Becoming Your Best Self: Strategies for Personal Development

How's the tour going? It's going great. It's. The crowds are well-dressed. Extremely positive there, for good reasons. Apolitical in the most in the best sense of the word, welcoming. The theaters are packed, and the lectures are going well to extremely well. The time I spend afterward meeting people is it's like being in a wedding celebration. I would say that's the closest thing I could. What do you mean?Well, you know, you go to a wedding and you meet all sorts of people you don't know generally, and everyone's happy to be there and they're all looking good because they dressed up for the occasion and it's a positive event and, and.That's the closest analogy that I can think of that would describe what's happening. So and.People that are there are there because they're trying to put their lives together and they are putting them together and it's working. And so everything about it is as positive as it can be, fundamentally. So, yeah, it's going great. I saw you took a trip to the Tesla factory. What were your thoughts after the meeting?Elon Musk, did he get to speak to him much? Ah, I wouldn't say much. We spoke probably for 20 minutes in total. Not purely privately because there are other people around, but you know, I just, that just barely gets you to know the surface of someone like Musk because he's an amazing person and God only knows what's up with him.All things considered, we saw his new truck. He was taking people out for a ride. I didn't. I didn't go out for a ride. The truck's an amazing piece of engineering. The factory is massive, you know, What do you say about someone who built a functional electric car, and then shot it into space on a rocket?He's a singular person, but I thought, I thought it went very well. It was a very interesting evening. So I was pleased to be there. And, you know, we sort of walked around each other a bit and.It was just fine. Do you guys interact a fair bit on Twitter? We seem to, yeah. Yeah. What do you think that is why you're converging?I don't know. I don't know exactly.We're both well known and I suppose to some degree that that increases the probability of that kind of convergence. But maybe he's aiming up. Me too. He seems to be. He's ending up literally. He's ending up very literally. Yeah. Didn't he put a, wasn't there a spaceman?A model of a spaceman in the driver's seat of the car that he put out into space, that that's certainly possible. He's got a theatrical twist, there's no doubt about that. And a great sense of humor, because that's funny to shoot your car out into space on a rocket. That's a pretty good joke. What is it?What is it? That's why is it that someone like Elon has got himself to the stage where he can say things that almost every other CEO, he's the richest man. I don't think he's got himself to that stage. I think he's always done that. And so now he still knows how to do it. I mean, you know, people think.I'll say what I have to say when I get to the point where I'm protected and secure. It's like, first of all, being protected and secure does not give you the courage to say what you have to say. That's that's completely, that theory couldn't be more backward. You think you're going to get braver and braver as you get more and more protected. Do you think that's how the world works I mean I've watched think that's how the world works. I mean, I've watched university professors think that at some point they're going to say what they think as they develop their career, but by the time they're protected and secure, they spent so much time not saying what they think, that they aren't even who they were, and they don't know what they think. They aren't even who they were, and they don't know what they think. So no, he says what he says because he's always done that. And people who are like him are like that. And so Steve Jobs, I presume, was the same way. I mean, I know people who knew him. He always said what he thought, and he was pretty.Damn, cut and dried about it. Which is why Apple products are such miracles of technological mastery. He had an unbelievably canny design eye and was very.Oh, he cut whole projects without a second thought in some sense, when they weren't working. He did that when he came back to Apple the second time, refined the entire product line, and got rid of a ton of different things. So we're focusing on this. Yeah.Right, right. So that was proof. I mean, maybe it was Luke the first time, which it wasn't, but coming back and doing it again the second time showed pretty clearly it wasn't. Same with Elon, right? He's refined what he does to a couple of very, very tight parameters.Now he seems to have although his the enterprise he's put together is unbelievable.High functioning, I mean to produce an automobile sub-industry that's competitive to bring down the cost of space exploration by a factor of 10 and to invent reusable rockets and to have developed this boring technology.It's it's miraculous. He's probably an alien. Yeah, probably, probably. There are only two, probably a reptilian isn't American car companies, I think that hasn't gone bust. Ford and Tesla and Tesla came very close several times.Yeah, it's an amazing accomplishment. So go Elon, as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, he's a remarkable person. What color skin emoji do you use? If I used one, it would be black.Why? Why not?It's so preposterous, all of that.No. Everything that's happened to Rogan, all this idiocy around race, this insistence that we can be reduced to our race, our ethnicity, our sexual identity.It's so appalling and it's so.Destructive, and one of the reasons that I had a lot of reasons for making my political stance about Canada's compelled speech laws, I had a lot of reasons for making my views about that known.One of them was.The fact that my government had introduced.A bill that required me to say things a certain way, which was an unparalleled move in the history of Western democracies and something the Americans had made strictly unconstitutional leave in 1942. So that was part of it.Part of it was I knew that this.Top-down mandated.Belief that.Confusion around gender identity was a positive occurrence to provide that freedom. Let's say I knew that for every person that saved, that would doom 1000 people, primarily girls, to a kind of psychological contagion as confusion about sex and gender identity.Ramped up.I knew the literature on psychological contagion. It was It's quite a psychological contagion.You could think about them as psychological epidemics.So the last one, the last one of any real size, was the Satanic daycare scares in the 1980s, but you're probably not old enough to remember that. But the largest, longest senses in the US.Criminal justice history was handed out often to women who were accused of late-onset female sexual predation of children in daycare centers.The FBI invented a whole new category of perpetrator category that didn't exist because there are no late-onset female sexual child sexual predators. They don't exist, but there were women who.Obtained prison sentences of several 100 years for hypothetically being involved in these satanic daycare abuse rituals and there was a just swept across the whole country like the Salem witch trials, except at a much larger scale. There's a book called Satan Silence that was written by a lawyer.The social worker that documents it. It's just unbelievable. There were stories about underground tunnels where children were being taken down and well, every possible thing you could think of was happening to them. All in the name of Satan.Ritual. it was a contagion and those things happened it happened with cutting behaviors happened with eating disorders this is almost all among girls because they're teenage girls are most prone to thisIt was a contagion and those things happened. It happened with cutting behaviors, happened with eating disorders. This is almost all among girls because their teenage girls are most prone to this. This is almost all among girls because teenage girls are most prone to this. They called it hysteria back in Freud's time, but there's a book by a man named Henry Ellenberger called Discovery of the Unconscious that traces back psychogenic epidemics to about 300 years, and I knew that.You know, people in adolescence, especially people of a certain personality configuration.I have some trouble settling into a stable identity.For a variety of reasons, it can be a high negative emotion, which is associated with low self-esteem. Those are more or less the same thing. And then in all likelihood high trade openness, which is the creativity dimension. And the high trade openness people, they're the ones that are more likely to have green hair and red hair and lots of piercings and lots of tattoos and dress in a.Somewhat in a non-standard manner, let's say that's all associated with creative behavior and they have trouble catalyzing a single identity. And then if you throw in categorical confusion, which is exactly what you're doing when you declare that there's, you know, an endless number of gender identities, then people who are.To identify dissociation and psychogenic.Contagion.There, you're going to demolish them. Abigail Schreier has documented that quite nicely in her book Irreversible Damage. And it's way more girls than boys, and it's thousands and thousands and thousands of them. So you think, well, perhaps a few people who are.Transgender benefited from this new reality, but for everyone who's benefited, and you know, I'd like to see the data just showing how much they benefited and that'll take a long time to accrue. 1000 people have been just demolished by this.So and then what else on the?Well, that, that's basically that on the political front.I could see all that coming. I talked to the Canadian Senate about it. When they put in the legislation, they didn't listen. They just thought racism, bigotry, sexism, It's like, yeah, have it your way. But you know, So what? All these girls that have rapid onset gender dysphoria and disfiguring themselves and taking hormones and you know.Waking havoc with themselves and their families and the broader culture. These people that were so woke and so permissive, you think they're going to have that on their conscience? They're on to something, some other noble venture.So give me your thoughts on the modern dating market.Well, I'm too old to have any thoughts on it in some sense, not from a personal perspective. Well, I don't understand that level of detail. You know, I, I do know some things that are happening perhaps at universities where.There are far more girls than boys and more women than men.What happens in those institutions? This is what it looks like anyway. Possibly.So females are hypergamous, which means they'll mate across and up hierarchies, socioeconomic hierarchy, but competence hierarchy is really at the bottom of it. And so when you set up a situation where there are far more women than there are men in a given domain, say, where mate selection can take place.Most of the men still don't do very well because most of them are still rejected by women, but a small minority of men do extraordinarily well. If you think well means unlimited sexual access. And so what's happening in the universities is that.A small minority of men have sexual cart blush in some sense, and most men are in the same position that most young men are always in, which is they're in a state where they're not particularly desirable to women. And then the women of course are frustrated because the minority of men that they would like to have long-term relations.With it's, it's a, it's a seller's market for those they're not settling down. That's the sex ratio hypothesis, Yeah. And the reverse happens, right, you see whoever the most scarce sexes gets to determine the rules of the game. So men are in high demand because of the short supply.You get more short-term mating. Yeah, you get it.An increase in relationship dissatisfaction among women and when the reverse happens, you get more dates before sex you get.That more long-term mating you also get more sexual violence in that situation as well when there is a surplus of men and a scarcity of women but I think there's such a far more that more long-term mating. You also get more sexual violence in that situation as well when there is a surplus of men and a scarcity of women. But I think there's such a far more unstable society. You know, I was pilloried a few years back for my comments about enforced monogamy because they were taken out of context and twisted. Get twisted now, but what did you mean by that? I mean that one of the one human universal is the construction of societies to both mandate and reward monogamy. And there are all sorts of reasons for that. It's because it's the best long-term solution, fundamentally.But one of the reasons for that is that when women are scarce, men get violent. Now, you know, that was read to say, well, I thought that this society should be distributing women to undeserving men, which of course, is absolutely and utterly preposterous and bears no relationship whatsoever to anything I ever said or thought.Or anything anyone sane would ever think or say or has ever thought or said because I don't know anyone politically ever who was insane enough to think that the state should distribute women to men. Like that's just never happened. Sort of be accused of that belief and then for that.You know, be put forward as a credible representation of what I thought was just one of the preposterous things that has happened to me. It's an unfortunate name. Enforced monogamy because it's a term from anthropology, right? But what you mean is.Culturally celebrated monogamy, cultural norms that are supporting people and raising that opportunity. Supporting and punishing both, but mostly supporting. I mean, the punishing is that there's, there's a moral.Disapproval applied to say cheating right to adultery to especially running around behind your partner's back if you're married particularly that, but even if you're even if you're in a long-term stable relationship, it's like, well, that's all enforcement. It's not police with Jack.Boots But that's not the only type of enforcement. It's not the only type of sanction or threat of punishment or disappropriation or disgust or contempt or shame or frustration or disappointment. All of those things and.All of that is because monogamy is a good long-term solution but in some sense a troublesome short-term solution. If you have other options then all of those elements of social support.Let's say needs to be put into place, and that is it as far as I've been able to determine by looking at the anthropological literature.Norms surrounding monogamy are a human universal. There are exceptions, but they're very, they're very specific situational reasons for those exceptions. So do you see the ONS data that came out a couple of weeks ago that said, for the first time since records began, 50.1% of women?Childless by 30. So there are more women without children at 30 than there are women with children for the first time. So this is somebody clipped a part of one of my podcasts, I believe it was what I was talking about.What, what our society do to 19-year-old women or 18-year-old women, 19-year-old women would just lie to them all the time. You know, the first lie is there's nothing more important than your career, more or less by definition. So that's the first lie. The second lie is there will be nothing more important to you in your life than.Career so that's the second lie and then the third lie is there should be nothing more important in your life than your career. So that's the third lie and then.Implicit in that is the idea that children are burdened and that the idea that women should have children is part of the oppressive patriarchy and should be resisted. And who are men to tell me what I can do with my body and hey, fair enough, and etcetera, etcetera now.I've worked in female-dominated occupations my entire life. I work. For example, I worked as a daycare worker way back when. I was like 19, probably 80, something like that.And no men were doing that. But I like kids. And so that was fun. I worked for Social Services in Alberta in the childcare department. And then I've been working as a psychologist, either training or as a psychologist since then. And that's been a female-dominated enterprise increasingly as the years went by. But even when I.Was when I first entered it so I'm in the post-female workplace generation firmly I never experienced the world except as that and so I've watched women. progress through their professional careers at every level of attainment from the lowest to the highest and observed what happened and relatively I would say bias-free because of the 30s No late 20s.There's a psychological transformation and what happens is that they place less emphasis on their career and way more emphasis, particularly on having a child. And that reaches a crisis point around 29 or 30 for the vast majority of women and their attitude flips.And I've seen it flip very dramatically with many women and I suppose the most signal single most.Convincing.Evidence of that. I worked with high-end lawyers in Toronto for about 10 years. I was part of an organization. We went to law firms, high-end law firms, and said send us your most productive people.And we'll help them iron out whatever wrinkles there might still be in their life. And the advantage to them is that things will go better for them. And the advantage to you is they'll be even more productive. And there's a good management dictum, which pays the most attention to your most productive people 'cause they're bringing in the bulk of your revenue.Disproportionately. And so I worked with men and women who were at the peak of their careers in a very difficult enterprise. And so these were women who were generally very attractive, well put together physically.Pretty stable psychologically, extremely conscientious, very very smart, and high achieving from junior high through high school, university, and law school.Onto the top firms rocketing up through the ranks, full partnership by the time they were 29 or 30. And all the law firms, all the women bailed out all of them. The law firms couldn't keep them. And I, I was really, and I talked to the women a lot about a lot about this because I was very interested in it. After all, I knew.Law firms were bending themselves over backwards and tying themselves into knots trying to retain these women because why wouldn't they? You know, just just being greedy capitalists is enough. You know, we don't want to lose their high-performing women because they're performing at the highest level and they couldn't keep them. The women wanted to have nine-to-five jobs. They.To bind the job so they could have a life. And that was especially true once they got interested in having a child or had one. And what they came to was a very interesting realization. So because they were highly conscientious women, they sort of did their duty and, worked hard and diligently and didn't pop their heads up to ask questions.They're in junior high, they got their best grades, they were in high school, they got the best grades, and so on through, right till they reached partnership. But that's sort of an apogee, right? You hit partnership in a senior law firm, it's like you're at you're at the top of your profession. Well, then what?So then they looked around and they thought, hmm.Here I am with all these like.Hypercompetitive meth is perfectly willing to work 80 hours a week nonstop to stay at the top.What the hell are they doing 'cause that's the real question. What is it? What is it that characterizes this small percentage of hypercompetitive men? It's not.You can assume that that's how everyone should be, but first of all, that isn't how everyone is. Or you can flip that and say, well, there's only a small minority of human beings that are willing to do this to work flat out eight hours a week. I mean, they're getting, they're certainly being paid for it. Let's make no mistake about that. But.Well, what about the rest of your life? Well, that's what the women asked. Why am I doing this? And that's a great question. Well, for men, there's a different answer than for women. It's a different answer. And it isn't like the men are exactly thinking this through. It's it's more like this is an integral part of male motivation.The more successful you are as a man, the more women like you. But the problem that you have now is that as women are getting better educated, with more employment, more status, and more prestige, they compete themselves out of their ability to find an attractive mate as women rise through the dominance hierarchy. And this is.Competence, higher competence hierarchy. Sorry, who's going to tell women the equal access to opportunity that you have recently just acquired? What that's doing is it's making it more difficult for you to find a mate that you're fundamentally attracted to. Yeah, well, it, it, it does a lot of things. I mean, it does.Providing women with a lot more opportunities on the economic front, it does decrease their dependency on their mate in relationship to economic security and educating women.And countries that are willing to educate women, that's the best predictor of their future economic success. So if you look at developing countries and you want to find out what about a developing country is most likely to predict the fact that they will continue to thrive economically. It's their attitude towards the education of women and but couple more things.Women's educational status predicts their children's educational status, but men's educational status doesn't, so that's also an important multi-generational effect., I released a video, I was going to conclude that other story. I released a video or someone released a clip of me talking about some of the things we just talked about and it went out on YouTube Shorts and it's got like 5 million views in a month or something like that. And the comment section is.Unbelievably vitriolic every single comment is vitriolic and it's all from women. It's like, who is this old white ******* telling us what we should do with our bodies? You know, and I wasn't being judgmental. I was just saying exactly what I said to you, which is well, I've watched women.Over the entire course of my life with, I would say, an affectionate eye, you know, I love my sister, I love my wife, I have a daughter, I love my mother. I'm pretty happy about women, all things considered. I don't have an axe to grind about how they should conduct their lives. I don't even know how they should conduct their lives. I've watched what happens, and I've also watched what happens to women who.Hit 29 or 30 and then can't conceive and that is not a fate I would wish on anyone. It's awful and 30% of couples fall into that. 30% of couples have difficulty conceiving. It's a lot and the probability that you'll have difficulty conceiving increases with age.So, you know, say la vie but it's very interesting to me to see how vitriolic those comments have been and how, how uniform that is because usually on my YouTube channel in particular, 95% of the comments are positive. And this is completely the opposite of that.So and then so you brought this up at the beginning, you said 50% of women now at 30 point 50.1, the childless by 30. Yeah, Yeah. Well, you know, that's. That's not good. That's a sign of something profoundly wrong with the entire culture at an extremely deep level. I don't think that women need to take it as us trying to tell women what they should or shouldn't do, but I think that it would be very fair to say that you need to be.An incredibly unique woman to make it to 50 without a family and look back and think, yeah, I did this right. That's not to say that those women aren't out there. They are. I know some of them. But I think overall that it's anyway, it's the same with everyone, for everyone, I mean.This is another example of how our culture has just lost its moorings. It's like, well, what's life well?You have a job or a career and hopefully, you're productive you contribute something to the community and you provide yourself and your family with the necessities of life. That's a quarter of your life or 1/3 of it, something like that.You have an intimate relationship, you have a family. That's life.And if you don't have one of those, that's 1/3 of your life you don't have. Now some people, maybe they're doing so well on the other two fronts that they can cope with not having that. Or maybe they're doing so well on one front, they can cope with not having two of them. Yeah, maybe.It's pretty hard because if you want to have a great career, it's hard to do that if you're alone and without a family, right? I mean, the people that I've seen who've been best situated in their life, all things considered, even in relationship to their career, have a pretty solid monogamous relationship that stabilizes them and then they.Have a family that also stabilizes them and broadens out their life. And, you know, exceptional people do exceptional things and good for them, but they're by definition, given that they're exceptional, they're a tiny minority. This is always the argument between conservatives and liberals, right? Because of the liberal types, they're more tilted sometimes.Towards what would you call it?Uh, compassion or appreciation for the exceptional. And fair enough, the exceptional is necessary, but.On average, what everyone does on average is the thing to do. And so you just look, you see, well, what do people do? Well, if they have a job or career, they have an intimate relationship and they have a family, and if you don't have one.Any one of those things? Well, then you're treading water harder. Doesn't mean you can't do it, and it doesn't even mean possibly that you shouldn't try. But as a default presumption, it's just utterly foolish.What else are you gonna do with your life? Well, maybe you're wildly creative. Fair enough. You know, that's extraordinarily rare as well, subject to the power law problem in any case, which is even if you're hyper-creative, the probability that you're gonna be successful at that economically is extremely.Extremely tiny to the point where it's almost nonexistent. It's so difficult. It does happen in some, and you can have spectacular success if you become successful. But wasn't it you say last night that of the 100,000 most recently printed books, only 1000 have sold more than a million? Yeah, something like that. It's something.Down. Yeah. Everywhere, everywhere. Power law. That's, you know, a tiny minority of people do all the work. A tiny minority of people get all the benefits. A tiny minority of athletes score all the goals, a tiny minority of men get all the women, et cetera. A tiny minority of stars have all the mass. A tiny minority of rivers have all the water and a tiny minority of cities.Have all the people, etc, etc, etc, everywhere always, you know, and, and we're so clueless in our culture that we blame that on capitalism. It's like how does that account for the massive stars, people? So or the, you know, the volume of rivers or the population density of cities.Rolling the clock forward. You and Elon tweeted recently about population collapse. What do you think is going to happen there? Oh, well, I've thought for at least 10 years that the biggest problem in 50 years will be that there's just not enough people. I remember hearing you say a few years ago that you thought we'd peak at about 9 billion. Yeah, we probably won't hit 9.Yeah, and I knew about stats because think about how crazy it is to think that we might be living on Earth right now at a time with the largest number of humans that are ever going to exist at one time. Yeah, that's highly probable. And, you know, in the populace, my mind, the population collapsed.In developed countries is precipitous right it's like at fault we fall off a Cliff because it's the same as everyone knows this from the pandemic. The R naught number is if fewer people are reproducing next generation you have fewer people to reproduce as fewer people are reproducing and it.Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I, I worked on it, the UN committee. It's got to be 10 years ago now.Do you help draft the UN Secretary General's report on sustainable economic development? And so I looked at all sorts of things like that. I was very curious, for example, about because people have been beating the overpopulation drum since.Well, it kicked in in the 1960s, you know, because there were dire predictions. By the year 2000, the Club of Rome came out and said, well, there'll be riots and mass starvation and mass movement, of migrants and all the things you hear about climate change because there's too many people on the planet. And that just didn't happen at all. That was just.That it wasn't just wrong, it was anti-true. It was wrong. What happened instead was that everyone got way richer and the the bottom section of the population in terms of economic distribution got lifted out of poverty. Inequality still exists, but that's that power law phenomenon we already talked about. Not that that's trivial, it's just unbelievable.To determine what to do with there are solutions, but certainly getting rid of capitalism isn't the solution. And so I looked at population trends and first of all found not that this is an act of genius or anything, that as soon as you educate women.The size of the family shrinks precipitously, like the below replacement. And that's partly because women have other options That that's a human play out. Oh, yes. I mean, all the all the countries in the West are way below replacement. Korea is way below replacement, and South Korea, and Japan, are way below replacement. Yeah.Yeah, it's a number one. Number one on the planet. It might be Chad. Chad, The country in terms of growth, has eight children on average. Yeah, I think Nigeria will have more people in it than China by the end of the century.So, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Musk, you know, he's a far-looking man and so he's looking around the apocalyptic corner, let's say, oh, we're running out of people. And what that means, of course, is that you run out of young people, right? You don't run out of old people first, 'cause everyone who.Is here now is going to be 30 years older in 30 years and it'll be young people we don't have enough of. And of course, young people are the ones who do the innovation and are going to do most of the heavy lifting etcetera. And so there's going to be a terrible shortage of young people. Well, you see this with some of the things that I posted that ONS data..1% of women childless by 30, and both men and women are replying to that tweet saying well good, there's too many people on the planet. In any case, I know how this NPC midwinter is so dangerous because it makes people believe that they have.Something grounded backing up their claims. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and this idea that the planet has too many people on it, this is, there's no sentiment more implicitly genocidal than that statement.So what do you mean to many people?Exactly. And what do you mean by the planet? And what do you propose to do about that exactly? Mass abortion? Is that your answer? Or should we do something a little more dramatic? Maybe we'll just shame people out of having children. And I've seen people do that literally. I saw a professor when I was at.Ted, I think it was, it doesn't matter. It was several professors talking to a couple hundred students and one of the professors was an environmentalist, activist type, he got up on stage and shook his finger at the whole young crowd saying that he and his wife had only decided to have one child.Which was, in my opinion, one child too many for him. And told all the young people there, if they had a shred of ethical decency, that they would severely limit their reproductive potential. And I stood up and said that I thought that was the most, one of the most appalling things I'd ever heard anyone in academia say to young people, which is saying something because they.Of appalling things. And it was a very uncomfortable moment. And he huffed off the stage, but, you know, in a frenzy, talking about how you couldn't talk about such things without being pilloried on ethical grounds. And yeah, that's for sure. You come out as a what, Emissary of the academic establishment? You tell young people that humanity is so corrupt that they should.Considered not propagating because that violates the deepest of ethical norms and you think that's a good thing and that that's your right and it was just beyond comprehension. It's beyond comprehension, but it's associated with like a deeply rooted.Existential self-hatred, and I mean hatred at the level of humanity is like a virus on the planet that we're a cancerous growing.Racism.Right, right, right. It's that. Yeah. Well, we're a cancer on the planet, you know, unchecked growth, just like a cancer. It's like that's how I say cancer. It's OK. We know where your heart is located.Because what's, what's the implications for, for a doctrine like that? What do you do with the cancer? Cut it out? Yeah, that's for sure. Poison it or whatever. Whatever. There's nothing you don't do to a cancer. So you're going to use a metaphor like that. There are too many people on the planet. You're going to use a metaphor like that, you know, and then you're going to, you're going to also decide that.Virtuous while you're using it because you're on the side of the planet, whatever the hell that means. So yeah, it's, it's unbelievable, and a huge part of it's rooted in this existential shame and and and horror at the condition of being human and the fact that life is rife with suffering and a lot of its unjustified. No, it's a Mephistophelian position. So Mephistopheles was laid out, portrayed in Kurthis Faust. That's the story of a man who sold his soul to the devil for knowledge. It's a story of intellectual pride.Goethe stands in relationship to German literature in the same manner that Shakespeare stands in relationship to English literature and Earth is Mephistopheles.Says straight out twice in the play, once in the first of his two books and once in the first book and once in a second. Gertha has him restated twice.Existence is such a foul thing because of all its suffering, essentially, that it would be better if it was merely annihilated. And that's the Mephistophelian stance. This whole show should just come to a halt. Look at how corrupt people are. Evil reigns everywhere. It's nothing but will to power. We're destroying the planet.With our unchecked ambition, all rooted in greed and Machiavellianism and jockeying for a position we're so contemptible that we should just roll up and die. And we should shame women into not having children and we should shame men so they never manifest any planet-destroying ambition.It's unbelievably appalling. It goes all the way down to the bottom, the bottom of things. That's what's tearing our culture apart, this dispute about the nature of existence at the most fundamental level.So the universities have come out on the wrong side.Sure. Talking about the individual, one of the things that I see holding people back is comfort. So it's easy to get life to a stage where it's not that bad. It's not that good either. At least when you have a full-on breakdown, there's only one way to go, right? You're only going to go up from there, but I think it's possible to.Hello, for years in a just about passable life, right? Sedated by comfort. And I see this temptation in myself as well to give up the good for the great. What would you say to people who are trying to escape this curse of mediocrity?Well, if you're satisfied with it in some fundamental sense, I mean, there's something to be said, I suppose, for walling off a private space for yourself if you can maintain it, and detaching yourself to some degree from the troubles of the world and maintaining your little private garden. The problem with that is the snakes tend to seep in.Outside, right, it's, it's pretty difficult to wall yourself off in any real sense from the concerns of the world. So it isn't clear to me that that's a viable solution. It also means that you might justify to yourself a lack of civic engagement. You know, I shouldn't go to church, I shouldn't take part in the political process because it's also corrupt I should hide myself from.All the annoying noise that's generated constantly on the media front. And I have some sympathy for that viewpoint, but I don't believe it's possible because you can't have, you can't have a walled garden independent of independently of the health of the broader society. It's just not possible.Maybe you can have it for a very short period, but so, but if you're, if you're comfortable with what you have and it, it's Gen. it's genuine comfort. And I think, hey, but generally it's not. I think for the most part it's, it's people that have become sedated, you know, they've forgotten their dreams, but they've forgotten that they've forgotten them. Pink Floyd's comfortably numb is about this, right?Become comfortably numb. Mm-hmm. I think most people I had, I had this friend, and this, this story hit me. So, umm, during the pandemic, running a podcast, I was able to have the thing that I feel I'm good at my artistic pursuit and outlet that was available for me to continue. It was increased because I didn't have other stuff to do.And I have a friend that's a Barber and he got a job at a supermarket. Barbers shut down for a long period and he got a job at a supermarket stacking shelves overnight and asked him. I was like, man, how are you? How are you finding a new job? It's a big, big change. He's like, do you know what it is? I don't mind the work. I don't mind the people that I work with.But man, I miss being good at something. Right, Right. Right. Well, dude, that hit me so hard. I missed being good at something. Yeah. Yeah, well, people need the opportunity to be good at something.If so then you might ask yourself, well what's the best antidote to the discomfort of life and you might say well it's comfort.I suppose that's what you.Act out when you swaddle a baby.But a better antidote is something like Adventure to excellence.And that's a far better antidote to suffering than the mere absence of suffering.So not to say that the mere absence of suffering, that's not anything, you know, stepping out of that sedation from comforts difficult, though, especially if you've become routinized to it. Yeah, well, that's the difficult difficulty of maturity. You know, the Freudians said very wisely that the good mother necessarily fails.What does that mean? I mean, she stops providing the comfort that insulates people against the need for adventure. I heard you say recently that a mother's ability to let her child go out into the world knowing that they're still vulnerable and it's now down to them and the world's stock after them, that's one of the bravest things that they can do.Fiction so and that's exemplified best in while the best.A portrayal of that I've seen is Michelangelo's Pieta. No, it's, it's a statue of Mary and she has Christ's body on her as an adult on her lap, and he's broken and destroyed and you know, she's displaying that.That's that's the bravery of a mother to allow that to happen, but not only that, to to facilitate it. Facilitate it. So what about we go, kid, where you go, where you go? Well, why? It's dangerous out there. It's like, yeah, no kidding.It's more dangerous here if you stay with me.By a lot.So you might lose your body out there in the world, but if you stay here, you lose your soul.How do you see that as an individual? Let's say that there isn't the mother there that's pushing you along.Well, you know one of the things, Jung Karl Jung.Was very interested in edible complex and that's basically that overprotective maternal.And he?He criticized Freud for presuming that it was something the mother did. He says it's more relational than that. First of all, it would be something the father would allow to happen, assuming there was a father around. So let's not forget about the paternal contribution to allowing that to occur.Because in some sense, it's the father's role to serve as the antithesis of that maternal overprotection. So a woman is extremely bonded with her infant, say, between zero and nine months, and the infant is utterly helpless and so.Complete compassion and the provision of comfort are the only job that matters. And that's the case. And then the woman has to switch gears to some degree. The mother has to switch gears as the child starts to become more.More mobile fundamentally, and more independent. She has to let go of the infant, which is a real grieving process, and she has to start to facilitate this movement towards independence. But that's a hard shift and so partly the role of the father.That is to be an advocate for the child's independence and to comfort the mother, to let her know that that degree of security provision is no longer necessary, but also to act as an advocate for the child's outgoing.Outgoing desire and so, so it's the edible situation is not only the mother, it also says the weak father, but then it's also the child. So you can imagine because you don't believe that.These negotiated agreements were relational. So you know, you're 6, you're in Grade 1. Maybe you're feeling a little ill.Maybe you're not. Maybe you're playing with being a little ill, and maybe you're playing with exaggerating how I'll you are. And your mom comes downstairs and says, you know, you've got a test today at school. Maybe you haven't quite prepared for it. Maybe you know you should have. And she says, but you know, you, you seem to have a tummy ache.Maybe you're too sick to go to school. And the kid thinks maybe I could just stay home and, you know, Mom could tuck me in and I wouldn't have to take that test and I wouldn't have to confront the world. And he says, yeah.Yeah, I'm on my stomach hurts and. And away we go.And the child has made a choice.And you think, well, that's and that's a catastrophic choice. And you think, well, children shouldn't be held accountable for choices they make at that age. It's like.That child's soon gonna be an adult that's going to make very similar decisions.Nick, the choice has consequences, and to be held accountable for that is to recognize purely that the choice has consequences and that it is a choice. Now, you know, you could say, well, 95% of the blame is to be put on the mother. And maybe that's an overestimate. I think it probably is, but.The child could say, Mom, you don't have to worry about me. I'm gonna get up and go do this and.That's a choice.And that's the right choice.So these are always chicken and egg problems, obviously, but that flesh out the complexity of the situation. You know, if you're if you're being enticed down a pathological Rd. you can accept or reject the invitation. Now, some people are better at enticing and some people enforce it more harshly and you know.There's all sorts of individual variability in situations like this, but.Just because you're offered the bait doesn't necessarily mean that you have to take it.