of children which which sets you up properly for the last half of your life so like i’m 55 now you know and um both my kids just got engaged in the last month so that’s pretty bloody amazing and they’re both setting up households and and they’re stepping into adulthood and i’m fortunate enough to have them in the city that i live in so hooray for me that’s so bloody fortunate that i can hardly believe it i mean we’ve helped them out and tried to make it what would you say to make the possibility of their living here be something that’s viable but i’m absolutely thrilled that they’re going to be around and i’m looking forward immensely to having grandchildren and like what else are you going to do when you’re 55 you know and you’re going to be 55 it’s going to i might have 40 more years like what am i going to do with those years well so i have a good marriage thank god for that and that’s partly due to the outstanding moral quality of my life my wife who i’m also extraordinarily attracted to and uh you know we’ve built a life together and we’ve had kids together and we’re happy with our kids and we had plenty of of struggle with our kids because one of our children my daughter had serious serious health problems which she seems to have managed to resolve partly as a consequence of her own brilliance but you know we’ve set ourselves up now so that our children are respectable and mature young adults so thank god for that and they’ve got partners who we both really like and they’re going to have children and well hooray you know that means that this next part of my life is going to be something that i can advance into with a with a fair bit of hope and and and excitement and the idea of having little kids around again is thrilling because i really like little kids they’re really really fun and so the the shackle together is more like it’s a it’s it’s it’s such a i may have even said that but it’s such a cynical way of looking at it it’s more like what you’ve produced is an unbreakable bond between two beings and that that makes both of them both of them better in every way if it’s based on if it’s a relationship that’s based on trust and genuine communication that’s very difficult thing to attain because you have to be willing to tell the truth and the truth is generally a horrible thing you know i mean it’s easy to tell truth when everyone wants to hear what you have to say but it’s very difficult to tell the truth when no one wants to hear it least of all yourself and so marriage gets a very bad rap in our culture and so does child rearing and i think that’s absolute catastrophe because really being in a long-term relationship a marriage let’s say and having children that’s two-thirds of your life even if you’re a highly career-oriented person that’s two-thirds of your life and i’m a highly career-oriented person and my family has been unbelievably important to me and has also been something that’s enabled me to be very effective in my career because my house has been a sanctuary for me and thank god for that especially over well many times in my life but especially over the last year so you should you should get to know someone long enough to know that you too can tell the truth with each other communicate and negotiate because the most important part of a relationship is the fact that you can tell each other the truth and negotiate so how does it feel to be viewed as a father figure by many people who grew up without one well um i think it’s an unbelievable honor how’s that and that is really what i think i think it’s a tremendous honor and i’m doing absolutely everything i can to be worthy of that and i would like to say to all the people out there who grew up without a father that’s really too bad because you need a father there to encourage you that’s what fathers do is they encourage they help make you courageous and if i can help people develop the capacity to be courageous and to learn to tell the truth and to be responsible then that’s great i i can’t imagine a better outcome for me and so if people are willing to help me play that role and to use what i’ve been teaching to guide them in that manner then hooray i couldn’t possibly imagine a better outcome than that so so how do you formulate good questions given that a well given that a well-oriented question seems often more critical than the answer that’s a great question by the way um a lot of what you do to formulate good questions is listen like if you’re engaged in dialogue with someone and you really listen to what they’re saying the all you have to do is notice when you don’t understand what they’re saying and then ask them for a clarification and that’s the case when you’re dealing with the the factual world as well you know um what you do to formulate good questions is is admit your own ignorance to yourself and then try to articulate that ignorance as clearly and simply as you possibly can and so i do that all the time when i’m in my clinical sessions with people because they’ll be telling me the story of their life years ago perhaps or maybe events over the last few weeks or whatever and they’ll tell me the story and and i’ll detect elements of it that i don’t understand or that are unclear or that seem self-contradictory and so then i’ll just ask it says well i don’t i don’t understand what you’re saying there you said this as far as i can tell but that wasn’t clear what exactly do you mean and so a huge and and get them to articulate it and and maybe i’ll say well you said this now but you said this you know 10 minutes ago and as far as i can tell those two things are opposites and so how do you how do you bridge the gap between those things and but the critical issue with regards to good questions is that you admit to yourself your own ignorance and you’re not embarrassed about it like there’s nothing wrong with being ignorant well that’s not true it’s a terrible thing to be ignorant but it’s inevitable but it’s not a moral flaw it’s just unfortunate the moral flaw is in refusing to admit to it and so you know the students who do really well in classes are the ones who ask basic questions they put up their hand and say look you know everyone else here seems to understand this but this is a point that i really don’t get and you know rarely a person asks a question like that and they haven’t been listening and they haven’t been paying attention and they’re just being annoying but most of the time people who do that have been paying attention and they’re asking a question that everyone else in the room would also like ask but is embarrassed to do so so um all right you said that positive emotion comes from moving towards a goal but also that friends and family are crucial critical to a fulfilling life are both of these hitting the same neural circuits i would say no not precisely the the positive emotion that comes from moving towards a goal looks to me to be primarily dopaminergic and the the positive emotion that’s associated with friends and family i think is much more associated with the opiate system and some of the best work on that was done by jak panksap j a a k panksap p a n k s e p p and he wrote a book called affective neuroscience and a variety of very very good scientific papers and laid some of the initial groundwork for understanding the relationship between the functioning of the endogenous opiate systems and social bonding so no i don’t think they’re the same they share overlap because the opiate circuits can activate the dopaminergic circuits but but there there are definite differences in the system that that that seeks out goals and that’s the system that panksap actually called the seeking system that’s the dopaminergic system and the more affiliative systems so they’re definitely overlapping but separate neural circuits and so not to take away from your interpretations but for a skeptic how do you know that you’re analysis of biblical stories are true well that’s a great question but the issue there is what what do you mean by true i would say they’re functional because i’m a pragmatist and i mean that technically i believe that our conceptual structures are tools to help us orient ourselves in the world and so the issue for me is are the interpretations that i’m making of the biblical stories useful functional tools for people to use to operate in the world and how can i demonstrate that their canonical interpretations of the bible well i can’t demonstrate that what i can say is that people can listen to them and make their own judgment about whether or not they’re useful and valid which i think is a better way of thinking about it than than true because truth in literature mythology is a very tricky concept and especially in a book like the bible which as i pointed out in the first biblical lecture is the first truly hyperlinked text where every almost every verse interacts with almost every other verse and so it’s an end it’s endlessly deep and there’s an endless number in some sense of valid interpretations that could come forth from it but um there there’s more to the answer to that question but i can’t go into it for now because i’m well we’re running out of time and i’m running out of energy in fact it is 9 30 and so and so and my daughter has just showed up and my wife has told me that so i think i’m actually going to take this opportunity to bow out and to say once again thank you um this is my wife by the thank you um this is my wife by the way might as well where what i was watching the video and i thought she was still in the room the video is lagged so um i was actually interacting with a ghost there for a minute um i wanted to thank you all again for supporting me um i also want to say i know that for you patrons that have been supporting me to the for at the 200 dollar level i know that i promised to give you producer credit on the biblical videos and i haven’t forgotten that i just haven’t done it yet because i would like to say because i’ve been doing a bunch of other things and i do actually believe that’s true but i haven’t forgotten and i still want to do it and i think it is important and you have been crucial to the production of these this series all of you patreon supporters and i’m hoping that i can continue to put the support that you’ve been offering me to to ever better use and hopefully you can also help guide me in doing that in these q and a’s because it gives us a chance to uh to communicate so um well so i’m going to say good night and uh thanks a lot to all of you and we’ll see you in a month um get your act together all of you and and do what you can man it’d be a wonderful thing to see and if enough people start doing that maybe we can turn this whole mess around that’d be lovely and maybe it won’t take that many people to start it so that’d be a good goal so good night