Jordan Peterson MOTIVATION | Success, Money, Inspiration, Lectures & Self-Discipline

Key Takeaways

don't make a plan that is what you should do make a plan that outlines a future so that you can sit back and say look if I had that future then all the horrible things that are going to happen to me are going to be worthwhile that's what you want do you want to think this game is worth playing despite its tragedy that's what you've got in life enough meaning to serve as an antidote to tragedy and then you generate a strategy the other thing you should do if you're not very industrious is discipline yourself eat three times a day at regular meal times that's a good thing to practice because that starts to put some stability into your life get up at the same time I would highly recommend all those young people out there who are listening you want to get a jump on life get the hell out of bed in the morning as I've got older I've got up earlier and earlier now that's partly because you don't need as much sleep but it's also partly because I've got more and more discipline get up early in the morning and get your things done learn to get up at six in the morning and you'll be one deadly creature especially if you can get to work you'll have half your damn day done and so that's a massive massive Advantage hey it's Evan Carmichael and this channel was created to help you overcome the number one challenge that is holding you back a lack of belief in yourself you watch these videos because you know there's something more inside you too you've got Michael Jordan level genius at something so today let's live your best belief life and get some incredible motivation from the one and only Jordan Peterson look Will Ferrell Warren Farrell not the comedian Warren Farrell the author he outlined data in why men earn more which is a book I would recommend by the way showing that if you work 13 longer hours you make 40 percent more money it's non-linear so you think why is that well imagine you had 10 employees and one of them Works an extra 10 percent it's not much well how often is that person going to be promoted assuming you have a clue as a boss it's like you're going to look at the 10 people and you're going to think oh that guy's always here like 45 minutes early it's like why don't we give him the promotion obviously right so these tie these small edges that you can manage like that work an extra 10 or extra 13 percent have non-proportional payoffs that's part of the Pareto distribution so get get your sleep cycle organized so you get up in the morning learn how to do it no excuses I'm too tired in the morning I don't like mornings who cares that's not relevant it's like discipline yourself so you can manage it schedule your meals because that's a good disciplinary routine and then learn to use a calendar like Google Calendar most of you many of you out there do not use a calendar okay a calendar is not a prison and it's not a tyrant not if you use it properly a calendar keeps anxiety at Bay it makes sure that you do what you need to do which is important because otherwise you fall behind but if you use it properly though it's also helps you plan what you want to do so I could say well lay out your damn calendar and design the days you would like to have that's what your calendars have is for so you can put in all sorts of things in there you want to do and that would be good for you and that's a really good a really good way to start being more industrious make a plan you need a plan for three years you need a plan for the next year you need to plan for the next six months you need to plan for the next three months you need a plan for the week you need a plan for the day you need a plan for the hour all of that all of that I make lists constantly of what I have to do and they're like daily weekly monthly yearly right now I can't look out more than about six months you know because my life is too complicated and chaotic but but you need a vision of who you could be what character you could have three to five years out you can't go much farther than that because life is too unpredictable I think to make Vision that's longer term than that subject to there's too much chance associated with it to spend a lot of time on maybe you can stretch it to five years and in rare cases you can have a 10-year goal but it has to be pretty low resolution but you want plans at all those levels of resolution you want to write the things down and what because what are you going to do you're going to stumble around and get get what you need you're going to stumble around and be useful to other people and it's useful to be useful to other people you know they want to work with you then they want to do things with you they want to have you around they trust you they open up opportunities for you and if you stumble around like you're blind you're not going to get anywhere and then you're going to suffer and then you're going to be bitter and then you're going to be cruel so that's a bit that's hell that's a bad outcome so unless you want that don't aim for it and or or aim for the opposite because that's how you get out of it you should treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping and the first question is well why don't you and the answer is well there's a lot wrong with you you know and it's hard to exercise enough love and Care in a deep and non-naive way to care properly for something like that it's an encouragement to assume to act out the proposition that even if life is as difficult as it seems to be and if you're as vulnerable and weak in a fundamental sense as you definitely are and characterized by this terrible propensity for the infliction of voluntary suffering on yourself and others and that destructive tendency that there's still something within you that's so remarkable and so aligned with with order and being in the proper manner that you can climb above that let's say like Abel and that you can make the proper sacrifices and that you can set yourself right and you can set your family right and you can set the world right and that the mere possibility that that might occur that that might be within the realm of potential means that you have a moral obligation to exercise the responsibility to take care of yourself as if you're something that matters and that if you did that properly it might turn out that what you did would matter that it would matter to you that it would be meaningful in the way that things that matter are meaningful and that it would matter to everyone around you so I would say well without Free Speech there's no true thought and then you might say well who the hell cares whether or not we think and I think the answer to that is fairly straightforward I mean you might think it's so obvious that it doesn't need explanation but there are very few things that are so obvious they don't need explanation so the reason you think is so that the world doesn't smack you as hard as it might fundamentally you know and I really mean this technically because the way that people evolve the capacity to thought for thought was that the prefrontal cortex which mediates a lot of of voluntary linguistic ability actually emerged over the course of evolutionary history out of the motor cortex and so that's a very interesting thing to understand because it means that you know animals basically think by moving and the problem with that is if you think by moving and you make the wrong move then you're dead whereas what human beings can do is they can generate fictional avatars of themselves in fictional worlds and they can run the avatars as simulations and the ones that get killed they don't Express in behavior and I mean you could do that with words too although people you know originally would have done it mostly with images they do the same thing with drama and so the reason that you think and I think it was George was it Alfred North Whitehead that said this I think but I'm not absolutely sure the reason you think is so that your thoughts can die instead of you and that's a Brilliance it's a brilliant brilliant phrase and and absolutely the case so if you think properly then you kill off the ideas that if you acted out would kill you or at least cause you suffering or perhaps cause suffering to the people around you and since it's more or less obvious a priori that suffering is worse than not suffering under most circumstances it seems reasonable to act in a manner that will minimize it to the degree that that's possible and so you need Clarity of thought because that helps guide you through a world that's enshrouded in fog and full of sharp objects and if you don't want to stumble into them and impale yourself then you should have sharp vision and sharp capacity to communicate you know that's one of the things I tell students when I'm trying to teach them to right because they no one ever tells them why they should learn to write it's like you learn to write so you can think and you learn to think so that the world doesn't treat you any more harshly than it absolutely has to and that's no joke you know and if you if you're a person who's been around a bit you see very rapidly that people who sharpen their arguments properly and can articulate their position and defend it are always always the people who are most successful and most compelling and that and that change the way structures function and and that also help things continue in the proper path when they're running down the proper path it's no joke to be articulate and to be able to think there isn't anything that's more powerful than that and that's a good segue into the second or the third part of what I wanted to talk to you about see since I made those videos uh I've become I guess the word is popular on yeah well in many ways by about November by the end of November last year there were more than 200 newspaper articles about the consequences of the videos that I'd produced and I and those were like in press printed articles I'm not talking about anything that happened on YouTube and YouTube is a very strange phenomenon that let me tell you it's a far more powerful than you think so just as an aside I was on a program last week hosted by a guy named Joe Rogan I don't know how many of you know who Joe Rogan is Joe Rogan gets 1.2 billion downloads of his podcasts a year you just think about that like that's absolutely unparalleled and everybody under 30 is getting their news from either Facebook or from YouTube and the whole conventional media sources their debt is they're so dead you can hardly believe it so YouTube and one of the reasons I'm bringing it up is because YouTube is the first platform that's produced for people the capacity to make the spoken word as far-reaching and permanent as the written word right that's a complete cultural revolution it's the first time it's ever happened I mean it wouldn't have to be YouTube it just turns out that that's the platform that got there first but it's a big deal and anyways um the re the reason that that that my that I became popular I think was partly because of the of the political philosophical videos that I made but then when people came to my website to watch them they stayed generally speaking to watch the lectures that I had been posting on there since 2013. and uh those were derived from work I did on a book called maps of meaning which I published in 1999 and you see what I was trying to do with that book was to sort something out that was very complex and that was when I was growing up and the cold war was raging I I couldn't understand precisely why we had divided into two armed camps around our respective ideological positions either why those ideological positions were so important that people would risk the destruction of the world to protect them let's say or why it was those two particular ideologies or whether or not this was just a difference of opinion right which would be that would be a more post-modern view is there's multiple ways that you can organize Societies in the west we happen to organize our society one way but that's one of a plethora of potential ways of organizing society and let's say the Communists had decided to organize their society another way and human beings are infinitely malleable and so you know the social structures that we occupy are arbitrary in some sense and matter of opinion and maybe Collective opinion but nonetheless still a matter of opinion and I thought well is it the case that the values that we hold to be true in the west are merely based upon opinion and so I started to investigate that and and the conclusion that I came to as a consequence of hitting the question from multiple different perspectives was that that was not a reasonable way of formulating of of of interpreting the evidence and so I looked at neuros evidence from neuropsychology and Neuroscience mostly mostly uh based at least in part on the work of someone named Jeffrey gray it was a very good psychologist very interested in anxiety I looked at General behavioral psychology looked at literature and I looked at mythology and I could see a pattern emerging across all of those which I think is a nice way of determining whether or not something exists like it's one thing to see a pattern in one set of data but if you can see the same pattern in another set that's quite historically distinct from the first and then see the same pattern in another set and then another set then the probability that that's a spurious pattern starts to decrease quite radically pick something aim at it as you move toward it you'll get wiser then maybe your aim will change that's okay but at least it'll change in an informed way it's like discipline yourself in one dimension see what happens well that's exciting and I think that's something that's open for everyone you can do that I shouldn't say that because I don't believe that I think you can find yourself in situation that's so dire that you don't there's no escape from it but that doesn't matter because this still this is the hero myth might not be the best we have might not always work but it's still the best we have and the fact that it might not work doesn't mean we should throw it away it's still the best we have I mean everyone dies and so we fail in some sense the fact that a symphony ends doesn't mean that it wasn't worth listening to you look where you think it's important to look so I'll say that again you look where you think it's important to look and that means that while a hierarchy of importance is no different than a hierarchy of value they're the same thing a hierarchy of priority is the same as a hierarchy of value and a hierarchy of priority and a hierarchy of value and an ethic are all the same thing right because you're going to look at what you believe to be of cardinal importance otherwise you look well if you're talking to someone and you look at their feet that's not going to be going very well right first of all they're not going to be very impressed with you because they actually want you to look at their eyes and that's because we communicate value with our eyes and we do that directly our eyes have even involved to do that our eyes have whites around the iris so that you can see where people Point them because it's that important to know what people think is important we see the world through a structure of value and I think that a huge part of that structure of value is actually derived from the entire set of texts entire set of texts and they're into relationship that have the biblical Corpus at their base and so it seems to me that you I think you can make a pretty damn strong case maybe on scientific grounds that you can't see the world except through the lens of the Bible like literally you actually can't see it now if it's not the Bible it might be some other Corpus of texts but it might be it isn't and if it was well is it going to be a corpus of text that we share because if it isn't then we can't share our perceptions and our values and if we can't share those then we fight those are the options right we either stabilize our hierarchies of value in some way that we agree upon mutually or we fight that's or we're unbelievably chaotic and confused and that'll just produce fighting in any case and so we have this structure of texts built from the bottom up it's predicated on the biblical narratives and the texts exist in relationship to those underlying narratives and derive a fair bit of their meaning from the meaning of the underlying narratives and and vice versa you know um and so then the biblical is it possible that biblical truth is the sort of truth that is the precondition for truth right because you think well it's religious people make the claim people of the Bible make the claim the Bible is true well there's all sorts of different kinds of truth that's that's an interesting claim but it's not very elaborated it's it's insufficient um and you know often what happens to Christians when they debate skilled atheists like Richard Dawkins is they treat the Bible like it's a scientific theory and darkness just mops the floor with them because it's actually not a scientific theory compared to scientific theories and so as soon as you go there well it's like a scientific theory it's like no it's not it's not and so does that mean it's not true well it means that if the only thing you think is true is a scientific theory but I don't think that you can practice science except within an ethical framework that's not in itself science and so it's possible that there is a deeper truth than the scientific truth which is the ethic that has to be their a priority before you can even begin to do science we should make much more of an effort to ensure that kids are unbelievably proficient readers and a lot of that is going to involve early automatization of letter and phoneme and syllable and word recognition so because what happens is when you teach a child to read first of all you teach them the alphabet and the sounds and we have an alphabetic language thank God because it makes things much simpler and so you teach them the letters and then the two letter combinations and then the three letter combinations then they can sound out syllables and then they get words but it isn't until you can read phrases automatically at a glance that you can read for content and pleasure and so a lot of kids get stuck especially if they don't come from particularly literate homes where where all of this is sort of taught you know maybe starting at you know 12 months when they're first dragging a book around and and becoming familiar with the book as an object right before they even learn to read you got to get kids through that automatization phase and that requires intense Mass practice and that's not that intrinsically interesting right but if you can get them to the point where they can read for Content well then it starts to become interesting just as interesting let's say as going to a movie or perhaps playing a video game and so that has to be made an absolute priority and and the far if the faculties of Education were doing their job they would have produced technology to solve that problem for virtually every child because it is only a matter of practice smarter kids will learn faster but with enough practice pretty much everybody is going to get there so and then there's the marketing issue it's like well why should you read well do you want to be stupid you want to be stupid what happens when you're stupid you walk into walls because you don't see them and if someone comes along who's more educated than you more literate and canier they'll just you'll lose man you'll lose and you'll lose too because you can't think properly so you won't aim at the right things and you won't be informed by the great individuals of the past and you need that we're historical creatures this isn't optional so part of it has to be marketing for lack of a better word it's not really that it's an explanation why be literate because it makes you it helps you become who you could be helps you move out into the world and have your Great Adventure and to bring people along God only knows what you can do if you've got your words lined up properly and young men would listen to that if someone who knew what they were talking about was telling them that as you found out if you've explicitly formulated a set of goals and you're pursuing them then you've adopted the responsibility to act in a certain manner to make those goals realize themselves that's that's responsibility that you've adopted rather than responsibility that's been imposed on you assuming that you've thought through the goals and you find your spirit in harmony with those goals you can consult your resentment I think that's a very useful step if you find yourself angry and bitter about the things that you are responsible for doing then that's an indication that you might be operating under some unhealthy compulsion that you're rebelling and that's the reason for the resentment against the insistence that you act in a certain way although it's also possible that you're just immature and that you're rebelling against the discipline that's necessary to attain the goals that you genuinely do want to attain and that are valid and that you are what actively engaged in constructed so you have to get that straight and some of that's a consequence of thought and again some of that's a consequence of of discussion with other people with whom you're intimate enough to have a conversation like that and perhaps they have conversations about similar things with you if you're fortunate at the end of God's creation describing how order emerges from chaos or being from potential there's this strange line which is probably the most important line that's ever been written in our culture at the basis of our culture and that is that men and women are made in the image of God and what does that mean well if God is that which confronts potential with truth and courage and makes what's good out of potential that seems to indicate that we have the same faculty like on a smaller scale we're not omniscient but we're not bloody well nothing you know our our conscious is integrally tied into the structure of being in some manner we don't understand and it certainly is the case that we take what isn't and turn it is into what is that's something man that's that's quite the trick we've been able to manage and so we're made in that image and so what are we supposed to do well that's what we're supposed to do we're supposed to type our letters and make our phrases and construct our sentences and build our paragraphs and put our chapters together and make our books and communicate to people and straighten out the damn culture and constrain the malevolence and ignorance that besides each of us and push nature back and extend ourselves out into the unknown and confront the potential that's there in the illimitable quantities and make the world better than it could be otherwise to Move It Away From Hell which and it can certainly become that and toward heaven to the degree that we can manage that and that is a good enough goal that's the thing you need something you know because your life is tough It's hard you need something that you know you need something to get out of bed for and fight for and that's something right to fight let's say against hell and for heaven that's something to fight for is especially and you know if you if you don't if you want to be convinced about this like read a little bit about hell read the gulag archipelago or read ordinary men or read the rape of Nan King or read about what happened in Nazi Germany during Auschwitz and all the catastrophes of the 20th century and see if you believe in hell and see if you think well maybe not having that happen anymore would be a good idea and then think about maybe that's something you could contribute to and then it wouldn't have to happen anymore and that would be a good thing and God only knows what great things we could manage under such conditions we're becoming incredibly technologically powerful and what would it be if we became what would it be like if we became equally wise well that would really be something God only knows what we could manage in the next 20 years or the next hundred years you know we're running at 40 percent most of us you know because we're half in and half out and it's not surprising because life is difficult it's like well what if you were 90 in or 95 in or or all in because you're all in anyways right it's a it's a life and death game no one gets out of this everyone dies you might as well commit yourself and you might as well commit yourself to the highest good that you can attain because why not it'll imbue your life with meaning it's hard the responsibility is there but all the meanings in the responsibility and that'll make your life better it'll make your family's life better and should make your culture better maybe it make the world better it's like that'll justify your damn miserable existence at three o'clock in the morning when you're wondering what the hell you're doing here and that's a good thing because there's going to be days when you're aching and tired and sore and there's people in your family that are sick and you're cynical and bitter and you need a reason to get up and you think yeah well a little more heaven and a little less hell maybe I can pull that off today and tomorrow and next week and that's worth struggling forward for my rule too is treat yourself as if you're someone responsible for helping and it's sort of predicated on the idea that regardless of your inadequacies and your malevolence which you know I'm sure you have many inadequacies and no shortage of malevolence just like everyone else regardless of that you have a moral obligation so that would be a responsibility to assume that despite all evidence that there's actually something of intrinsic worth about you and that as a consequence your duty bound to treat yourself like that is true and then it turns out that if you do that well then your life gets better and and I don't mean happier exactly although I would say it gets happier I mean it gets richer and more meaningful and deeper and and more worthwhile and and you become more educated and you become wiser and and and you treat yourself with more respect and you're a better model for other people and you're a better father or a better sister or a better mother whatever it happens to be it's and you're less ridden by that guilt that's that gnaws at you and shame that's there otherwise saying you're not what you could be you're not what you could be and that's a hell of a voice to get rid of and it's certainly not one that's easy to ignore so that's a pretty good that that idea that there's something Divine let's say that resides within you of ultimate worth um even as a philosophical statement or a psychological statement rather than a metaphysical statement it seems to be a precondition for establishing properly harmonious relationships with yourself and that's that's man that's worth thinking about a lot you know that you have because you think you couldn't think that in some sense you just own yourself you know because people do kind of make that claim especially when they're trying to justify for example their right to Suicide that you know it's it's your life it's your body your yours to do what you will with and if that was true well then it would seem to me that life would be a lot more straightforward because you would just tell yourself things that you would instantly obey and believe so first of all you'd tell yourself all the things that you were going to do and then you just run off and do them which you don't obviously because it's much more difficult at that and then you'd also say well enough of the guilt and the shame and the negative emotion and the disillusionment and the vengefulness and all those things that make life hard especially the self-recrimination it's like what the hell do we need that for and if we're our masters of Our Own Destiny and owners of our own faith then why can't we just command to ourselves that that be dispensed with and like that doesn't work I've never seen anybody able to do that so I mean you can fool yourself for very brief periods of time into thinking that that might work but but it doesn't work and and that's strange and this is one of the reasons I love the psychoanalysts say because they were really the people apart from the religious types who figured out that whatever you are you're not a unitary Spirit that's under your own dominion you know you're something like a loose Unity of a multiplicity of spirits many of which are doing their own thing which you're striving to bring into some form of unity but even that Unity isn't something that's under your control in any real sense it's it's a Unity that has its own nature that you have to exist in relationship to and I would also say that that's one of the things that keeps people people's feet firmly on the ground because otherwise you it's easy to become egotistical and narcissistic you know if you if you think that you're the center of your own being you know in some fundamental sense then you're only what you're only beholden to yourself you're sort of a self-created creature perhaps you could think about it that way but it doesn't work like that it's like the ideal that constitutes the unity that you might become then sort of manifests itself for something that you could strive toward but aren't and it it also serves as a judge it's the thing that keeps you up at night saying you know there's some things you're just not attending to and you should get at it because life is short and there's no shortage of trouble that you might end up in and a wise person would attend to the dictates of his conscience and and lay out his actions in the world according to what he knows to be true and correct and that is how people think and it isn't obvious that we why we think that way that this is part of the reason that it seems to me so obvious that we have a religious Instinct because I can't think of what else you would possibly call that other than a religious Instinct the notion that our morality is linked to our desire to survive is I'm perfectly fine with that the devil's in the details to some degree I mean one of the fields of endeavor that I've been particularly struck by is uh the work of people like Franz DeWall and friends the wall has written a serious and also Jacques penkship hey I'll tell you something cool about rats some of you I'd like to do that some of you have probably heard this before but this affective neuroscientist named jacquesab he studied rats for a long time and he's very sophisticated researcher and I think he was one of the greatest neuroscientists who lived in the last 50 years sorry I don't think there's really any question of that he might have been one of the top three might have been he'd be in the top three be a tight race up at the top three he did this great experiment it was so smart so juvenile routes like to play and they like to wrestle they like to engage in rough and tumble play and you might say well how do you know a rat likes to do something it's like are you anthropomorphize it and the first thing I would say to that is you should anthropomorphize unless there's evidence to the contrary because we share a biological platform with rats and they're a lot like us and a rat is a lot more like you than your stupid model of a human being is like a human being so you try building a rat hard so anyways you can tell rats want to play because if you put them in a little Arena where they can Rough and Tumble play and wrestle and then you bring them there the next time and you make them work to open the door to play they'll work and so that's how we know you like something you'll work for it you know so you can apply that to rats and they'll work hard for it and rats deprived of play their prefrontal cortexes don't mature and they they're kind of hyperactive which might tell us something about boys in school but we won't go into that if you take a rat of the same age as another rat and you put them in a play area but the other rat has a 10 weight advantage the big rat will pin the little rat and they actually pin each other pretty much like dogs do when they're wrestling well they don't pin quite as much but humans certainly do it and pin means dominate dominance or that's one interpretation you only make that interpretation if you think that the hierarchies that rats live in are dominance hierarchies predicated on the expression of power and we all kind of think that because we use the term dominance hierarchy but you know that's a political term as well as a scientific term and it's predicated on the notion that the fundamental basis of hierarchical structure among mammals and other complex organisms is power and that's wrong it's not just wrong it's it's corrosively wrong it's misleadingly wrong it's like it's seriously and not acceptably wrong anyways you pair the rats once and you think hey big rat wins over little rat establishes dominance That's the basis of the relationship but the thing about rats is like people they don't just play once because they live in social groups that are reciprocal they play repeatedly and Banks up being a very smart researcher realized this so he paired rats to play the same routes over multiple occasions and the first thing he observed was the second time the rats got together the little rat had to invite the big rat to play you know when rats do the same sort of thing that dogs do when they want to play and and that that play behavior is so cross-species common that all of you know when your dog wants to play you know you can you can take your dog and whack him like that if you do it right and he goes and tries to bite you but not really right he plays in his Tails wagging and and when dogs are playing it kind of looks like dominance Behavior like it does among boys because boys really like to rough and humble play by the way although girls like it too but not as much you can distinguish the play behavior from aggression and if you can't that means you never had any friends I mean no I mean that that's that I mean that that's what it means it means that's what it means because part of being able to have friends is be to be able to identify aggression versus play and and part of playing is to pretend to be aggressive quite aggressively but still be playing right there's a tremendous social skill in that anyways the little rat has to ask the big rat to play which I imagine is somewhat you know humiliating for the little rat but he's the little rat so tough luck for him and the big rat contained to play and then they play and then you can observe how they play over repeated boats if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win at least 30 percent of the time even though he could win 100 of the time the little rat will no longer invite him to play and you think yeah it's like no not yeah like the emergence of morality in rats through play that's a big Discovery man that's a big Discovery and that's there's that reciprocity eh that that exists within the rat hierarchy and stable hierarchies in complex mammals are not predicated on power so friends the wall is showed quite clearly that you know that so chimps have a pretty rough hierarchy and it's pretty male dominated now barnables are quite different we won't talk about them because it's not germane to this particular point but you might think you know the biggest chimpanzee with the biggest teeth he's the Tyrant he's the winner and that happens sometimes there are tyrannical chimpanzee societies but what dewal has shown quite clearly is that I don't care how big and tough you are if you don't play fair two guys 90 your size can get together one day when you're not feeling so well and tear you into bits and that's exactly what happens among the Champs so tyranny you know that can be a route to dominance it can even be a route to sexual access because it is the case among chimpanzees that males who are higher in the power hierarchy are more likely to farther Offspring not because the female chimps choose them because female chimps aren't choosy unlike human females it's a profound difference between the two species but because the big that more uh superordinate male chimps chase the soup subordinates away so but the wall is shown quite clearly that the males who managed to occupy positions of authority and competence longest in chimpanzee hierarchies are intensely reciprocal with the other males more so than the other chimps in the hierarchy they do a lot of mutual grooming and are preferentially attentive to the females and their infants and so even among chimps and chimps can be damn brutal right Jane Goodall discovered I think it was 1975 another landmark in in late 20th century scientists at science that and this was a real blow to to the social constructionist utopians juvenile chimps Patrol the borders of their territory and if they come across chimps from other troops and outnumber them they will tear them into bits and chimps are unbelievably strong and it's unbelievably brutal and so good all basically discovered that chimps have the human equip or the the equivalent of human tribal Warfare and that's quite frightening if you're sensible because you know you might be the kind of optimist who thinks that human conflict is caused by capitalism or some bloody Daft notion like that and that wouldn't that be lovely because then it would be you could just get rid of it by getting rid of capitalism which you wouldn't be able to do anyways but you know what I mean it's but if it's I mean we split from chimps about seven million years ago and if the problem of Intergroup aggression is that deep it's a terrible problem you never want to underestimate the people that you're at war with that's a big mistake they're and I see no evidence at all for a clinical Psychopathology on Putin's side and he's [Music] Russians are complicated and he's complicated he is by no means the worst leader that brush has had in the last hundred years not by any stretch of the imagination I'm not standing up for Putin but I'm not going to casually demonize him you can't take your simplistic understanding of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin which is incomplete and then say well that's Putin it's like look we're in trouble here Wars tend to spread and everyone thought when the first world war started yeah I'd be a few months and then when it wasn't they thought well we'll win easily it's like no that isn't what's going to happen and the people thought the same thing in World War II and they thought the same thing in Afghanistan and so this is a localized Ukraine Russia conflict well first of all no it's not it's a war by proxy of Russia against the entire West obviously now all the world isn't on board with that but much of the world is but not all of it and so you know you might say when your sleeve gets caught in an industrial machine and only an inch of your sleeve is in you think well I've still got my whole arm it's like yeah for the next 10 minutes but don't be thinking that that's how it's going to be in half an hour and it'll be an absolute bloody miracle if this doesn't engulf us all and there's a high probability of that with all of that all that that entails what would it mean for the Russians to lose like let's say that's what the West wants we want Russia to lose okay well what do you mean by that lose exactly do you want the Russians to feel that they're going to lose they have atom bombs what is going to happen to a country that's already paranoid and misguided if they also think they're going to lose you think they're just going to lose and we're not going to lose along with them that's not going to happen and so we're playing with fire on and I think I'm I've written an article uh called the Civil War in the west because I think what's happening in Russia and Ukraine is a civil war in the west it's just that's just where it started Russia's the West and it's not just about post-soviet territorial expansion it's not just about oil and gas it's definitely about those things but it's about way more it's about the stunning blindness and stupidity of Europe on the energy front who didn't know this was going to happen do you who's so blind that they believed that making Europe dependent on Russian oil and gas for environmental reasons wasn't going to produce this well we didn't know well if you were a Statesman and you didn't know that you are so incompetent that it defies comprehension because that's so self-evident how do you frame that how do you take that emergent chaos and make habitable order out of it you don't know is the whole capitalist system rotten to the core I mean that's a convenient explanation under those circumstances that's for sure were you working for a psychopathic son of a did you make the wrong choice in University and was that your father's fault because you never did what you want or was it your fault for not standing up to him or is it a dying industry or is maybe this a wake-up call that you should go do something else that you've been waiting to do you know that you've actually wanted to do your whole life and that's why you're doing such a miserable job at your current occupation because you're bitter and resentful about the fact that you never did what you want you don't know it's all of those things at once and that's very stressful because all of those things at once is too many things and that's the re-emergence of chaos that's the flood that's the return to the beginning of the cosmos that's another way that it's been represented mythologically it's that you Voyage all the way back to the beginning of the cosmos when there's nothing but undifferentiated chaos and that's what you're confronting and maybe it's too much for you and often it is I mean that that can really that can be traumatizing it can hurt your brain you know it's just too much for you to Bear it doesn't matter you're stuck with it and so how do you respond to that well some of it is catastrophic negative emotion you freeze and that's protective and maybe you don't even want to move you don't want to bloody well get out of bed for a week and that's because your body is reacting as if the bedroom floor is covered with snakes and the best thing for you to do is just not move just freeze not a pleasant situation to be in because it's your hyper aroused very very physiologically demanding and there's zero about it that's productive except maybe the snakes won't see you but they've already seen you so that isn't helping very well so you've got all this undifferentiated negative emotion anxiety fear hurt anger guilt shame emotional pain the whole plethora of catastrophes and then maybe on the other side lurking down there is thank God I'm done with that job I just bloody well hate it I drag myself off to work every day and there's a little part of my soul that's so goddamn happy I finally got fired that I can hardly stand it you know and maybe you don't even admit that to yourself because well that would mean that all that time you spent at the job was just some cost you're deluding yourself the whole time um it is an interesting thing to consider though sometimes if you're in the unpleasant circumstance of having to fire someone you know sometimes firing someone is the best thing that can happen to them which doesn't mean that you should go out and like enjoy it although I have met very disagreeable people who actually enjoyed firing people and I'll tell you a story about that at some point because it's quite interesting but you know sometimes if someone's just limping along in their job and doing it as miserably and wretchedly as they possibly can imagine the best thing you can do to them for them is to say you know you're failing at this and and that doesn't necessarily mean that you would have to be failing at absolutely everything else in the entire world so maybe you should just accept the damn failure and go off and try something new and I mean that's terrifying for people and I know they hate it and all that but but sometimes it's better than the alternative which is just slow torturous death so here's a funny way of looking at it so let's say you fall right into that hole that's underneath any everything and you've hit an anomaly that you don't understand you say what's that anomaly made out of exactly I know that's a strange way of thinking about it you know because it's not or you could say we'll just go along with that it's a metaphor what's that anomaly made out of well here's a way of thinking about it's made out of Spirited matter and here's why this is something I learned in part from Piaget said well it's made out of matter because of course that's the world matter and the world is also what matters and so that's kind of a nice Duality there but it's made out of spirit because when you encounter something anomalous and go down the rabbit hole when you go into the underworld it's underneath everything that you've relied on you learn things down there so what's down there is information and that now it's maybe way more information than you want but it is information it's information and what can what can you do with the information you can inform yourself with the information right you can put yourself in formation with the information that's helpful too and so and you think well you you're a psyche maybe you're not a spirit it depends on you know whether you're a materialist or not but at least we can say that you're a psyche the question is what's your psyche made of well it's obviously got a material substrate but the matter happens to be a raid in a particular order and that's an information order and so when you fall into the underworld that's underneath everything and you encounter that latent information then what you can do is enhance your psyche you can grow your spirit because what you do is you take the new information and you incorporate it that's like eating the Apple that Adam and Eve ate you incorporate that and that makes more of you and that's not a metaphorical or a metaphysical proposition it's not it's to say nothing other than well that's what happens when children learn you say think what happens Charles 3 has a pretty low resolution representation of the world and is a fairly low resolution human being got all the constituent elements there but isn't differentiated in any tremendous manner that's all still to come in the future and so what does the child do explore what do they explore things they don't understand that's where the information is because you already understand what you understand there's no information there you go where they're where you don't understand that's where the information is and out of that information you generate a higher resolution world and you generate a higher resolution self and so out of the combat with the underlying Dragon of chaos you generate spirit and matter and that's what you do when you go down into the underworld so if it doesn't kill you or if it doesn't make you wish you were dead which it probably will but there's a bunch of you that has to die down there anyway so maybe that's not such a bad thing because if you had this relationship that ended in betrayal then there's something that's just not exactly right right there's something that went and the reason I'm saying that you think well that's kind of moralistic it's like actually I don't mind being moralistic in case you haven't noticed but but that's not it's not a fair comment because you're playing this stupid game it's like you live with someone infidelity that's the game right you've decided the rules with the game comes a morality the morality are the rules of the game well then the thing collapses into infidelity it's like well you played the game wrong or it was the wrong game one of those two you it's one of those two you pick the damn game and having picked the game you can't all of a sudden say well no those aren't the rules it's like yeah yeah if you pick the game you pick the rules and if you fail at complying with the rules then you failed now you could say well I could pick a different game it's like I don't care how you solve the problem you're still stuck with the problem it's a moral problem fundamentally and it might take some major league retooling too to fix it so you're at Point a trying to get to point B that's not working out you hit an anomaly you're not getting to point B that's for sure your medical school student you write your mcats which is this test you have to write to go to medical school you get 25th percentile I don't know who you are but you're not a pre-med student and maybe you never were right and that's the rub man and so who the hell are you you don't know collapse down here into this motivational conflict this place of motivational and emotional uncertainty and tremendous information right it's a place of transformation it's the Phoenix that burns it's the burning part of the Phoenix that burns it's it's the journey to the underworld it's the journey to hell it can really be a journey to hell because you may find out that the reason that your partner betrayed you or that you didn't get your damn promotions because there is seriously something wrong with you and you know it and I don't just mean that you don't know what you're doing I mean that there's 25 percent of you that is seriously aiming at things not being good and so you fall into the underworld and you find out that oh God I just got exactly what I was aiming for or I got exactly what the