 With all of our technological might and power, could we not have a future of unlimited abundance and opportunity for everyone? Is it not possible that we could aim at that? And is it only naive to presume that that might be possible? Or is it actually a hallmark of courage and faith to say that that is what we could have if we chose to do it? Today's episode is a special one. We got Jordan Peterson on the show. He's had a profound impact on all of us here at Mind Pump, and we finally got him on the show, got to sit down and have an excellent conversation. Now he blew up all over the scene on social media, on YouTube. His book, 12 Rules for Life, sold millions of copies. He advises people on how to live better lives. He's very outspoken, very, very intelligent. He's a great person. People absolutely love the guy. So do we. So we know you're going to love this episode. Today's program giveaway is Maps Anabolic Advanced. If you want to win that, here's what you got to do. Leave a comment below this video on the first 24 hours that we drop it. Subscribe to this channel. Turn on notifications. If you win, we'll let you know in the comment section. Also, it's Cyber Monday, 60% off. All Maps programs. All bundles. 60% off. It's once a year. Right now. Go check it out. Click on the link at the top of the description below. All right. Back to the show. Jordan, thank you so much for coming on the show. Hey, I'm happy to be here in warm Arizona. Yeah. So you invited us to the ARC event, which was a massive honor, and it was incredible. We didn't know quite what to expect. We knew that, you know, we had watched your video on why you had created it, but listening to the talks, they were so impactful. I would like for you to explain a little bit of why did you create this? What's the goal and the reason behind the organization? What's the future goals of doing this? Well, the fundamental goal is to help people understand that we need to confront the future with faith and courage and optimism, not because we're naive about problems, because that's foolish, but because the way that you turn the future into the best place that it can be is to face it with faith and courage, optimistically. And young people have been fed two pathological stories for about 60 years, and one is a hedonistic story, which is the idea that it's really all about you, but in the narrowest sense of you is that you should be, you should define yourself, you should pursue your pleasure wherever it takes you. The libertarians tilt this direction a little bit. It's one of the flaws of Anne Rand's philosophy that we all define ourselves and that society emerges properly out of the harmonious balance of narrow self-interest. And the problem with that is that people confuse their narrow self-interest with hedonic desire, and that's a big mistake. You're not just your bloody whims. And if you pursue your whims, first of all, you're immature because that's literally the definition of immaturity is to pursue what you want right now and damn the consequences. And then the other story that young people have been forced, I would say, to swallow is that the future is going to be an apocalyptic nightmare, and that's a consequence of the evil, power-mad pathology of human beings, and that the best we can do is, you know, limit ourselves in all directions and try not to scar the surface of Mother Earth. That's like, it's so pathological. And what we would like to suggest to people instead is that if human beings sort their identity out properly, which means to accept responsibility for themselves and then in step, more and more people across a broader and broader time span, that we can organize our society so that we can literally make the desert bloom. There's no necessary intrinsic limit to abundance and opportunity, and it depends on how people organize themselves. So I was just, I'm writing a new book called We Who Wrestle With God, and I was writing a section this week looking at something called the Curse of Natural Resources. So we have this idea in our culture that's a materialist and an atheist idea and even a Marxist idea at core, that there is such a thing as natural resources. So there's just the wealth of the Earth and it's laying around waiting to be picked up, and then the people who pick it up and hoard it are the evil capitalists and, you know, they're oppressing everyone else and every bit of that's a lie. There's no relationship between the amount of natural resources that a country has and its wealth, like literally no relationship. In fact, there might even be a slight negative relationship. It's called the Curse of Natural Resources in that if wealth is lying around in the form of fossil fuels, for example, abundant fossil fuels, the countries tend to become extremely corrupt and greedy. And, you know, a small number of people do take the wealth as a consequence of the resources and there's no economic development. And then there are other countries like Japan. Japan has no natural resources to speak of, yet it's extremely rich. And the reason for that is that Japan is a very disciplined, conscientious economy and people, the Japanese are that way, and they can trade with each other without, without complication. It's part of the reason the US is so rich, like the default economic transaction in the United States is honest. If people are honest and they organize themselves responsibly, there's absolutely nothing they can't do. And so we're trying to put forward a notion of identity that is technically it's, it's a subsidiary identity. It's predicated on the idea that you're not in your head. You're not subjectively defined. You exist in relationship to other people, necessarily. Like you have to take care of yourself and that's an integrative act because you have to get your whims under control. You have to treat yourself responsibly and well over the long run, not only in the moment. And then if you're mature enough to do that, maybe you can join with someone else, wife or husband optimally for a long-term relationship and you can build something out of that. And then that's part of your identity. It's not subjective. Like your, your relationship with your wife is not subjective. Right. It's negotiated. And then if you can manage that properly, well, then maybe you can have a family and you can extend yourself out into your community. And that gives you identity at multiple levels of, of what inclusion that's a good way of thinking about it. Something the lefties might be happy about. And as you get better and better at that, you can bring more people together across longer and longer spans of time. And if you do that properly, then there's no limit to abundance. Now, there's a biblical narrative that, that describes the subsidiary structure, it emerges in the story of Exodus. And Moses is presented with the idea of subsidiary structure as an alternative to tyranny and slavery. So imagine that if it's just about you and you're not responsible, you're just pursuing your hedonistic whims. You know, you're like a two year old and a room full of two year olds needs a ruler and a, a, a state full of immature individuals needs a tyrant. And so what happens if everyone becomes hedonic, hedonistically oriented, then you need a tyrant to control them. And the alternative to that is to, is to build a structure of governance at, at all these multiple levels of social interaction where, where every level takes responsibility for what's appropriate to it, and then you don't need, you don't even need a government technically, or that is the government that actually becomes the proper government. If I, let me interrupt you for a second, Rick. I'm going to back you up here. I years ago, I watched Free to Choose. This was a Milton Friedman documentary done in the late 70s. And he used the example of Hong Kong. Yeah. Hong Kong was a third world country and very, very rapidly became extremely wealthy and they have almost no resources. All they have is a, a port essentially, right. And they freed up their markets and used, allowed people to trade freely and became extremely wealthy. And then to back up your other point about our hedonistic whims, you know, I'm a huge market supporter, but markets give us what we want. And so if all we want is like in our space, we're in health and fitness. If all we want are convenient, tasty, hyper palatable foods, well, that's what we're going to get. That's what we have. Yeah. So it's like you need a responsible society who can make the right choices when the choices are so free. Otherwise you just end up in a bad place. Well, a consumer, like a free market consumer society can, can feed hedonistic whims, right? And you'll end up eating nothing but sugar and carbohydrates, for example. And you can understand why people would want to do that because the immediate gratification is very high, but the medium to long-term consequences are negative. And you, you, this is part of the problem with the strict libertarian philosophy and even as a branch, let's say, of classical liberalism is that it reduces people to what they want, but then even more to what they want right now. And the thing is, you're not, you shouldn't be just what you want right now, because well, you can just, all you have to do is think about this like intelligently for a few seconds. You know, there's going to be times in your relationship, say with your wife or your husband, where you're going to get, you're going to be angry, like maybe even enraged and rage wants defeat of the opponent and victory now. And it wants it at all cost. And if you give in to that rage, then you're going to rampage around like a brute, and you're going to do something stupid. And it's stupid because it'll compromise you and your relationship in the medium to longterm. Like you'll come out of your little rage fit and you'll be embarrassed about how, well, how short term you were. And there's a neurological component to this. So when you're, when you're very young, when you're an infant, say up to about the age of two, your, your behavior is basically controlled by instinctual systems that govern motivation and emotion. And so the basic motivations are thirst and hunger and temperature regulation and, and aggression and the basic motivations are pain and surprise and joy and anxiety, etc. And those systems are more or less in place when you're first born and up till about the age of two, you're basically just rotating from domination by one of those systems to another. There's an exploratory system too, by the way. These are very, very deeply seated in the brain, like extremely old from an evolutionary perspective. And that's only about maybe five to 10% of your brain. The rest of your brain is there to integrate all those emotions and motivations across longer and longer spans of time so that more and more people are included. And as we're socialized, what happens is that control of our behavior moves from these low order motivational and emotional systems up into more evolutionarily recent cortical areas. And that parallels maturation, but it also parallels a more inclusive view of identity and operation over longer and longer time spans. And so we all know this, right? Because one of the things that you try to teach your children is, is to delay gratification. Now, that sounds like inhibition, like don't be impulsive, but it isn't just inhibition. It's just, it's not just that you're stopping your kids. What you're doing is helping them develop a more sophisticated form of adaptation that makes the lower order impulses unnecessary. So for example, if you have a very aggressive kid and you socialize them properly, you don't just inhibit their aggression. What you do is you teach them how to play competitively, but fairly, right? And then you get a real optimal kid that way because you'll get a kid who's got tremendous drive for victory and who makes a great teammate, but who will play by the rules and who will also foster the development of other kids. And, you know, it'll be that someone who could be a great team captain because he wants to win, but he wants to bring everyone along and build them at the same time. And that's not just inhibition of aggression, right? That's substitution of a better game for the aggressive game. And so part of what we want to do at Ark is to make all this clear to people is that respond. There's no difference between responsibility and maturation, let's say, and there's no difference between responsibility and abundance and productivity. And there's also no difference between responsibility and meaning. And that's another, one of our major emphasis is at Ark is that, and this is something that young people are not taught properly, is that, and you guys know this, I mean, your discipline people, the deep meaning in your life comes from adopting voluntary responsibility, right? I mean, that's how you build yourself. That's how you build a family and a community and a business. And that's, it's, it doesn't gratify your whims, but it's better. And that, and that parallels, this is something Jonathan Pascio talked about at Ark, and he's quite the genius, you know, that there's a hierarchy of good. And what's at the pinnacle? Well, classically, that's defined as God, the spirit that's at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of good. But good is a progression towards more and more desirable modes of sophisticated being. It's not some arbitrary, like relativistic, everybody can have an opinion about it. What do you call it? It's not arbitrary. It's not arbitrary. There's a morality that's built into the structure of human social existence, and we're trying to explain that to people and to get them to understand what it means. Yeah, he said something brilliant in that, and you've said this before in other words, where your value, your top value will, it will tyrannize all the other values to bend and twist themselves to serve this other value. Absolutely. Now he used a few examples, but one of the examples that I think of, you know, there was a, I can't remember the person who was on the cover of Time Magazine, but it was a gentleman who was a climate activist and literally the quote was Google. It would be, I think it was ex-Google executive, and he said it would be better off if there were no humans at all. Yeah, right. And I mean, no, crazy statement. Yeah, that's for sure, man. You go to one of those, go at his tongue. We should just kill everybody. Yeah. Well, the two things that surprised me about that is one, had he said we should just kill this group of people, no way he would have been on the cover, but because he's killing everybody, apparently it's OK. But the second part was, you know, here we have somebody that has made the climate his God. Well, it's nature worship, essentially. Right, right. And so, of course, killing people makes sense. Everything makes sense if you're worshipping. Well, it's the sacrifice of, this is one of the things that's so uncanny about the natural world. So in the Judeo-Christian tradition, part of what happens among with the Israelites is that there is an idea of God that's not nature. And so there's a prophet, Elijah, who really establishes this for the first time. Elijah has a showdown between the prophets of Baal and Baal is a nature God and Yahweh, who's the Abrahamic God and Abraham wins. But the, and it's Elijah is the first person who posits that the God of Abraham is the voice of conscience, like it's a massive psychological transformation, you know, because people, modern people, especially the more atheistic and materialist or rationalist types, they don't, you know, they have a parody vision of God. And that's that, you know, God is an old man with a beard hiding in the clouds, you know, halfway between here and outer space. And their basic response is, well, we've been to the moon and, you know, we didn't pass through the heavenly domain. And so therefore, there's no God. And you can understand that objection to some degree, partly because people haven't been instructed properly about what a more appropriate alternative view is. And one of the more appropriate views, and this is a classic argument for the existence of God, is the voice of conscience, you know, you wake up at three in the morning and you're, you call yourself out on some stupid thing you've done. Now, this is a real mystery because, look, maybe you took advantage of someone for sexual purposes. There's about happens to people all the time, you know, maybe you got somebody drunk and took advantage of her. And and so and you wake up at three in the morning and you're pretty disgusted with yourself. Conscience comes calling. Well, it's a mystery, right? Because you perform the act. And so what? Why are you holding yourself responsible now? And what is it in you that's holding you responsible, especially because maybe you'd rather not be held responsible because you just assume why can't you just reprogram yourself so you could just do it again with no guilt, with no shame, with no disgust, you know, with without a second thought, but you can't. And it was Elijah who first posited that the God of Abraham was the same as the voice of conscience. And so and that's a very well, that's a very useful thing to know. And it helps people, modern people zero in on what's at the top. Now, you might say, why would the voice of conscience be associated with what's at the top of a hierarchy of value? And the answer is when you transgress against what's intrinsically good, the voice of what is intrinsically good will call you on it. And that happens all the time. That's why you feel guilty. And there's what's interesting about that many things. But one of the things that's interesting about that is that there's a kind of autonomy about it. This is why God is represented in the biblical corpus as a like as a spiritual force is that this thing that calls you on your own behavior isn't under your control, and yet it's something that seems to be somewhat internal, right? Because like a sense of shame is something that happens to you, it's something internal. But you can't control it. OK, so what do you make of a spirit, so to speak, a being that's another way of thinking about it, that calls you on your misbehavior subjectively that you can't control? We have to define it as something. And Elijah defined he said, oh, that's the same thing as the God of Abraham. It's the same thing that you make sacrifices to. And what's the logic in that? Well, to sacrifice something is to give something up that you value. It's the same as work because what you're doing when you work is you give up your time for some future gain. It's like the definition of work. OK, so you sacrifice. And what do you sacrifice? Well, if you're smart, you sacrifice the lower to the higher because it would be a kind of stupid sacrifice to give up what's great and get what's, you know, lesser as a consequence. So in principle, when you're making a sacrifice, the sacrifice is towards something better. Then you might say, well, what's the ultimate sacrifice and what's the ultimate point of the sacrifice? And that would be the ultimate good. And it's also the ultimate good that calls you out on your misbehavior. And as far as I can tell, like, I just don't see a way around that argument. Now, you might say, well, that's not God. It's like, well, have it your way, man. Like you, you come up with a better explanation. You're welcome to you're welcome to come up with a better explanation. Well, this makes me ask it. So something we kept hearing at ARC was that we need a better story, right? Or a narrative. Like, why are our narratives and stories so important to humans? Like, why do we need a narrative? That's a great question. Yeah. What is it? Well, you know, the the rationalists and the OK, so the empiricists believe that you learn, you're socialized, you gather information, you're educated because of incoming sense data, right? Everything that you have in your mind, in your psyche is a consequence of your sensory experience. OK, well, there's a big problem with that theory. The theory is wrong. The advanced cognitive neuroscientists know 100% that that theory is wrong. And the reason for that is that, well, there's an infinite number of facts. Like there's there's one fact per object, but then there's facts for any number of combinations of objects, too. And so you drown in facts. Now, you could people experience this actually at times. So one of the things that psychedelic experience does is what would you say? It plunges you more into the world of pure fact and everything becomes miraculous and there's way too much to pay attention to. And the problem with that is you can't orient yourself. Like if you're paying attention to everything, you're just going to die. You have to have a hierarchy of attentional prioritization. So for example, you can notice this while we're talking. We're looking at it. All we're doing is looking at each other's eyes. Even though there's all this. Right. And there's many things we could be paying attention to. To be a gorilla back there. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. They're going to be a gorilla back there. I wouldn't even notice it. Well, that's right. So so with every move of your eyes, you're inhabiting a pyramid of attentional prioritization. Some things at the pinnacle and the thing that's at the pinnacle is the thing that's dominating your attention. OK, so that's that's with every glance. And this is another problem with the empirical view. Like the empiricists think we're just passive observers of the factual world, but we're not passive. Like when you're using your eyes, there's like four different kinds of eye movements that are going on all the time when you're looking at something. There's these little movements called saccades that move your eyes back and forth. If your eyes stop moving, even for an instant, you instantly go blind because the cells at the back of your retina will exhaust themselves. And so your eyes move so that the visual image moves across cells so they don't exhaust themselves. But then you're also, you know, you can voluntarily move your eyes. There's eye fields in the front of your brain that allow you to do that. And then if something unexpected occurs, you'll automatically move your eyes towards it. And you're when you're seeing, imagine you closed your eyes and you wanted to and you hadn't seen this microphone. You want to get a picture of it. You could you could touch the microphone multiple times with your fingertips and you could build a picture of the microphone in your imagination. That's what blind people do. When you can feel your way around a woman, you can even feel someone's face and get a picture of it. You're doing exactly the same thing with your eyes even though you don't know it is your, your, it's like throwing a basketball at a statue trying to get a picture of it. You're hitting the world with your eyes constantly and you're making choices about what to aim your eyes at and to direct your attention. Okay, you do that in a, in a pyramidal structure that puts something at the top. Now, what we're doing here, okay, why are we attending to each other's eyes? Because we want to see what, what each person is looking at. Okay, that'll help us determine if our attention is shared. And if we're having a genuine conversation like kids playing a game, our attention is going to be focused on the same thing. Okay, what is our attention focused on in this situation? Well, if we're having an honest conversation, then what our attention is focused on is the transformation of our psyches as the conversation proceeds, right? And so each of us in principle is willing to give up our stupid ideas insofar as they can be modified by someone else. So it's a sacrificial offering. It's like I'm talking to you because, you know, I could be talking to you to dominate you or to look impressive or to do something narcissistic or I could be listening to you to see if you know something that will modify something I know which will let kill it and force it to regrow. And so we're participating in this process of sacrifice and regeneration and our attention is focused on that. Okay, what's a story? A story is a description of someone's hierarchy of attention. So if you go to a movie, for example, you see the hero that you'll watch the hero and you'll see what he's attending to and that'll give you some insight into his hierarchy of values. And then there'll be consequences to him playing out that hierarchy of values in the world and you'll evaluate the consequences. And so, you know, if he ends up in prison, for example, or being beat to death or ends up in some state of abject misery, what you're going to conclude is that that's a hierarchy of attentional prioritization that you don't want to emulate. And so, and even more broadly, you could say that there's two patterns of attentional prioritization that are archetypal. You see that played out in the hero and the anti-hero. Now, it's archetyply that would be Cain and Abel or it's Christ and Satan. It's Batman and the Joker. It's Superman and Lex Luthor. The whole idea of a supervillain is a variant of the idea of Satan. You see that permeating, for example, the Harry Potter stories, because Voldemort obviously is a variant of Satan. I mean, he's a serpent for Christ's sake, but how obvious does it have to be? And you could say that there's the most beneficial possible hierarchy of attention and then there's the most destructive possible hierarchy of attention. And great stories dramatize the conflict between those two things. And that's the conflict between, that's the eternal battle between good and evil, fundamentally. And if you have any sense, you want to be on the right side of that. So in that sense. Where does Klaus Schwab fit in this hole? Yeah, well, we're all trying to figure that out. Yeah, well, Schwab and the WAF types, they're basically rational technocrats, right? And so there is a biblical theme of rational, the rational technocrats build the Tower of Babel all the time. And so what they're doing is building, the Tower of Babel is a ziggurat and a ziggurat is a pyramid, it's stepped. Okay, and it's a very ancient form of architectural design. And in Babylon, that's Babel, in Babylon in ancient times, the kings had competitions in the different city states that existed at that time to see who could build the highest ziggurat. And the idea was, the guy with the biggest ziggurat is closest to God, right? And so what happens in the Tower of Babel story is that people are building these ziggurats, trying to replace God with technological accomplishment, right? Trying to put themselves in the place of God and God gets irritated about that and he makes it unable for people to communicate. And well, we're in that situation now because I can give you an example of that because we're worshiping the wrong things, we're building the wrong towers, we can't even agree on what a man and a woman is anymore. That's how fragmented our speech has become. Is it safe to say then that stories and narratives essentially orient us to the world and help us move through it? We see the world, you can't, you have to see the world through a story. I was talking to this guy named Carl Friston a while back and he's one of the, he's the world's most cited neuroscientist at the moment. He invented the technology that enables people to interpret MRIs. And so Friston is like a major league scientist and I asked him, is an object perception a micro narrative? It's a very specific question, it's an odd question. Because you wouldn't think that that would necessarily be the case. And he said something like, necessarily and inevitably. And so, and this is something that we don't, this is another reason why the empiricists are wrong is like when you see something like this bottle say, you're not seeing an object. You're seeing something of functional significance. It's a tool, it's not an object. There's a difference between an object and a tool. A tool can be used. And essentially what you're doing when you look at the world is you're looking for pathways, tools and obstacles. And the story that you inhabit is the pathway and it lays out the tools and the obstacles. And there's no way out of that. It's not like there's some basic level of perception underneath that that you overlay tools and obstacles on. Quite the contrary, it's primary. So I can give you an example of that too. There's a form of brain damage that produces a behavior called utilization behavior. And so if you have prefrontal damage, that's very advanced part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex. It's the part that's responsible for abstract thought. If it's damaged, you can develop a condition called utilization behavior. And if you're dealing with a patient who has utilization behavior and you put a cup in front of them, they have to pick it up and drink it. And they can't walk down a hallway with an open door without turning through the door. And it's because you literally see the world as a place there called affordances of offerings for action. And the reason for that is we're navigators. We're not people who lay a, what would you call a film of meaning over a meaningless world? That isn't how it works. What we perceive is meaning. Yes, we perceive meaning. You know, the AI scientists that run into this problem when they initially thought, read this article, where they initially thought that they could just have the cameras, look at things and identify chair, couch, and they kept running into problems because how do you teach this computer that that's a chair and this is a table? Or that a beanbag and a stump are both chairs, given that they don't look the same in any way. Yeah, this is exactly what they said. Huge problem. Oh yeah, yeah, they hit that in the 1960s. About the same time, it was about the same time that the post-modernists figured out that we saw the world through a story. And it was the same discovery. And that's a very astute observation. It took a long time to build machines that could operate in the world, not because action itself was difficult, but because perception was so difficult. It's so difficult really that it seems impossible. It's virtually impossible to see the world. This goes back to our debate about the robot and the not being able to decipher it. So we have this ongoing debate on the podcast on whether we'll have robots in our house doing the dishes or not, or we'll actually be traveling in space. And I say that we're gonna be traveling space first. Commercial moon flight. And the reason why I say that is because the AI, they cannot figure out how to teach the AI to know if the plate is clean or dirty. It can move a plate all day long, but to be able to decipher between if it being clean or dirty. Yeah, well, the dish I have a chapter in my new book called Post-Modernism and Dishwashing Robots. Well, it's because you think, you know, like an entry-level job as dishwasher. It's like, yeah, fine, that's easy, is it? Build a machine that can wash dishes. Because you think about what a dishwasher has to do. It's like, not only do you have to get the dishes clean, whatever that means. You know, when I worked as a dishwasher, I had some trouble to begin with because the cooks would bring me these old pots, you know, these huge pots that they, and they were covered with like varnish, essentially, from being used so often. And I had no idea. It's like, they wanted me to clean it. Well, how clean? And that's actually an unbelievable, clean enough. Okay, clean enough for what? That's where the story comes in, right? Clean enough to make delicious food safely with no risk of contamination for your clients, but not so clean that you spend all day taking every bit of varnish off that pot so that you can't clean any other pots, right? And then at the same time, while you're getting along with the cooks, while you're getting along with the waitresses, right? While you're trying not to be a pain in the neck, while you're trying to have a bit of a sense of humor. Like it's unbelievably complicated. And it's because as a dishwasher, you're nested in a very, very complex story. And it's not something that's easy to substitute with the rovers. I feel so validated. I feel so validated. Okay, I wanna stay in this talking about the importance of stories because I had a question I wanted to ask you. I wasn't sure if it was gonna come up in this conversation, but this is perfect for it because one of my favorite talks you did, you actually did in San Jose, and it was actually the Q and A portion at the end. And you were asked a question about what you would do differently with raising your kids. And your answer actually was, you would have took them to church. And I thought that was, I don't think any of us thought that answer was coming. And so I have a feeling that has to do with the storytelling. Okay, so elaborate on that a little bit. I taught this course at Harvard and at the University of Toronto called Maps of Meaning, which is online and in various forms. And some of it was an explication of some biblical stories. I concentrated on Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel. And Exodus mostly in those courses. And that was fine when I started teaching in the 1990s, let's say, because every one of my students knew the stories. But by the time 2015 rolled around, there were lots of kids in the class who didn't know the biblical stories. And so it was very difficult to make reference to them. And so whether we know it or not, the biblical stories are at the core of the shared story through which we all see the world. And when you lose the basic stories, you lose the reference points for the story as such. Now, people are really starting to figure this out. I talked to, at our conference, I talked to Ayan Hercie Ali and Ayan escaped from a very fundamentalist form of Islam. And her and her husband, Neil, were both very much attracted to the new atheist doctrines and Douglas Murray's in exactly the same camp. And they've come to understand that there's no secularizing morality. It has to be based on stories, right? And Carl Jung talked about stories. So imagine this is another way of thinking about the necessity of stories is that there are things you know that you can say. And then there are things that you don't even know you don't know. And so then imagine there's a gap between the things you're just absolutely ignorant about. They're far beyond your comprehension. You don't even know that they exist. And the things that you know well enough to talk about. Well, there has to be a buffer between those. You can't just move from the absolutely unknown to the completely spoken in one fell swoop. The dream, the dream is on the edge of the unknown, right? And because a dream, when you have a dream, you think, what the hell was that all about? Which is a weird thing to think because you dreamt it up. It's like, what do you mean you don't know? Well, it's so strange, isn't it? That Freud said, well, you're trying to disguise the meaning of the dream from yourself because it points to repressed content. And sometimes that happens, but Jung's take on that was no, no, no. The dream is where the mind meets the mystery of the world. And the dream is the first transformation of what's absolutely mysterious into what's partially known. So it's the first mapping. And so, well, you can imagine this. Imagine that you go on a date and you're pretty happy with the girl that you're with and then you start to fantasize about her. And what you're doing is building a model of what she might be like, right? And maybe it's a naive model and it's wish fulfillment because you build her into something that she's not or maybe you saw something in her that will blossom into love, which is actually a representation of her true character. But in any case, the fantasy is the first foray of knowledge and that's the dream. And, well, a description of a dream is a story. And so, we have our propositional knowledge that the philosophy and the explicit knowledge we have but that's nested inside a story, it has to be. And then the story is nested inside a dream and the dream gets stranger and stranger at its edges until it fades out into what we don't understand at all. Now, part of what the biblical narrative is is the dream in which our culture is embedded. And you might say, well, is the dream true? It's like, well, it's a funny question because the truth of a dream isn't the same as the truth of an explicit philosophical argument. It's a different kind of knowledge. It's imaginative knowledge. Like, look, I can give you an example of the complexity of this truth. So, there's an insistence in the Old Testament that the proper relationship between man and God is one of sacrifice. Okay, because sacrifice is just a constant theme, right? As soon as Adam and Eve are kicked out of paradise, they have to work and work is a form of sacrifice and the story of Cain and Abel is a story of two patterns of sacrifice, like genuine sacrifice, that's Abel and false sacrifice, that's Cain and false sacrifice is what you engage in when you're trying to get away with something. Okay, so, but why is the relationship sacrificial? Well, it's because that's how we establish our relationship to the future, right? As we don't just live in the present, we live now and we live tomorrow and we live next week and next year and five years from now and we have to govern our behavior in the present because of our knowledge of the future and that makes the way that we interact with the world sacrificial. We're always giving up the immediate now for something more comprehensive. Okay, so the biblical narrative is trying to take that apart. How do you best give something up and what's the ultimate target of the sacrifice? That's really the question that's being asked. And so, the sacrifices get more and more extreme. So, for example, Abraham is called upon to sacrifice his son and that's really something, right? I think most people who have a child would rather die than have their child put to death, right? So, the sacrifice of a son, it's the ultimate sacrifice. Now, you might say, well, why do you have to make the ultimate sacrifice? Now, what happens in the story is God calls on Abraham to sacrifice his son and then he doesn't have to. And so, the moral there is that if you will not be deprived of anything you're willing to give up, right, right? Right, it's a very strange idea, right? And then you can think about that very practically. It's like, well, life is gonna call on you to go through some very difficult times. And if you're going to adapt to those difficult times, you have to give up everything that would stop you from adapting. And God only knows what that might be. There's a motif that emerges as the biblical corpus develops that calls for a higher and higher form of sacrifice. And so, by the time you get to Christ, and so Christ's story is the ultimate sacrifice. That's a good way of thinking about it technically. The moral is you have to confront everything, everything about life, everything about malevolence, and you have to give up everything. And if you're willing to do that, then everything is returned to you. And I think that's, I actually think that's just right. I think that's the case. That's like great, that's also awesome. It's absolutely. Yeah, you know, two things come to mind when you talk about the importance of stories. You know, if we were to talk, for example, about let's say the environment, okay? One story is that we're a cancer on this planet, and we're just destroying everything. And so if that's your story, well, then you're hopeless. And the answer is, well, by all means necessary, protect the environment, including allowing people who are unfortunate to die away because they can't afford these new energy sources, whatever, right? So it's sacrifice everything for this. The other story could be the environment's important. Most important thing though, and this story is people, that's why we want a clean environment. So let's innovate, let's have more people. Whereas the other story might be like, don't have people, they're cancer. The other story might say, we need more people because that's who solves these problems. Yeah, including environmental problems. That's right, right. And then the second part that reminded me, my grandfather came here a long time ago. He passed away, but he came here as an immigrant and he loved this country so much. He was a poor Sicilian. And he came here and I remember him telling me, he goes, you know, it was different back then. I said, what do you mean? He goes, well, when I came here, you had people from all these different countries and, you know, just, we didn't speak the same language and there were, I was Italian and he had Jewish people, he had Irish people, he had German people and he goes, but we all had the same story. We all came here for the same reason. I said, what do you mean? He goes, well, we all came here for opportunities. So we all work together. The story seems to have changed to where you have lots of different people, but it's not, they don't share that same story. And so now we have all this conflict, whereas... Well, that's what you have when people don't share the same story. You have conflict and that's the basic flaw in diversity theory and multicultural theory. It's like the world's multicultural and obviously there's tremendous benefits to that. I mean, the fact that we have all these different cultures means that we have repositories of wisdom and knowledge that we can all draw on and share. And anyone with any sense would think of that as a wonderful opportunity, but the flip side is, well, wherever there's multiculturalism, there's conflict between cultures and there's war. And so the price you pay for a fragmented narrative is war. And you might think, well, we can just import all those cultures into our own culture, but how are you gonna do that without importing the war? It's like, is someone's gonna wave a magic wand and only the positive aspects of the diversity are going to remain. And so the post-modernists, one of the core claims of post-modernism is that there's no uniting narrative. Okay, no uniting meta-narrative. And it's a preposterous claim partly because every action you undertake is a consequence of a uniting narrative. So for example, if I reach to pick up this bottle, I'm doing like 100,000 insanely complicated things to move my hand voluntarily. Like I don't even know what they are. I can feel that I have voluntary control of my muscles, but I can't control the cellular activity. That's all happening automatically. But this smooth movement to produce this outcome is that that's a uniting narrative. The uniting narrative is it's good to drink some water. You know, and it's a relatively low order narrative, but it's still a uniting narrative. Otherwise my behavior would just be completely incoherent. And the narratives, we have narratives that unite our perceptions and our actions at every level all the way up to the top. That's what happens in this society that is functioning well. And the American dream was the uniting narrative. And it was something like the search for abundance and opportunity in one nation under God. It was something like that. And the modern insistence is that's all power and oppression and that we don't need a uniting narrative. It's like, well, fine, then we have conflict and that's just not. The criticism is that that uniting narrative was nothing but a manifestation of power. And that's just not, it's just not, right? It's so naive to think that way. Anybody who's ever been on a successful sports team or ran a successful business, imagine doing that without a narrative, without having a common goal that we're all moving towards, good luck. Or imagine doing that on the basis of power. You know, it's like you're gonna be the team captain and you're what are you gonna do? You're gonna beat everybody up when they don't perform properly. I mean, you can pound people into shape. It's a stupid way of leading. Totally. And it's gonna produce all sorts of counterproductive. And you're gonna lose. You're not gonna win. That's right, and you're gonna get taken out. Yeah, yeah. You know, Franz DeWall, a great primatologist, he's been studying chimpanzees forever. You know, and we have this notion that it's the roughest, toughest power man chimp that rules the damn roost. And DeWall has shown that that's not the case for chimps, even for chimps, because the brutes, they can dominate for a while, but as soon as they have an off day, two or three of the important, absolutely, and take them out right in the most brutal possible way. And that's generally how dictatorial tyrants end. You know, they're tearing apart like Mussolini was torn apart, or they end up like Hitler, you know, in a burning bunker, put a gun to his head. It's power, the leftists, and this came out of post-modernism to some degree, the leftists insist that the narrative that has united us in the past at every social level is one of power. And that's, it's unbelievably cynical, that viewpoint. It's not true. It justifies the use of power, which I think is its fundamental motivation. Like if it's nothing but power, man, and I've got some power, of course I can use it because there's no other narrative. And it's just naive to think so. It's like everybody's just after power, you know? It's like, really, that's your theory of the world, everybody's after, and why would you even want it? And so the idea with ARC was, get all these people together who have some sort of influence to help shift and change the narrative. Because the one we currently have, definitely, I was gonna say seams, but I think it's pretty clear, is producing despair, anxiety. Hopelessness. Hopelessness. Sinusism. During a time when we have more, I mean, abundance than we've ever had. I mean, for all intents and purposes, almost doesn't make sense. Well, this is the thing that Pazio put his finger on at the ARC conference. He said, you know, along with the material abundance that we've produced, we have an abundance of despair. You know, and Jonathan Haidt has really documented this as the topic for his next book. I think his data now suggests that the median liberal female is more likely than not to be diagnosed with a mental illness, right? And he thinks most of those women in particular, because he's been focusing mostly on women, they're, most of them won't be married, most of them won't have children. And he might say, well, that's fine if they don't want to have children. It's like, it's not so simple. So this is what the data show right now. This is brutal. It's brutal. 50% of women who are 30 don't have a child, okay? Half of them will never have a child. So that's 25% of women. 90% of them will regret it. So imagine now, now we have, we have 90% of 25%. So let's say that's 20%. 20% of women are gonna end up voluntarily childless, in, sorry, involuntarily childless. Well, think about the trajectory of their life. You know, it's fine to be single when you're maybe, when you're say between 20 and 35 and you're young and you're fit and you're beautiful and you're attractive and you have the possibility of multiple relationships, say, maybe with the proper relationship as the goal. But that's not so fun by the time you're 45 and it's downright dreadful by the time you're 60 and the typical woman now who's 60 can expect to live to 90. It's like, what the hell are you gonna do with those 30 years? No family, no long-term relationship. Well, since we're talking about stories, let's talk about the narrative around being parents, you know, growing up in this culture like fathers were always presented as bumbling idiots or, oh my gosh, I'm married, life is over and the guy who wasn't married, he's got the fast cars, all the girls, that's the way you should go. Yeah, he's Andrew Tate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every single man is Andrew Tate. That's probably the scary part about him because there's a lot of things that we've talked about Andrew before and there's a lot of things that he says that I agree with, but it's dangerous that that's the guy that all these young men are looking to. Yeah, well, it's not much different than rap culture in the 90s, I don't, you know, I mean, look, if you're demoralized and dependent and neurotic and afraid and you see a tough guy who basically says, you know, up yours to the world, I'm gonna get what I want, you can see that as a developmental progression, right? And maybe that's something like the attraction of the shadow. Those boys that are so dependent, they're nowhere near aggressive enough and then Tate comes along and like he's genuinely, he's a tough guy, he's a real fighter. So you gotta give the devil his due, you know, but he's putting forward a vision of maturity that's quite short-term and hedonistic. And I think that's best exemplified by the fact that he got tangled up with, you know, the whole Onlyfans. How he made his money as well, really shifted the way I saw it. Oh yeah, man, there's no excuse for that. There's zero excuse for that. And maybe he has enough sense to regret it, but you know, I doubt it because you don't do that sort of thing to begin with unless you've strayed pretty far into the dark side of the world. Well, this is evidence of the narrative going wrong where it used to be a source of pride for a man, you know, two men meet each other. How many children do you have? Six kids, wow, whoa, that's amazing. You could support. And it turned into how many kids you have? Six kids, oh man, sorry about that. Yeah, yeah. And for women, the narrative completely changed to where it was oppressive and burdensome and they lost the freedom. And that narrative is what's causing this. It's unbelievable. Well, and you gotta ask yourself too, like, okay, freedom, what do you mean by that? Freedom for what? Okay, let's say it's freedom for sequential short-term sexual affairs. Okay, so that doesn't work for women. There's no evidence at all that that works for women. Like it works for a higher proportion of men, but it works for virtually no women. And so the situation that women find themselves in is that that form of sexual misbehavior just dooms them to a kind of shame. And I think the reason for that is sex is costly for women and for obvious reasons. Jesus, you don't have to be a genius to figure out why that is. And so what is this freedom? It's this heat, it's not freedom. It's the elevation of the hedonistic whim to the highest place in the pinnacle. It's like, well, I can sleep with whoever I want, whenever I want. It's like, well, here's another frightening thing about that. So there's two broad mating strategies, reproductive strategies, you might say, among human beings. And they echo broader strategies that are part and parcel of the animal kingdom. There's like the long-term investment strategy and there's the short-term sexual strategy. And so mosquitoes, famously, are on the short-term end of the reproductive spectrum. So their bet is, well, we'll lay a million eggs and we won't pay any attention to them and like 999,999 will die. But one will live and that's good enough because it keeps us in mosquitoes. Right, it's a numbers game. Absolutely, it's a numbers game. And the other reproductive strategy is high investment. And human beings are the highest investment animals by a huge margin, right? I mean, like raccoons, I think they take care of their young for like three years. And there's a fair number of animals who have a lengthy dependency period, but in humans it's like 18 years. Yeah, we can take care of our souls for a long time. Yeah, right, till you're 40. Like, and even after that, it's still communal and familial, right? And so, okay, so human beings tilt to the long-term investment side of things and the better people do that, better. Okay, so now why do I know that? Well, imagine that you look among people who are pursuing partners for, who are pursuing partners partly for sex. You could imagine there's two strategies. There are people who are looking for a sexual partner within the context of a long-term intimate relationship and then there are people who just wanna sleep around, right? And they want as many partners as they can in the shortest possible period of time. And that's the player mentality. Okay, then you say, well, what personality characteristics predict short-term mating preference? Well, we know it's dark tetrad, it's dark tetrad features. So the people who prefer one-night stands preferentially are, this is fun, narcissistic, psychopathic, Machiavellian, so they're manipulative and to capital off, sadistic. Well, so that's not to have the opportunity to become someone like that, that's not freedom, right? That's elevation of the lowest possible desire to the highest possible place. It's a myth of freedom and what we do with health, people sometimes will say, well, God, I just wanna be able to eat whatever I want. I wanna be able to not exercise. That's too much structure, that's not enough freedom. To which I say, you know. It's chaos, not freedom. Well, the fact that if you stay fit and healthy, you have more freedom. I can run up the stairs, I can play with my kids, I don't lose mobility. I don't get so sick that I need all these medications. So it's really a myth. It's not a trade, we position it as like, oh, you sacrifice all this freedom. In reality, it's you're far more free. Yeah, right. By doing it the right way. Well, that's the thing about, that's the thing about like, what would you call it? A genuine discipline. Like you can think of discipline as, you shouldn't do that. But that isn't what discipline is. Discipline is the integration into a higher form of freedom. That's a much better way of thinking about it. It's like, yeah, you're a lot freer if when you're 50, you basically have the physique of someone who's 30, right? And if the price you pay for that is that you have to give up gluttony, which is exactly what I wanna eat, whatever I wanna eat, whenever I wanna eat it, that's not freedom. That means you're completely subordinate to your hunger. That's not freedom. Unless you think you're your hunger, which is a pretty dismal way of thinking about yourself. They're heavy chains, heavy chains that carry around. Absolutely. Yeah, when I, you know, I've been wanting to ask you this question. Every time I watch you talk, you're, in my opinion, my strong opinion, you're incredibly just brilliant and intelligent in terms of human behavior and what drives us. And I know from my space, some of the best coaches and trainers are good because we struggled internally with a lot of these things ourselves. And that just drove us to learn more and more. So I can't help but wonder, are you so hungry for understanding humans because you've had internal struggles? Is this, what drove you, and what continues to drive you to learn as much as you do and just to dive into these subjects? Well, I think some of it's just natural curiosity. You know, I'm curious about everything, but I also had a very specific target that emerged for me back when I was in my early 20s. I was earlier than that, even probably first when I was about 13 or 12, when I first became aware of what happened in Nazi Germany. I was very interested in concentration camps and how a very specific interest, which was how could you be a guard in a concentration camp? Or how could you enjoy being a guard in a concentration camp, which is an even darker question. And that's sort of thing fascinates virtually everyone because you see all these movies we have about serial killers and about psychopaths, about people who are extremely criminal. There's a real fascination with evil, but I couldn't find a more pure manifestation of evil than concentration camp guard at Auschwitz who's happy with his job. And so then that brings up two questions. It's like, well, is that person just a monster, like the Nazi monster of a relatively simple-minded movie who's completely unlike you, or is that someone who's like you? And the evidence unfortunately suggests quite strongly that many of the people who committed brutal atrocities in Nazi Germany were, they're absolutely indistinguishable from the typical person. Was that terrifying to realize? Terrifying, terrifying. Like, oh my gosh, this is potential. We all have this potential. Oh, there isn't anything more. Look, there's two things you can confront that terrify you, really. Like there's the domain of mortality, right? Illness and death and physical and psychological degeneration. I mean, that's pretty damn terrifying, but what's more terrifying than that, I think, is malevolence. And to confront that, there isn't anything more terrifying than that. You see, so in the Christian story, for example, so Christ's story is the story of ultimate confrontation with existence. That's a good way of thinking about it. And so Christ's death is the worst possible death, right? Because it's the most painful death and it's a consequence of betrayal and of tyranny. And it's in front of the people he loves and he's young and he's innocent and not only innocent, but good. So it's the worst form of brutal death. And so he confronts that voluntarily. But that's not all, because part of the mythological tradition is that once Christ is crucified, he descends to hell itself. And so you might ask, well, what does that mean? And what it means is that if you're gonna confront life fully, you have to confront the reality of unjust suffering. That would be the realm of unjust death. And you have to confront the reality of malevolence. And then as you- Within yourself. Well, that's the thing is, first of all, first of all, you sort of confront evil as an external reality, right? It's the bad guys. It's the Nazis. It's the communists. It's whoever is convenient for you not to like, let's say. But as you look into that more and more deeply, what happens is that it pulls inside of you, right? It starts to become something that's personal and psychological, spiritual, and not something that's external. That's why Solzhenitsyn said that the line between good and evil runs down the heart of every single person. And so one of the things, for example, I learned about totalitarian states. You see, we have this idea that a totalitarian state is like a bunch of freedom-loving people oppressed by like Hitler or Stalin. And that's just not, it's not the case at all. There's nothing about that model that's true. In a totalitarian state, every person lies about absolutely everything to themselves all the time and to everyone they love. And it's the grip of the lie that's the totalitarian state. I'll give you an example. So I was just reading this book by a guy named Theodore Dale Rimpel and it's called The Wider Shores of Marxism. I think that's the name of the book. And he went to North Korea and went to Pyongyang, which is the capital, which is sort of a showcase capital. And there's a department store there that's many stores high and it's full of the best consumer goods that North Korea can produce. And believe me, those aren't very good. But even the communists have to show, despite the fact that they're contemptuous of modern capitalism, they have to show that they're perfectly capable of producing the workers' paradise. So there's this big store. There's hundreds or thousands of North Koreans in it. And they're acting out buying. And so what Dale Rimpel did, he's brilliant, SES, he followed some of them around to see what exactly they were up to because you can't pull the wool over his eyes. He's a smart guy. And he saw that a bunch of them would just go up an escalator around a block inside the department store down the escalator and then back up. And they were doing that like 10 hours a day. That was their job. And nothing in the department store was for sale. It was all for show. So, and then he did it and he did something really funny which was he decided to buy something which no one ever does, including the foreigners. So he went and bought a pen and he picked up the box of the pen and he said it was encased in really cheap cardboard and the ink on the cover or the box had bled through everywhere because the cardboard was so cheap. And you know, in the modern West, I don't know, you guys, you buy things from Amazon. The packaging is just a bloody miracle. It looks like it's just been sent something from heaven. The packaging is so perfect. Anyways, he took the pen out and the rubber was too hard to erase a pen and the ink was dry and like the little metal clip on it snapped off right away. It's like, so the reason I'm telling you this is because in a totalitarian state, absolutely everything is a lie. The pen is a lie. It's not a pen. It's a simulacrum of a pen that you use to produce some theater to deceive dim-witted Westerners into presuming that North Korea is the communist paradise. People can't even buy the non-existent pen. They have to act out the fact that they're shopping even though they're not and they don't have any money. And even if they did have money, nothing they bought would work. It's just lies, lies, lies. Like for Hollywood. Yeah, well, you said something a while ago that blew me away. Years ago, I heard you say, you think that if you went back in time in Nazi Germany, that you would be Schindler. The odds are you would be a Nazi. Oh yeah, everyone takes that. Oh yeah, you'd be Schindler. Yeah, right. It completely blew my mind because as a kid, you think, oh, those evil, I would have been, and then you think about it, you really think about it and go, most people would have gone right along. Well, look what happened during COVID. I mean, I really saw this in Toronto. My conclusion in Toronto was that 70% of Canadians would have worn a mask for the rest of their life happily with no complaint. And 30% of them would have been thrilled to do that because it gave them an opportunity to inform on their neighbors. Brutal, brutal. So with the importance of narratives and stories, and we now have, I mean, when the printing press was invented, that was just incredible. Like the first time, the average person now had access to stories, there were no gatekeepers, or at least there were less gatekeepers than there were before. Now we have the internet, now we have all this media. I mean, we started our podcast, nobody got in our way. We didn't need any sponsors, we just put it on air. So the potential for both good and bad are almost endless. How do you feel about that? Do you feel? I think that's a good way of putting it. I think what distinguishes the time we're in is that the battle between good and evil has been going on forever, but slowly. Well, it's not slow now, it's really fast and it's gonna get faster and faster. What's that gonna look like? Is it just a fastest way? You can see it unfolding right in front of us. I mean, part of it'll be a rate of technological change so rapid that we won't even know what's happening. Like how closely have you been able to follow the advances in AI? Oh my God. Well, right, you just can't, right? First of all, there was chat GPT and then like the next week there were 10 ridiculously sophisticated new artificial intelligence technologies that no one had ever dreamed of. You can't even keep track of them. And so we are in a situation where I think we can see the starkness of the choice before us more clearly that at any other time in history we could enter into a period of unbelievable abundance and opportunity or we could make a hell so complete that everything we've done so far would just look like practice. And I think part of the reason I'm touring around and doing these sorts of podcasts and so forth is too and this is part of the purpose of ARC. It's like, well, which of those two realities are we going to choose? And the answer is, well, what are you gonna choose? Because that's the answer. It's like, no, it's not up to Klaus Schwab and the W.E.F. buddy. It's up to you. And that's a terrifying proposition, but I think it's true. And you can just think about that practically too. Like you guys, you just started this podcast. How long ago? 96, no, nine years ago. And so you didn't have any institutional backing. You just decided to do it. You get 10 million downloads a month. Okay, so you have this immense influence. It's like, yeah, that's right. That's what you have. And that's the case for everyone. And people think, well, I don't have any influence. It's like you're hiding your bushel under a light. You have a lot more bloody influence than you think. In fact, you have more than you want. That's what's so terrifying is that the things you do, man, they echo. So there's definitely a strong sense of urgency. The scariest part of all this for me and it reminds me of the talk you did at Dave Ramsey. So Dave Ramsey was one of the favorite things I ever heard you talk about when you talked about the importance of what's going on with our children between the ages of like two and five and with play and that role that it has. And we're finally seeing a generation of the iPhone generation grow up into be- Deprived of play. And it scares the shit out of me because I have a four-year-old right now and I have friends that have kids my same age and I see how easily they adopt these behaviors of allowing the iPad to babysit their child. And heaven forbid, as another parent, you say anything. So it's like you don't wanna step in and say you shouldn't be doing that because that's like the worst thing you could ever do to another parent, right? So, but I'm watching this unfold and I really think that a lot of the stuff that we're talking about that we're fearful of is starting with these kids and what the content they're consuming. And probably socially integrated. Yeah, what they're not doing socially. Like talk about that, because that talk I think is one of the most important talks I've ever heard you do. Well, kids learn between the ages of two and four, they learn to integrate beyond the confines of their own psyche, right? So a two-year-old basically is still self-obsessed and they can't play with other kids. Now, what does it mean to play with someone else? It means that you negotiate a shared space of attention. That's what it means. So if a boy wants to play house with a girl, then he has to propose the game. Do you want to play house? Do you want to play tag? Like there'll be some offerings on the table. And the first rule is the other person has to want to play. And that's a good rule for social conduct in general. You know, the narrative in our culture is that it's power that dominates everything. But the alternative to that, as far as I can tell is something like voluntary agreement, right? Okay, so if the boy has a bit of sophistication, he'll make some offerings to the girl about different games and she'll pick one. Or vice versa, because the girl can make the offering too. But the crucial issue is they both have to want to play. Okay, so now they've shrunk their world, we're going to play house. Okay, the next thing to do is to assign something like a role. So you can see that they're acting out a story, right? The story is long-term committed relationship, something like that. That's what it means to play house, establishing a household. And so then they have to accept a role, could be mother, could be father, maybe they reverse the roles for the sake of the game, but they both have to agree on that. And then they're concentrating on the same thing and that brings them into emotional alignment. Because if you and I are pursuing the same goal, our emotions go into sync because our positive emotions say we're progressing towards the goal and our negative emotions say obstacles are in the way. And so if we have the same goal, we can now understand each other because our emotions align. That's how it works. So the kids construct a shared space and then they play. And to play is to experiment, right? Well, what if I act like this? Maybe I've seen my dad raise his voice or I've seen my dad tease or then the kids will act that out and see what happens. So watch how the girl reacts. And they want the girl to continue the game. But more than that, they want the girl to continue the game across multiple games. That's what happens when you have a friend. And so that's like a friend is a meta game because a friend is someone you play multiple games with. And the basic rule of a friendship is don't muck up the friendship, right? And you certainly not to win any particular game. You can see kids will hurt each other's feelings if one of them cheats to win an immediate game. And the cost of that is, well, it can be the friendship. Well, that's a stupid sacrifice. You're gonna win one game and forego the opportunity to play a hundred games. That's a stupid, obviously that's counterproductive. Well, between the age of two and four, kids learn to play more and more sophisticated games and to bring more and more kids into the game. And that just expands out into being socialized. And the kids who don't manage that by four, they never manage it. They're alienated. Is that because of the plasticity of the brain? No, it's because the other kids ratchet up ahead of them. So what kids will do when two kids meet each other in a playground, they'll sort of engage in small talk like adults do. This is what you do at a party. You engage in small talk. Why? Well, you wanna see if the person you're talking to can play a primitive game. At your level, right? Well, at some level, at least, to say, well, how are you doing? Well, if that stumps the person, you think, well, really, you think, okay, there's something, if they're awkward and they can't manage that, you think, okay, you're not very sophisticated. And maybe you might interact with them a bit, but you'll go find someone else to play with, right? And so, or maybe you introduce yourself and you see if the person can say their name and shake hands. Guy had clients who couldn't do that. They'd been so not attended to. They had no friends, no friends. Never say, well, how do you introduce yourself? Well, you know, they put their head down and they mumbled their name and they put their hand out. It's like shaking a dead fish. Like, so the first thing we would do is just practice the introduction. It's like, no, stand up, watch the other person, match their tempo, grab their hand, but not too hard, but not like a dead fish. Say your name loud enough so they can hear it. And like we practiced that. Some of the people I was with, we practiced that like 50 times till they got expert out. But imagine if you're 30, you haven't had any friends your whole bloody life and you don't even know how to introduce yourself. Like, how are you gonna get out of that? Jordan, we've had the opportunity to meet a lot of people that are Instagram or YouTube famous that have millions of followers. They have all this personality on the YouTube channel and then you meet them in person. And it's that. And they can't look us and we meet them. We're all excited. Those person looks like they got a great person and they get in a room like this and they do exactly what you said. Don't make eye contact. Don't even really introduce them. So they're completely different. So they were completely socialized for social media. Yes, yeah. Yeah, well, the other thing that happens, this is what fathers can do for kids too is a lot of that's embodied knowledge. So one of the things that young mammals really like, especially males, but females as well, is rough and tumble play. And that's embodied play, right? And so, and it's something you get better at if you work out too, because it integrates you. But embodied play isn't just a matter of abstract knowledge, right? It's so, for example, when I meet people after my lectures, I meet and greet, I meet about 150 people. And I did something of a study about how to make people comfortable when I first meet them, because you guys would know this from being coaches. You know, when someone first comes to for help, they're on edge. They don't like admitting they need help or want it. They're embarrassed to be there. They're skeptical and they're looking for an excuse to run the hell away. Totally. So you have to make them comfortable as fast as you possibly can. And one of the things you can do is when I've learned this, I've really watched this because I've met like, I don't know, 150,000 people in the last six years, like a lot of people, everybody who walks up to you will have a different tempo. Right? And so one of the things you do when you're reaching out to shake their hands is you match their tempo and then you mirror it. Yeah. And then they know, they know right away that you're integrated enough not to be obsessing about yourself when you're meeting them. And that gives them some confidence in you. And that might not be a conscious thought. It's not conscious. It's all demonstrated in the gesture, right? So you reach out and then they'll grip your hand in a particular way and some people very firmly and then you return that, some people less so and generally then you use a more firm handshake but you know, you watch the person and you do what you can to make them put them at ease. And that's embodied. And part of the way that we develop that ability is by engaging in rough and tumble play when we're little and fathers play a huge role in that because they, when you're playing with a kid in rough and tumble play, you're stretching them out. You're pushing them to the limits of their pain. Yeah. They're trying to, like, because the place where wrestling is fun is right on the edge of disaster. Yes. Right? It's gotta be intense. Oh, it was boring. Gotta find that fine line. You find that fine line and that's where you play. You play on that fine line and every game is like that. You play on the fine line. What kids want when they're checking each other out and this is what you do at a cocktail party too is you find someone, you start with small talk and you ratchet yourself up. You engage in more and more sophisticated interaction. If you find someone that you can play with, then you'll talk to them. The conversation gets interesting right away. And so, and you're playing, you're playing to push yourself further along the pathway of development. That's the right kind of game. Very important, especially, I mean, both with your boys and girls but even with your girls, it teaches them what safe touch is from a man and what unsafe and the way they are. And how to defend themselves. Girls with brothers are much less likely to be raped not because they have brothers but because they've learned from a very, right, exactly. Well, they've, look, I had clients in my practice who were always getting into sexual trouble, girls. Always, like you couldn't put them anywhere without something untoward happening to them. And I watched to see and the reason for that is they didn't know how to say no. And like sophisticated girls say no so subtly that it goes unnoticed. It's just that nothing happens, right? And so that's unnoticed. Whereas these, I'll give you an example. I had one client who she was very lonesome and a reasonably attractive girl but very, very troubled. And a delivery man came to her door. It's the plot of 3,000 pornography movies, right? It's like pizza delivery guy shows up to hot girls. I've got something for you. Yeah, right, exactly, exactly. So that sort of fantasy is lurking in the back of the minds of like delivery men all the time. And she invited this guy in which is like, that's a mistake, right? Because I'm not ragging on delivery men, it's an important job. And now he comes to the door and this girl's being real friendly to him and invites him in. And like, things didn't go well, put it that way. Well, why? Well, maybe she shouldn't have even opened the bloody door. Like she should have known how to say no, but she had no idea. She had no idea how to act out no. And she'd been hyper sheltered, right? So- And they learned that from older brothers, from their fathers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. From their boy, from their brother's friends, from playing, from playing with boys. So I think at the beginning of time, I mean, I think that we've always had parents that probably missed this a little bit, right? That maybe the dad was so busy at work and the mom was busy doing her thing. And so the kids, but at least, you know, say 25 plus years ago, the kids would have to probably, with their imagination, create things with rocks and toys and figured out. We're now, we're replacing that. So I feel like it's- It's not the content, it's the replacement. Yes, I feel like it's far more, because that's had to happen, right? There had to have been a kid who didn't get the right play 25 years ago too. But more than likely that kid didn't get an iPad or somebody that was probably playing house. Well, and they were also, they were also much more likely to have siblings to play with, and also much more likely to have opportunities to play with other kids without the screens. Like when I had my kids, it wasn't uncommon. I had the, Tami and I were the youngest parents with the oldest kids among the group that I associated with at Harvard. And we weren't that young, we were like 30. You know what, that's not that young to start a family. But we would bring our kids over to the houses of other people with kids. And the first thing they would do is put on a movie. It's like, no, throw the kids in the basement and leave them alone because they'll, after they're, let them figure it out, they'll, that's right, there has to be some deprivation so that they can start using their imagination and play. And what they're doing is producing social microcosms, right? And learning how to get along with other people they don't know learning how to play together. And I see a lot of the pathology that we see on university campuses looks to me like all this identity confusion. It looks to me like delayed fantasy play, you know? Well, the cosplay and all that sort of thing. That's become a percent. Yeah, yeah. It's delayed play. Wow, you know, talk a little bit about, so I'll tell you a story first to kind of illustrate what I'm going here. But years ago I had a friend of mine who opened some restaurants and he was giving me a tour around them. And so he's taken me around and he's introducing me to everybody. This is John, this is Mike, this is whatever. And he goes, and this is nine. And then he's going through it. And I said, nine, that's kind of an interesting name. So I go back and I looked at the guy and I said, he doesn't look German. I think that's a German. I said, are you German? And he goes, no, I said, your name is nine. And so then my buddy goes, hey, nine, show them why we call you nine. And he lifted his hands and he was missing a finger. Okay, so that's his nickname. And I heard you talk about this with men. Like the friendships that men have, like the way we tease each other is such a different level with what girls tend to do. We tend to be very mean. We tend to check each other, but there's something important there. And I've heard you talk about this before. I think you told the story of somebody showing up to a construction job with a paper bag, paper lunch. His nickname became, I don't remember what it was, paper bag. Lunch bucket. Yeah, well he had a lunch, he didn't have a paper bag. That's what he was supposed to have. He had a nicely packed lunch that his mother had made for him, which was fine. You have to make fun of that. Yeah, and then you have to accept the joke. And he didn't accept the joke and things didn't go well for him. Yeah, well what men do quickly in, especially working men groups, especially if it's a high stress environment is they check the other people out to see if they have any capacity for play and for emotional resilience. It's like, I'll poke you. And why? Well, I wanna see what happens if you're stressed a bit. Well, why? Well, because we might encounter a stressful situation. And I wanna see if like, are you gonna be there or not? Can you handle it? Can you handle it? Exactly, exactly. And if that's done well, it's rough, but it's fun. And if it's not done well, then it just goes sideways and no time flat. And the way to make it go sideways is for someone to come up and make a joke at your expense that's a bit rough and then to get all peeved about it. And then you're just screwed because someone else will say, like irritate the onlookers. And they'll think, yeah, is that right? How about this? And then it just goes. There's a bit of a gender difference there, right? Because like, if you look at like pranks that boys will do versus, I told my daughter, she's 14 and she just got this boyfriend and they were gonna do these pranks. I said, don't get in a prank war with a boy because they go to the 15th level, you know? So what's the difference? Is there a difference between the genders when it comes to what we just talked about, the nicknames and the poking or is that the same problem? There's not a lot of difference before puberty, but there's a substantial difference after that. And we probably understand more about how boys play than about how girls play. Well, yes, girls are more, they're more covert in their interactions. They're certainly more covert in their aggression. Boys aggression tends to be pretty obvious and it tends to be physical or the kind of rough joking that we're describing. Women are brutal in terms of the aggressive tactics they use. They're much more likely to use reputation, savaging and exclusion. And set a trap. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. And one of the advantages to being a boy is that you can just have a fight and that's the end of it, you know? And that happens fairly regularly among boys and among teenagers as well. It gets less and less frequent as men get older and older, but girls don't have that advantage. And so there's often no limit to the amount of psychological torment they can employ with one another. And part of what's happening in the modern world too is that that feminine pattern of aggression, which is reputation, savaging and exclusion and denigration, mobbing, that scales brilliantly on social media. I was just gonna ask. Yeah, yeah. Where's the other kind is? Well, you can't punch someone on Twitter even though you desperately need to. So what are the consequences of not having that? Justin always jokes around, he makes this joke that we need to bring bullies back and he makes a joke about it. He says there's not enough people who get punched in the skin. It's not the most popular campaign, but yeah. Well, the Simpsons did a great job of that because Nelson months, he was a very complicated bully and he was definitely an agent of social order. He corrected quite a few. Yeah, he corrected, that's right. He was a corrective, that's right. And disagreeable men are correctives. They set limits. They set limits on a kind of, what kind of stupidity do they? Kind of a blind dependent. They set a real limit on dependent stupidity, right? Cause the more aggressive guys, you can remember this from high school, have nothing but contempt for boys who are dependent. Right? It's like, grow up. The boy must believe. You have to go run to the teacher, do you? Right. And that's a perfectly reasonable objection. You know? Can you settle this yourself or do you have to run to the teacher? Well, if you run to the teacher, you're a mama's boy, which is exactly right because you can't handle your own disputes. And so, that rough bullying behavior can go too far and frequently does and the more bully like boys don't do that well as they mature, right? It becomes less and less productive as a strategy as they get older and older, but... I almost feel like the, not the action as much, but the threat of potential physical action is a check that you need. I mean, I remember once being in the car with my girlfriend, somebody cut me off and she decided to flip the guy off and yell at him. And I remember thinking, if he gets out of the car, I'm the one that's gonna get the fight out of you. And they have to have the explanation with her. It's like, I don't flip someone off unless I'm okay with what might potentially happen. Right, right, absolutely. And social media has eliminated that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and I think we don't know exactly what keeps the psychopathic bullies at bay, but one of the things that keeps them at bay is definitely like tough men who will give them a slap. And so, out in the real world, where that's a real thing, the psychopathic narcissistic cowards tend to shut the hell up. Online, zero constraint. And I think this is a real problem because we're producing a virtual world that's overlaid on the actual world, but the rules in the virtual world aren't the same. And that means the virtual world is delusional. And because if you have a representation of the world in your imagination that doesn't correspond to the actual world, then you're delusional. Okay, one of the delusions that saturated the social media, the virtual space, is that you can get away with being a dependent narcissistic psychopath. And the problem with that is that historically, when those people have got the upper hand, everything collapses, because they're the burn it all to the ground sorts of resentful creatures. It's not good that they have free reign on social media. It's really not good. And the virtual world seems to enable, I think virtual worlds enable psychopaths. And that's not good. I feel like the best check for that in the social media world is just open debate and discussion. You gotta let them at least get checked by ideas, but we've seen that get censored so often or shut down. Yeah, well shut down by the same sort of people who scream and yell and have temper tantrums and claim to be compassionate while there being nothing but narcissistic and who can't tolerate. You shouldn't offend anyone. It's like, well, no one about anything ever. Do you have any worries about what you're trying to do with getting silenced along the way? Like, okay, well, maybe YouTube doesn't want us to say this. And maybe do you think about that? Like YouTube has mostly left me alone. They censored talk I did with Helen Joyce on the transgender phenomenon and also one with Robert F. Kennedy, which was shocking to me because he's in the midst of a presidential election. That's right. I couldn't believe YouTube would shut down a discussion with a presidential contender. And that that's not a scandal. I got kicked off Twitter by Joel Roth and his team of absolute bloody narcissistic psychopaths. And so that was annoying. And there's been no shortage of journalists who've attempted to savage my reputation, most of them female, but not always. And with some success, but no long-term success, luckily for me. And that's partly because I didn't apologize. What's the prediction? What do you think is gonna happen with Elon and Twitter? Do you think this is gonna be a great rival we're gonna see? Do you think something's gonna happen? What do you think is gonna unfold with Twitter? Well, Twitter is such a snake pit. Like it isn't obvious to me that it's salvageable. Now, Elon is an extraordinarily intelligent and able person. And so, and I think he's made Twitter better than it was. But, you know, Twitter might be an unplayable game, right? I mean, we don't know. It's a new form of social organization. It has weird, untested rules. Like everybody gets to talk to everybody no matter what. Well, look, part of the reason that you have a house is so that it has walls and it has a door. And the reason you have a door is so that any lunatic on the street can't come in and yell at you. And Twitter is a place where any lunatic can come in off the street and not only yell at you, but yell simultaneously at you to everyone you know. Well, it's not obvious at all that that's a playable game. It might just partly, because it enables. That's such an interesting thought. Yeah. It enables people who have no social power to have social power. Now, generally there's a reason you don't have social power. Like if no one's listening to you, if no one at all is listening to you when you're 30, you're either very, very unlucky and that does happen to people, or there's a reason no one's listening to you. And then you can go on Twitter and a million people can listen to you. And it's probably the case that a million people shouldn't be listening to those people that couldn't get anyone to listen to them. Right? It's not good. It's a, you know, we thought we'd democratize the public square. It's like, well, have we democratized the public square or have we turned it over to the mob? And I would say we've turned it over to the mob. That's a really interesting thought. Yeah. I've never thought of it like that. How do we figure that out? It's never existed in human history. No, well, it's because it just cannibalized itself. We don't have a blueprint. Well, I could easily, there have been online games where that happened, right? Huge multiplayer games that just collapsed because they're, you could say because their constitutional framework wasn't sufficient or you could say because the story they were inhabiting wasn't self-sustaining. And so they just turned into chaos. And there's no reason to assume that Twitter won't do that or Facebook won't do that. Like we have no idea and Twitter's also weird because of the way it started. Had that 140 character limit. Okay, so what would humans be like if they could only speak in 140 character bursts and they had no social hierarchy? Because that's what the experiment is. And well, what happens is, well, I think what happens is it enables the psychopaths. That's what happens. And that you don't want a platform and anonymity does that too. And I've been fulminating against anonymity online for quite a long time because I think you should have the courage of your convictions. I think that the worst in people is brought out by anonymity and the anonymous people say, well, I can't say what I really think because I'd have to suffer the repercussions. It's like, yeah, maybe you're morally obligated to suffer the repercussions of what you say. Like maybe that's part of being a citizen is that you have to take, I know that people can pay a disproportionate price for their opinion. But I would say, if you utter an opinion that you believe to be valid and true and you pay a disproportionate price for it, then that's evidence that your culture has become corrupted in a way that you should do something about. Well, so you shouldn't be able to just hide and get around that somehow. You have to face it. Yeah, see, someone listening right now, you're the perfect person to say this because you have suffered tremendous pressure and consequences for voicing what you believe to be, what I largely agree with, to be true. How have you dealt with that? Because I can't imagine the stress that you've had since day one. Like you went from professor to all over the place and although you've had a tremendous amount of support, I've been to a few of your events and it's all extremely positive. I've never seen a single negative person. No, no, no. Well, most of the negativity is online. Like almost all of it in the virtual world. It's like our experience. No, no. You meet people in person and you get the people that change their lives. How much of it is artificial, I guess? How much of it is artificial, do you think, in terms of boxing? I think that's a good question. I think virtually all of it is artificial. I think that the people who oppose me, so to speak, actively are a tiny, tiny minority. Like maybe one in a hundred, something like that. And they're disproportionately overrepresented online. And the reason I think that is because I just don't ever have any trouble in the actual world. Like sometimes, and I have security people and there's a reason for that, but it's very, very rare. And so, and in terms of paying a price, well, when things first blew up around me in relationship to the first political act I took, I suppose, which was opposing the... Bill's, was it C? Bill's C-16, right, that made it mandatory to use someone's preferred pronouns, right? Compelled speech. Compelled speech, yes. That wasn't pleasant because certainly my university job was immediately threatened. And had I not maneuvered extremely carefully, I would have been fired. You could have lost everything. Well, I would have lost that and my clinical practice was threatened. And at the time too, when all that happened, the Canadian Revenue Agency was also on my back for a mistake they had made. Yeah, so I had the goddamn government IRS equivalent in Canada on my back in quite a major way. They eventually apologized and realized it was a mistake they'd made. It's like, thanks guys. That was six months of bloody hell right when I needed it the least. And my university job was under siege. And my reputation was on the line and my clinical practice was threatened, well, permanently threatened. I mean, I had to close up my clinical practice and I had stopped being a professor fundamentally. And so yeah, that was a lot, no doubt about it. But look, man, maybe there is no way I was gonna continue to be a professor and not say what I thought. Like why would you wanna be a professor and not say what you, the only reason to be a professor is because you can teach people what you believe to be true. It's a fool's game otherwise. Like if you're smart, you can make a lot more money than you can being a professor. Like if it's just a matter of career success. And while it was the same with being a therapist is the only thing you have to offer your clients as a therapist is the truth. And so once that's compromised, the game's over fundamentally and you might as well just admit it. Now I was fortunate, I had three sources of income and two of them were threatened. The third wasn't. You know, and you might say, well, that puts you in a unique position but what I would say about that is no, no, I put myself in that position. You know, like I had dealt with people who had been in trouble a lot in my clinical practice and I saw what you do to make sure that you're standing on firm ground. And one of the things you do is make sure that you're standing on firm ground. So when the university came after me, I could think I knew this from doing negotiations, helping my clients through tricky negotiations. Like the first thing you do, if you're negotiating in a difficult situation is you make sure that the person that opposes you can't take anything away from you that you wouldn't give up. Cause they'll threaten you, I'll take away this. It's like, fuck you. Here it is. Well, then what do they do? You know, if you're willing to give it up, the power that the other party has over you immediately disappears. And you know, you might say in favor of what? An answer is, well, in favor of whatever happens next. You know, the upside is, is that it's been crazily interesting. And I would say this is something I've been trying to teach people to is that why tell the truth? Well, it's a really good long-term strategy. It's the only good long-term strategy. But the other advantage is, the more you tell the truth, the more crazy and interesting things will happen to you. Oh wow. It's dangerous. It is. And it's partly because you have to give things up. Like, you know, if you're talking to someone and you want to impress them, then there's all sorts of places you won't go and things you won't say because you don't want to sacrifice that, right? But, and then maybe you'll impress them to get whatever the hell it is that you want. But then that's what you'll get. If you're fortunate and it works. The problem with that is, well, maybe that's not the best thing you could have got. Maybe the best thing you could have got was whatever would have happened if you would have just said what you thought. And that's, that's a very interesting game to play. It's like, I'll just tell you what I think and we'll see what happens. I love it when it's at a grand accuracy. I love it when it's at a grand accuracy. It's way more interesting. I love it when you say, and what the hell do you know? I've heard you say that so many times and I remind myself that's true. I don't know what I really want. Yeah, well, that's the basis of our genuine humility. It's like, don't be thinking that you got this. Maybe you do, like possibly, and maybe better than you did yesterday, but a better theory is, let's see what happens. And this is also an article of faith, you know? One article of faith is that you should abide by the truth. And then the question is, well, why? If you can get what you want by lying, so you can get out of a responsibility or you can gain something you didn't earn, why not do it? It's a question every child faces. Well, the right answer to that is, well, what the hell do you know about what you want? It's like, maybe you will get what you want, but then you're staking yourself on the claim that you knew what would be best for you. The alternative is to say, no, and I do believe this to be right. Whatever happens to you if you tell the truth is the best thing that could have happened. Doesn't matter how it looks. That's an article of faith. It's like, because maybe you tell the truth to your wife and it's really rough, right? You have a big fight, maybe you're, Christ, you're not getting along for two months and the whole bloody relationship is shaking. You think, well, that was a big mistake. It's like, but then maybe a year later, you think, yeah, that was the best thing that could have possibly happened because things play out over different time scales, you know? And the truth is a long-term game. It's not a short-term game. Speaking of wives, your wife has got to be incredible support for what you do. What was that like when you were going through that and you were going home and you're like, hey, I said this and now I'm getting all this heat and what was that? What's that like at home for you? My family's been like rock solid and I've had some trouble with some of the people I know, but my close friends and my extended family, they've been like 100% behind me right from the beginning. Well, those videos that I first launched against Bill say 16, I'd been putting videos online on YouTube, my lectures and so on, starting to experiment with it. This was back, I started about 2013 when YouTube was just, you know, a new thing and no one knew what the hell it was. And I'd been talking to, I had more and more clients in my clinical practice who were there because they were being bullied by social justice warriors. At one point it was like 25% of my clinical practice. Thought something weird is going on here. And then the university, well, the Bill C 16 came out at the same time the university was imposing these idiot DEI restrictions and trying to educate clinicians and psychologists about psychological realities and everybody was just swallowing it. It was like really starting to grate on me. And I came downstairs, my wife and my son were sitting at the kitchen table. And I said, I've been really thinking about making a video about this new bill and about what's happening at the university. What do you think? And they said, I think my wife said, go ahead, you've been talking about it long enough. She said, I'm sure she said, what could happen? What could happen? That's the worst. But my wife is very adventurous, you know? And which is part of the reason I was attracted to her to begin with is like she's in for an adventure, that woman. And you know, when some absolutely absurd offer comes our way, you know, like we were invited to Israel now, like to go in the next month, to go visit various cultural groups and so forth in Israel. And you know, her attitude was, yes, now I don't think I'm gonna do it because I have to finish a book I'm writing at the moment. But when an adventure presents itself to my wife, who's a very sensible person, her attitude is almost invariably, yes. The only thing that ever interferes with that, I would say, is that the adventures take her away from her grandkids and her kids. And you know, that's something that has to be managed, right? Cause we don't wanna never see our kids or grandkids, but she's behind me and vice versa, you know? We've got each other's backs and we always did when we had kids too. We have a very solid relationship. And it's a playful relationship too. What's the difference between being a father and being a grandfather? Cause now you have grandkids. What's the difference? My mom, when I had my kids, my mom said, you know, I loved my kids, but I love my grandkids more almost. She's like, it's almost like I get to redo this again and I feel so much more wise and it's just so much more joyful. And you know, I get to give them back on the hard times. Yeah, there's always that joke, right? Right, right, right. What's the difference been like for you, you know, being a grandfather versus a father? Well, one of the things that, well, Tammi and I were very sick when our grandkids were little. And so that was rough cause we didn't get to know them as much as we could have. But it is like a chance to revisit the best of having kids again. And so that's, and it's very fun to watch your kids turn into parents too. You know? Well, it's good to see them mature because it is the case that children mature people. It's very hard to become mature without having a child. And I think the reason for that is you're not mature until someone else matters more than you, like unquestioningly, you know, and maybe you've got that with your wife and there might be some other special people in your life that, you know, are more important than you are, but for sure that happens with your kids. If it doesn't, you're a narcissist, obviously. And so it's very good to see, it's good to see my kids put that cap on their maturity and to see my son turn into a very competent father and my daughter too. They've done very good job with their kids. And then like I love being around little kids, I'm really good at playing with them. And so it's fun having my grandkids around because I can torture them and torment them, bounce them around and tease them. And I've always, my dad was very good with little kids. And I think I learned what my mother was as well, but it was, my dad's kind of a rough guy. He's a tough guy, but he has a real soft spot for little kids. And he was really good with little kids. And so I learned to be comfortable with little kids very early on. And I really like having them around. And so it's great. And when I had my own little kids, like I would rather spend time with my family. This is another thing about being tied down. It's like, whenever I had a choice, by the time I was like 30, when we first had our kids, if I had a choice between going to a social event or going to hang out with my kids, it's like, it's no question. They're fun. Why the hell wouldn't you? Well, if you're smart enough not to let them be annoying. You know, well, really. It's like, if you're annoyed by your kids, then stop them. It's not good for them for you to be annoyed with them. They need you. And this is, you see this sort of tension often between mothers and fathers, because fathers are more likely to set limits and boundaries. And that intimidates women, especially if they don't trust men. And the price of that is if your children aren't well-regulated in their behavior, they're annoying. And if they're annoying, then you sort of, you're sort of with them grudgingly. And then they pick that up. It's awful. It's awful. It's way better just to like quit that. You know, go sit on the steps till you're civilized and come back and play, you know? And that's way better. And it's not that hard. You have to put up with some momentary emotional disruption, but it's usually a relief to the kids too. You know, they, kids push you because they want to see where the boundary is. And they want to see where the boundary is. So they're not terrified, right? Cause they don't want to have the whole world in front of them. They want to have this much space that they can master. So you put a limit on and they're like, oh, okay. Got it. You can play inside those walls. Yeah. That's great. How often do you, you and your, I guess your kids and grandkids, how often do you guys get together? Oh, let's see. How often are we getting together now? Well, I'm here, I'm visiting Michaela now and we'll be here for about two months. So I'll get to see my granddaughter, her daughter for much of that time. We already had a very good time this morning. I was throwing her up in the air in the pool as high as I can throw her, but she really likes. My favorite meme that was at the arc was the, who put that one? Oh yeah, yeah. Who was it? Were it Bob Seeson? We were so active. We were so active. It was Warren Farrell. Yeah, he'd be a good guy for you guys to interview. Oh, you have. Yeah, yeah. So that's a funny story. He was on the same plane. We were talking about the event and he hears us and he turns around and he goes, oh, you're going to the arc? You're going to the arc? We were like, Warren? Yeah. He was on our show years ago and we were talking about how, but he's, he has such an important message and he's so soft-spoken. I wish he had a little more authority. Well, he's a good guy to deliver the message though because he has impeccable, leftist, progressive. Yes. He comes from the background of that. Yeah, he does, he does. And so he's a very good person to be talking about what he's talking about because it's hard for the progressive types to shunt him off into a corner as, you know, like a right-wing fashion. Right, he led the filmist movement, right? Yeah. Warren Farrell is not a right-wing fashion style. And he's very, and he's an impressive person too because he wouldn't have got involved with the national organization of women if his temperament didn't tilt him into the sort of progressive camp. But he looked at the data, you know, and that's what put him on the pathway that he's on now. He looked at the facts in a manner that was truly scientific and decided that no, there was something going on that was wrong. And so he's a very effective advocate for men and boys, and that's extremely important. You know, you guys were saying earlier, you know, as the decades have progressed, especially on television, we went from father-to-nose best in My Three Sons where the father was like the, and leave it to beaver where the father was the admirable head of the household to, you know, the absolutely bumbling stupidity of virtually every man on an ad or in a sitcom. And, you know, it's fine to satirize and to poke fun, but in a manner that's contemptuous, that starts to become pathological. And a lot of that shift was, shift in the direction of contempt. And you don't want to be contemptuous of men who are striving to do their best by the family. That's a, that's stupid. That's a big, it's a terrible thing. Do you think this is the result of just, just I guess, terrible narratives? Or do you think there's something a little bit more, I don't know, how you would put it. Do you think there's someone's driving this? Like, we need to get this. We can't underestimate the impact of the birth control pill. Because the birth control pill, the best way to think of the birth control pill is that it's a, it's equivalent to a species altering genetic mutation. It's, it's a major transformation because for the first time in history, women had voluntary control over their reproductive function. And that's just not something that any females had ever managed in the history of life. Like it's a big deal. And so, you know, the daily wire put out that documentary, what is a woman? Think, well, why are we asking that? How preposterous? But the reason we're asking that is because once the birth control pill exists, the question of what is a woman actually becomes the question. It's like, because now a woman before the birth control pill and a woman after, they're not the same creature. And so now the question is, well, what is this new creature? And one answer is, well, they're just the same as men. You know, they can have sex the same way men can. They can pursue careers the same way men can. All the temperamental differences between men and women can vanish because they're just socialized. They're just constructs. They're not real. Women are just men for all intents and purposes. Well, that's, it's possible that that was true, but it isn't true because women differ from men in all sorts of ways. They're more interested in people and less interested in things, right? They differ in temperament. They're more agreeable. And they're higher in negative emotion. They're physically smaller, right? They, there's all sorts of patterns of perception and inclination that make women differ from men. And, but we don't understand them very well. For example, we don't understand. It's like, well, if a woman is free to choose, what will she choose? Does she choose family? Does she choose career? Well, it's only been three generations since the birth control pill hit the streets. It's not surprising we're still sorting this out. Women don't exactly know because they never needed to know. Life just unfolded. And now it's a matter of voluntary choice. And here's a question like, now that you can decide to have children or not, do you decide to have children or do you just not do it? And if you have children, well, how many and when? Well, the answer to that question is no one knows. And so we're stumbling along trying to figure it out. Now, my sense is my observation has been, and I think I just watched. I've worked in female dominated professions my whole life. And so, and by the time I entered the workforce, women were overrepresented in my field of endeavor. So there was no male domination of psychology. Like that's just never been a thing. And so I've watched women. And my observation has been it's a rare woman who doesn't have relationship and family at the center of her attentional focus by the time she's 30 and in an increasingly insistent manner. And that it doesn't matter how stellar their career. And I can give you a good example of this. So I saw this in academia, you know, but the place I saw it most clearly, I spent 10 years working as a consultant to law firms in Toronto. So our deal was we went out to the big law firms and Canada, Toronto has Bay Street, which is the Canadian equivalent of Wall Street. And it's where the biggest law firms in Canada sit. And Canada has a big financial economy, financial services economy. And so the lawyers in Toronto compete at the same level as some of the lawyers in New York and Chicago, let's say. So it's a high end enterprise. Now, great lawyers are rare because to be a great lawyer, you have to be a master of the details, but you have to be able to go out and sell. So those are called those rain makers and that's how they're known in the high end firms. And if you have a rain maker, you wanna keep them because they make you a fortune. They go out and drum up business plus they can do the legal work. Most lawyers can do the legal work. A small subset of them who can do the legal work can sell. And those are like those people are like hyper valuable. And so if a law firm has someone like that, they do everything they can to keep them. Okay, and so half of them are women. Well, so what happens? Well, what happens is that the big law firms lose all their women around between 28 and 32, all of them because the women decide. So if you're at the top of your game as a lawyer, you're gonna be working like working 60 hours a week. And anybody at the top end of their profession, they're not working 40 hours. They're working like 60 to 80 hours. And they're working too. It isn't like I'm at work. It's like every, I had a woman who, one of my clients, she was a consultant for Deloitte. She bought a microwave so she could shave 15 seconds off the time it took her to heat up her coffee in the morning. Like that's how attentive she was to the details of her schedule. She had three kids and a husband and she was managing that plus this incredibly intense career. All the women bailed out between 28 and 32. And the reason for that was they kept climbing the corporate hierarchy till they got to be full partners at these big firms. And then they were working like these 60 to 80 hour weeks. And they were looking around thinking, why am I doing this? Now men will do it partly because status for men and socioeconomic status, it's a huge part of the game. There's nothing that makes a man more attractive to women than productive generosity, like socioeconomic status. It is the biggest predictor of male attractiveness by a huge margin. It's correlated at zero with female attractiveness. Like men don't care and women care about almost nothing else. That's not that cut and dried, but it's close. So men have this additional motivational driver to be hyper competitive. But the women, they hit 30 and they think, why in the world am I working 80 hours a week? They're often married to men who make plenty of money. So the money doesn't matter, not really. And so they all quit. And they go find a nine to five job or even a part-time job. And then they wanna pursue family and children. And why wouldn't they? Because like who said that career is the defining goal of your life, a corporate career. And it's so weird that it's the bloody progressives that push this. It's like, okay guys, I thought you thought capitalism was like a power mad, oppressive endeavor. And yet you're pushing this. Yeah, it's like, but women should do nothing but have a career. Really, that's your theory. Like I don't get, I don't understand that at all. But I also don't think that it doesn't work out for women. It just, that isn't how the world lays itself out. Not at all. And the sad part about it is, and I've watched this unfold in my own family. My wife's, they, basically the, my mother-in-law is like the matriarch of the family. She married a terrible man, alcoholic, abusive. And so, and she's done an incredible job of keeping everyone together. But part of their story or narrative of these girls all coming up is you don't need a man. You can do this yourself. And they saw that firsthand how strong their mother was. And so, you know, and that was an attractive quality that I saw in my wife that she was independent. She was strong, but it was such a strong narrative that you see even the nieces that grew up in that. And now I'm watching them very, very successful. They have their master's degree and they're making $200,000 a year, but they're landing that 30, 32 years old now. And just starting to play the dating series game. And then there's like this, and there is a short window. It's like, it's like- The pool is very small. Well, here's what happens to women in that situation. It's awful, it's awful. First of all, the number of men they'll find accessible, acceptable drops to virtually zero. Because you need, here's what you need. You're 30, you're a 30 year old woman. Let's say you're attractive and you're smart and you're career oriented and you're making lots of money. Okay, so what sort of man are you after? Well, you're after a man who's likely a little older than you, say 34, who isn't already in a permanent relationship, which is like, well, why is that? And who is that? Cause that guy's gonna get snapped up. Who's just as educated as you, or more so, who's making just as much money as you, or more so. It's like, well, there aren't any guys like that. There's two guys. Yeah, that's right. There's two guys. Or they got Peter Pan syndrome, right? Yeah, right. But it's worse than that because the man, let's say you are that 32 year old man. Okay, now you've got your choice. You've got 30 year old woman who's like spectacularly attractive and smart and independent and all that, but she's 30. And you've got 25 year old woman who's the same except she's 25. Well, all the tilt is gonna be towards the 25 year old, not least, especially if you're not ready to adopt responsibility because the 25 year old woman gives you a seven year, what would you call it? It's a seven year span of flexibility. Whereas the 30 year old woman, it's gonna be you date her, you marry her, you have a child like now, right? Well, no, that's not gonna work. It's not gonna work. Partly you have to ask, well, why would the guys do that? Because they could go for the 25 year old, which they will. And also the 25 year old's an easier target, so to speak, not as intimidating. A lot of the women that I worked with, they never even got asked out because they were so intimidating. The guys would look at them and think, well, I don't have a chance with her. And even if that wasn't true, that's what they thought. Very triggering for some people to hear this, but you're literally like, this is just how it is. There's no doubt about it. I watched this for 10 years. And you know, the women- Everybody knows this, women listening know this. They know this, they don't want a data man that makes less, you typically makes less of them is lower status, less education. They want someone above them, typically. Oh, yes. And that's cross-culturally the case. Yes. Well, and no wonder, like why, if you're a high resource woman, why wouldn't you look for a higher resource man? Like that's a better deal. So of course you do that. And it's partly because why, you know, gold diggers. It's like, no, the woman's gonna put herself in a vulnerable position by having kids. So she's gonna be looking for someone who can tolerate the fact that she's gonna be in a vulnerable position. So obviously she's gonna look for someone who can bring more to the table than she can. Obviously. Right. So yeah, it's so pathetic. We're so dumb and it's so hard on young women too. And I mean, they do have a difficult needle to thread because if you're gonna be educated as a woman and have a family and kids, you really have to get your act together fast in about an eight year span of time. And that's not that long. You know, the other thing people don't really understand is that, you know, let's say you're young and attractive and you think, well, I'll eventually find a partner. It's like you're probably only going to really be able to try out about five people in your life, right? Because imagine it takes a year to get to know someone. You know, maybe it's six months, but six months and then engaged. That's pretty fast, especially if you didn't know the person at all. So let's say a year. Well, how many people are going to come along at the right time who check off all your boxes exactly when you need it over the eight year period? You'll be lucky if you. That's right. You'll be lucky if you have five. And if the relationship is intimate, you're gonna be pretty damn battered after the fourth one if they shattered. So you don't have that many chances to find the right person in your life. And this is why women are just naturally more choosy. They have to be, they should be. Of course they should. Absolutely. This goes back to what your original point too. It's just sad that we don't celebrate the family unit. Motherhood, fatherhood, you know, the discipline around it and what that means. Well, the great advantages of it, like I had a great career, really. Like I got my first academic job was at Harvard. And that's like, that's impossible, right? That's like, that's the NBA. It was ridiculous that that happened. And so when I went there and Harvard was just doing fine in the 1990s, it was a great place to be. So I had a stellar career and I had excellent graduate students and I was popular with my undergraduates. It was fun. And still the best part of my life was my wife and my little kids. Oh, that's great. You know, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I loved my job, but when I came home and I had my little kids around and my wife, that was just, that was just fine. More men need to communicate that. You know, we talk about our kids on the show and family life. And we get so many comments from young men. I mean, we're mainly a fitness and health podcast, but we get so many comments from young men who say, God, listening to you guys makes me, I didn't want to have kids. No, I do. Yeah. Well, think about it this way. You're going to have these little kids. You're going to know them better than you knew anybody in your life. That's open to you. Okay. Now in these little kids, you're going to see your relatives because they're related to you. So you're going to see echoes of your father or your echoes of your mother, your sister, your brother. You have the opportunity to have with that person the best relationship with anyone you've ever had in your life. Like, and that's what that person wants more than anything else. That's what you're being offered. Amazing. Yeah. So why would you, plus little kids, if they're reasonably well behaved are ridiculously entertaining. They're fun, you know? And they're clowny and comical and playful and they really want your attention and they want to be around you. It's like, you got a problem with that? What's the problem you've got with that? No, nobody said, the point I'm making is that's not communicated enough. That's for sure. Because when you experience it, like the joy, you know, I just recently talked about this. I work out regularly in the morning and I just changed my schedule so I could wake up earlier, work out in the garage with my wife. We get interrupted by the little ones, try to keep them asleep. How old are your kids? So I have four kids. I have an 18 or 14 and then I have a big gap. I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old. Right. So you got to do it twice. Yeah, I did. So the little ones, you know, they often will interrupt us. We can't play the music loud in the garage. I don't have the same hardcore or whatever when I'm doing my thing or like I normally would. But then I get to have breakfast with the kids. Sometimes they interrupt us. They come in and watch us or I play with them in between sets. And then every day now when I go off to work, you know, they greet me at the door. The joy that I get from that is so superior to the best workouts or hitting the new weight or, you know, the focus that I used to, I would trade that, you know, any day of the week. But it's not communicated enough, you know? Jordan, how would you characterize the type of parent we need to be in like say, zero to four, four to eight, eight to 12 and then like 18 and beyond? Like what's the most important role we play? Because I know that as they change, almost our role changes too. Well, there's no difference between attention and love. So pay attention, listen, watch. I would say, and also pay attention to when you're happy to be around your kids and when you're not. Like one of the chapters in my first book was don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. So I take that seriously. If your kids are annoying you, go talk to your wife and these kids are bugging me. And maybe she's gonna say, well, that's because you're, you know, you're a selfish tyrant. Okay, well sort that out because maybe that is why. But maybe it's not. Maybe it's because they're annoying. And so maybe your wife says, yeah, they're kind of bugging me too. It's like, okay, let's put a stop to it so that the kids are delightful to be around. And you know, you think, well, you're interfering with the flowering of your child's freedom. It's like, no, you're not. You're helping guide them down a path that makes everyone in the world want to be around them. There's nothing you can do for your child that's better. That's your job. Your job is to make your child, is to encourage your child to be maximally socially attractive and not in the narcissistic self. That doesn't work anyways. Like in, I'm a great teammate sort of way, right? Or I'm a great team captain, the kind of kid that everyone wants to play with and that people will listen to, the kind of kid that's honest and that helps his fellow players develop. And that's a wonderful thing to see in your son or daughter too when that starts to flourish. And so it's like, pay attention to your kids. Play with your kids. And then don't let them... The rule of thumb is something like this. Don't let them do anything that brings shame to them. You know, we used to take our little kids to restaurants when they were very little. Only for about 45 minutes because when they're under three, that's about what they can tolerate. But the rule was like, you sit there and behave for 45 minutes, you know? You eat what's in front of you and you act like a civilized human being. And the consequence of that, now and then I used to have to take the kids. I know I used to stand out with my daughter in the winter in Boston. She'd misbehave in the restaurant. We'd go outside. It's like, you know, 10 below. It's like, what are we doing out here, dad? It's like, well, we're standing here until you decide whether you want to be out here in the cold or in the restaurants. Like, take your choice. I'll stand here until mom and Julian are done eating or we can go in there and have a good time. Decide. She'd stand there for like a minute or two and then she'd think, okay, we can go inside now and then she'd behave. Okay, so the disciplinary routine had to be imposed, but then we'd have a fine time and we weren't annoyed at our kids because we got to go out now and then. But the upshot of that was almost inevitably at the end of meals, there would be other families come over, often older people and give the kids a pat on the head and compliment them. And do you think how nice that is for the kids because they go out and all they get from other people is positive feedback. And so imagine you want to set up your kids so that the way they present themselves to the world does nothing but invite positive feedback. And you do that by certainly by letting them know when they're being annoying. It's like, you're not being funny. That's not funny. That's not amusing. That's annoying. Sort yourself out. And the kids, they demand that from you as they want to know the rules. That's why they'll desperately torture you even. They need to know the rules because they're trying to figure out how to adapt to the social world. And it's your job to encourage them to be the best at that that they can possibly be. And then you just prevent like a myriad of problems because once your kids, if your kids start to have good friends at four, they're set fundamentally. Because they're in the social world then and it just starts to expand. Then you're there as a resource and their kids can come over to your house and play and you can regulate that. We had like, our kids came over to our house a lot when they were teenagers. My wife was very good about that because the kids used to come over when they were teenagers and they were afraid of me to begin with. But after they'd been there like four times, they were afraid of Tammy, which I thought was so funny because her attitude was very straightforward. It was like, you're really welcome here. But if you do something dumb and we never have to see you again, that's really not going to be a problem. And then what happened was that they didn't do dumb things. You know, they did, you have to have some realm of tolerance for noise and stupidity. But the limit you put, the limit you place should be your limit. It's like, I don't find it amusing to have these people here anymore. Then it's gone too far. You have a right to, no, you have a responsibility to put down those limits. And then you check it with your wife because maybe you're having a bad day and you're a crabby bastard and you're being mean and you should find out if that's the case, but maybe not. Maybe it's just time that the stop sign goes up. This is why I thought your talk at Dave Rancho was so important because I think so many people underestimate that zero to four because I think parents a lot of times think, oh, they can't really articulate how they feel. They can't really communicate very much. They don't realize what they're downloading and the fact that they're paying attention, man. And I believe even more so because they can articulate, they are observing and you are building that child that right out the gates. And so the way you communicate to your spouse, the tone that you use in the house, the whether you decide to just let things go or discipline. Whether or not you're watching them while they're on their own versus on your phone. All that stuff. And I just think we've gotten away from, away from how important that is. And I think that we've found these tools with iPads and TV and streaming everything that to be these babysitters and they're missing out on this unbelievably important time. And I think we're seeing that manifest in these teenagers now that got that scary. Jordan, I want to respect your time. One more question. Sure. That's okay. You know, people that they just start learning about your watch and you seem very serious and you know, and how you communicate but you seem to have this real appreciation for comedy. You see, like with comedians in particular. And so you obviously have a really strong sense of humor appreciation. Tell, talk about that a little bit because I've noticed, I mean, you've been on, I mean, obviously Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn and yeah. And you talked about how you like comedy. Yeah, what is it about comedy that you like so much? Or why is it so important? Play. Okay. You know, I was fortunate a lot in the town I grew up in, working class town, the real pathway to status for boys was humor. More so than sports even. At least I would say Canada isn't as sports obsessed as the US with the possible exception of hockey but our competition was for humor always. Like in class, we're always trying to make each other laugh when we were socializing. It was always like the guy who could make everybody laugh was at the top of the heap. And I had three friends and my junior high friends, they all dropped out of school by the time they were in about grade 10. They're a pretty funny bunch, but pretty rough humor. The guys that I became friends with in high school were from this little tiny place even smaller than the town I grew up in called Bear Canyon which had literally been settled in 1937. It was at the farthest end of the Northern Prairie. And it was pretty isolated community and they had just learned to amuse themselves and they're incredibly funny. I went touring with two of them last year and we had a blast of a time, incredibly funny. And then the people I went to college with was the same thing. It was all competitive humor. And then my friends, my kids, what did Tammy say about Michaela? About two years ago, she said, you know, I think everything that Michaela says is a joke, so yeah, Tam, that's right. Everything Michaela says is a joke. And Julian was like that too. And so, and I think part of that is, is that there isn't anything more important than play. Fundamentally, I think play is the antithesis of power. I think what men can really bring into a child's life is that sense of play. That, you know, women are concerned with care and fair enough, you know, but men can be concerned with play and play is a form of care. It's a high form of care. And that's another thing that the young men who are listening might think about too, is you can play with your kids. Like that's fun. It's not like burdensome responsibility. If it's burdensome responsibility, you're not doing it right. You know, there's obviously, you have to pay a price to have little kids because you have to take care of them, but have to, that's the wrong way of thinking about it. You get to. You have a pet for Christ's sake. Why do you have a pet? Because you want to take care of something. You know, it's a primal need. And it's way more entertaining than like some idiot bout of hedonistic self-satisfaction. They're not even in the same universe. It's way more, it's way more rewarding. Is there a connection of humor and intelligence? I find some of my smartest friends have some of the darkest humor. Is there, have they proven a connection there? Well, smarter people by and large can be funnier because they're just faster and sharper, you know? And I think what really distinguishes comedians though is their capacity to pay attention, they're watching. Because you got to time, you got to time your damn joke, right? And you can say something like super mean and vicious. If you say it in exactly the right tone at exactly the right time, it's like hilarious. It's hilarious. You know, and so that is that capacity to pay attention. I think that's why so many of them make effective podcasters. They're very good at paying attention. And comedians also have a commitment to the truth because people either laugh or they don't. It's really cut and dried. And a lot of what comedians do is tell truths that other people won't say. Social commentary. They say the unspoken, everyone laughs like, yeah, I caught that too, but I... Get away with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a little humor and a lot of stuff. Yeah, definitely, definitely. So good. Well, excellent. Jordan's been an absolute pleasure. Well, thank you. Thank you very much for the invitation. I hope we can do this in a time at some point. We'll come to you, we don't care. Yeah, well, it turns out I'll probably be coming down here, you know, now and then, so. All right, good deal. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you. Good to meet you guys.