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  • Hello.

  • So a couple of you who are out there, maybe you could just send me a quick text and tell me if this is working.

  • Yes.

  • Excellent.

  • Can you hear me Mad, Matt?

  • I work at Mars and Toronto.

  • Can you share your thoughts and why it hasn't worked?

  • Wow, that's a complicated question.

  • Let's get to that a little bit later.

  • You guys can hear me.

  • Excellent.

  • Let's go.

  • So this is what I'm going to do.

  • I want to talk to you first about Patriot.

  • And then I'm going to take some questions that people have said.

  • I've got this new thing called, uh, pigeonhole, and that's enabled people to vote up questions.

  • And then I'm also going to take some of the questions that are on.

  • You know, that air streaming in.

  • So so hopefully that'll work.

  • See if I'm in focus.

  • Not too bad.

  • All right.

  • There we go.

  • Consider the overwhelming success of the patron account of the money raised by rebel.

  • What will you be doing with the contributions?

  • Well, that's great.

  • All right, so I'm going a couple of things to say about that.

  • So the 1st 1 is, you know, I would say a number of people have bean attempt and not an overwhelming number, but a number of people have been attempting to take me to task for the fact that my patron support has Bean.

  • Let's call it overwhelmingly successful.

  • And so I'll tell you how I formulate my response to that.

  • The first is I'm generating almost all of my contact and making it completely publicly accessible.

  • So it's free, right?

  • And so that way I'm bringing, I think, awareness of psychological issues to a very large number of people.

  • And so far, at the moment, my view count on YouTube is up to 13 million.

  • And I did a little bit of calculations last week to try to figure out what the total view count was, Um, for for the cuts of my lectures that have bean appearing on YouTube and then the political material as well.

  • And I think it's upward of 50 million.

  • And so I'm making psychological and political content available to 50 million people and so you know, that seems like a reasonable thing to do now.

  • People who don't agree with what I'm saying my differ, but I think that could be separated from the educational content as well.

  • So and then with regards to the Patriot on subscribers, every single person who's doing that is doing it entirely voluntarily.

  • And I also set up that Patriot account long before any of this political material emerged.

  • So and my sense with the Patriot on viewers and you guys conclude me and if I'm wrong about this, is that there's two things happening, as one is.

  • It enables people who are not very happy about the current political situation in the West to to to contribute to something that might be, at least to some degree, attempting to stem the tide of such things as toxic political correctness.

  • And second, that it enables people to support my endeavors to bring general education to a wider audience.

  • And that seems like a good deal for everyone.

  • And, you know, you might say, Well, it's a particularly good deal for me, and I'm certainly not complaining about what's happening.

  • But I would also point out that it doesn't exactly being a straightforward thing.

  • And so, um, so I guess if anyone else wants to try it, they're more than welcome to now.

  • Having said that, um, I would also say that the real issue here and I think this is the fact that this isn't self evident is also a commentary on the toxicity of our culture at the moment is that it actually isn't the issue.

  • The issue isn't really how much money you have.

  • I think that that's a resentful and relatively vicious way of judging someone else.

  • I think the issue is what you do with the money when you have it.

  • And, you know, um, I'm not a particularly hedonistic person and I'm not 25 years old, You know, I'm 55 years old and I'm going to be a grandfather in a couple of months.

  • You know, Thank God for that.

  • And what I want to do with that money is to do the best things I can possibly think of to do with it.

  • And one of the things I'm thinking about.

  • I started this biblical Siri's and a lot of that's help thankful, thanks to you guys on Patri on, because that enabled me to generate the capital that was necessary to rent a theater because for 12 lectures, that was a $60,000 investment about that something like that and then another $8000 for the for the camera work, and that had to be basically dealt with upfront.

  • So it was a reasonable financial risk.

  • Now I've bean crazily fortunate in that theater tickets have also sold out.

  • So it looks like the biblical Siri's will pay for itself with some extra left over.

  • And so you know, I'm pretty happy about that because that gives me some more working capital.

  • And then you might say, Well, what am I going to do with the capital?

  • Well, I'm going to continue doing the sorts of things that I'm already doing.

  • I want to do a series on the 100 greatest books of the Western canon, for example.

  • I want to move genuine humanity's education out of the universities where it isn't being taught anyways, as far as I can tell online where people can access it freely.

  • I'm talking to a wide variety of people right now about trying to do that in a more formal sense, so that the possibility for widespread university education can be made universally accessible, and one of the things we're trying to crack is the problem of how to teach people to write, because that's a real troublesome thing.

  • And by the way, you know you guys.

  • If you go on to my website Jordan Peterson dot com, and you go into courses and you go into psychology for 30 if you look carefully there, you'll see that there's an essay rubric that teeth that tells people how to write.

  • And actually that's become quite popular.

  • And so, if you're interested in how to learn to write, I've written something about that already, and we're gonna make a piece of software that's gonna help people learn to write.

  • And so I've got plans for how to make writing education broadly accessible to people.

  • So I would like to make humanity's education of the highest order broadly accessible to people, and I also want to teach them how to write.

  • And I'm going to try to crack the online university accreditation problem.

  • And so part of the money that or a substantial proportion of the money that is being donated to me, let's say or is being offered to be by my monthly supporters, so that's all of you people is going to be going to projects exactly like that.

  • And the reason for that is that what the hell else would I do with the money?

  • You know?

  • I mean, to me, money is a tool.

  • It's not.

  • It's not the means whereby you develop a luxurious lifestyle and spend your time burning yourself.

  • Have to death in the sun in the Caribbean, snorting cocaine and chasing hookers.

  • You know, it's just that's just not in the cards for me, and and so I wanted to vote it towards the sorts of things that have already been pursuing except on a broader scale.

  • And so, you know, when I think of people like Elon Musk, too, not that I'm comparing myself.

  • The Lord must.

  • But I mean, he has plenty of money, and I mean, you really somebody's gonna have the damn money.

  • It might as well be people who have the kind of vision that people like he does have, because maybe they'll do something good for the world.

  • I mean, I hope is Giga factories produce batteries like mad so that we can, um, start to make alternative energy sources economically viable and maybe reduce our dependence on oil and maybe get ourselves out from underneath the thumb of the Saudi Arabs.

  • That would be a good thing.

  • So the monetary issue, it's it's quite interesting.

  • It's like it is not that you have the money, it's what you do with it.

  • So anyways, those are some of my plants, and that isn't all of them, because I'm going to come up with a bunch more plans, and I'm going to try to implement them as rapidly as I possibly can.

  • I've put my clinical practice on hiatus for the next three months so that I have a chance to think, and I've requested that the university advanced my sabbatical by one year.

  • So I should have about a year to think about what I should be doing with YouTube and how I can be promoting broad scale public education of the highest quality.

  • And that's a really fun problem to solve.

  • And the fact that I'm being supported by all of you people on Patron makes the probability that veil to all be able to devote my time to that much higher.

  • So so that's what I'm going to deal with it.

  • I'm gonna do the best things I can possibly think of to do with it and, uh, hopefully that'll work.

  • And so far it seems to be going well.

  • So, um yeah, I mean, I've Bean taken aback quite a bit by the I mean, it's not surprising that, you know the people who have been trying to take me down, let's say, are squawking and bitching because I happen to be generating a fairly reasonable income from this.

  • Although I don't think about it as an income has already said, I think about it as a as a tool kit for pursuing more interesting things.

  • It's like if that's the best they could do with regards to continuing to tarnish my name, well, then let them let them go right ahead about that.

  • I think the proof is in the outcome and like the biblical Siri's, and that's a direct consequence of the Patriots support that seems to be going like mad.

  • I think you know about 500,000 people have watched the video so far with another who knows tens of thousands of people listening to the podcasts, and that's just a bloody miracle that that many people would be interested in what I consider the fundamental foundation for any true humanity's education so great will build from there.

  • And so that's That's what I'm gonna do with the money.

  • So and if people don't like that, then they don't have to donate or they don't have to subscribe.

  • It's hardly like it's mandatory.

  • So anyways, I'll start with that and I'll get to another question or a question.

  • Another question hum, Here's one that got 264 votes so far.

  • Is the belief in something more than experienced reality unreasonable?

  • Okay, so I want to address that question technically, to begin to begin with, because one of the things that you want to do when someone else you A question is that you want to take a look at the question because the question boxes you in in a certain way.

  • And if you're going to answer the question you make, you have to make sure that you've properly processed the structure of the question.

  • So let's look at this one is the belief in something more than experienced reality unreasonable.

  • And so then I'm gonna go Socratic on this and say, Well, it depends on what you mean by belief experienced reality, something Maur and unreasonable and and see.

  • The problem is you can't really answer a question like that unless you delve into the definitions.

  • So let's say, Well, what do you mean by experienced reality?

  • Do you mean that which is directly grip a bill by the senses?

  • While then I would say, Well, do you believe in numbers?

  • Because numbers aren't directly experience a ble, but obviously they're riel.

  • If you define reality as the use of concepts that give you grip and power in the world.

  • And I think because I'm a pragmatist in part, I mean part of the way that I define something as realists, whether or not it has functional operative status in the world.

  • And so the belief in something more than experienced reality is obviously clearly reasonable if you regard abstractions as something more than experienced reality, and that brings up another issue, and the issue is whether or not abstractions or even more real than experienced reality.

  • And I would say often they are because otherwise abstraction wouldn't work.

  • So it's definitely not unreasonable, and then you do you mean merely subjectively experienced reality, or do you mean the kind of reality that could be experienced by multiple people at the same time, because that's also different, that the latter is more in the domain of scientific inquiry.

  • And I think the problem with belief in subjectively experienced reality is not so much that what you experienced subjectively isn't really is that you can get the categories wrong.

  • You know, dreams are riel, but they're not the same kind of real as things in the outside world that other people can experience.

  • And to conflate the two or two failure failed to distinguish between them is a form of insanity.

  • But that doesn't mean that both of them aren't real.

  • So so the simple answer to the question is the belief is the belief in something more than experienced reality.

  • Unreasonable is no, but it depends on it depends on your specific definitions of all those terms, and those sorts of things really matter.

  • Okay, Bob Asprey says I'm a 58 year old American redneck who never went to call it a day in his life.

  • But I feel like I'm getting a world class education every day.

  • Thank you, Dr Peterson.

  • You are very cool.

  • Well, thank you.

  • I don't know how cool I am exactly.

  • But I'm I tell you, man, and this is the dead truth.

  • I am absolutely thrilled that I have the opportunity to provide educational resources to people all over the world.

  • It's a dream, you know, really.

  • I mean, it's an absolute privilege.

  • So and I get letters from people like you very, very frequently from all over the world.

  • You know, when the fact that now we have the technology to allow people in principle to have a world class university educationist, mind boggling and here's something I think is absolutely comical.

  • And I've been pursuing this with a group of people that I've bean discussing, I've been having intense discussions with some in Silicon Valley and some in Montreal, in some in Toronto.

  • You know, here's the university situation.

  • In many ways, Number one, they're putting students in debt in a tremendous way in the United States over because of overpriced education.

  • They don't let the students declare bankruptcy because of the debt.

  • And so it's basically indentured servitude.

  • And so then students come out of university, indefinite heavily at the time of their life when they should be relatively free of financial burdens.

  • So that they can be creative and entrepreneurial because you're going to do that when you're young.

  • Generally speaking, then the universities have become administratively top, heavy and stultified.

  • Because of that, then they've abandoned their commitment to the humanities.

  • Right then, they're not utilizing modern technology to extend.

  • Their reach is broadly as they possibly could.

  • Then they've.

  • They are in some sense abandoned their responsibility to do accrediting properly and devalued the value of the degree because they treat their students like consumers and inflate the great currency.

  • So to me, that's a perfect storm of error.

  • And so I see an opportunity emerging right now where the intellectual property that's related to the true humanities and that would be a least in part, the Western cultural cannon could just be taken out of the university's grip and provided to people in high quality form online.

  • And if I can crack how to teach people to write, and then also to figure out the accreditation problem, which I don't think it's not an overwhelmingly complex problem, it's complex, but not overwhelmingly.

  • Then there's no reason that the university can't move, can't move online, and I would say the true University exists where people are pursuing education because of a bloody well want to get educated because they know that being sharpened, articulate and historically informed and philosophically wise and all of that makes their lives better, makes them better citizens, makes the more responsible.

  • And so I want to follow the university where it goes.

  • And as far as I'm concerned, the university is where people want to listen to wisdom.

  • And I'm going to try to dispense wisdom to the degree that I'm fortunate enough to have access to it.

  • So anyways, Bob, like, I'm thrilled that I could be of service to you, and it's a real privilege, and so and we're going to do more of that.

  • So all right, so another question.

  • Am I feeling all right?

  • How is my health?

  • Well, that's a good question.

  • Um, I've had I've had a history of depression.

  • As some of you may know, it's a plague in my family, goes back many generations and also has afflicted one of my Children quite badly.

  • But we are figuring this out, and I'm actually feeling pretty good right now for the first time in about seven or eight months, I'm really looking forward to the future again and I'm getting my energy back.

  • And when I have energy, I have a lot of energy.

  • And so and because I put my clinical practice on hiatus and because I've applied for a sabbatical and I'm going to have some time and because of this massive construction project that I've been engaged in in my house because I put a basically a Native American longhouse on that ceiling of my house, believe it or not, maybe one day I'll walk you through that.

  • If you'd be interested, I'm gonna have a lot of time and I'm finishing a book.

  • It's due on June 5th.

  • It's called 12 Rules for Life, an antidote for chaos, and that's just about done, and it will be out January 9th, I think 2018.

  • Then you know that's gonna clear up an awful lot of time for me, and so my health is good.

  • I've lost about £50 because I've stopped eating carbohydrates almost completely, and so that's bloody unbelievable.

  • I'm back down to the weight I was when I was 30 and I think that I'm going to get on top of my health problems and my daughter, who's had extraordinarily serious health problems, including to hip, like a hip replacement when she was 16 and an ankle replacement when she was also 16.

  • She walked around on two broken legs for a whole year and excruciating agony like she's figured a lot of this out and she's offer anti or her immune suppressant medication and all sorts of other things.

  • So it's a painstaking process, and I've been eating nothing, literally nothing but beef chicken and sell it for a whole month trying to figure out where my dietary sensitivities are.

  • But so anyways, that's a long answer to your question.

  • But I'm feeling pretty damn good.

  • And if I could get a few more administrative matters that are chasing me around, but I think I could get on top of them and then, man, I'm gonna be back out it, and that's gonna be real fun.

  • So okay, let's see what else we got for life questions here.

  • What would I say?

  • The male to female ratio isn't my classrooms currently.

  • Oh, yeah, there's no man, man.

  • It's like 80% women in my psychology classes and in 10 years There won't be a man left in the humanities unless they go online.

  • In which case, maybe it'll only be man because, you know, I don't think so.

  • But most of the people who are watching my videos are men spent 90 91% actually.

  • So, yeah, the men are bailing out of university like it's just unbelievable announcement happening for about 30 years.

  • So, um, it might if things don't change.

  • And if the present linear trends continue, then yeah, it'll be all women by by 2025 that's really not good.

  • Not it's good.

  • Not good, because there's so many women.

  • It's not good, because there aren't any men.

  • And obviously that's not good for the women either, cause I don't know where they're gonna find their men, So All right, what are your thoughts on the Book of Revelation in the Bible?

  • It freaked me out when I was a kid.

  • Yeah, well, I should say so, man.

  • If you're an adult and you read it, it should freak you out.

  • What are my thoughts on it?

  • I think it's I think it's the, uh, count of ah, hallucinogenic trip.

  • Probably probably.

  • What would you call caused by psilocybin mushrooms?

  • Maybe Maybe Emanated mask area, which were was identified by a guy named Last Saw about 25 30 years ago, maybe even more as the soma of the ancient Hindus.

  • So, yeah, I think it's a hallucination.

  • I think its account of an extremely profound hallucinogenic trip that that's what I think.

  • I mean, what it means that's a whole different issue.

  • And I'm going to try to address that when and if I get to the Book of revelations in my biblical Siri's.

  • But that's gonna be probably a couple of years in the future at the rate I'm going, because it's taken me three weeks to get through Genesis one.

  • So all right, Violet Irwin says, I look great while Violet, your avatar looks great, too.

  • And, well, thank you.

  • Part of the reason I look great, I think, to the degree that I do is that I have a very good camera that my son help me purchase, and so it makes me look a hell of lot better than I actually do.

  • Look, so, anyways, I appreciate the sentiment.

  • All right, Do I see any downside to a child being raised by its father in the 1st 3 years while the mother is working full time are their psychological consequences for the child to be expected?

  • I think that depends very much on the individual situation in the family.

  • Um, I'm not convinced that the art of infant care is something that a tremendous number of males are highly specialized for.

  • I think you have to have a feminine temperament, and that would mean to do it to do infant care properly.

  • And that would mean that you have to be at least very agreeable.

  • And maybe you also be have to be relatively high neuroticism so that you respond rapidly enough to the distress Christ of the child.

  • And I also think that in order to born the way that you have to born when you're a mother who's taking care of an infant, let's say under nine months, I think some of the bio chemical transformations that accompany pregnancy, childbirth and lactation probably set up the proper biochemical underlying biochemical and psychological milieu that makes the kind of bonding that that increases the probability of high level care possible in those few months.

  • That doesn't mean that men can't do it.

  • But I would also say in my experience that it's kind of hard on men, you know?

  • Um, it's a complicated issue, but like one of the things I experience and I really like kits, you know, like I love kids and they generally respond really well to me.

  • Babies, they're a different matter because I'm I don't really feel fully qualified to give a baby what it needs.

  • And I guess you know, that's part because you know, breastfeeding, at least so far as is firmly in the domain of women.

  • In fact, it's one of the ways by which you could define women if we were actually into that sort of thing.

  • Um, so I think that there are circumstances under which that's a good thing to do, and actually, I had a business partner have a business.

  • Partners helped me develop the self authoring, sweet, very smart guy named Daniel Higgins, who was on M.

  • I T engineer and also has a PhD in psychology from Harvard, and he spent a lot of his time taking care of his kids when they were little.

  • His wife was going to medical school and He's a pretty masculine guy, and, uh, it was hard on him, man like it just about killed him.

  • And I mean, they didn't have a lot of money and she was going through medical school and they had two and then three little kids.

  • And so, you know, that's a very busy time of life.

  • But, um, he did it and he did a great job and he has wonderful kids, and he paid a hell of a lot of attention to them.

  • But he was not easy.

  • It was not easy for and you know, my wife when I watched her with our little kids when they were infants in particular, like she had an affinity and a proclivity for that sort of thing.

  • And my wife is actually a pretty tough cookie, and I wouldn't say overwhelmingly feminine by temperament.

  • She's kind of disagreeable and quite emotionally stable.

  • Rather than being agreeable and high neuroticism, which is a more typical set of feminine traits.

  • She was so damn good with infants.

  • It was just unbelievable, you know, and I do think that the bio chemical transformations that accompany pregnancy and so forth do facilitate that I must have seen that with my sister, who is quite a masculine woman and very adventurous man.

  • She, uh she smuggled Mercedes trucks across the Sahara Desert in the 19 eighties from France, down through the whole Sahara into *** and, uh, babysat orphan gorillas in the Congo and ran safaris through Africa like she's She's a very adventurous person, and she took a lot after my father, who's quite a tough guy.

  • But, you know, she had kids when she was 40.

  • Luckily for her and man, she turned into my mother overnight.

  • And I really like my mother, you know, like, that's no insult.

  • Believe me, she's a She's a really great person, very, very carrying, very kind, probably to her own detriment.

  • But to see my sister transform into this tough, masculine person who I respected a lot for exactly those virtues into into Mum was really quite remarkable.

  • And to think that there's nothing biochemical about that.

  • It's really, I think, quite naive, you know, and pointless because, of course, there's something biochemical about about birth and childcare, for God's sake, has been going on for, like ever since sexual dog morph ism emerged on the evolutionary landscape.

  • So that's that.

  • Do you think that boys in our society are in need of a concrete transition to manhood, like a modern day initiation ritual?

  • It probably doesn't matter whether they're in need of it.

  • They're not going to get it because you can't really just invent something like that, right?

  • It has to be.

  • It's something that evolves over a very long period of time.

  • I do think that what they need, I've really observed this, interestingly enough, in the response that young men have had to my public talks and probably on YouTube as well with regards to what I've been saying because you know, young people have been fed this problem since the 19 sixties that the pathway to happiness and freedom in life, first of all, that those are the things that you were supposed to be after, especially happiness, and that they're to be found in, like rights and untrammeled freedom.

  • And that's complete.

  • That's completely one sided, because for every right there is a corresponding responsibility, and freedom can be chaos just as much as it can be, you know, blissful lack of responsibility and the ability to make hedonic choices.

  • One after another, and I've been speaking to young men in particular.

  • They're the ones who keep coming to my talks, by the way, a boat truth in action and responsibility and like they're eating that up, it's there.

  • I can see their eyes light up, which is so cool.

  • I have been talking to the people who ran for the conservative leadership in Canada about the fact that when I go talk to male audiences, especially young men, that they're unbelievably enthralled by any discussion of genuine responsibility and truth.

  • And so the conservatives have something to offer young man, and I would say that's roughly akin to an initiation.

  • You know, the idea is that at some point you have to tell young men, Look, grow the hell up, take on some responsibility, straighten yourself out, act honestly, make yourself into an admirable and powerful character, not because you're domesticated, like a bloody puppy or a sheep, but because that's the way to genuine authority and influence and and the capacity to do great good in the world.

  • And that's like an exciting call to adventure.

  • And I think that that's a modern, sophisticated intellectual equivalent to something like an initiation ritual.

  • And so I hope to be like promoting that message more and more.

  • I was speaking to a member of one of the leaders of the indigenous communities in Canada today about maybe getting the high school version of the future authoring program, that future authoring program.

  • I've talked about that a bit before on Patron.

  • You know, it's a program at self, are throwing dot com that enables people to generated vision for their lives and also Thio and to detail out that vision and make a plan of it.

  • I think most of you pager on subscribers have got links to that already and user names and passwords and hasn't really remarkably positive effect on young men who are disenfranchised, who tend to be ethnic minorities and so initiating them into the idea that they need to take control of their own destiny and that that's the proper pathway to authority and stature and and not self esteem.

  • But self respect, which is a completely different thing, I think, is a reasonable modern equivalent to initiation ritual.

  • Okay, so let's take another live question here, Brennan B says.

  • I'm halfway finished cleaning my disaster of a room.

  • Well, I've got something terrible to admit people because at the moment I'm sitting in my room and it isn't clean.

  • The back behind here where you can see is clean.

  • But because of the events of the last seven months of being so overwhelming, I would say that there's a certain amount of chaos that has invaded my immediate environment.

  • But I have plans to get this place sorted out in a serious way over the next few months, from top from bottom of the host to the top.

  • So halfway, Brandon.

  • That's a good deal.

  • And there's really psychological consequences to that, you know, because the if you're interested in this everyone here's a really sophisticated book you could read.

  • You could take a look at Carl Yoon's last book, which was called Mysterion Conjunction ISS so that it's Latin and no, the first part of that book is really kind of like of a dictionary of symbolism.

  • He wrote it, I think in his eighties, and I think he was trying to get down as much as he could have what he knew as fast as he could.

  • So the first part is a dictionary of symbolism, and it's very difficult to read unless you read a lot of his other writing.

  • But the second part of the book, which I think is an absolute work of genius, Yo, makes a couple of propositions about higher order moral development.

  • So I'm gonna run through them really quickly and described their symbolism.

  • So, he said, the first thing that you want to do if you're going to get your act together and this is like an extension of the of the PGA idiot notion of stages of moral development, he said, You know, you have an intellect and you have a set of emotions and motivations, and you can conceptualize the intellect symbolically as masculine and the emotions and motivations symbolically is feminine.

  • And so the first conjunction, which is the bringing together of the masculine and feminine to make a complete being, would be the union of the intellect, with the emotions and motivations, so that you're not fighting your deeper motivations with your thought.

  • You know that they're all moving in the same direction, and so that would be conjunction number one, and so then that makes you united in terms of your capability for subjective experience.

  • You're all pointing in.

  • All of that's pointing in the same direction.

  • And it's one of the things that could make you unstoppable because you're not at war with yourself.

  • That and so the next conjunction, as far as he was concerned, was also expressed symbolically.

  • So now you have the masculine union of intellect, emotion and motivation.

  • And then you have the body, which you could now conceptualize this feminine.

  • So then you bring those together in a creative union, and so that means that you start to act out what you think and feel so that there's no paradoxical relationship or or enacted lie.

  • They call that a performance of contradiction between what you think and feel and what you do.

  • And that's and so because part of being on honest is that you act out what you believe right, and so that's great.

  • So that's the next conjunction, and so that makes you integrated in mind and emotion and motivation and enacted, enacted routine and body great so that another way of bringing yourself together.

  • But the third conjunction is the one that's most interesting, and it's also the one that's most difficult to understand, And that conjunction occurs when you take this unified mind body continuum, let's say and you think, Wait a second, there's a There's an element of that missing, and that's my experience, my experience of the world that's hypothetically outside of me or that's hypothetically, not me.

  • Now you know, the your experience of the world outside that's not you is a very strange experience, because it isn't self evident, for example, to me that my wife is not me.

  • We spend so much time together.

  • She's in my experience so much.

  • We have a joint past and a present and a joint future.

  • The same with my kids and the people who were close to me.

  • It isn't obvious to me that my wife is less valuable to me than I am to me.

  • She's certainly more valuable to me than some arbitrary body part, like an arm or a leg.

  • You know, people are perfectly capable of making gestures of physical self sacrifice and in order to rescue people that they love.

  • And so just exactly who you are and just exactly who the external world is not clear it all.

  • And so the last conjunction for young was the eradication of the distinction between your subjective experience as you and your objective experience as you.

  • Which is to say, for example, that if I'm walking down the street and I encounter someone in trouble and that trouble calls to me as something that I could conceivably do something about, the fact that that trouble isn't set right in the world is actually is actually because it's part of my experience is actually my problem.

  • Now that doesn't mean that it's my fault, Although it might be, might not be.

  • Perhaps it isn't, but it might be, but it's still my responsibility, and it's reasonable to consider the disruption in my experiential field than encountering someone who is in trouble produces as an actual disturbance in my in my being and then to act as if it's my responsibility to rectify that disturbance.

  • Now the problem, of course, comes in that you don't know how.

  • So if you run across the street alcoholic, for example, in the middle of the day and they're stumbling wrong blindly and maybe they're schizophrenic to boat and mumbling terrible things, you know it's going to disturb you and it would be good if you could set it right, but you don't know how.

  • So you can't You have to avoid it.

  • But that doesn't mean that that isn't you, because it's also you.

  • And I think that's why in the story of the boat, for example, like the Buddha was basically offered when he became enlightened the chance to remain in Nirvana, right?

  • As a uniquely enlightened, singular individual.

  • And he actually regret rejected that offer because it was his deepest conviction that it was.

  • It was not possible for one person to be enlightened and to be in a state of Nirvana if everyone wasn't in that state at the same time.

  • And so he had to move himself out of that utopian experience of Nirvana and come back to the normal world, let's say and to try to raise the consciousness of people around him because he regarded that as unfinished business that was his personally.

  • And so now I don't remember Who is that?

  • Oh, yes, that's all about cleaning your room.

  • He has exactly so well.

  • The thing is, is that your room isn't not you, it's actually you.

  • And so there's no difference between the chaos that's outside of you in a place that you spend as much time as you spend in your room and the chaos that's internal psychologically.

  • And you know, one of the things I often do when I'm first dealing with my clients as a simple exercise in setting themselves right psychologically is, too.

  • Have them start to clean up their external environment because in people know how to do that.

  • And there's no difference between that and putting yourself straight psychologically, as you know when you do something as serious, is starting to clean up your room.

  • And so, Brendan, the other thing, I would say, is like Finish cleaning your room and then see if you could make it beautiful, because that's also unbelievably useful, man, because it teaches you about beauty.

  • And so then you could make one room in your house beautiful, and then it's organized and together and beautiful.

  • And so once you do that with one room, like your way wiser than you were before, and you've actually accomplished something concrete that solid and incontrovertible that you can point to that strengthens your character, and then maybe you could do the same thing with your whole house.

  • And then maybe you could do that with the more with the world around you.

  • And believe me, if you start doing that, you're not gonna be sitting around wondering what the meaning of life is, because you're gonna find it in that.

  • So all right, so let's see, um Maxim Mark says, thoughts on the Jews.

  • Well, that's complicated.

  • Most of most of my friends were Jews, which is pretty interesting, you know.

  • And when I grew up in northern Alberta and there were no Jews up there, it also, um, coming out to Eastern Canada.

  • Especially.

  • Much are all.

  • There were lots of Jewish people there, and I made friends with lots of them and then in Toronto.

  • And I think part of the reason that so many of my friends have been Jewish is because the Jews have, you know, I'm obviously speaking in a very general sense, is they have a rich intellectual life and tremendous respect for for intellectual pursuits.

  • And so we have a natural affinity, and so you know, more power to them.

  • As far as I'm concerned, there's a fairer.

  • There's a fair bit of evidence, especially with regards to the Ashkenazi Jews that they, they're they're average accuser about 15 points higher than the general population, which accounts in part for the radical overrepresentation among Nobel Prize winners, for example, and also in positions off.

  • Let's say authority and responsibility in many different domains, and it's like, Man, I'm not unhappy about successful people.

  • It's like a ZAY said.

  • It's the same in relationship to money.

  • As far as I'm concerned, it's It's not that you have a position of authority, and I'm not going to say power because power and authority aren't the same thing.

  • But if you have a position of authority, what matters is what you do with it.

  • And so if competent people occupy positions of authority, then more power to them.

  • That's lucky for the rest of us.

  • I'll tell you that.

  • So and I think you know, I have often thought this about the Jews to is that if you're gonna be a minority, you should least have the decency to fail.

  • And I think that part of the room because you know, then well, you're around and you're annoying because you're a minority and you know, because people are fundamentally ethno centric, and all human beings are like that.

  • But if a minority fails, then why you can say, Well, at least they failed, and you know that maybe allows you not to hate them quite as much.

  • But the Jews have this annoying proclivity where they go as a minority to become extremely successful.

  • And, of course, nobody can stand that.

  • And so that's a huge part of what accounts for anti Semitism, which are regarded and absolutely no abysmal.

  • And and and, uh, what would you call it?

  • Reprehensible.

  • A priori stance, you know?

  • So that's some of my thoughts about the many ways, All right.

  • Next.

  • How did I meet my wife and why did you marry her?

  • Well, I'll tell you one of the earliest memories I have of my wife because it kind of tells you what she's like.

  • A.

  • So she lived across the street from me in this little town that we grew up in called Fairview, Alberta, and I think I fell in love with her the moment that I saw her.

  • And although I don't think the feeling was necessarily mutual, and so I was about like seven, I think something like that So I've known her for like 48 years.

  • And here's one memory because this is their two memories.

  • Don't tell you.

  • So one of them was when I was in green five.

  • I got glasses and I was pretty proud of these glasses.

  • They were horn rimmed glasses, you know, and I was pretty proud of them and I went out and I she came out onto the street.

  • She looked at my glasses.

  • I said, What do you think of those?

  • And she says, I think you look really funny in those.

  • And then she pointed at me and ran into her house.

  • It was like 20 years later that she finally told me that she had always wanted to have glasses and she was jealous about it.

  • But, you know, she decided she'd give me a good teasing and a good poke.

  • And so that and then we used to play croquet together and one of the great delight she would take it.

  • I don't know if you've ever laid croquet, but you know you're sometimes the one person's ball that they're hitting and another persons will come together and then you can stand on your ball and you can nail it with the croquet mallet like knock the other person's croquet ball halfway down the block.

  • And she used to think that was pretty damn amusing when she did it to me.

  • So and, uh, let's see, what else can I remember about her?

  • That was but yeah, I mean, I told my dad when I was in grade five, I was sitting with her on this big, um armchair in our living room, and she was sitting beside me on the arm chair, which I was pretty damn thrilled about on Dhe.

  • She was being chased around by all the boys in the school at that point.

  • Even know she that was in the elementary school, you know?

  • So she's very hard property, Let's say, among the elementary school boys and so I was pretty happy ever sit by me.

  • And so anyway, she left and I told my dad that I was gonna marry her, and I remember that and he told that story on our wedding, which was quite cute.

  • And then I'll tell you one more story, which I really think it's funny.

  • This is so funny.

  • So we we were friends when we were kids.

  • And then, you know, girls mature faster than boys, and she's a year older than me because I skipped a grade in school.

  • We were in the same grade in school, and so, you know, when she had about 13 or so, it kind of went our separate ways a little bit.

  • Although we still remain friends and she had a paper route and I took her paper route over when she hit 13 or so and I, like, quadrupled the damn thing I think, which I think is pretty funny.

  • But I also delivered paper to her house, and, um, one day she was there with the number another of her friends and who was a kind of a cute chick, too.

  • And I liked her quite a bit, and they were sitting around talking about, like talking about how they were feminists, roughly speaking, and they were talking when I walked in about the fact that neither of them were going to take their husband's last day when they got married.

  • And Tammy, my wife, I think, said to her friend, While that really means I'm gonna have to find some whim and marry him and she turned around and looked at me and smiled Eva Lee and said, Hey, Jordan, do you want to get married?

  • And of course, I had heard the whole conversation and, you know, she knew I liked her, obviously.

  • And so that was nice.

  • Little comical dig.

  • She has a very vicious sense of humor.

  • And, you know, I kind of laughed and I thought Huh?

  • Okay.

  • Okay.

  • So So then what?

  • We were I was, like, 28 she had come to see me in Montreal.

  • And, um, we were talking about getting married, and she said we were talking about what that would mean.

  • And then we started talking about what the name would be, and I said, Hey, I've got a story for you.

  • Um, remember when you were 13 and I was delivering papers to your house and, uh, because I suggested that she take my last name and she wasn't so sure about that?

  • And I said, Well, you remember that little story, that little episode that we had when you were 13 and I came over to your house and you told me that you weren't gonna take your husband's name and that you're gonna have to marry some wimp said Okay, well, you know, here I am.

  • But, you know, if we're gonna get married, you're gonna take my name, and that's the end of that argument.

  • And so, you know, she had the good graces to go along with that.

  • But that was actually, you know, extraordinarily comical and ridiculous.

  • So So, yeah, so that's a good one.

  • What's my advice to young men seeking a woman for marriage and family?

  • Yeah, well, okay, fine.

  • That's the same quest.

  • Second question, that's That's pretty straightforward, man.

  • I mean, you can't eliminate the necessity of being attracted to one another.

  • That's important.

  • And that's mysterious, you know?

  • So, for example, here's a funny thing if you one of the things we know that attracts people to one another is bilateral symmetry.

  • And so if you take men and you rank them by the symmetry of their faces, and then you give the asymmetrical men T shirts to wear clean T shirts for a day and the symmetrical men clean T shirts to wear for a day, and then you give the T shirts to women and you have the rate the the odor.

  • The women rate the odor of the symmetrical men as more attractive than the order of the asymmetrical Met.

  • And then, and there are other factors that determine sexual attractiveness that are based on biological factors that air so that deeply embedded in terms of smell.

  • For example, so women also tend two, not be sexually attracted to the to the scent of men whose who have.

  • If I remember correctly, it's R H factors that would make for potential trouble in childbirth.

  • And they're often the reason that the women give for not preferring.

  • The scent of those men is that they smelled too much like their brother, something like that.

  • So there was weird, mysterious things that determine whether or not people are sexually and physically attracted to each other.

  • And I think it's very important that that's part of a marital relationship.

  • The next most important thing is trust, man.

  • It's like there's no marriage that successful without trust you guys, you've got to tell each other the truth and one of the reasons that you believe that marriage as an oath and Carl you as a bond was necessary.

  • It's really wise.

  • It's like, you know, telling the truth to someone is no simple thing because there's a bunch of things about all of us that were terrible and weak and reprehensible and shameful and all of those things, and they kind of have to be brought out into the open and dealt with.

  • And you're not going to tell the truth about yourself to someone who can run away screaming when you reveal who you are.

  • And so the marriage bond is something like, Okay, here's the deal.

  • I'm going to handcuff myself to you and you're gonna handcuff yourself to me, and then we're gonna tell each other the truth, and neither of us are going to get to run away.

  • And so our once we know the truth and we're either gonna live together in mutual torment or we're going to try to deal with that truth and straight ourselves out and straighten ourselves out jointly.

  • And that's gonna make us more powerful and more resilient and Maur and deeper and wiser as we progress together through life.

  • And and I think that's absolutely brilliant because if you leave the back door open, man, you're gonna use it.

  • That's for sure, and the oath is there.

  • And this was Young's commentary on the spiritualism ation of of the Human Pare, born by Christian marriage, for example, which which emphasized the the what would you call it, the subordination of both members of the marital union to a higher order personality that was embodied in the figure of the logos.

  • So the idea is that in the Christian marriage, for example, the man isn't the boss and the woman isn't the boss.

  • The boss is the mutual personality composed by the seeking of truth in both of them, and that's conceptualized as theirs.

  • Their joint subject, Gatien to the logos, and that is absolutely dead on man.

  • It's like the ruler of your marital life should be your vow to tell each other the truth because, like in hard times during your life, when you've done something stupid and idiotic, that might take you down and you don't have anybody that you could turn to.

  • You know, if you have a partner that you can trust, you can go say, Hey, you know, I made a big financial mistake, man, and it's really torturing me, and I feel like a complete idiot and it's really dangerous, and the person there is gonna help you figure out what to do about it.

  • And they're going to know that when they make a stupid mistake and their bloody well going to that, they can come and talk to you and that you guys are gonna work your way through it.

  • That's a big deal, and there's a couple of things.

  • Our culture gets really wrong, and one is a devalues marriage.

  • That's really a very bad idea, because marriage is marriage is like 1/3 of your life and maybe more.

  • And kids air 1/3 of your life and your your your life outside of marriage and kids is 1/3 of your life, you know, approximately speaking, and to miss any of that is a massive, massive mistake.

  • Now, having said that, I will also say that for some people missing, one or more of those is necessary because they have a reason.

  • You know, maybe they're brilliantly creative artists, and they need to devote themselves entirely to their career or their outstanding in some way.

  • And so they need.

  • They can justify the sacrifice of one part of that try out of being to another part.

  • But for but generally speaking, it's a very dangerous thing, and it shouldn't be done.

  • And also kids get an absolutely terrible rap, you know, because kids air delightful if they're well behaved.

  • One of the chapters in my new book is called Don't let your Children do anything that makes You dislike them, and you can do that, especially if you discuss it thoroughly with your spouse.

  • Your the person that's helping you discipline the kids and Children are the best company because they're really enthusiastic about everything.

  • They love doing new things.

  • They really love you.

  • So they're happy that you're around.

  • All you have to do is make sure they're not too hot and they're not too cold and they've had something to eat and they're not too tired, and you don't expect them to stay engaged in something for longer than they can manage.

  • Because we used to take our kids when they were little out to restaurants, for example, and they could sit there, no problem, behave really nicely when they were two and three, but they couldn't do it for more than about 45 minutes.

  • He can't push your luck.

  • But I also noticed with little kids is that they got antsy and unreasonable about 5 to 10 minutes before the adults did, too.

  • It's just the adults were too stupid to notice the kids would notice right away.

Hello.

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