The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
13 Jan 2025 · 2h 29m · Jordan Peterson, Steven Bartlett · 21 quoted facts
Jordan Peterson argues that a good life, a lasting marriage and a healthy society all depend on voluntary sacrifice for something higher than yourself. He says modern individualism, easy pleasures like pornography, and avoiding hard conversations leave people lonely and sexless. In his view, taking on responsibility, telling the truth and committing fully, as in marriage, is what makes life meaningful.
The conversation moves from practical advice on relationships, sex and porn to a larger question: where do our values come from? Bartlett, who says he is wrestling with marriage and faith, keeps pressing Peterson for plain answers. Peterson stresses that people cannot invent their own values. He treats Biblical stories as accumulated wisdom about how to live. He admits his own faith was tested during years of illness and loss.
Peterson says a marriage ends when roughly 10,000 fights were never had. Every avoided conversation piles up behind the next argument and makes honesty harder.
Peterson says couples who live together first are more likely to divorce. He argues that trying someone out sends the message 'unless someone better comes along', and that living together is not a real model of permanent marriage.
Peterson argues porn makes people less driven to pursue real relationships. He says men do much of what they do to impress women, so easy gratification takes away the urgency.
For someone whose life is a mess, Peterson recommends one small fix they will actually do. He says humility means starting where you are, and that progress and decline both compound.
Peterson says people cannot create their own values, because only a few ways of living work over years with a spouse, kids and community. He sees Biblical stories as a record of what works.
Peterson says marriages end when couples avoid hard conversations. He estimates about 10,000 unspoken fights pile up over the roughly ten years it takes a marriage to collapse. He also advises setting aside time each week to hear what your partner has noticed.
No. He says couples who live together first are more likely to divorce. He argues that living together is not a true preview of marriage, because marriage is permanent.
He calls it addictive and says it makes sexual gratification too easy, which reduces men's drive to pursue real relationships. He would not support a ban, but says restrictions on its distribution could be considered.
He says easy casual sex lets the most manipulative men dominate the dating market, so women trust men less. He also points to porn and to high-achieving women having a smaller pool of men they would accept.
He uses 'God' as a definition for the highest good that all other goods point toward. For example, he calls God 'the voice of adventure' in the story of Abraham. Pressed by Bartlett, he says he believes Christ embodies the prophets and the law.
Stated by the speakers. Each quote matches the transcript, which shows what was said, not that it is true.
Jordan Peterson says his disputes with the College of Psychologists of Ontario have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and run for about ten years.
“The battles I've had with the College of Psychologists in Ontario, those are no joke. It's very, very stressful and unconscionable, so expensive, hundreds of thousands of dollars, years, it's been ten years of legal battles.”
Jordan Peterson says he has known his wife Tammy for 52 years and considers her his best friend.
“I really have a great relationship with my wife and like, I've known her for 52 years, it's a very long time”
Jordan Peterson says that when controversy erupted around him he had three sources of income, which he describes as deliberate.
“Now, when things blew up around me, I had three sources of income. That wasn't accidental.”
Jordan Peterson says that for ten years his clinical practice worked with high-achieving employees of consulting and law firms.
“I worked for ten years with a strata of the highest achieving women likely in Canada. I had, as part of my clinical practice, a offering that we made to consulting firms and law firms”
Jordan Peterson states that in the West about half of women aged 30 and younger do not have a child.
“we know now that at the present time in the West, half of women 30 and younger don't have a child.”
Jordan Peterson says one in three couples at age 30 have trouble conceiving, defined as a year of trying without success.
“one in three couples at 30 already have trouble conceiving. And that definition of trouble is one year of attempt with no success.”
Jordan Peterson says personality studies describe men oriented toward short-term relationships as Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic and sadistic.
“they're Machiavellian, which means they use their language to manipulate, they're narcissistic, which means they want unearned social status, they're psychopathic, which makes them predatory parasites, and they're sadistic.”
Jordan Peterson says couples who live together before marriage are more likely to divorce.
“we know that couples who live together are more likely to get divorced rather than less.”
Jordan Peterson says he and Tammy, who had been childhood friends, married when he was about 27 or 28.
“and we didn't get married till I think we were about 27, something like that, 28.”
Jordan Peterson says roughly 25% of internet traffic involved pornography and that the desire to exchange it was a large part of why the internet was created.
“What? 25% of internet traffic, something like that, that desire to exchange pornography, was that what created the net? Yeah, was a huge part of it.”
Jordan Peterson says sexual imagery in print began opening up in the 1920s and took off with Playboy, followed by Penthouse.
“The window for sexual representation started to open in the nineteen twenties, let's say, but it really got going with Playboy. Then Penthouse came out right after that”
Jordan Peterson says about 30% of Japanese men and women under thirty are virgins, with a similar figure in Korea.
“I think 30% now of Japanese men and women under thirty are virgins. It's about the same in Korea.”
Jordan Peterson says Robert Crumb helped establish the graphic novel genre in the 1960s in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury.
“Robert Crumb was the establisher. He was one of the people who established the genre of graphic novel, really, back in the sixties in Haight Ashbury in San Francisco.”
Jordan Peterson made a course on the Sermon on the Mount for Peterson Academy, which he describes as the longest record of Christ's direct utterances.
“I did a course for Peterson Academy called It's on the Sermon on the Mount, and the Sermon on the Mount is the longest record we have of Christ's direct utterances”
Jordan Peterson says Elon Musk told him he had an existential crisis around age thirteen and resolved it by pursuing truth and understanding.
“He had a terrible existential crisis when he was, like, thirteen, you know, and he reconciled that essentially with a quest.”
Jordan Peterson defines postmodernism as skepticism of meta-narratives, meaning overarching unifying stories.
“the definition of postmodernism is skepticism of meta narratives”
Jordan Peterson notes that in the Biblical story the patriarch's name changes from Abram to Abraham as he is transformed.
“Well, Abraham changes so dramatically that he gets a new name. He starts as Abram and he ends as Abraham.”
Jordan Peterson says his wife's father, his father and his mother all died in the same year.
“Her father also died, so we lost her father and my father and my mother this year.”
Jordan Peterson says that during a period of severe pain he walked about twelve miles a day for months because he could not sit.
“I was walking like twelve miles a day, cause I couldn't sit. I did that for months, winter, rain”
Steven Bartlett says he has been on only about four dates in his life, and that he has been with his current partner for six years.
“I've actually been on, I think, four dates in my entire life. I'm 32”
Jordan Peterson says he knew his mother for sixty-two years and has no negative memory of her.
“I don't have a single negative memory of my mother. It's really quite something to know someone for sixty two years”
Peterson argues that modern liberal individualism only works when shared traditional values underpin it. He says mental health depends on being nested in family and community.
“the liberal experiment in individualism only works when the conservative foundation is in place”
Peterson describes the personal cost of his long dispute with his professional regulator. He explains why close family and friends anchored him.
“The battles I've had with the College of Psychologists in Ontario, those are no joke.”
Peterson's central claim about marriage is that avoided conflicts pile up until the relationship collapses.
“A marriage ends in divorce when there's 10,000 fights that haven't been had.”
Peterson draws on his clinical work with high-achieving professional women. He argues that fertility and mate selection create hard trade-offs.
“free and easy mating environment, women don't trust men, and no wonder”
Peterson contends that trial cohabitation raises divorce risk and sends the wrong message about commitment.
“couples who live together are more likely to get divorced rather than less”
The two discuss porn's addictiveness and what it does to young men's drive. Peterson also covers policy limits.
“any thirteen year old boy can now look at more beautiful naked women”
Peterson predicts AI companions will worsen alienation. They will give 'the worst part of you' what it wants.
“better conversation with a decent chat bot than with anybody he's ever talked to”
Peterson offers practical advice for someone far from discipline. He says to fix one small thing and start where you are.
“humility is starting where you are, that's what humility is.”
Peterson explains his reading of the Abraham story, and why he thinks people cannot invent their own values.
“The God that comes to Abraham is the voice of adventure.”
Peterson discusses years of severe pain and his wife's illness. He says everyone's faith is challenged.
“I was in extreme pain for three years, right?”
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We know the couples that live together before the marriage actually increases the probability that the relationship will fail. And the reason for that is very straightforward.
And talking of things that risk harming relationships, subject we've never spoken about before is
Oh, yeah, and that's a huge reason sex has disappeared. People need to stop doing that.
Jordan Peterson, the psychology professor, people love or love to hate.
He's undeniably one of the greatest intellectual phenomenons on the planet.
and many view him as the ultimate father figure.
Welcome back, Mr. Peterson.
We're built for maximal challenge, and that isn't the way we view ourselves in the modern world. We view ourselves as built for consumption and pleasure, for example, watching pornography.
But what are the downstream consequences of that
Well, first of all, it's easy
to get what?
sexual gratification.
But does it matter?
No, it's a catastrophe. You're not desperate anymore. And if you're gonna have the true adventure of your life, you're gonna need love, shame, guilt, desperation, and pain. Like it's hard, but now people take the easy road, like avoiding conflict, for example. And I spent a lot of time studying evil. It arises when good men hold their tongue. Now you may suffer some consequences of speaking, but retreating one step at a time defensively, when it makes you sick of yourself, there's nothing worse that can happen to you.
You want your life to be unbearably entertaining, and maybe all the sorrow and catastrophe has to be part of it. Because otherwise, there's there's nothing about it. That's glorious.
Over the last two years, you've been through a particularly difficult time, and because you've been through that, have you been able to develop a strategy that helps you go through suffering?
Yeah, oh, definitely. So the first thing
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Back to this episode. Your book comes at a really interesting time in my life personally. Your book is called We Who Wrestle with God, and it's my belief and suspicion that there's a lot of people wrestling with God at the moment. And when I say the word God, I don't necessarily mean some man in the sky with a beard. What I really mean is a greater meaning, a greater sense of meaning. Um, the world feels like, and you speak to this in the book, that it's gotten more and more individualistic, and there's consequence to that.
fractionated is another way of thinking about it, right? Because you can think about it as individualistic, and that's a positive spin, so to speak, but alienated, isolated, and fractionated is the what would you say is the accompaniment to that? See, I think, I think, I think the case is is that the liberal experiment in individualism only works when the conservative foundation is in place, right? If you aggregate people together and they share enough fundamental values, especially of a particular sort, then you can concentrate on the individual and individual freedom.
But there's a lot of preconditions for that. And you know, the Scottish liberals, so the ones who really established Western liberalism as a philosophical and political movement, they knew that, you know, it was individual liberty, Judeo Christian substructure, and that was an assumption. Now, the problem with modern liberalism is that that underlying foundation has become extremely shaky, and everyone feels it. That's what the culture war is about fundamentally, and that fact is invalidating the fractionated liberal experiment.
Partly, see, it's partly because we have the wrong conception of identity. Fundamentally, identity is a hierarchical structure, so we kind of think that you end at your boundaries as an individual, but you don't. Because, well, you're probably not not gonna want to be alone. So then let's say you're married, okay? So now your identity as a husband, that's a social identity, and then you're you have an identity as a father, that's a social identity. Then you have an identity as a member of your community, and a member of your city, and a member of your state, and a member of your nation.
And then you're involved in a metaphysical endeavor that constitutes the foundation for the nation. Let's say that's would be one nation under God. That's one way of thinking about it. Or you could think about it as the self-evident truths that underlie the state. Your identity exists at all those levels, and then your mental health isn't something you carry around in your head. It's the harmony that exists or doesn't exist between all those levels, and that isn't how liberal individualists think about identity at all.
And that's because they were, for a long time, fortunate enough, so all those other strata were in place.
So where do we find ourselves now if we don't have that hierarchy and we aren't held in place by all those layers and sort of social and I guess family identities?
Mm. A drift in a storm alone. So look, here's here's an interesting fact. So psychologists who are statistically minded, they're called psychometricians, they're psychologists who are obsessed, research psychologists who are obsessed with measurement and concept definition, spent a lot of time aggregating concepts. These were in some ways, what they were doing was equivalent to the development of early large language models. So psychologists were at the forefront of that on the statistical side. Words that we use to describe people clump together.
So, for example, if you're extroverted, you're social and you're happy, you're enthusiastic, okay, so those clump together. If you're anxious, you're also you also tend to be frustrated, disappointed, grief stricken, and in pain. All the negative emotions clump. Words associated with your empathy aggregate, words associated with your dutifulness aggregate, and so do words associated with creativity. Those are the five fundamental dimensions of temperament. One of the words that clumps with negative emotion is self consciousness, which means that self consciousness is so tightly associated with suffering that they're not conceptually distinguishable.
Which means literally, the more you think about yourself, the more miserable you are. And it it it makes sense when you understand how social people are. We're so social that you can take the most antisocial human beings imaginable, so psychopathic criminals, and you can punish them by putting them in solitary confinement. That's how social human beings are. And so your mental health is way more dependent on your nesting within a social structure than on your say, the internal coherence of your belief systems.
In fact, I think it's hardly at all dependent on the internal consistency of your coherence of your belief systems. It's more like, does anyone like you? Do you have any friends? Do you have anyone that loves you? Or more, or maybe even more profoundly, are there people for whom you make sacrifices? Right? That's a very and and that's it's relevant to the topic of this book, obviously, because the relationship with the divine in the stories that I'm detailing in this book, most of them are old testament stories.
The relationship with the divine is a sacrificial relationship. The divine is that to which sacrifice is directed. Well, if you get married, it's a sacrificial offering because you sacrifice your potential relationship with all other women to that woman.
What does one do on an individual level if they find themselves in such a society where individualism has taken hold? Um, and they can't necessarily easily change the society. Are there day-to-day, week-to-week choices that I'm making that are pushing me away from that meaning and purpose and sort of, uh, collective, I guess, sense of responsibility? Like the the individual listening to this now that completely agrees with you finds himself as being a lonely person and goes, What do I do about this, Jordan?
Well, one of the things you do with disagreeable people who are more inclined by temperament to be competitive and attain victory for themselves is one of the exercises you can do with disagreeable people. If you're a disagreeable extrovert, you tend to be narcissistic, and the problem with that technically is that you alienate people, and the problem with that is, well, you're hyper-social, so if you alienate people, well, then you don't have anyone. And not only is that lonesome, but it's also extremely impractical.
I mean, you know, um, you certainly, and no doubt, learned this more as you've become successful. It's like you need a team, and right, and the more and the more tightly knit it is, and the more you're all working in the same direction, the better everything works. Well, you. It's not useful to be a narcissist because maybe you get what you want right now this time, but as a propagating strategy across time, it's a degenerating game.
Okay, so what do you do? Well, instead of thinking about what you want, or even thinking about how to strategize in relationship to your goals, you might think about what you could do to for other people, or you could think about what you would do if you only did what was true and right. Those are very different orientations, right? And the religious orientation fundamentally is the orientation towards what is true and right. And you might say, Well, I don't know what's true and right.
It's like, Yeah, kind of, because our knowledge is bounded and we're ignorant. So do we understand the nature of the highest good? Well, no, but it's a very rare person who doesn't know some of the time when they're doing something wrong. And it's also a nonexistent person who doesn't have some concept of the good, because you can't act without a concept of the good, because you act towards a goal you deem desirable. So that's up. I mean, unless you're trying to make your life worse, and people do do that from time to time, but we'll leave that as an exception.
I mean, you have to, you have to have descended into hell in a way before you're in a situation where you're actively working to make your own life worse. That can happen, but assuming that you're relatively well embedded in the realm of the normal, then you're moving towards something better always, because otherwise there's no motivation. We we know this technically, this isn't even disputable. So the positive emotion systems that make you enthusiastic, so that fill you with the desire to move towards a goal, independent of fear, say, you know, because you can move towards a safety goal because you're afraid, but imagine you're trying to accomplish something.
You have a goal. The positive emotion systems operate to track progress to the goal. Positive emotion is a consequence of evidence of movement towards a desired goal. Okay, so now you have a proximal goal, you know, like our proximal goal right now might be just to like in the most micro level possible, might be to display facial signs of interest in the conversation, right? It's very micro goal, but then that's nested in our desire to have an interesting conversation on the topic we're having right now.
And then inside the podcast as a whole, and then as part of the podcast enterprise that you're involved in, as part of the book enterprise, let's say that I'm involved in, that's nested inside our view of the world, right? So you see there there are nestings of the good that have no upper limit. That's Jacob's Ladder, by the way, and at the top of that is the good itself, which is the divine for all intents and purposes.
Divine? What do you mean by that?
That's a definition. That that's what I mean is that in the hierarchy of what's good, the divine is the peak, Good talk. Okay, right? I don't know what that is. That's also an insistence in the biblical texts, by the way. In the final analysis, the divine is ineffable, it's not definable, and it's beyond you. And that's partly because it's there's a practical reason for that. Even you know this as well. As you move towards a goal, let's say you attain a goal, okay, now you've accomplished.
Well, are you done? It's like, No, a new potential goal emerges, a new pinnacle, and then maybe you'll accomplish that, but then a new one exists. And so you could say that the the domain of the the domain of opportunity is limitless, right? Because the thing that's at the pinnacle recedes as you approach it. And that's a you could say that's a technical definition of God, which is accurate. That is a technical definition of God. God is the good towards which all goods point.
The these are definitions again, remember, they're not proclamations of faith, they're definitions. So we obviously all believe that all good things share something in common, because otherwise we wouldn't have the category good. And then we all believe that there are rank orders of good, because otherwise everything good would be equally worth pursuing. No one believes that, so there's a rank order. Well, if there's a rank order towards some end or some pinnacle, you can also think about it as a foundation.
Depends on which metaphorical landscape you want to inhabit. Then the question becomes, Well, how do you characterize that which is the ultimate aim, that which is and should be the ultimate aim? Well, the the stories on which our culture is predicated characterize that in story.
do you think many people have an ultimate aim in their mind?
They they do, whether they know it or not.
What do you mean by that? So, like the average person listening to this now, do they are they conscious at all of what they're?
No, but it's implicit. One of the things the psychoanalytic thinkers insisted on, Carl Jung in particular, was that everybody acts out a story. Sometimes it's a tragic story, sometimes it's the story of hell, like you're trapped in a story, one way or another. Now, do you know the contours of your story? Not necessarily. I mean, people are often very bad at describing themselves. They don't know what they're up to. That doesn't mean they're not up to something.
And you could also think about them as the battleground between warring stories. That also happens. That just means they're fractionated in their psyche. Yeah, they're being pulled in many directions at the same time.
someone said to me actually yesterday, they said an interesting way to understand your self narrative or your self story is to answer the question. If you were a character, a fictional character, who would you be? And I in that, you'd figure out whether you have this sort of hero heroized story, or if you're a victim. So I ask you that question, Which fictional character would you be?
Bugs Bunny.
What?
Bugs Bunny's a trickster character, right? So yeah, more serious answer. Do you ever read the idiot? Yeah, well, I'm probably half idiot and half Raskolnikov. That's another way of looking at it.
why did you say that?
The um character of the idiot in Dostoevsky's novel is a holy fool. It's a strange combination, a person who's doing things right in a manner that's, I suppose, not obvious. That looks that can easily be confused with naivety or foolishness, playfulness, even I suppose,
Is that how you characterize yourself? Someone that's doing things right, but in a way that others perceive as foolishness or naivety?
or or even malevolence at times, you know, I mean, that's partly why people have gone after my reputation,
Does it? Does it ever bother you? People going after your reputation or them?
for sure. I mean, sometimes it's like it's been very distressing, very distressing. The battles I've had with the College of Psychologists in Ontario, those are no joke. It's very, very stressful and unconscionable, so expensive, hundreds of thousands of dollars, years, it's been ten years of legal battles. Um, calumny in the press. They're they're attempting to undermine my professional credibility with some degree of success, you know, because when your professional college goes after you, people have to make a choice.
It's either the professional college is corrupt and wrong, or the individual being targeted is corrupt and wrong. It's way easier to draw the second conclusion, and under most circumstances, in a valid state, that's the correct conclusion. So, and it was very stressful to find myself embattled at the University, University of Toronto. I liked working there. That place had its problems, but it was pretty functional and and I really liked being there. I I I enjoyed my career as a professor.
I had great relationships with the undergraduates and my graduate students. I loved doing my research, which has also disappeared. Um, so now those are the serious disputes that I've had reputationally, let's say. Um, there's a lot of casual reputation savaging that I don't really care about from journalists and so forth, although sometimes that's been pretty brutal. Because whenever that happened, especially when things just started to be developing around me, let's say on the public stage, when it.
When I encountered a particularly psychopathic journalist, which happened quite often, particularly in the UK, um, it was completely a toss up which way it was going to go. Like it could have just finished me and my family. That that was definitely the case three or four or five times, maybe more than that. So, yes, it's very bothersome now now, and really, for a long time, all of that takes place within a much broader context. All the interactions I have with people in my actual life are ridiculously positive.
And what would you say? Positive and gratifying, you know? So
That's a form of suffering in a way, and everybody goes through suffering. And because you've been through that, have you been able to develop a a strategy or a some kind of anchoring that helps you when the wind blows like that?
well, yeah, oh, definitely. I mean, I I had very strong relationships when all of this started to develop around me, and that's just become more the case. A very tightly knit family and a very tightly knit group of friends. Now I lost some more peripheral friends, but you know, that's unfortunate, but c'est la vie. So there's that now. Is that a strategy? Um, well, it's not exactly a strategy because I didn't design it towards an end.
It was more like an end in itself, right? I mean, I had kids not as a strategic move, but because I like kids, so, and I particularly like my kids, so that's not a strategy. And I really have a great relationship with my wife and like, I've known her for 52 years, it's a very long time, and, uh, she's definitely my best friend and probably has been for 52 years. And so that's really helpful. That that and that refers back to this issue of identity that we were discussing, you know, my identity is well structured in in the social sense, and then in terms of strategy, yeah, I mean, I have a meta strategy, I suppose.
I just say what I think right now. Is that a strategy? It depends on how you define strategy. It's not a strategy that's designed to serve my ends, not not in a individualistic way. So I'm just trying to see what happens if I say what I think. That's a way of n navigating in the world, right? It's an adventurous way of navigating in the world, because you don't know what's going to happen. You have to let go of that.
And then there's a f an element of faith in that, right? There's faith in everything you do. You know, the the empiricist types, the scientific reductionists, they say, well, you can move forward in the world without faith. That's complete bloody rubbish. There isn't anything you ever do that's important that you don't do in light of faith. It's like, if you get married, you do that on the basis of the evidence, do you? What bloody evidence do you have?
You're 23 years old, you don't know a damn thing, you know, you. Maybe you're in love with the person that you want to marry, but you have no evidence whatsoever about how your life is going to go. None. You have to leap into the unknown, like you do with everything that's important. That's all faith predicated. Now the question is, faith in what? Well, if you decide that you're just going to say what you think, then you have faith in the truth, at least insofar as you have access to the truth.
Is it true to say that if you hadn't have said what you think publicly, then you would have experienced less suffering than you have No, I don't really?
think so.
So if you'd said, if you'd stayed in your practice, you know, as a clinical No, because I would psychologist,
have had to not, I would have had to bite my tongue.
and you think that's more
I know it, it's not a matter of thinking, I know it, I know it. Uh, absolutely, 100. I spent a lot of time studying evil, a lot of time, and I know how it arises. It arises when good men hold their tongue. You don't want that. There's nothing worse that can happen to you. Now you may suffer some consequences of speaking, for sure, but all things considered, which is the right attitude if you're wise. There's nothing worse that can happen to you than to falsify your speech.
is saying nothing a form of Yes, it is when falsifying your speech?
you have something to say. Yeah, definitely.
Because there's a lot of people probably listening now that have a lot they wanna say. But if they say it, they're gonna lose their job, or they're gonna. There's gonna be immediate consequences, which might mean they can't feed their family.
yeah. It might mean that, but it also might mean that if they bite their tongue and pretend to be something other than they are, they'll be a weak model for their children. And, you know, is that better than having some financial instability? Maybe here's a counter proposition. If your job requires you to lie, maybe you should find another job. Now, look, I also understand that there are strategic considerations in such a decision. There's no sense martyring yourself stupidly.
And if you're going to say what you believe to be the case, then you need to put yourself in a position where doing so won't be instantly catastrophic in a way you can't fix. Because that's not a good, that's not wise. Now, when things blew up around me, I had three sources of income. That wasn't accidental. Now, you know, people say, Well, you were fortunate. It's like, Yeah, and careful. So I didn't wanna have all my eggs in one basket, and that turned out well, I knew that.
It's like you have no autonomy if you have all your eggs in one basket. So if you're gonna think strategically, if you're gonna think like someone who's at war, let's say, then you don't leave your, you don't leave a mortal flank exposed. And so, if you know, here's a rule. If you find yourself in a position where you're unable to speak, you haven't fortified your territory properly, right? So then you have to think about that. It's like, you think, Okay, why can't I say what I believe to be the case?
Where am I vulnerable? And you can say, Well, that's inevitable. It's like, No, it's not, it's not inevitable. That doesn't mean it isn't difficult to to fortify and to put yourself in a position where you're on the offense successfully, that's hard. But retreating one step at a time defensively for your whole life and shrinking while you do it, that's also not very. That's also difficult. It's just the kind of difficult that wears you down and makes you sick of yourself.
That's not a good, that's not a good plan, that's a bad plan.
and did you see this when you were in your clinical practice? Did you see it in people? Oh, constantly, How does it show up on the surface? What? What are the words that they say to articulate that? This sort of slow diminishing retraction?
Oh, you see that in people's marriages all the time, when marriages deteriorate. A marriage ends in divorce when there's 10,000 fights that haven't been had. And I, I really, I, I'm, I'm not just guessing at that number. It's like, let's say your marriage isn't going very well, and so you have five uncomfortable quasi disputes a day. Just to pick a number, maybe it's 50, maybe it's three, whatever five will do. Well, that's 1500 a year.
Okay, now you just aggregate that over, let's say the ten years it takes your marriage to collapse. Well, you've got something approximating 10,000 fights you didn't have. That's 10,000 times you remained silent when you had something to say, and they all aggregate. And then every time, once you've collected the first 5,000, then every time you have a dispute, all 5,000 are lurking behind that dispute. And the fact of their existence makes it much less likely that you'll say what you have to say.
That's the reemergence of the dragon of chaos as a consequence of fleeing from your fate. That's exactly right.
last time we spoke, you said something which stayed with me, and I've actually forwarded it to a few of my friends on this particular subject. You said to me, you're gonna have to sit and spend ninety minutes a week speaking to your partner.
It's so annoying.
It's so annoying, it's so annoying, but it's so important. And so many of my friends that are in re have relationship difficulties, I send them this little four minute clip I have on my phone of you saying that. Because, uh, the ninety minute, no, it might be ninety five minutes, it might be eighty five minutes. But the concept of you need to sit down and create a space where she or he or whatever can tell you what they've noticed.
why they don't like you? Yeah, yeah, well, it's especially. I think I don't think that you can really
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establish the kind of relationship with a woman that you want with anything in the road. Like, it's hard for women to give themselves to men, and no wonder it's amazing they ever do it. They have a lot on the line. What are the preconditions for that offering? Uh, peace and security. You can tell if if it's if the territory is being cleared, because play emerges, right, right, play emerges, and play is a very fragile motivational state.
It can be disrupted by almost anything. So if there are impediments to understanding, play will not arise, and then you don't have the romantic adventure that you want. It's grudging, right? You don't have a voluntary partner, and that's a very hard thing to attain, right? That full voluntary partnership. That means that you're in sync with each other. You, you can't expect that to be easy, you can't even be in sync with yourself. Like, it's hard, and you need to keep each other up to date, you need to know what's going on, you need to iron out the sources of discomfort or distrust.
And that there's a lot of Dante's inferno
what's that?
that, well, Dante's Inferno is a characterization of hell by by Dante, by it's one of the most famous poems ever written. And it's it's you could think about it as what you have to do to get to the bottom of things. So let's say that you have a dispute with your wife, and it's a recurring dispute, right? It's an issue, you have an issue. Well, do you want to address the issue? It's like, Do you want to do surgery without anesthetic?
Like, it's the same question. Addressing an issue is a journey into the abyss. Dante placed Satan at the bottom of hell, right? So that's the figure of malevolence itself, encased in ice and frozen, so immobile, surrounded by those who betray. That's the lowest level of hell. Why? Well, it's often the case that if you journey into an issue
Spiral down.
to the bottom, you'll find betrayal, right? Because maybe your partner doesn't trust you because she was betrayed. Highly probable, highly probable, or her grandmother was betrayed. Like, you know, there's bad blood between men and women.
Can you ever solve for that? So if I'm in a situation where my partner doesn't trust me because she was betrayed, whether it's something I did or whatever, how do you ever get rid of the devil at the bottom of the spiral?
well, you have to s you have to find out that it's there. Okay, that's a hard question. You both have to want to. That's the first thing, cause that's the setting of the aim. What do we want? We want to play forever in God's heavenly garden. How about that? That's a metaphorical representation, right? But that's a walled garden, that's the human environment. The walls are the walls of your house. The garden is nature displaying itself in its beauty within boundaries.
That's a place that play can take place. That's what you want. You got to think about it. What do you want? Okay, so now we might ask, What do you mean? Want? Okay? If you were taking care of yourself and you could have what was good for you, what would that be? Now? That's a hard question, right? You're gonna have to think about that for a long time. What would satisfy something as someone as miserable and resentful and useless as me, right?
If I could have it now, people will, they don't even wanna address that issue. Because part of the problem with making your aim clear is you know when you're failing, and people would rather keep the evidence of their failure obscured from themselves, even if it meant continued failure. But now let's say you decide not to do that. You're gonna think, Okay, I'm gonna aim high, I'm gonna take care of myself. Okay, now your wife's on board with that.
Now, that's a hell of that's a. That's really what the marital vow is in the final analysis, most deeply, is the willingness to participate in that game. Now you have to tell each other the truth. What the hell do you want? Well, she doesn't know, and neither do you, not really. So you got to start digging, finding out, and you and noticing. It's like, now and then you'll see that you're happy with each other, and maybe it'll happen kind of randomly.
You'll be out in some, I don't know, maybe you're at a restaurant, or you're going for a walk, or who knows? And you'll notice, Oh, this is going well. It's like, Oh yeah, this is going well. What are we doing right? Could we take that little episode and could we start to expand it, you know? Cause one of the things you can do in a marriage is you can notice when things are going well. And then you can have a chat with each other and say, Look, I don't know what we did during this period of time, but let's see if we can figure it out.
See if we could do like 10% more of that next week, or 1% more, and then just make that expand. You can do that too, by, you know, hypothetically, at some point, if you're married, at some point, you were in love with your wife. You can remember that, you have to remember that, you have to practice remembering that, you have to practice bringing it to mind and occupying that. Because when you first fall in love, it kind of happens to you, right?
That's a gift, but you have to. In order for that to last, you have to become an expert at, you have to become an expert at it. You have to take it on as a responsibility. It's offered as a gift, but then you have to take it on as a responsibility. Then you have to practice. It's like, Oh, yes, I love this person, and if you don't at the moment, you have to think, well, I did and I could.
So why don't I? Is it me? That's probably it's you, might be them too, but you might as well start with you. I mean, you got lots of flaws, you could start with those.
what if you just made a bad decision? As in, like, you, the person you picked, you think they're not compatible, Well, that's she's staying working
a tough one, eh? Because you're not really compatible with anyone. You know, people think, well, I'll find the right person. It's like, first of all, no, you won't. Second, if you found the right person and they ever saw you, they'd just run away screaming. So it's just the whole conceptual scheme is wrong. I when I was on tour, there was one three day period where the same question emerged from the audience. Cause I do a Q and A three nights in a row.
How do I find the person that's right for me? And I, I tried answering it, and by the third night, I thought, Oh, I know why I can't answer this question, it's cause it's a stupid question. It's badly formulated, like profoundly badly formulated, fatally badly formulated. It's not the right question. The right question is, how can I learn to offer something to someone else that would make me eminently desirable? That's a way different question. Like, it's a they're not even in the same conceptual universe, and it's the right question.
Because you can build yourself into a person that people would line up to be with. how Well, have you done it to some? De Well,
you told me not to do?
you're very successful, right? You? You're increasingly successful.
Your book warns against narcissism, Jordan, sir.
Yeah, there's there's a difference between narcissism and giving the devil his due. You've let okay, let let's pull back a little bit. What have you done right?
I have focused on myself for a long time, and
Okay, what does that mean?
it means I fortified myself financially so that I'm, I'm, you know, I can support others, I can support a family.
so that's not exactly focusing on yourself, right? That's focusing on getting your act together, right? And I'm being very picky about the words, because focus on yourself that has a narcissistic connotation, but that that isn't what you're talking about. You said you fortified yourself financially. Okay, so now you're you you have foundation under your feet financially. Okay, okay, good, what else?
I go to the gym, so I'm strong, physically strong, um, which is use useful. Um, I've learnt a lot, done a lot of learning about myself, about how I show up in the world.
right, so you're trying to learn,
Yes, I've lost some skills.
okay, so well. So there's three things that are pretty good. You've got a firm financial foundation, you've your work, you're, you're maintaining yourself physically or even improving yourself, and you're doing the same thing, say, spiritually and and intellectually. Okay, well, that'll attract a fair number of people, just those three, right? And maybe you're increasing the probability that it will attract the sort of person that you would like to attract.
that is very much the story of my life. Like, I think, don't think people realize this, but I've actually been on, I think, four dates in my entire life. I'm 32 and I took this really counter sort of seems counterintuitive approach to myself, which was as an 18 year old, I basically couldn't attract anybody. I was also not on dating apps, I wasn't doing so my for ten years, I basically focused on myself. And at, you know, s twenty seven years old, someone messaged me and I went on it, and this is how I am.
Like, I, if I'm gonna go on a date, it's gonna be, I'm gonna go all in. It was a three day date that I planned in an Excel document. I've been with that person for six years, so I feel like I didn't date, I didn't good, yeah, go to bars and try well, look, and like, you know,
that's worth taking apart. Um, I li. I like to do arithmetic with my clients, like people hate arithmetic, and it's no wonder, because it's so savage. So I'll give you an example. So fifteen years ago, I counted the number of times I would see my parents. It was like 20 times, so then I knew that, right, 20 isn't very many, right? How many people do you get to try on in your life? Five, if you're lucky, if you're attractive and fortunate, you get five cracks at the pinata.
Five isn't very many, and people think, well, it's a there's plenty of fish in the sea. It's like, that doesn't mean they're gonna swarm around you, buddy, right? It's, and maybe it's even worse for women, because their timeframe is is very short, you know, like, if a woman isn't in a relationship, family relationship by 30, then it's starting to get pretty damn rough, and that's almost independent of how attractive she is. It's like, you don't have much time, better get yourself prepared.
when you say pretty damn rough, what do you mean Well, to find a mate or to have a child? Or
both, both. Well, we know now that at the present time in the West, half of women 30 and younger don't have a child. Okay, now we also know that couples 30 one in three couples at 30 already have trouble conceiving. And that definition of trouble is one year of attempt with no success. Okay, so fertility goes off a cliff at 35, so 30, you're pushing your luck. At 30, at 35, you are seriously pushing your luck.
I worked for ten years with a strata of the highest achieving women likely in Canada. I had, as part of my clinical practice, a offering that we made to consulting firms and law firms, and the offer was send us your best people and we'll work for them. But the consequence of that is that they'll be even more productive. So in the typical law firm, for example, there's people who don't do well, then there's people who are good lawyers, then there are people who are good lawyers that bring in business.
There's like none of them, they're super valuable, and if a law firm has someone like that, they want to keep them. And they're often women half the time, let's say, um, and those were the women. I worked with a bunch of men too, but I'll concentrate on the women here. Those were the women I was working with, and they were generally extremely attractive, extremely intelligent, very hard working, and very focused on career development. And they were they'd done very well in junior high school, in high school, then they, you know, aced college and their LSATs.
And then when they were articling, the firms snapped them up quickly and then they rocketed up towards partnership. And then then they were 30, and they all thought, What the hell am I doing, working 70 hours a week with a bunch of insanely competitive men, right? And that is the question. It's like, What are you doing exactly? And then, even if you're radically successful, let's say in your law school career, if you get run over by a bus on the way to work, the waters just close over you at the firm, and the firm continues on.
It's not like anyone cares, not really. So now I'm, I'm not saying that people shouldn't pursue a career, I'm not saying that. But I would say, even in my case, and I'm male, so that makes a big difference, because men are also oriented towards status competition victory in a way that women just aren't. Not, at least not in the career domain. And the reason for that's very straightforward. And the the thing that makes men, by default, most attractive to women is their comparative success in the hierarchy of men.
It's a walloping predictor, and it's irrelevant to men, like men don't care at all whether women are successful in their career. It's not a determinant of their attractiveness. In fact, it's often the contrary. Well, these women that I'm talking about, they were often alone. Why? Well, they're beautiful, so that, like, intimidated 90 of men right there. They're smart, so that's another 90 of the remaining 10. They're accomplished and wealthy. Well, like, first of all, who's gonna approach them?
and second, who are they gonna accept? Cause women are hypergamous, right?
Is that? Does that mean that men are insecure and m sort of emasculated by a strong, successful woman?
Sure, yeah, well, but there's reason for that. Like, it's not weakness on the part of men, exactly. It's the desire of the woman to find someone who brings a benefit to the relationship. And why? Well, she, because a woman will make herself vulnerable when she has a child, and so she's looking for a man who'll be helpful compared to her. Okay, so if the woman is like, full of ability, well, then her standards for a guy who's gonna be helpful get very high.
And that's hard on her because it decreases the pool of available candidates radically. So, like, there's a negative relationship between IQ and women and the probability of being married, so it's harsh. Now, is it? Are men intimidated? Well, yes, obviously. Are men intimidated by beautiful women? Well, you can answer that, especially if you're young. Why? Well, the probability that any given beautiful woman is gonna reject you when you're a young man is like, it's basically 100.
Now it's not exactly 100, and there are exceptions, but the default response is rejection, and beautiful women get hit on, you know, a fair bit.
Some of the. It's interesting, cause there's a a bunch of stats which I find quite interesting. One of them is that sexlessness is increased is increasing, people having less and less that's, oh yeah, that's sex.
fascinating, it's, that's fascinating. Does it Yeah,
matter?
oh, it's a catastrophe.
And and why are we having less sex? What is the com complex web of factors that have brought us to this place? And also, I mean, like, Well, one divorce rates,
of them I would say is that ma in a in a free and easy mating environment, women don't trust men, and no wonder. Well, here, here, here's a terrible thing to know. So imagine that there are men who are oriented towards short-term relationships, and there are men who are oriented towards long-term relationships, committed relationships, right? Okay, so that would be the men who want love along with sex, let's say love and commitment. Then there's the party today, because we're all dead tomorrow sort of guys, and there's some women like that too, although fewer women, cause they pay a much higher price for sexual impropriety.
So the pool of short-term maters has more men in it. Okay, what are they like? Well, the personality studies have already been done. They're Machiavellian, which means they use their language to manipulate, they're narcissistic, which means they want unearned social status, they're psychopathic, which makes them predatory parasites, and they're sadistic. Okay, so now you open up the mating market so that short-term dalliances are acceptable. You throw all the women into the hands of the psychopaths. Well, that's a bad strategy, and it's no wonder that it decimates the mating market.
Because women are thinking, well, are those men trustworthy? And the answer is no, and sex is costly. Like, we have this immature delusion that we can free sex from, like the grip of the oppressive patriarchy, let's say. It's like, No, you can't, obviously you can't. There's it. Emotional entanglements are an inevitable consequence of intimate physical relationships. There's that, then there's the issue of abortion and pregnancy that actually constitutes a problem, and then there's sexually transmitted disease.
And that's just like the first of a very long list of potential problems with sex. So there's no simple sexual landscape, and there are deluded people who think there there is a simple landscape and that there should be. But most they tilt hard in the psychopathic direction because they're manipulative
do you believe in no sex before marriage as a concept?
as an ideal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.
And and why would that result in better relationships and a better society more broadly?
Well, here's one way of looking at it. So let's say you take the alternative approach, okay, um, you're gonna try your partner on for size, so you live together. Well, first of all, we know that couples who live together are more likely to get divorced rather than less. We know that the probability of cheating is proportionate to the number of partners before the marriage or the committed relationship. Well,
Really?
well, partly that's just self-evidence, like the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, right? So if you had a lot of partners, you're the sort of person who's likely to have a lot of partners. And then the there's also a conceptual problem. It's like, is are you shopping for a car? It's like, you're gonna take it out for a test drive and see how it goes. Okay, that's not the right metaphor. And then here's another problem.
I'm gonna see what it's like to be married by living with this person. It's like, No, you're not, cause you don't know what it's like to be married until you're married. Whatever you're doing when you live together, that's not a model for what you're going to do when you're married, because being married is different, it's permanent.
So you're saying, don't live together before you Well, I are married,
I know the stats on living together. It's like you live with someone and and then you marry them, you're more likely to get divorced. so you think, It doesn't work like the the. The theory was you try it out, and if it works, you go ahead with it. Yeah, well, the theory was wrong, because that isn't, that isn't what happens. It actually increases the probability that the relationship will fail. It's also partly you gotta ask yourself what the message is.
I know what the message is when you live with someone, it's pretty straightforward. You'll do unless someone better comes along, and I'll grant you the same opportunity. But Jesus, that's a hell of a foundation for a marriage, for a like long-term relationship.
so you're saying, go go from single to married and living together straight away without the like trial period.
Well, I don't know exactly what the trial period should be. I mean, people have dated, and I'm also not saying that this is simple. It's not. SI Well, why would it be simple? It's not. There isn't anything more difficult that you do in your entire life than find a partner and establish a family. It's like, it's gonna be hard. How to do it optimally? Well, I can tell you in my own experience, you know, uh, like, I s I.
I've known my wife since she was eight, and we were friends, good friends, and we kind of departed from each other during adolescence. Um, I was a year younger than everyone in my class, and she matured faster. Women do anyways, and so that kind of split us apart, and we didn't get married till I think we were about 27, something like that, 28. But it would have been better to do it earlier.
so get married earlier.
Yeah, it's just time I didn't have with her.
What case would you make to me? F for marriage versus cause I'm, I'll be honest, I'm wrestling with marriage, not just God. Um, I'm trying to understand what the what the point of marriage is versus the relationship we have Children. now is, but I can have children in the relationship I have now.
Yeah, hm. The general rule of thumb for life is that you should do what other people have done forever, unless you have a really good reason not to. Don't deviate from the straight and narrow path. Like you are already deviating in all sorts of ways, you're very entrepreneurial, right? So your life has a variety of adventurous pathways. You're gonna wanna put firm foundation wherever you can, that'll actually free you up to do more adventurous things. Children are a multi generational commitment because it's children and grandchildren.
And so the the marriage is a signifier of that. And I in order to stay with someone optimally over the longest period of time possible, it has to be serious. And for something to be serious, you have to throw everything at it, you know? And you might say, well, love is enough. It's like that's a very naive view of the world because there'll be times because that's kind of like saying, well, as long as we love each other and we're happy, we'll be together.
It's like, well, if you're talking forty years, there's gonna be plenty of years in there where you're not happy and you probably don't love each other. So what then? You're gonna just is it just gonna dissolve? Or are you gonna say, we're in this, you know, come hell or high water, which is the vow, come hell or high and hell and high water, they're coming. And then you gotta ask yourself, you know, is this the person you want in the boat with you when hell and high water come?
And that's not gonna be fun, that's for sure. You wanna do it alone, or you think that when everything falls apart around you, you're gonna be in a better position to find someone better? I don't think so. It's a long. And then, you know, you, you take the marital vow in a religious sense, and you do it in front of a community, right? So it's it signifies commitment, and you need that. Because, like, you think you can maintain all that commitment on your own, maybe you can.
I doubt it. Generally, people can't, like no one. We need to fortify ourselves in all sorts of ways to get through the things in life that are most difficult.
but the traditional marriage agreement, one that's a legal agreement, does it need to be? Can can I not take my partner, have a wedding in front of our friends and family, sign a contract, maybe even do it in a sort of religious religious context without having it it to be a relig- like a legal document that the government are involved in? well, you could, but Is it not the same bond to you?
they're. You're talking about a multitude of different bonds, right? Fundamentally, right? You're the the one that you're prioritizing is the bond that's voluntary and predicated on what the love of the moment. I mean, we want to be precise here, right? That. So I think that's a reasonably we reasonable way of conceptualizing it. And it is a romantic view that that should prevail, and it's a romantic view that that should be sufficient. I don't think it there's.
It's often the case that it doesn't prevail, and it's generally the case that it's not sufficient. And so then you might say, well, maybe you want to add a legal element to that, and you want to add a metaphysical element to it, because those are all fortifications and they're indications, even to yourself, that you're serious. It's not like we understand ourselves, you know, like people are just as mysterious to themselves as someone else is mysterious to them.
You go ask yourself, it's like, okay, well, what processes? What do I have to put in place to ensure that I'm doing the right thing? Well, when you're embarking on something difficult like marriage, then you better have everything necessary in place.
if you and Tammy hadn't gotten married and you were just in a relationship like I am with my partner, how do you think your life would be different? And do you think you
I don't think it would have lasted.
you don't think your life would have lasted Oh, well, no, all the relationships?
that's pro that. That's undoubtedly true. I mean, both of us just about died in the last five years, and I don't mean by a little bit. I mean, like it was touch and go for a long time. So it was a good thing everything was in place through that. I mean, the the waters were pretty high for the last three years, four years socially, professionally, physically.
The what?
What are you wrestling with exactly like in this issue? You know, yeah, yeah, it's I mean, you're. It seems like you're trying to sort out the relationship between the emotional attachment and the personal attachment and the social structures that say surround marriage.
it's. It's complicated because even any answer I might give you is if if you go down that spiral, you might find something at the bottom of it. That's not what I'm saying. So what what I mean by that is just definitely. as you asked that question, I just got a glimpse of. I just had a bit of a flash to, like, my issues with commitment and how I watched my
okay, so what? Do you had a little fantasy?
No. I just I just remember recalling feeling like my dad was in prison when he was in in his relationship. So I think that still Okay, so now part of me.
I can tell you what to do with that. So you bring those images to mind, right? So you've got this question in mind, you just out, you just found out something, you said that there's something at the bottom of this. Okay, now, if you watch your fantasies, they all shed light on this descent into the abyss, so to speak. Now you had a flash of memory, okay, that memory is associated with all sorts of things, and you can bring that to mind and let it play itself out, right?
And it'll explore the contours of the problem that you're. Now. You put your finger on a very important problem. You said that you saw in your father someone who was trapped in his marriage. That's no bloody wonder you're leery of that, right? So now you okay. So now the question would be, what was the nature of that entrapment? What evidence did you have that that was in fact the case? How much of that was him, how much of that was her, and what is it that they did wrong and right?
You need to know all of that, and you need to know how it affected you. That's a great obser- see, that's so cool, because that very frequently happens to people when they ask a question that's like a revelation. So you ask a question that's like a prayer. The question is, is there something at the bottom of my the trouble I'm having conceptualizing marriage? Okay, now you wanna know, that's the first precondition. Okay, then you'll get memories, images like that, and then people shy away.
It's like, I don't wanna go there. It's like, Yeah, that's for sure, you bloody well don't wanna go there, but you do, because if it's there, you will go there, right? It'll plague you, and it'll plague your life, it'll, it'll show its head continually in your relationship. Or you can get to the bottom of it, which is people will fight their whole life with their partner to avoid getting to the bottom of something. That's how terrifying it is to get to the bottom of something, right?
But if you do get to the bottom of it, then you don't have to fight for thirty years. So that's very much worthwhile, and it'll it'll lighten you as well, you know, cause you're, y- you have a real issue. It's like, how can marriage not be a trap? Well, yeah, right, definitely, that's a very good question and an and an important one. How can marriage be a trap? How can not being married be a trap? How can being alone, being a trap, be a trap?
How can being deluded about what holds people together be a trap? There's traps everywhere, man, there's traps everywhere, and so there's no risk free mo pathway forward. There's just risk everywhere. Okay, so that's a really useful thing to know. Then the question would shift to something like, Well, if I wanted to construct a relationship that had that was optimized, that's what you have to ask yourself. It's like, and your and your, and your partner, it's like, what are we doing here?
What do we want? Tammy and I decided, for example, when we first got married, we I. Well, I mentioned this to her right away when we decided that we were going to take things seriously. It was like, we're gonna tell each other the truth, so that was part of the vision. Like, no matter what,
no matter what.
right? Yeah, no matter what. She's been very good at that, I would say, better than me. I've been good at it, but she's been really, quite remarkably good at it. She really threw herself into it. And I mean, that's that causes a complete transformation, but there's plenty of skeletons in the closet to be revealed. God, that's for sure.
Talking of things that risk harming relationships, one of the things I wanted to ask you about, a subject we've never spoke about before. But it ties into the themes of relationships, marriage and, um, and sex, is pornography, and generally,
Oh, another reason that sex has disappeared. Right, right?
you talk about hedonism in your book. Um, we who wrestle with God. Pornography is this a bad thing,
is a terrible thing. Yeah, it's a terrible thing. Everything about it is terrible.
really?
Well, first of all, it's addictive, and no wonder. I mean, any thirteen year old boy can now look at more beautiful naked women in one day than the greatest king who ever lived managed in his whole life, right? So it's like, Wow, that's not.
And talk me through the downstream consequences of such a possibility.
It's easy. It's easy, Yeah,
it's easy to get what
sexual gratification, that's not good, it's not supposed to be easy, and it's easy. So how desperate do you have to be to get married? Not desperate at all? It's like, Yeah, right, what do you know? You don't know anything. I'm married just because I'm in love. You're an idiot. Got to to put you in a position where you're gonna have the romantic adventure of your life, the true romantic adventure of your life. You're gonna need love and desperation, buddy, you're gonna need everything working on your side.
Love, desperation, terror, shame, guilt, everything working for you. And so you take the easy road. pornography. Sure, you're not desperate anymore.
So pe- people that consume pornography, do you think they're less motivated to attack life and to Well, they're definitely accomplish things?
less motivated to pursue sexual relationships with women.
Away of that? Are they then less likely to then wanna go to the gym or have a
Oh, definitely.
career? Or it's an interesting idea.
How much? So, yeah, How much of what men do do they do to impress women?
a loss.
It's like, Yeah, like all of it, all of it. I mean, the status battles that men back to the law firms, for example, so the the men I worked with, they were very concerned with their bonuses and their and their, you know, their end of the year performance reports. Why? Well, part of it was the money. Most of them had lots of money. It's like I'd ask them, they say, Well, that's the money is how we keep score.
Well, what does that mean? Well, it's money is the way that men in those competitive enterprises say they they compare themselves to one another. And why do they want to be at the top? Cause women peel from the top, so men are trying to impress women all the time, and they'll do it in positive ways and in pathological ways. The window for sexual representation started to open in the nineteen twenties, let's say, but it really got going with Playboy.
Then Penthouse came out right after that, and Penthouse was like full frontal nudity display, and then Hustler came out, and Hustler was sort of well, whatever Penthouse didn't show you, Hustler will show you. And it got pretty low brow, like it was a rough, low class magazine. It didn't. It just shed all the pretensions that Playboy and Penthouse had, and then the net came along. It's like all those engineers who couldn't establish a relationship with an actual woman exchanging pornography.
What? 25% of internet traffic, something like that, that desire to exchange pornography, was that what created the net? Yeah, was a huge part of it. What's that done? Well, as you pointed out, I think 30% now of Japanese men and women under thirty are virgins. It's about the same in Korea. Relationships between men and women are falling apart in the in the rest of the West in the same sort of way. Now. Can you attribute that to pornography?
Certainly part, like, if I was a young woman and I was looking at the pornography world online, I'd think, yeah, maybe not.
One of the interesting things we noticed when we were doing some research on this was what the top Google search around this subject matter is. How do I quit? and I feel like the third one is, how do I quit? And and that it's in such high quantity of people searching Google for how to quit pornography that it feels desperate, like it feels is desperate. Well, desperate.
why wouldn't it be addictive? Like,
And why doesn't pornography feel good to that's a good people?
question, that's a good question. Well, there's nothing heroic about it, that's for sure. It's like, it's. It's obviously nothing to be proud of. That's a different issue than whether or not it's wrong, right? It's certainly not an accomplishment. I mean, I don't think anyone would disagree about that. It's not an accomplishment. Well, maybe sex is supposed to be an accomplishment. Maybe you violate the spirit of sexuality itself when it's not an accomplishment. You certainly do that if you rape, right?
So is it an accomplishment? Probably. So what if your accomplishment is false? Well, then are what are you betraying? Well, if it's associated with sex, maybe you're betraying the most fundamental possible thing. Certainly possi- like, well, there's life and sex, that's pretty much that, right? You're alive and you reproduce from a biological perspective, and so you're violating the spirit of what you're. Maybe you're violating the spirit of relationship, maybe you're violating the spirit of adventure, the spirit of romance, the spirit of reproduction, the spirit of life.
Likely
it's. It's so interesting that people seem to be a lot of people seem to be angry at it. They s they seem to be angry with they they what it's done to should be angry, them.
they should be angry.
Even on an individual level, people seem in the comment section of these episodes that we've done about the subject matter, people seem to be angry about its existence and what it's done to them.
Yeah, they should be angry, they should be outraged. It's outrageous, it's outrageous.
Would you ban it if you were in charge of the world?
I don't know how to answer that. I think any policy that policies that require force rather than voluntary compliance are generally bad policies. There are restrictions that should be placed on its distribution. But I would have to spend a lot of time thinking through what those were from a policy perspective. I think it's wrong. No, I don't think I know it's wrong. That doesn't mean I know how that should be dealt with at the level of policy.
It's complicated. I do understand why young men and young women are angry about it. It's like, where are the adults? where are the adults? where have they gone? They're not protecting, like eleven year old kids, from what you can see on the net. You know, I remember when I was a kid, I I. I got a hold of some of these underground comics from the nineteen sixties, and a lot of the underground com comic artists were.
They're pretty pathological creatures, like Robert Crumb's a good example. Crumb led a pretty good life for someone as demented as he is. And there's a very famous documentary made about the Crumb brothers, and Robert Crumb was the establisher. He was one of the people who established the genre of graphic novel, really, back in the sixties in Haight Ashbury in San Francisco. And his imagination goes places that you don't wanna, you don't wanna be along for the ride.
Seriously, like, seriously. And I read some of that material when I was, like, eleven, you know, I never forgot it. It was shocking as hell. And like typical eleven year old, now it's like, there are things that he is going to see that he'll never forget. It's not good.
and the brain is still forming at that age, isn't it? So it's
Oh, definitely.
it's an interesting way to shock the Well, we also brain.
don't know. Well, that's right. We have no idea whatsoever what a diet of pornography exposure does to somebody who's, you know, making their way through puberty.
What would you say to the those individuals then that have been googling that, like how to quit? Cause, I imagine if we thought about percentages, I'd say what? 90% of people that are listening right now watch pornography, at least this. I don't know what the numbers are, but but it's a lot, a lot of people, it's a vast write down, majority.
write down what it's doing to you,
Write down what it's doing to sure, write you.
down every exhaustively, everything you think it might be doing to you, write it down, everything. Don't don't worry about whether you're right or not. Like, maybe it's not doing some of the things you think it might be doing, but make an exhaustive list, then start thinking through. Is like, is that what you want? is that what you want? and then write down what you want instead. That'll help, because if you're gonna look, any hedonistic endeavor is rewarding in the moment, obviously.
The problem is is the price you pay for it in the medium to long run, right? That's the problem, and it's the contradiction between those two things that's the problem. Okay, now, if you want to quit doing something that's gratifying in the short term, you need to know why, right? Because otherwise you won't have the willpower, you won't have the the part of you that thinks, Well, what the hell will win? What the hell? Which is what people think when they do something they shouldn't do.
And they should notice what they say to themselves when when they're making that rationalization, because what the hell refers to hell, and you. The reason to stop doing things that are self-destructive is because they're self-destructive. I mean, is that the sort of person you want to be? Is that the model you'd like to have for your son, for example? Is that the way you would imagine that someone you admire would act? These are good questions to ask yourself.
No, are you the sort of person that is acting out a pattern that you think is admirable? I don't think pornography, masturbation fits into the ideal of heroic masculinity. I don't think anybody thinks that it's there's something furtive about it and second-rate, obvious, like OBV. It's ridiculous in a sense that we even have to have this discussion because obviously
Well, these things creep in, don't they, to society, and they become normal. that's for sure. First So I mean,
they creep, then they rampage.
we almost can't remember a time if if you're a young person when there wasn't pornography. You Well, you got you, definitely can't remember you open an app and you get Absolutely a hundred a limit to
percent. Oh, and it's gonna get way worse. Wait till there are AI equipped, adjustable pornographic suck you by. Then we're really gonna have fun, cause we're already at a c- at the point now where with a decent chat bot, a really alienated young man can have a better conversation with a decent chat bot than with anybody he's ever talked to in his entire life. Right now, they're gonna get a lot smarter, and soon they're gonna have, like, well, you can.
Al- there's already services of this sort available. They'll be fully fleshed out. Two-dimensional women, they're not women, simulacra of women, right? So yeah, it's interesting, that cause with my hedonism, design your own girlfriend.
she won't call you, she won't give you, she won't argue with you, she won't do the ninety minutes a week.
Yeah, right, right. She'll give you everything you want, but that's not true. She'll give the worst part of you everything it wants. Jesus, that's not good. The worst, weakest part of you will get exactly what it wants. That's not good, that's ser- that's seriously not good.
I mean, that's what pornography is kind of doing, right?
Definitely. Yeah, well, and there's an edge to it too, right? Because one of the pleasure is enhanced by novelty, right? So so that that brings up an issue with regards to marriage. You know, I talked to Bill Maher. Bill's alone and he's my age, you know, and that's painful. But he said to me, you know, in his Hollywood hedonistic manner, that he really couldn't imagine being with the same woman, you know, for any length of time.
It's a novelty issue. It's like, Well, are you restricted by the woman, or are you restricted by the limits of your own imagination? This is an important question. Like I would say, if you establish the optimized relationship with someone, you they're inexhaustible. That doesn't mean novelty isn't important, it's important, that's part of play. So
yeah, a lot of people struggle with that. I've got a lot of friends that struggle with this idea of being with the same person forever. Um, the same person, okay,
that's the problem. that's yeah, Well, but that's
it's interesting.
really no. Look, I kn- I understand, like, I know that novelty enhances pleasure, so the question is, how do you keep your relationship alive? That means novel, you play
it's interesting, cause actually what I actually think's happening there is. It's not that they are miserable with the same person forever, it's actually the thought. That's kinda what I said, the thought of being well, that's with the same person.
part of that trap, eh? Well, okay, so that's very good observation, because what see, because that thought is gonna have a story attached to it. The story's gonna be something like, Well, I'm with this person. We both become unattractive quite rapidly, we get alienated from one another. There's no sexual dynamism or romance or excitement. And then we just sit, you know, and eat like cold eggs while looking at each other harshly over the table at breakfast for forty years.
Well, yeah, that's dismal, so, you know, maybe don't do that.
yeah, yeah, there's an element of control to it. On this point of hedonism as well, I was thinking, because we're talking about pornography, but there's many types of hedonism in my life. Whether it's, uh, you know, eating the sh, the cookie, or I, this is a I don't actually do this, but it's a metaphor of eating the cookie from the mini bar. In my hotel room here in New York at one am. in the morning, when I know tomorrow I'm gonna regret it.
There's all these forms of hedonism, there's like scrolling on TikTok or whatever it might be. And hedonism shows up in my life in these li- little, uncontrolled, like, oh gosh, fuck, I've made a mistake.
of course, of course.
And it sometimes shows up when I'm disabled in some way, emotionally disabled, and so it's almost it feels like it's a form of medicine. Now. I I could write down on this page who I wanna be. I could say I don't wanna be the person who eats the cookie, I don't wanna be on TikTok, I don't wanna watch pornography, all those kinds of things. But then staving off that moment where you know you're, you're weakened in some way, and I use that word, maybe it's you're weakened in some tired.
way by something tired or whatever. Sticking to those principles when in that moment, when it's hard, is that just again a case of just being clear on what I want in the long Well, that term?
helps, it helps, practice helps. Um, surrounding yourself with people who have the same aim and that keep you, um, responsible, accountable, that helps. accountable, okay, Oh, yeah, you need all of that, because that battle, the battle between immediate gratification and medium to long-term investment, that's a real battle. You know, like the the right amount of pleasure in the moment isn't zero.
yeah, okay, I don't wanna live a life of misery, Well, so I mean,
right, right, and you can't. You don't wanna be a the joyless grind for whom everything is tomorrow, right? It's very hard to cause. What you're trying to do is you're trying to optimize emotion and strategy over all time frames,
and you don't know how long that timeframe right? Well, is.
that that's also a problem. Exactly, exactly
If I might have one day left or so, I don't need to do Well, and we also anything.
know, you know, w- when people are, say, off to a battle in wartime, they party like there's no tomorrow. Well, because maybe there isn't so definitely. The the religious insistence is that you should live in the light of eternity, right? Is that you should attempt to conduct yourself in a manner that is best. All things considered over the longest possible conceivable span of time. Now,
Does that mean don't have the dessert?
no, no, because no, it. It doesn't mean that, because, look, in the biblical text, for example, there is an insistence that, uh, the spirit of the divine wants the provision of life more abundant. That's the language, the the idea of a fruitful garden, an earthly garden of delights, even that's part and parcel of a vision of paradise. It's not joyless, it's it's harmoniously balanced. I think best way to think about it is likely musically, you know, in a in a musical piece, that's great.
Every note has its place, every note has its proper place in relationship to the whole, right? But every note is also worthwhile. Well, that's what you want is you want to balance your concentration on the present with your apprehension of the medium to long run. So I'll give you an example of that. So I did, I did a course for Peterson Academy called It's on the Sermon on the Mount, and the Sermon on the Mount is the longest record we have of Christ's direct utterances, let's say, and it constitutes the core of Christian ethics.
It's a set of instructions, and the instructions are very specific, so essentially the instruction is to aim at every moment at what's highest. Okay, so this is something you have to practice, okay? So the idea is that at each moment you're bringing to bear a certain attitude, and the attitude is I'm going to do what's best. Okay,
For him?
now, all things considered for me now, for me now, in a way that works tomorrow, for me now, in a way that works tomorrow and next week and next month and next year. And five years from now, and ten years from now. In relationship to my wife, in relationship to my kids, to my parents, to my community, right? It's that whole identity, you're optimizing that now. You might not know how, but that's your aim, okay, so that's that's the injunction to put the love of God above all else, to aim at what's highest.
Now, you don't exactly know how to do that, but that doesn't matter. You can specify your aim right now. No doubt you do something like that with your podcast, right? That's why it's successful. Yeah, okay, you agree with that. Yeah, cause it's Why?
because it's it's difficult, isn't it? There's just immense pressure when you're a podcaster, um, to aim at something else, and you have to. We me and Jack talk about this a lot. You have to have like a certain set of principles that are non-negotiable, but whatever principles you choose and believe in, they they come at a great cost.
Okay, what are the principles? So See, this is worth delving into, because one of my you've been very successful principles, yeah, as an podcaster,
one of my principles is I will. I try not to judge the people I'm speaking to, and I try not to come in with, um, preconceptions. I take them as I meet them. I, I try not to. I'm in search of genuine curiosity in them or some kind of answer or truth. right, so there's a And
search in it.
yeah, it's a search. Well, that's a quest, Yeah, yeah, eh? So you yeah.
know what an adventure story is a quest?
Can I answer that question potentially included? Yeah,
yeah. There there's only one thing I would take issue with. You said that you don't judge, see, I would say, probably you don't condemn. You have to judge, cause you have to listen, and you have to separate wheat from chaff, you have to evaluate. But you can do that without careless condemna- condemnation or a priori. What would you say? Like a tyrannical is insistence that what you know now is sufficient? Yeah, yeah, you, you, you wanna not.
People say I'm not judgmental. It's like, that's not a virtue. You wanna be, you wanna use judgment all the time, but that's not to con- like I could judge you, so I don't ever have to listen to you about anything.
yeah. J. A judgment might happen in my head, but it's then about how I treat the person based on that judgment. I don't wanna treat them based, I don't wanna have some like higher, um, egotistical Yeah, that's it, values that I'm, that's it. Yeah, that I'm correct that's right. Yeah, and that like,
yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's so, right, that's exactly yeah, you're it.
right, I am judging.
That's a hypocritical moralizing. Yeah, it's the moralizing I hm,
is like, I think I'm better than you because that's exactly of it. Yeah,
exactly. That's right. You don't want to, you definitely don't want to do that in a podcast. Journalists, the pathological journalists, they that's all they do, all they're doing is establishing moral superiority on the flimsiest possible grounds, at the least possible cost, in the most spectacular way. Yeah, it's really not It's hard being good.
a podcaster, especially in this particular moment where there's been such a focus on podcasting. Cause of what's happened in this election cycle. You really have to be clear on what you believe in, because the winds are gonna blow like the the world
oh, definitely.
is going to try and sway you. They're gonna say you can't speak to this person, you have to speak to this person, don't do that, don't do this, this is wrong. And you go, Okay, so how do I weather such a storm? When when I know the storm is coming, I'm gonna have to look to Rogan to go look at what, you know, Rogan, the the the arc of Rogan. And if I'm put, if I'm also a podcaster,
just keep asking stupid questions. Yeah, well, that. But the, you know, that is that quest, that and and what people want in a discussion is a quest. They want to see bloodhounds on the trail towards some truth. That's what they're after, they want to participate in that. Same with the public lectures I do, I'm always trying to answer a question. I don't know what the answer is. When I go on stage, it's a real question.
Do you think Joe has Joe Rogan? I've never actually met him, but do you think he's just has great faith in humans? And that? Because there's obviously been a lot of pressure on him. So how he survived that is he just has faith in who he is, he has faith what he's doing.
in his own ignorance.
Okay, and that those watching, which is a lot of people watching Rogan, will understand.
yeah yeah. Joe's on a quest, he's trying to be smarter than he is, that's what Joe does. It's curiosity that's driving him. This is what Musk said, too, about himself, and he said that to me when I interviewed him. He said that was how he reconciled. He had a terrible existential crisis when he was, like, thirteen, you know, and he reconciled that essentially with a quest. He decided that he could just pursue truth, pursue knowledge, pursue understanding, and that that would.
That's meaningful intrinsically and valuable intrinsically, and that's the beginnings of a religious orientation, or more than the beginnings, even cause the quest is a religious pursuit. It's pursuit of the truth, it's pursuit of the treasure that the dragon guards, right? And so treasures and dragons, they're always in the same place. It's very annoying. It's a good thing to know, though, because if a dragon shows up, you can always ask yourself where the treasure is.
might be close.
It's there. So okay, so back to the sermon on the mount, because we were talking about orientation. So aim up. Assume that other people have the same value as you do, and that that value is associated with whatever's divine, and then concentrate on the moment, right? So it's the the most distant possible upward aim, with the most intense possible concentration on the moment, right? You're good at that. That's what that's. I can't say that's what's made you successful, but it's certainly part of it.
Because you pay attention, see, that's, that's what paying attention means, because you want your your, your intent to be focused, because otherwise your attention is fragmented, so you want your attention to be focused. Now your attention is focused on something. Now we, we, we pulled it apart a little bit. You said that you're, you know, you have these principles and that you're trying to learn, and so your attention's pretty focused. And then you bring all that to bear in the moment, right?
And then people find that compelling, cause they're on, they're, they're along for the ride, they're along for the adventure, and that is meaningful, it's the essence of meaningful. And so so w- What we were trying to address was the relationship between hedonism and and, say, intelligent, long-term prosocial strategy. You can, you want them both, you want, you want. There's a optimized solution that delivers both far better than any other solution. This is the pearl of great price that Christ speaks about, that anyone wise and wealthy would sell everything they own to purchase.
There isn't anything better than that.
For the for the person listening right now that is struggling with this concept of like, we talked about hedonism, discipline, like they're just so far from it. Cause there's a scale of people that are, you know, able to stay focused on the long term. F- for the people at the very other end of the scale who just look at their lives and go, I just I hear what he's saying. For some reason, it's not working like I can't get out of this situation.
yeah, well, You meet these people all maybe maybe the time
you can't start on the porn side then, you know, like my, this is how a good behavior analyst approaches problems of that sort. It's like, okay, is there something in your life that you know is not right, that you could improve, that you would improve any step whatsoever? Well, generally, you can just ask yourself that question. It's like it's a contemplative exercise. Sit on the edge of your bed and think, Okay, where is my life off?
Kilter is so then then you have a variety of ideas about everywhere. how to. Yeah, okay, okay, I'm on my mom's so
bed, I'm in, I've got no relationship, my job's crap, I hate it. okay. Then I'm watching I'd say, zero in pornography. on one of those Yeah,
and find some small thing that you could fix that you would fix.
why a small thing?
Well, because, look at you, you're completely goddamn useless. You better find something small that you could do
Why?
now. If you can find a big thing, good, but obviously you haven't been able to, cause all these problems exist. So, see, one of the emphasis in the religious realm, let's say, is humility, one of the things that's emphasized. Well, what's humility? what's the opposite of pride? Well, humility is starting where you are, that's what humility is. And it's annoying because, you know, like, if your life is a mess, then you have to see that you're the person in that mess.
And then you have to understand that your first attempt to redress the mess might not be something you're particularly proud of. You know, I mean, I saw this lots in my clinical practice, where people would the first steps they had to take to put things in order were pretty embarrassing. It's like, Really, that's all I can do. Hey, man, uphill is better than downhill. And there's a doctrine in the Gospels that Christ puts forward, which is very interesting, he says.
Uh, it's the Matthew principle, it's called. To those who have everything, more will be given, from those who have nothing, everything will be taken. Okay, so it. It lays out a view of the world progress, regression, that's one model, here's another one, progress, regression, this is the right model. So even if you have to start small, you incru- s you accrue success in, um, exponentially, you accrue defeat exponentially, too. That's the abyss, that is hell. You start going downhill, you go downhill faster and faster, start going uphill, you go uphill faster and faster.
So even if you have to start small, or even painfully small, which is highly probable, especially if you're trying to tackle something that's really plagued you, doesn't really matter.
how small?
Take, I would say, take the step that you can take, that you will take, that actually feels like some accomplishment. Imagine you're dealing with the three year old kid and you want to encourage him. Okay, you want to set him a task that he d. You don't want him to say, Dad, I could do that when I was two, right? But you don't wanna set him a task that there's not a chance he'll manage. You want to set him a task that will stretch him beyond where he is, that has a reasonable probability of success, right?
why? why stretch him from where he is?
Well, because you want to grow. I mean, look, if you love a child, you love the child for who he is and who he could be, and you want to indicate your love for both of those. I think if you're a father, you tilt even more towards love for who the child could be.
What is self belief in this context? Cause people, uh, people, everyone's looking. So many people are in search of two words, I think it's three words, but self belief and confidence. And in this context of that small task, how is that building my self belief or confidence? yeah, well, If I
cause you watch yourself do it
and that does what to me?
well, well, look, if you see someone, a friend who is continually incrementally improving, you're gonna. Well, maybe you'll be jealous and resentful and bitter and miserable and try to undermine him. But assuming you're not, like, completely encapsulated by dark forces, you'll think, Oh, that's admirable. Well, you, you see the same thing in yourself. You have to act, you have to develop an opinion of yourself the same way you would develop an opinion of someone else. So now I, and I'm not hypothesizing about this, by the way, we know this clinically.
If I want to truly help you build your confidence, rather than merely readjusting the words you say about yourself, which would be something like self-esteem, which is something that doesn't even exist, by the way, it's just a pathological concept altogether. You want confidence, okay, more to the point, you want the confidence that's based in competence, otherwise it's narcissistic. Okay, so how do you develop that? Well, you watch yourself exceed your limits, and then you think, Oh, look at that, there's something in me that can exceed my limits.
That's your true self. That's a good way of thinking about it.
And in doing so, you actually realized that limits exist and that you imposed one on yourself in the first place, Well, that you, isn't it? Hm,
that's one of the things you can realize. Certainly, that that also you don't exactly know where the limits are. It's like, well, I exceeded that. It's like, okay, well, now what? What's the upward limit to exceed? What's the upward arc of exceeding limits? That's Jacob's ladder. I would say this is the promise of the kingdom of God. That's one way of thinking about it. There's no upward limit, there's no limit to how bad things can get.
No one would deny that who has any sense. So that means, in a way that hell exists, you can find your way there with no problem.
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And if you do it, please tag me, send me a message online. It's interesting what's going on with young men in particular at the moment, because it does appear, and I don't have the stats on this in front of me, but it does appear that young men are more and more in search of some type of religion.
Yeah, definitely.
Um, I think, I think Islam, I think I read Islam's on the rise amongst young men, or it's the the dominant religion that young men are being drawn to. But in the context of what we've described, that person who sat on the edge of their bed, do they need religion? And I'm being intentional, not to say God, I'm saying religion.
Well, it's. These are hard things to do on your own, right? I mean, you only have the span of your life and the probability that you can figure out how to live. Merely as a consequence of consulting your own limited experience is zero. It's too complicated.
So the religion might be your society, it might be your friends, your family. In in this context, it's
That's part of it, that that would be the more structured part, the more traditional part. You need the traditional stories. That's why I wrote this book is to indicate, well, at least in part, well, what the stories are, and also what what they mean. It's not only that, it's not only what they mean, it's how knowing what they mean changes your life. So, for example, in the story of Abraham, God comes to Abraham. Okay, now questions emerge from that statement.
What do you mean, God? and how does he come to Abraham? What the hell does that mean? Well, the story lays that out. The God that comes to Abraham is the voice of adventure. It's a definition. So this is a good thing to know. God is the voice of adventure. Okay, so now think, let's think about this a little bit. So the God that's the voice of adventure is the God of the forefathers of Abraham, the father.
He's a patriarchal spirit. Okay, if you're a good father, you speak with the voice of adventure to your sons. Obviously, you know, you're encouraging them. It's like, get the hell out there, you know, make something of yourself. Why do you do that? Cause you have this little kid and you think, get at it, man, let's see what you can be. And so that's that voice of the benevolent father, and that's the spirit of the ancestors, and behind that there's the God who's the voice of adventure.
If you pursue the spirit of adventure, there will be things you have to give up, right? You know that, I mean, you know, you, you're taking steps. We'd even say that steps forward in your life. What do you mean forward? What do you mean steps? Well, they're little adventures you have that transform you and transform your circumstances. Okay, you have that adventure, and you have to change as a consequence of it. You have to give up your immaturity so that you can take advantage of this new opportunity.
Okay, and that changes you. Now you're a slightly different person. Now a new horizon of opportunity opens up. You have to make a sacrifice. It's like, okay, looks like if I'm gonna do this, I can no longer afford this. Well, Abraham changes so dramatically that he gets a new name. He starts as Abram and he ends as Abraham. Abraham is the father of nations. So what's the moral? If you pursue the spirit of adventure and make the proper sacrifices, you become the father of nations, right?
That's true.
there's a really interesting I. I grew up as religious, uh, until I was eighteen. I say religious, cause, uh, the term's difficult to define to me. But um, my my mother's re was believed in a god, she was Christian, my father's Christian. And at about eighteen, I started reading a lot of Richard Dawkins books and other people's books. And I got to this place where I think I was atheist by the definition of I didn't think there was necessarily a God.
And now I find myself in this place of being agnostic now. When I think about the Bible as a compass or as a as a guide, the the the part of my brain that's like rooted in this, like, I need evidence for everything goes. Is this just a book that a bunch of men wrote thousands of years ago when they were sat around a campfire or whatever? And if if it is, then it's just one person's opinion, as much as any, as much as any self-help book on a shelf is one person's opinion.
Well, okay, let's take that claim apart. I mean, yes, it is stories that people came up with thousands of years ago, but no, definitely not one person's opinion, definitely 100% not. Because these stories have been transmitted over millennia and organized and edited and transformed by a very large number of people. So it's at minimum, it's a massive collective effort, and it's a collective under effort undertaken by arguably the most literate and intelligent people there are, and that'd be the Jews.
Why would Yeah,
I listen to the Bible more than I'd listen to something Socrates wrote, or any philosopher for oh, there's that?
a huge overlap between the the Greco, the Greek philosophical tradition and and the Christian tradition. I mean, Western culture is the amalgamation of Greece, Jerusalem and Rome. So, and the early Christians saw tremendous parallels between Christian theology and Greek philosophy.
Where do you think we we come from? You know, you've got the like Darwinism, evolutionary theory of we've evolved, et cetera. Then there's the more religious view that, you know, if you really look, listen, think about the f- the, uh, first testament and, um, the early Testament and the stories of the, you know, creation. People think, you know, maybe we were just popped out of nowhere, but where do? Where do we youth believe that we come from?
Do you believe a God put us here, or do you believe that? Do you believe evolution is true? Do you believe both are true?
You have to read the book.
Yeah, but I want I wanna, yeah,
I know it's very, but uh, but I I'm not trying to be a a smart aleck in in that response. It's a complicated answer, right? It's a complicated answer. I think that we're guided by the spirit of meaning. Okay, I think that's also our deepest instinct.
that somewhat dull winnesium.
Well, I had a rule for this book is I didn't make any claims about the biblical stories that I couldn't justify scientifically. I don't think there's a conflict. I I think that viewing the biblical stories as an amalgam of superstitious proto-scientific theories is absurd. I don't think there's any evidence for that at all. These are stories,
So do you believe?
stories and scientific hypotheses aren't the same thing. The Lord of the Rings is not a scientific hypothesis, but that doesn't mean it's not true.
Do you believe my great great granddad was a an amoeba?
Well, if you go, you were a sperm at one point. I mean, it's not that implausible. We all come from single celled organisms.
This is so I I'm asking these questions because I'm genuinely ras- it's like I'm genuinely wrestling with a bunch of big existential questions that I've actually only been wrestling with. Maybe for like, I'd say, a year, so it's very fresh for me. And it's funny. My arc here is religious Christian. G- up until maybe eighteen, just like staunch atheist for two years, to the point that it was like my identity. And then, like, let go of that, drifted for a couple of years and find myself at this really interesting point where I'm like, back at the door of, like, Okay, let's re look at some of these answers again.
yeah. Well, that's How you been, your life been?
exactly why I wrote this book, because I know that that's the time, and it's not just the time for you, that's the time that we're in.
yeah, it's the time we're in, a hundred Yeah, oh, definitely, percent. Yeah,
definitely. Well, it's partly because the enlightenment has exhausted itself, partly cause it was wrong.
it's failed us, the individual.
Well, I think exhausted is a better word, because it wasn't like the Enlightenment was without its benefits. When We made you say the enlightenment, immense technological progress. The the hypoth- the materialist reductionism of the atheist scientist. It's not right. Factually, they were wrong, th- their theory of perception was wrong. They're wrong. We see the world through a story, we do not see the world as a collection of facts. They're wrong. You see, the postmodernists figured this out, and that's why the postmodernists had a walloping influence on culture.
Now, I'm no fan of the postmodernists for a variety of reasons, but their insistence that we see the world through a story, that they're right, that's right.
I agree. I mean, if you th- uh, if you've obviously read the book Sapiens, um, by Yuval Harari. And his central point is that what bound us as humans and stopped us being these scattered chimps was stories. They bind us together. So I completely understand that we need a story. It's how everything money, governments, et cetera function, but what that story is. Now I can, I can agree It's a story that
of voluntary sacrifice.
100% agree that humans need that. There's no chance that we'd be here otherwise, and it's a set of values and principles. Now, those values and principles are often found in religion, but do they, and and a belief in a God? But do they have to be? Could they be found in? Could I theoretically make a new religion where me and my friends all unite against a set of values? Sacrifice, giving
That's a great question. Well,
parenthood?
this is what Nietzsche basically presupposed in some ways. So when, when Nietzsche observed that God had died, say in eighteen, fifty or thereabouts, his medication for that, his warning was we'll descend into nihilism and communist totalitarianism. And that was exactly right. Maybe a mindless hedonism in there, too. Dostoevsky concentrated more on that. Nietzsche said. We'll have to create our own values, we'll have to become. That's what the Superman is, the Nietzschean Superman, the man who creates his own values.
Try see what happens. You can't do it, you can't create your own values, because values are real, they're not arbitrary, they're not relativistic. So imagine this. Imagine there's a very large number of games that could be played, like an infinitely large number. But there's a very small number of games that people want to play. Then there's even a smaller number of games that sustain themselves and improve as you play them. Okay, so that's like a landscape.
You can think about it as a landscape of potential patterns of interaction. You could even think about it as a landscape of potential tribal affiliations, right? The rules of those games would be the principles of the society. Okay, now the question, your question is, could we come up with our own set of rules? And the answer to that is no,
why?
because the sustainable abundant playability of a game is not arbitrary. So, for example, if you want to get along with your wife, she has to wanna play the game you're playing. Okay, now, there's lots of games you could play that aren't gonna fit that criteria. Now, then, imagine it's even worse, though, because to get along with your wife, you ha- she has to wanna play the game you wanna play. But both of you have to play a game that works today and tomorrow and next week, next month, next year, right?
And then you have to play it with your kids and your parents and a bunch of other people.
So can I ask then? So is it the case that humans are designed in such a way where there's a certain set of values and stories that are most conducive with their reproductive survival? And so, if that's true, and I completely agree, understand why that would be true, because it's this true, true for all species. Like, there's a set of stories and narratives, probably in my dog, if you go back to a hundred years from when his ancestors were in the wild, that he needed to subscribe to to reproduce,
to be a dog.
to be a dog and to survive as a dog. But so the question then becomes, where do those values come from? Are they innate within us because of our environmental factors? So I need to be this way because of the environment I live in, so that I can have sex with somebody and reproduce because of I have two arms, two legs, et cetera. I'm this advanced chimp, or do they come from above somewhere and they're granted down to me?
Because if I look at every animal not or and oh, and okay,
yeah, yeah, it's the same thing. It d it's you're looking at the same problem from two different perspectives. It's and yes, they're handed down from on high. Yes, they're instincts.
so who they handed down from?
Well, the the the religious.
Do you struggle with this question?
Well, it's a complicated question.
But you struggle with the answer.
I I struggle with making the answer simple enough to offer rapidly.
Are you clear at yourself on it?
Not as clear as I could be.
What is it you wrestle with? I've said Well, what I think
clarity is part of it. I
do you?
mean, we want we want to make things as clear as possible, breadth of co coverage, right? I mean, I'm people ask me what I believe, and I say, well, I'm not hiding what I believe. I'm like, I lecture about it, I podcast about it, I write about it. It's like, that's what I believe. There it is. Is there obfuscation in that? Well, some partly things are complicated, so it's it's very difficult to give short answers to complex questions.
They you tend to give. If you give short answers to complex questions, the answers tend to be symbolic. You have to say something like, where do they come from? It's like, Well, they come from God. Now is that a useful answer? Well, it's a short answer, so it's useful in that it's short. It begs the question, What do you mean by God? Or we could return to that in the story of Abraham. These are definitions, because if you're gonna talk about what's properly put in the highest place, you have to know what you're talking about.
Okay, in the story of Abraham, the voice of adventure is to be put in highest place. And if you follow that, then you become the father of nations. That's reproductive success, right? So that means the idea is that there's an alignment between the instinct that calls you to adventure and the probability that you'll be attractive to women in the manner that ensures the survival of your descendants.
and is that an environmental It's both, issue? Uh, huh,
it's both, it's both. It emerges as a consequence of the constraints of social interaction. Let's say, like, there's constraints, for example, on what makes a man desirable to a woman, right? That has nothing to do with you. Those constraints, those are there, right? They're there in the society of women. They're eternal. They're not no woman. She might vary in her opinion to some degree, but she partakes of the pattern, so it's there now. It's also built into you because you're a social creature, and so your physiology indicates to you the nature of that pattern.
So does my dog have a different religion to me? Does he have a different God?
To some degree, it it's there's an overlap because you can communic the dog, your dog understands you, and vice versa. So there's there's. That's a good question. Social mammals understand each other, right? So there's an overlap in their deepest instincts or their highest impulses. You can think about that both ways.
I was, I was going through my head and thinking about, like the Venus flytrap and my my dog, my French bulldog, Pablo. And they all need a different set of behaviors and principles and values to survive and thrive and be happy.
well, you could. You could think about You know, that as sure, sure,
so I was thinking, then does that mean that they all have a different they have a nature, God?
yeah, they have a different intrinsic nature. That's another way of thinking about it.
Yeah, because of the environment and the factors that they face as that species. So then Pablo's God might be slightly different to my God, if we're talking about. Cause. I'm trying to understand if, like this idea of God is a set of evolutionary motivations
Yes, that it is, and it is that or you can think about if it's it as rising up from the material world or descending from on heaven. It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter fundamentally, it's the same, it doesn't matter. There well, those are different ways of looking at the same problem.
wh, when I say evolutionary motivations, it doesn't feel so divine, it doesn't feel like a place, a reason to gather in a church. It feels like I'm just kind of a a robot that's being steered by these motivations of don't do that, do this. This feels good. If you're with your friends and family, you feel good, so do that more. And if you're with your friends and family, you're safer, so you're more likely to have kids.
Or is it this sort of divine thing that we we society have told us God is where we should worship and we should thank you so much? And go to a church and get on our knees and pray, and because they they're two very different things. One's sort of like practical and pragmatic, and the other one is this divine thing.
okay, here's one way of thinking about it. So I mentioned that in the story of Abraham, God is the call to adventure. Okay, so that's a definition. Now the the the divine that's put forward in these library of stories has multiple characteristics. He's characterized in many ways, but there's an insistence that that reflects an underlying unity. Now the unity is incomprehensible in its essence. Okay, so you have to accept that as the initial starting point. You're not going to get the answer.
Okay, you can, you can see something complex from a variety of different perspectives. Okay, in the story of Noah, God is the impulse that comes to the wise to prepare when trouble's brewing. Okay, now, now, okay. So now you can think of that as an instinct, you can think about it as
got instinct, intuition. n negative emotion, Yeah,
anxiety, but but it's more than that, because it's you can be afraid of something that isn't real. Okay, now you might have to ask yourself, Okay, what are the preconditions for your fear? What are the preconditions to the validity of your fear? So you're afraid, and you should be. Well, let's say that's a characteristic of someone who's wise, okay? So then the question is, well, what's the essence of the wisdom that makes your fear valid? Noah is described, uh, in the story of Noah as a man wise in his generations.
So that means that by the moral standards of his time, he's an upstanding human being. Okay, so now you can imagine that means he exists in harmonious relationship with his present self and his future self. Okay, that makes him mature, but then he also does that in a way that serves his wife and his family and his community. So his self is balanced and optimized across those parameters. That makes him secure in his foundation and properly oriented.
If you're secure in your foundation and properly oriented upward, then there's no difference between the voice of the divine and the instinct for the instinct that preserves you in times of trouble. But you see, you can't exactly get there by the mere bottom-up materialistic notion, because you could think about the fear that guides Noah as an instinct, but the instinct is pathological unless it exists in this wider moral framework. Because can then you could have the fear of a coward.
Well, that's not helpful.
the wider moral framework, could that wider moral framework just be I'm in my DNA? I'm hardwired to want to reproduce? Because
Yeah, but rep. Even reproduction is see, this is, I think, where Dawkins went dreadfully wrong. Sex and reproduction aren't the same thing for people.
not anymore? Certainly.
Well, not at all, because we're high investment reproducers. Sex just gets the ball rolling. So so here's a question How would you have to act to maximally ensure the survival of your offspring? Okay, so now what do you mean? Survival? Do you mean that your son lives? Do you mean that your grandson lives? Do you mean that twenty generations down the road from you? The pattern that you represented is still propagating itself successfully. Does it mean that the people that you produce are able to take on all challengers because of the manner in which they conduct themselves?
That's a lot more complicated than just sex, like, way more complicated. So the pattern that Abraham, so Abraham is the father of nations, right? The there's an insistence in the story that the manner in which he conducts himself as a hero establishes the pattern that makes his descendants successful eternally.
I. I just can't figure out whether this is, um, whether, like, what, what order things happened in. In terms of is the Bible just a consequence of people trying to figure out our evolutionary motivations and turn them into these stories that guide us? Why just Okay, we can remove the word just,
well? because I know, But that's an important
yeah, yeah, it's it's an removal, important removal, because it's, you know, because it's it has bound Well, is the Bible people.
in part the story of human beings coming to consciousness? Yes, yes. Does it reflect a deeper underlying reality? Yes, how deep is that underlying? Well, let's say, okay, it's a story about the psyche, and then they'd say, well, no, it's a story about the psyche in society. Okay, so well, no, it's a story about the psyche in society, in the natural world. Okay, well, what's underneath that? The source of nature, society and the psyche.
This isn't an interesting question. It's a very direct one, but I would love just an answer that I cause I haven't got clarity on this. What is it you beli? What? What God is it that you believe in? I've taught heard you talk about this sort of substrate idea and such, but in a way simple way that I can understand. Do you believe in a man in the sky? God? Do you believe in? It's a Well, that's not force.
as that's not as primitive a conceptualization as the atheists would have you believe.
What is it you believe?
Well, there isn't anything more complex in the known universe than a human brain. So if you want a model for reality as such, like proclaiming that it has something akin to the structure of the human psyche is not an absurd claim, given that that is the most complex thing by far that we know of, by far.
So what is it you believe?
Well, I've been explaining it.
You? But I mean, in, uh, I, you know, I,
I did say I mentioned something which we skipped over very quickly, cause I introduced it too rapidly. Postmodernists figured out that we live in a story, but then they leapt to a faulty conclusion of two forms, well, three. There's no uniting story. That was one of their conclusions. In fact, the definition of postmodernism is skepticism of meta narratives. There's no uniting story. It's like, well, that's a stupid theory, because it there's no union, so what? There's just diversity.
Well, we worship diversity now in this utterly foolish manner. There's no difference between diversity and war. Without a uniting narrative, there's nothing but war. So no, that's not gonna work. Wrong hedonistic self-gratification. There's Michel Foucault for you to a t. It's like, why is that wrong? Why can't people just do what they want with whoever they want all the time? Cause it defeats itself and quickly. It's not a sustainable game. If it's all about you and your whims, I don't want to be anywhere near you, and that won't be so good for you.
That's not gonna work. Power, that's really where the postmodernists landed with their what would you say, temptation to turn towards Marx. It's all about power. It's like, first of all, that's probably a confession, if that's what you believe, and second, no, it's not. Try tyrannizing your wife and see how well that works for you. Try tyrannizing yourself and see how successful you are. Power's not the game. Okay, what's the game? What's the story? I mentioned earlier?
It's voluntary self-sacrifice, right? You offer yourself up in the service of something higher. That's the basis of society, that's a basis of psychological stability. The Christian insistence is that that's the basis of the world.
I'm gonna ask you again, cause I I wanna be, I wanna be clear, is what, what is, what is it you beli? What is the God you believe in?
I think that the claim that Christ is the embodiment of the prophet and the laws, I think that's true. Yeah, that so that's complicated. It's very, very complicated, but I think it's true.
so you believe that Jesus was God God?
Yeah, I I think I think if you understand what that means, that it's indisputable. I'll I'll give you, I'll give you a brief explanation of why Christ takes the sins of the world onto himself. So that means all the problems that there are are his problems, right? Okay, so the the idea there is that there's no difference between making that assumption and then actually beginning to address those problems. And there's no difference between that which best addresses the problems of mankind that and the divine, those are the same thing.
And I can't see how that can be otherwise, because the contrary hypothesis would be that you would adapt best to your life by avoiding things that are difficult and terrifying, and no one believes that. And so the pattern of the passion, this is the voluntary self-sacrifice issue taken to its extreme. The pattern of the passion is the decision to voluntarily confront and welcome anything that happens to you, no matter what it is. And that's a terrible thing to ask or endeavor to undertake.
But well, the alternative is to shrink away. Well, the spirit of shrinking away is the divine. It's like, I don't think so, like that, that's preposterous, the spirit of unlimited courage. Well, that's not a bad start for a definition of what constitutes the divine, the highest possible value.
has your belief in God religion been shaken at all? Oh, yes, definitely, Cause you've been constantly. over the last year and a half, two years, you've been through a particularly difficult time with losing people in your life that are, um, sort of foundational to you, Tammy as well.
Oh yeah, well, and I was in extreme pain for three years, right? I went through three years where every minute of my life was worse than any minute I had ever had previous to that. It was terrible. And did I lose faith? Was it questioned, challenged? Absolutely, absolutely. Um, it, it just became absurd. It was absurd. So many things had gone off the rails. And my wife was dying, my daughter was ill. I was things had blown up around me in fifty different ways, and I was like, seriously, in pain.
It was terrible. I was walking like twelve miles a day, cause I couldn't sit. I did that for months, winter, rain, whenever I had a friend who walked with me, it was terrible. And yeah, I mean, I thought, w what was the desperation? It wasn't even the pain, it was the fact that I was in such terrible shape that I felt that I was a felt. I believed that I was a burden to everyone around me and that that was only likely to get worse.
And I thought, What's the sense in this? What's the possible significance of this? So yes, everyone's faith is challenged. I mean, Christ himself cries in despair out to God on the cross, and the story wouldn't be believable without that. Like, if you're gonna live, you're gonna be pushed past your limit, right? If you're gonna live, so, but who knows what you discover when you're pushed past your limit?
In that moment, you know, I've been in my relationship for some time now, and I genuinely think I'd rather, I'd rather die myself than my partner die. And you were there as Tammy was struggling with her health, which is not something I've heard you actually talk about before. Um, in what I've observed, she was, she was dying. Is that harder to take for you than your own pain and struggle?
I think generally, if you love someone, it's worse to see them suffer than to suffer yourself. You certainly figure that out when you have kids.
And this all happens at the same moment, the same couple of years of your life. Is there anything to, you know, people always search for silver linings and things? Is there anything?
we're both alive, my family's thriving, the my adventure is expanding.
Life isn't fair, is it? Doesn't appear to be very fair, because I mean, this is how your story ended in that regard. But it
Is it? I don't know if an adventure is fair. I don't even know if that's what we want. Like, this is something I really came to understand more deeply when writing this book. You know, what are we built for? We're built for maximal challenge, and that isn't the way we view ourselves in the modern world. We we view ourselves as built for pleasure, you know, pornography. We we view ourselves as built for consumption, or for safety, or for, or for for, maybe for egotistical self-aggrandizement and fame.
Those are look many. All of those things are better than their absence. Let's say, you know, I think part of the reason that Andrew Tate is so popular among young men because it it's better to be a successful reprobate than a useless scrounger. Seriously, I mean, seriously. But that's why the villain in stories is often admirable compared to the coward, right? At least the villain is out there, like doing villain things, you know, but least he has meaning well, and he, he's not, he's not
the villain, at least the villain, villain has meaning.
the the villain's on a quest of sorts, you know, a committed and a committed villain can learn. That's another thing, too. What are we built for? I think we're built for maximal challenge, and that's that's way more interesting. I mean, one of the things that see, I figured out that lies, that totalitarian states were a consequence of lies in about 1985. I, I really figured it out. I'd been reading Solzhenitsyn and Carl Jung, I'd been reading, I was reading a lot, I was really obsessed by it.
I thought, Oh, I see, so hell is the dominion of the lie. Okay, so what do you do about that? Well, you stop lying. That's how you fight it, and that means you do that in your own life. You just stop. Just you practice stopping, you practice not doing the things you know you shouldn't do. You practice paying attention to your words to see if they're landing solidly and they make you confident instead of weak, right?
You abandon your short-term desire for control and power, understanding that there isn't anything better that can happen to you than what happens if you tell the truth, right? No matter what it looks like to you in the moment, it's a strange thing, but I can't see how it could be otherwise. Because you'd have to hypothesize that you're going to align yourself with life, with nature, with society, with God, with yourself by lying. No one believes that.
You might think you can get away with it. That's way different, right? But no one believes that. So well, so then what happens in consequence of that? Well, I think what happens in consequence of that is what happened to Abraham. Your life just goes like this, just opens and opens and opens and opens. I don't think there's any limit to that, and that's ridiculously entertaining, like unbearably entertaining. There's what you want your life, you want it to be unbearably entertaining.
And it's funny, you know, when you watch people go to movies, I mean, James Bond, right? That's an unbearably entertaining life, and that's what people want to see when they go to a theater, because that's what they want, that's what they want. And maybe all the sorrow and catastrophe that's part of that has to be part of it, because otherwise there's there's nothing about it. That's glorious
why does that move you so much?
because life is very wide, you know, there's the the peaks and valleys are very distant from one another. And I, I don't know. Maybe as you ascend uphill, your understanding of the chasm between the peaks and valleys also increases, you know, cause you think maybe as you're successful, you're happier. Well, first of all, I'm not sure that success and happiness are the same thing. I'm not sure that we want them to be the same thing. I don't even know what people mean when they say they wanna be happy.
If you investigate it technically, you find out that really what people mean when they say they wanna be happy is that they don't wanna suffer. That's different than the enthusiastic joy that you might think about. You know, that's part and parcel of a child's laughter. You wanna be happy. What do you wanna be laughing all the time? Is that what you're saying? Well, no, that's not what I mean. Well, what do you mean? Do you mean the gratification that comes along with the cookie at one in the morning?
No, that's not what I mean. Well, okay, what do you mean? Well, I don't know. It's like, Yeah, you don't know. Partly what you mean is you don't want pointless suffering. Fair enough, you know, fair, fair enough, but that doesn't mean it's happiness. That's your goal.
There's no meaning.
I don't think that's your goal. I don't think your podcast would be successful if that was your goal. I think you would have washed up on the shoals of triviality long ago. I do. Yeah, well, there's something you're doing that's working. There's something about the way you're approaching the situation that's of broad appeal. There's some archetypal pattern that's you're acting out in your conduct in your podcast, cause otherwise it wouldn't have the effect it has.
hm, it's true. I, I, I agree. I don't know what it is, but I because
Well, you know, some of it, we talked about some of it, you know, you said that you, you can, you can, you can apprehend the outline of some of the principles. Some of that you probably discovered as you went along, rather than, you know, putting them in place to begin with. This seems to work, you know? So that's a discovery of of a pathway,
well, y. As a podcaster as well, I don't think you really truly understand your principles until they're tested, so, and especially when they're tested from both sides. So the you know, this side's telling you to be more like this, and this side's screaming at you to be more like this. And you, you're faced with a decision. When you're s, you know, when I started out as a podcaster, there was no one screaming, there was no one there.
But at some point in the journey, you get immense pressure
Yeah, yeah, well, then you're and that forces also,
a decision out of you, yeah, well, it forces you're also a result. in a situation Yeah,
then when you have to start worrying about your reputation, which is something you don't have to worry about when no one knows who you are. And it's very dangerous to worry about your reputation. As soon as you start worrying about your reputation as a podcaster, you're gonna fail cause you're not interesting, then you'll stop taking risks. So then, you know, another question emerges. You've got people yelling at you from this side and this side. Well, how do you know what's right?
Well, it isn't partly. It's by listening, cause you wanna pay attention to your audience, but there's something guiding you. If you do what you're doing properly, that has nothing to do with the clamor.
yeah, yeah. It's funny because actually it links back to some of the principles we've talked about today. It's one of one of the things I've learned is having a good relationship, like good friendships and a good part relationship with my wife, is actually the foundation for me to be able to navigate the screen. People screaming at me from both sides Yeah, why because it just anchors me in. It's like an anchor of, like, knowing who I actually am, irrespective of the the
crowd?
like, the crowd telling you who you are. So that's how you well, that's do it,
a good. That's a very
you know?
good illustration of distributed identity. Yeah, yeah, it's like you are your wife and your friends and your family, right? That there's no fundamentally, there's there cannot be any separation there. That's yeah, and and when you s you said you've ex you experienced that, it's like that's what gives you, that's part of what gives you a foundation. It's like, Yeah, that's not illusory.
hm. And it's nice, cause, as you said, like, when I go out into the world, everyone is very nice to me. It's just if you spend too long on the internet, people scream at you from both sides. They say, do it more like this, do it like this. Where are the CEOs? This is called Diary of a CEO. We want more of these kind of guys. You know, we should talk about this politics, Trump, the the Kamala Trump, the.
And you know, the middle of that, you're going fucking hell. And that's where you have to take some time to really like, tune into yourself and go, Who am I? And why am I doing this? And what are my principles? And irrespective of the principles I choose or I believe in, that there's gonna be suffering, and there's gonna be sacrifice, and there's gonna be great adventure as well. And the good one thing I really like that helps me for some bizarre reason is the knowledge that I will die someday.
Why It's just
does that help?
it just. It's a good question. Why does it help? It helps because if I think it's focusing in me on what actually matters in a way that I wouldn't be, it wouldn't be as easy to otherwise. What it's saying is it's just a reminder of, okay, if I'm gonna die someday, then actually this person's screaming at me to be more like this. It obviously doesn't matter, like it obviously doesn't matter in the in the context of my other priorities.
well, it might be that death is what makes things matter. Ah, scarcity always makes Well,
the value of something. Yeah,
well, right, but. But then we're talking about a kind of ultimate scarcity again. Like you can ask yourself, one of the fundamental questions you can ask yourself is w What is the nature of the real, right? And I think death makes things real.
I agree. That's why it's an important. I don't know. Seems like a weird thing to say, but it reminds me that tr what's trivial and what's not? Um, in the context of a finite amount of resources, time, attention that I can commit, it's it's foolish to commit some of them to some of the things that I find myself committing them to. Sometimes when I remind myself of that death
How do you pick your guests? curiosity, Yeah, that's I pick people I wanna talk to. It's like, I'd like to hear what that person has to say.
yeah. And it's something that I'm trying to learn. So it's typically when I, when I've seen, you wrote a book called Who we who wrestle with God. That's the Lord Well, I was like,
of Israel, eh? That's what Israel means. Yeah, yeah, and I thought, well, that's the chosen people of God, Israel. I didn't know that, Yeah,
but I thought this is a subject that I'm curious about. So I would like to talk to Jordan to see if he can help me, you know, fill in this sort of jigsaw puzzle in my brain of subject matters that relate to this. And I evolve. I'm probably gonna have kids soon, and when I have my kids, I'm gonna be curious about parenthood, and I'm gonna speak to, you know, guests that can help me with that.
That's been my framework and it's worked in terms of I still like doing this. Well, there's So,
no reason. you know, So when I'm on stage lecturing, I'm on a journey, it's a real journey. It's not a act like I pose a question to myself before I go on stage. It's a question I want the answer to, and I don't have. And I go on stage and I try to move towards the answer. And people come along and I wanna go there and they wanna come along. It's a good deal, and the podcasts are like that.
If you're doing them honestly, it's like, I wanna talk to this person, that's a really I wanna
nice way of thinking about it, moving towards an answer, not even sure what the answer is, but
well, and it'll change as you approach it,
move towards the answer.
right? The questions and the answers change as you move towards it. That's okay, that's fine.
We were touching this earlier, but it's something that I wanted to touch on because one of the themes of this podcast is often the subject of grief. And I read that you lost both of your parents within sort of six months of each other. What d? What does that moment teach you about priorities, about life, about what matters, about anything that you could pass down to me? That's important.
Things last way less long than you think, so you should be aware of that and not take things for granted. No, and so, and I don't think I took my parents for granted. Now, did I do that perfectly? Well, we don't do things perfectly, but it was pretty good, it was pretty good. I learned when my I watched my wife's family go through the death of their mother, and one of the consequences of that was that my wife and her siblings and her father pulled closer together in during that time.
And that really, it was like a wound healing, you know? And so I saw that and I saw that that worked. So, for example, Tammy has a stronger relationship with her older brother than she did before. Her father also died, so we lost her father and my father and my mother this year. Basically, it isn't that her brother substituted for her father, but it was that there was more there than she had made use of. And so when her father departed, the possibility of expanding that relationship with her brother was on the table.
And I did the same thing with my sister and my brother, and that's helpful, it's helpful, so there's opportunity everywhere, like even in grief, there's opportunity.
is there one lesson that your father taught you that stays
Pay attention.
with you?
He was good at that, he was good at, he taught that very well, and it wasn't a good idea to not pay attention around my father. He, uh, he had a, he wasn't, he wasn't. I wouldn't describe him as an easy person. He had high standards and he was rather unforgiving, and that's, I don't know. Do you forgive the people that you love for not being everything they could be? That's a hard question. It's okay, dear.
It's like, Is it now? I think we have a lot of that in our culture. It's okay. I like you just like you are. Um,
Do you forgive him?
yeah, yes, I don't think they're. My dad and I sorted out our differences a long time ago. You know, when I left home, our relationship was somewhat fractious from the time I was 13 to the time I left home. He developed quite a severe depression, which ran in my family, and that made him harder to understand than had been the case previously. It also made the probability that if there were events in the household that they would be, they'd have more reverberation than they would have otherwise, and that was confusing to me.
I understood why that happened later, not much later, and it wasn't very long after I left home that whatever differences I had with my father were irrelevant. So we didn't really have unresolved issues. I wouldn't say
what about your mother? What's the one lesson
my mom was great.
what's the lesson, if any, she left with you?
My mother was a very hospitable person, and in the in the Old Testament accounts, hospitality is a cardinal virtue, and she was very good at making people welcome. When my the day my mother died, I, I, I s. I thought about her most of the day that day. Memories came to mind, and one of the things I realized about my mother was that, uh, I don't have a single negative memory of my mother. It's really quite something to know someone for sixty two years, and really, I really don't have a negative memory of my mother.
I don't remember any time where she acted. She was a good person, my mother. Um, I could always make her laugh. She had a very good sense of humor. I appreciated that a lot. And she, although she was a very agreeable person and a very feminine person, she was tough too, and she wasn't a Oedipal type. You know, she had strong protective instincts, but her desire to help her children become independent trumped that, for sure.
Jordan, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is, How do you feel most misunderstood?
Hm, I don't know if I am misunderstood. I think the people who don't like me, some of them have me confused with some figment of their imagination. Some of the people who don't like me, they understand me, they just don't like what they understand, they don't like what it implies, and so that's okay with me. I, I don't feel misunderstood. I wouldn't say I, I've got nothing to complain about. Um, people who've been listening to me, they understand me, and as far as I can tell, that's been very good for them, and that's unbelievably gratifying for me.
It's you must experience that. I mean, your podcast has had a broad effect, and I presume a positive effect on people. There isn't anything better than that to see that what you're doing has that broadly salutary effect. That's great. That's another indication of our essentially, I would say, religious nature. You know, Jocko Willing told me this, you know? Jocko said that he could, he could have easily been like a gang leader, criminal type. He's a tough warrior character, you know?
And he said, when he went into the military, he discovered that being the leader of a team and moving people in a positive direction, there wasn't anything better than that. And so that just straightened him out, you know, and I feel exactly the same way. There isn't anything better than that, and so I'm able to do that, and I see the evidence of that all the time. And whatever misunderstandings there might be about me, necessary or unnecessary, are so trivial compared to that that they're not, they don't even really register.
what a privilege, Jordan, That's for sure.
Jordan. Thank you so much. It's a privilege we share because doing this for me is a great privilege. And the fact that it positively impacts anyone is everything you've just said, and I see that in your work. But also I see it when we have these conversations in the immense avalanche of people who profess that you've changed their life in some positive way and moved them in a better direction. And that's irrefutable, and no one can, you know, I mean, there's, as I say, there's no greater privilege.
So Jordan, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it, thank
You bet. you, thank you so Thanks for the invitation much, thank you, again. It's always a pleasure thank you so much, to talk to you.
thank you. Isn't this cool? Every single conversation I have here on the Diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you'll know. I ask the guest to leave a question in the diary of a CEO. And what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home. So you've got every guest we've ever had, their question, and on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the person who answered that question.
We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question. The brand new version two updated conversation cards are out right now at the conversation cards dot com. They've sold out twice instantaneously. So if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly.