Q & A 2018 08 August A

Hello everyone,

So the first question that came up. Oh, there's something I want to say first. First, thank you for tuning in to this Q&A. It's always much appreciated. It's a pleasure to do these, and they seem to be quite popular. It's been a while since I did one, but I've been on the road a lot and away from my computer, and so that's the reason or the excuse. Take your pick; hopefully, it's a reason.

I wanted to let you know, to those of you who don't know, I have worked on two programs online that are hypothetically helpful to people. One is selfauthoring.com, and that helps you write about your past, present, and future to catch you up. That's the past authoring program: to identify your faults and virtues; that's the present authoring program; and to make a vision and a counter vision for your future and to make an implementable plan. There are writing exercises. I produced a 20% discount for all you Q&A people today, so if you use the discount code "August" at selfauthoring.com, then you can purchase the full set of programs for 20% off. And you have a two-for-one offer, so you can share that with a friend as well.

And then understandmyself.com is a personality test site that enables you to get a big five readout of your personality, with each of the big five traits—extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness—broken down into their two aspects. So you can get a pretty comprehensive view of your personality. And that code is also August, and that's in the description of the video in case you forget. So if you're inclined, you can use those codes, and you can try out those programs.

We know the future authoring program, for example, if university students do it, especially the ones that are struggling, it produces quite a marked increase in their propensity to stay at university and to get better grades. So the program seems very, very effective. So if you're trying to straighten out your life, then I would recommend the self-authoring program. And if you're trying to understand yourself better or someone that you know, then you could try understandmyself.com.

So that's that. The other announcement, I suppose, is that I've done the tour; I’m now about sixty-five cities with Tammy. Somebody asked how she manages this; she’s exceptionally good at traveling and very low in neuroticism. Thank God for that because it's been a stressful time, with lots of opportunity, obviously, and she likes to travel. So she's very good at helping me manage this. We're gonna hit about 40 more cities, 40 or 50 more cities between now and the end of April next year, which is when I'm going to bring all this touring to a close.

In September and early October, we're doing 20 cities on the eastern seaboard of the United States, and then, in October, near the end of October, about 15 cities in the UK and northern Europe. Then in February, Australia and New Zealand, and then in March and April, then the rest of Europe. That's the plan, anyways, and perhaps there'll be some side trips during those times to other places. And so you can find out about that at jordanbpeterson.com/events. You're more than welcome to come to the talks; they've been very good events, in my estimation.

I've really enjoyed them. I can tell you I enjoy doing those talks, and I find them a lot less stressful than talking to journalists. The crowds are there; the individuals in the crowds are there to come and listen to a serious discussion about how life might be improved. And they're very, very positive events, so I've been very happy to do them.

The Sam Harris videos I did for talks with Sam Harris, those are in preparation. We hope we'll have them out in August. Everybody's trying to come to an agreement about how they should be released. It's a rather complicated affair, given how many people are involved, but I think we're close to figuring that out. There'll be ten hours of taped talks, four or five sessions, two-and-a-half hours each. I think the talks were very, very productive; we'll see. The audiences seem to react positively to them, and they were very well attended. We had 8,500 people in Dublin and about 6,500 in London, so those were very large crowds.

So that's very cool. Hmm, "12 Rules for Life" has sold about 2 million copies now. And for those of you who are mathematically geek inclined, that's 57 miles of bookshelf if the books are stacked, you know, as you would put books on a bookshelf. So that's a lot of books.

And "Maps of Meaning," I released the audio version of that on June 12, 2008, and it hit the New York Times bestseller list for audiobooks in July and August. So that was rather comical, given that "12 Rules for Life" was never put on the New York Times bestseller list. So I thought that was an ironic little touch of fate, and I'm quite pleased to see how the audiobook is doing. If you like "12 Rules for Life" and you're looking for something that delves more deeply into the same themes, then you could try "Maps of Meaning." And I think the audiobook, which I read, is more accessible than the written book. People seem to be responding to it that way, so I'm pretty happy about all the positive things that are happening.

So, okay. How am I? That's the first question. How am I? Well, pretty good, actually. My health seems to have stabilized substantially. I'm feeling pretty sharp. I have periods of some negative mood, although they're short and sweet, so to speak. But I seem to be sharp cognitively, and I can concentrate for long periods of time and get lots done. I've been able to do quite a bit of writing in the last couple of months, partly blog posts.

Partly also, I had the privilege of being asked to write the introduction to the 50th anniversary version, single volume abridged version of Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago," and I finished that about a week and a half ago. That took me about two months to write about 3,500 words, if I remember correctly. It was a daunting task to write an introduction to a book that is tremendously influential and important, and also of exceedingly high literary quality.

So it was a daunting task to write that introduction, and I really wanted to get it right, and I hope I did. I spoke by email with Solzhenitsyn's family, and they seemed pleased with it, and so did the editor. I've had a couple of editors, including Greg Hurwitz, my novelist friend from LA, who's an absolutely vicious editor and extremely good at it. So they were happy with the final cut, so to speak. So was I.

So I seem to be sharp enough to do the work that's necessary to do. I've been working hard on the online university. I've got three people hired; they're all very smart young guys, and we're about a year ahead of where I thought we'd be at this point. We hope to have a minimally viable product sometime in the late fall. I'm funding that entirely at the moment, courtesy primarily of my Patreon support, so thank you to all my Patreon supporters for that. Hopefully, your money's being put to good use.

We'll probably crowdfund in November and see if we can set up enough capital for the next three or four years. I could raise money privately; there are lots of people interested in investing. But I think that I'm gonna try crowdfunding because, well, because I'd like this to be a public enterprise from the beginning, and I have lots of people involved, and we're thinking of all sorts of ways of getting people involved.

How am I other than that? Well, nonplussed and still feeling rather surreal about my life, I would say. My family's in good shape. My daughter, who was very ill, is doing extremely well, so that's miraculous, as far as I'm concerned. My son's getting married in September; that's Julian, and I like his fiancée—thank God for that. And so we're looking forward to that.

I'm going on a bit of a vacation during August, which is the first time I've had off for about two years, with the exception of one week last year. I'm going to a family reunion in Vancouver Island and then to Saskatchewan to see my family. I'm going to do two talks in Saskatchewan while I'm there—one in Saskatoon and one in Regina. I have a lot of family coming to the one in Saskatoon, so that and then a little reunion after that, so that should be cool.

So that's how I am. And I'm thinking hard about the next book. I have a new book contract about to be finalized, I think, in the next week. I'm hoping to release the next book, which will be "Twelve More Rules," probably, and "Beyond Mere Order" is the tentative subtitle. I'm hoping that I'll have it done by early spring, perhaps January of 2020, if not one year later. But I'm going to try hard to hit it so that I'm done by next September.

I'm gonna write non-stop from May to September, and then I plan to do biblical lectures from September through December. So the plan is to tour from January through May essentially, then to write for four months, then to lecture to prepare the biblical lectures and so forth for four months. And so that should be next year.

So that's an update; hopefully, that's all useful information. I'm very pleased about all the support; it's quite remarkable—all this interest in these complicated matters and complicated discussions. And it's so nice to see people concentrating on psychological and philosophical issues and leaving the idiot politics as far behind as possible because it's certainly, uh, what would you call it? A distraction and a dangerous one at that.

So it's so funny talking to the mainstream media types because everything they talk about has to be viewed through a political lens. And although I continue to insist—I did BBC "Hard Talk," which was aired today—and that was a classic example of an interviewer being entirely scripted and trying to push everything that's happening around me, I suppose, into a political narrative. And it isn't political, as far as I'm concerned. Not everything is political, despite the insistence of people who feel that the personal is always political.

It's like, no, there's a philosophical domain, a theological domain, and a psychological domain; those should be kept the hell separated from politics.

All right, what can two agreeable young women do to be more disagreeable and assertive if that isn't how she is temperamentally inclined? Oh, that's a good question, and I would say, first of all, that's a very common question that people who go into psychotherapy ask. I think the most common problem that psychotherapists deal with, apart from anxiety and depression, is probably assertiveness training.

So the first thing I would say is you really need to figure out what you want, and I would recommend doing the self-authoring program, the future authoring program in particular, because if you want to stand up for yourself, you have to have your goals and your vision well laid out and well defined. And then you have to have a strategy that is matched to those goals so that you can know what you want, so that you know when you're not getting it. Otherwise, you're left with a vague sense of dissatisfaction and resentment, and that's a very, very difficult thing to articulate. And if you can't articulate it, then you can't negotiate.

If you know what you want and you know why, then you can make a case for yourself. Okay, so let's assume now that you've laid out a vision and a counter vision, which the future authoring program also helps you do. So you know what kind of hell you want to avoid that you might drift into if you were too agreeable for the rest of your life—that would be a hell that consisted mostly of people taking advantage of you all the time and you feeling resentful and bitter about it. Not something I would recommend.

See, I think that women are agreeable because it helps them deal with infants, but it's not a great temperamental strategy for dealing with complex organizations in the adult world. So I think it's a price that women pay for also being adapted to have plenty of patience for very young children, and then you have to overcome that to some degree to put yourself forward properly in more complex hierarchies of accomplishment.

So, I would say once you have your vision established—your vision for the future and your counter vision, so you're afraid of what will happen if you don't stand up for yourself—then you need to consult your resentment. Because if you're resentful about something, as far as I can tell, there's generally only two reasons. One is you should grow the hell up and quit whining. So you got to find out first if you're just feeling sorry for yourself, and you can think that through, make a pro and con case, and you can talk to somebody that you care about about that.

I'm not assuming that that's the reason, but that's one potential reason. If you're not merely feeling sorry for yourself, then you probably have something to say and something that you need, and you need to figure out what that is. And then you have to develop a strategy to put that forward.

I've seen lots of people in my personal life and in my private practice not get what they want because, well, A, they don't specify it, and B, they don't ask for it. And if you're negotiating, say for a raise or for a promotion and so forth, you have to put yourself forward. You need to tell the person you're working for why you should be treated with more consideration or respect, or have more resources devoted to you, or more authority shifted to you. And you have to make a case for that, a compelling case, so that they have a reason to attend to you.

And that's not good; they're not going to notice because most managerial types are so overloaded with work that they never notice when anything's going right; they just notice the things that are going wrong. So you need to make a plan. You have to have a strategy that goes along with that plan; you have to have articulated arguments for why a certain form of treatment is appropriate to you, and then you have to have the courage to put that forward. And I guess you have to remember that you owe yourself as much as you owe other people. You have to take care of yourself like you take care of other people, and that’s a moral duty.

And if you practice that, you can do it. And a lot of that's also associated with telling the truth. You know, you don't have a better friend than the truth. Even though it can be very harsh in the short term. And so if you're unhappy at work because you're being taken advantage of, then you have to strategize yourself out of that.

You have to learn to negotiate and a lot of that also means that you have to overcome your hesitancy to engage in conflict. And you got to think about it this way: negotiation and conflict are somewhat indistinguishable. And it's easy moment-to-moment to avoid negotiation, conflict, but you pay a terrible price for it in the medium to long term.

It's better to face the conflict forthrightly in the present and make peace for the medium to long term, and there's courage in that. So that's the other thing I would say is gird up your loins and allow yourself to act courageously and truthfully. Truth is your best bet if you're too agreeable; so you know, you also might find that you have pretty good critical intelligence but that you think it's mean, and so that you keep it hidden.

Some of the smartest women I knew who were very, very agreeable had unbelievably good instincts with regards to figuring out what other people's motives were but they were ashamed of their suspicions. And really what that meant was they ended up being ashamed of their critical intelligence because they were so agreeable. So it may be that the darker part of you, the shadow part of you, knows things that you could know if you were willing to admit that they were true. And so you have to give some credence to your darker element, I would say.

How do you know if you're communicating with the actual person or a mask? I sometimes wonder if I can ever really know someone. Well, you can't ever thoroughly know someone because people are too complicated. You can't even really know yourself. How do you know if you're communicating with the actual person or a mask? Well, if you're communicating with an actual person, then you're actually having a conversation. You know when the conversation transforms as a consequence of participating in it, and it tends to be engaging and meaningful.

If what's happening is an exchange of ideological platitudes or just platitudes themselves for that matter, then you're probably engaging with the mask. So if the conversation is compelling and meaningful, and it transforms as it progresses, and you can see that give-and-take, that dance-like give-and-take, then you're communicating with an actual person.

The other thing I would say is that when you're communicating with an actual person rather than a mask, the person that you're communicating with tends to be quite interesting. You know, if people talk about what they know—which means you're really communicating with them—if they talk about their own personal experience instead of wandering off into the domain of clichés and ideological platitudes, then people tend to be extraordinarily interesting. And so that's another good tactic and a good hint that you're where you should be when you're conversing.

One of the rules I had when I was seeing clients actively was that if the conversation I was having wasn't interesting and if my attention started to wander, then we weren't discussing issues that were sufficiently vital because if we were discussing vital issues, then the conversation basically flew by. And so I think that's a good marker: what new wisdom have you acquired in the past few months that you want to share with us? Well, I've got one. I think I thought up a bunch of new things, but this one I'm really happy with.

I figured out why. You know, some of you know that there's a mythological trope that I discuss fairly frequently about rescuing your father from the belly of the dragon or the belly of the beast. It's a motif that you see when you see it in “The Lion King.” You see it when Simba is being initiated by the baboon—I don't remember; I think his name is Rafiki—after Nala humiliates him because he's still a pathetic adolescent.

He follows the baboon, I think it's a mandrill, actually, down underground, essentially through a long tunnel. There's a lot of kind of scary music in the background, and he ends up contemplating himself in a dark pool, and then his father appears in the sky. And so that's one example of the reconstruction of the mythology of encountering your father in the abyss. You look into the abyss and you see your father.

And then, in the Pinocchio story, Pinocchio, of course, when he's trying to become a genuine human being instead of a marionette pulled by other people's strings or an erotic liar or a jackass, because those are his alternate destinies, he goes down to the darkest place he could find—the bottom of the ocean—and finds the biggest monster he can look at, and inside he finds his father and then rescues him.

The question is: why do you find your father when you look into the abyss? And I really do think I figured this out, and it's quite exciting to me. It's such a brilliant image. So we know, as clinicians and also, I would say, as sensible people—but there's good clinical documentation of this—that if you find out, imagine someone's pursuing a goal and some of the things they have to accomplish or confront on the way to that goal frighten them, and they start to avoid, and then they get more afraid.

And, of course, their ability to pursue the goal or to accomplish the goal deteriorates because they're avoiding. If you're a psychologist, even a friend or a supportive loved one, let's say, you're gonna encourage the person to face the challenges that are making them afraid, to face them voluntarily. And what happens as a consequence of that is that the person usually is able to overcome those fears and develop the necessary skills and to prevail.

And that's partly because, not so much because they get less afraid, but because they get more skilled and more courageous. And so imagine that if you bite off a little more than you can chew, you get stronger as a consequence. You do that in the gym, for example. When you go lift weights, you lift weights that are a little heavier all the time, and as a consequence, you develop yourself physically, and you turn into who you could be; you turn into more than you are.

Okay, so if you face fears a little bit at a time—fears and challenges—and you do that voluntarily, then you become more than who you are. Okay, now let's recast that in archetypal language and make it into a kind of ultimate. So if you want to become everything that you could be, then you look into the abyss itself, which is the darkest place that you can possibly contemplate, and that would be the terror of mortality and insanity and suffering and malevolence—all of those. It would be like looking into hell, I suppose, to some degree.

And then by voluntarily doing that, then you call upon the strongest part of yourself to respond, and the strongest part of yourself is symbolized as the sleeping father nested inside the beast. And so the fundamental truth, when you look into an abyss, is that you don't see the abyss; if you look long enough, it's like the announcer to Nietzsche's conundrum. If you look long enough into an abyss, then the abyss looks into you.

It's like, well, if you look long enough into an abyss, past when the abyss looks into you, you see who you could become in the form of your great ancestral figures nested inside the catastrophe of life. And then you can join them, so to speak; you can incorporate that and become stronger. And you do that partly by taking on the challenge voluntarily, and that informs you because you learn when you take on challenges voluntarily.

But you also do that as a consequence of psychophysiological transformation because when you place yourself in challenging situations—let's say the abyss is the archetype of the ultimately challenging situation—then you turn on new genes in your nervous system and in your body that code for new proteins, and you build new structures inside of you. And none of that’s going to happen without the demand that’s placed on you by willing to confront the full terror of life.

And so then I would say the full terror of life is something like the reality of suffering and death, and the ever-present and the the ever-looming presence of malevolence in your own heart and in the heart of other people. So it's evil and suffering, and to confront that is really—well, you risk blindness by confronting that; that's also a very old story. You risk damaging your vision, but if you do it forthrightly, then you discover who you could be as a consequence.

And who you could be is the solution to malevolence and suffering. And so that just blew me away when I figured that out. It was partly a consequence of having lengthy discussions with Sam Harris and thinking this through more and more. I've been pushed to think it through, but I think that's an absolutely staggering—what would you call it?—articulating that image fully for me.

I don't know if I've articulated it fully, but articulating it more fully really had a profound effect on me. I think it's such a brilliant conceptualization that inside the darkest place is the heroic ancestor whose identity you could incorporate. Perfect. It's perfect, and I really believe it's true. And what it does is it says that a human being is actually stronger than the greatest challenge that can be set before him or her. And that's really something; I also believe it's true.

It doesn't matter how—the other thing that's so interesting about that is that it transforms pessimism into optimism. It's like, well, the world is a very dark place; it's full of suffering, and it's full of malevolence, and it might even be so full of suffering and malevolence that a reasonable person could question the justification of its being, as Ivan Karamazov does in "The Brothers Karamazov," which I would highly recommend, by the way. That's an absolutely great book by Dostoevsky.

But the truth of the matter seems to me that if you face the pessimism full-frontal, so to speak, then you find something in you that can—that's strong enough to take it on. And that really says something about, what would you say, the relationship between human beings and divinity, I would say, because it takes something transcendent of transcendent power to be able to rise above the genuine suffering and malevolence of life.

And I do think that we have that within us if we don't shy away from the challenge. So, you know, there's in the story of King Arthur and the Holy Grail, the Holy Grail is one of two things. It's a cup that either held the wine that Christ drank at the Last Supper or that was used to catch his blood when he was speared on the cross—either one. But it's the reservoir, let's say, of the fluid that eternally nourishes. It's something like that.

And when you go to look for the Holy Grail, you don't know where to look because you don't know where the Holy Grail is. And so King Arthur and his knights, who all sit at a round table because they are essentially equals, each go off to find the Holy Grail, and each of them enters the forest to begin the quest at the place that looks darkest to him. And that's another example of the same idea: that what you and another—it's another example of a dictum from Carl Jung, which he extracted from the alchemical literature, which was "in stir colinas infinite," or which means, roughly speaking, "in fill that will be found," or more to the point, "what you most need will be found where you least want to look."

But you have to look purposefully; if it chases you, your prey. If you confront it, then you're the thing that can transcend it. And that's an unbelievably optimistic message because it suggests that if you're willing to take on the burden of being with its suffering and malevolence, that you can awaken that which is within you that will allow you to prevail. And God only knows how deep an idea that is; it might be the deepest of ideas because who knows what the limit of a human being is?

So, well, that's some of the wisdom, so to speak, that I've acquired in the last few months. And there's quite a bit more to it, and I'm going to write all this down and hopefully publish a bunch of it in my next book. I figured out a bunch about hierarchies too and how they function, and I've developed a whole new way of conceptualizing.

One of the things I was arguing about with Sam was the relationship between facts and values because Sam, and he has his reasons, would like to propose that we can derive values directly from facts. And he wants to do that because he wants to nail the world of values to something solid so it doesn't float in air and get, let's say, hijacked by the fundamentalists or dissolve into nihilism. And both of those are terrible ends for a hierarchy of values. So he wants to nail it to something more objective and less relativistic and less grounded in revealed truth that removes it from the domain of fundamentalism.

And so I can understand his point and why he wants to do that, but the problem is that it isn't easy to derive values from facts because there's an infinite number of facts and, by necessity, a very finite number of values. In fact, most of the time when you're doing something, you're reducing the whole world to one value, and that value is encapsulated in whatever goal you happen to be pursuing at the moment or whatever you're paying attention to, which is also a form of goal-directed pursuit.

And so we've also figured out that—I kind of knew this, but I could articulate it better now—that you look at the world of facts through a hierarchy of values, and that hierarchy of values is instantiated in your nervous system and simultaneously a social construct because you pay attention to things of value that you and everyone else have established as valuable through a process of social negotiation.

And you need to pay attention to what you think is valuable that everyone else thinks is valuable because otherwise you wouldn't have any basis for shared attention, and you wouldn't have any basis for trade with other people. So that's another thing. So that's really been helpful because now I figured out that you reduce the infinite world of facts to the finite world of values by viewing the world of facts through what's essentially a dominance hierarchy of value. And that exists both out in the social world and neurologically at the same time, and so that's been unbelievably useful to figure out—and part of a mystery that I'd been trying to untangle for about three decades, so that's extremely helpful.

And I've also spent some more time thinking about the proper place of the right and the left wing. So the right wing basically stands for the, what would you call it, the right-wing serves as an advocate for hierarchy, and the left wing serves as a critic of hierarchy. And the right says, "Well, we need hierarchies; they're often hierarchies of competence. They're necessary to organize people and society, and they're necessary to get things done," all of which is true.

And the left says, "Yes, but hierarchies dispossess, and you have to pay attention to the widows and the orphans," which is also true. And so then the political discussion is about how to ensure that hierarchies are maintained and are functional but also have sufficient mercy within them to take care of the people who, for one reason or another, are struggling to find their place, even in a hierarchy of competence.

And then the necessity for free speech emerges out of that because the left and the right have to communicate so that the proper balance between the current structure of the hierarchy and its transformation and mercy can be established on an ongoing basis. So anyways, there are three things that I've really learned over the last few months, and there's a bunch more, but those will do for now.

If too much masculinity is tyranny, but the right amount is order, and too much femininity is chaos, what's the word for the right amount of femininity? Hmm, that's a really good question. I read that a bit earlier, and I couldn't come up with something immediate. But the only thing I can think of is that often femininity has been characterized as wisdom, and maybe that's so.

So the wisdom that God, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, that God consults is feminine; that's an old tradition. And maybe that's because order needs to be leavened with the right amount of chaos in order for wisdom to emerge. The order can be blinded, tyrannical, and dead, and so it's the mixture of the right amount of chaos that turns that order into wisdom. And then that wisdom is often personified as feminine.

Now, that doesn't exactly answer your question because it doesn't make the right balance. You still don't have tyranny, order; you still don't have order, tyranny, chaos. You're still missing the proper word there. I don't know. It's a good question, and the wisdom idea is the best I can make of it for now.

Is it better to marry someone with your temperament or a contrasting complementary temperament? Well, there is evidence on this, and basically, you don't want to marry someone with whom you're too mismatched. Now, the only possible exception to that is neuroticism. You know, neuroticism is a good predictor of marital trouble, and it's a good predictor of troubled periods, or perhaps sensitivity to trouble, which is in some sense the same thing. It's varied, and I don't know of any research specifically pertaining to this.

Now, I know that people who are high in neuroticism are more likely to miss work and to visit the doctor and to be unhappy in their marriages and so forth. And that may also account for why 75% of divorces are initiated by women. And I think women are more sensitive to negative emotion, partly because they have to take care of infants and need to be more sensitive to threat. And perhaps because sexuality is more dangerous to women and perhaps because women are physically smaller, and all of this seems to kick in at puberty.

Anyways, it isn't obvious to me that you want to match someone with regards to neuroticism. If you're high in neuroticism, I think if you're high in neuroticism, you need to find someone who's low in neuroticism because then you have someone around to calm you down. Now, apart from that, the research literature does indicate that matches are better, and you can see why it’s hard for extroverts and introverts to get along, especially if they're extreme extroverts and extreme introverts, because an extreme extrovert always wants to be with other people and in groups and an extreme introvert hardly ever wants that, and that's a very, very difficult thing to negotiate.

And then with conscientiousness, same thing. If you're really high in orderliness, it's very hard to be married to someone who's very low in orderliness; you're gonna end up doing all the cleaning, for example; that will drive you crazy. And if you're high in industriousness, same thing; if you're super high in industriousness and orderliness, you might want someone who's maybe moderate in both to kind of temper you a bit because one of the problems with being too high in conscientiousness is that you can't stop working, and you should probably stop working from time to time.

Agreeableness, same thing; it's hard for an agreeable and a disagreeable person to get along. You know, the agreeable person will always be dominated by the disagreeable person who won’t shy away from conflict, and is likely to dominate the agreeable person quite badly, so that's a tough chasm to bridge as well. So you look for temperamental similarity.

Now, it's complicated because, like, if you're really, really low in industriousness and you marry someone else who's really low in industriousness, well, that's going to be trouble for both of you because there isn't going to be anyone around who's going to do the work. So you might understand each other better, but as a long-term strategy, it's not a very good one.

So it seems like your message is primarily positive masculine, whereas the positive feminine is not elaborated with near the same resolution. What do you think?

Um, I don't really think that's true. I think that might be somewhat true of "12 Rules for Life," although I'm not convinced of that. The message in "12 Rules for Life" is to find a balance between order and chaos, and there's plenty of discussion in there about the danger of an excess of both. Certainly, "Maps of Meaning" is elaborated out more with regards to the positive masculine. With regards to "Maps of Meaning," it's elaborated out more completely than "12 Rules" with regards to the positive role of the masculine and the feminine.

I think it's complicated in part because the feminine, classically speaking, is associated with smaller-scale, intimate familial groupings, and so in a world that's obsessed with adaptation to large-scale social systems, it's harder to make a case for the role of the feminine. We don't really understand the role of the feminine in large-scale social structures. And you know, we don't have a cultural myth apart from "Beauty and the Beast," let's say, that describes the role of an independent female operating in the fundamentally masculine social world.

And we don't even know what something like that would look like, and there aren't guiding stories to some degree because women haven't been able to do that except in the last hundred years. So I don't know what the positive feminine on a large scale would look like, and we don't have guiding stories for that. This is partly to underline the absolutely radical nature of the birth control pill and not only that but the provision of technological devices that aid women in dealing practically with their monthly menstrual cycle, which was also a huge impediment to women in terms of interacting in the, let's say, the patriarchal world.

So now women can take their place in the broader cultural world, and we don't know what the model for that is. So you know, you might say, "Well, they should adopt the heroic masculine perspective." And, certainly, to some degree, that's true, but that's not a particularly fruitful archetype when it comes to having a family, and having a family is actually extraordinarily important, and it's certainly the thing that dominates the thoughts of the majority of women as they approach their 30s—all cultural noise to the contrary.

So it's something we're still puzzling out, and I suppose I'm still puzzling it out too. I mean, with my daughter, I tried to encourage her to be as sharp and as intelligent and critically-minded and ambitious as she could be, but also let her know that if she—and she was always interested in having kids—but to also let her know that having a family is an extremely important thing.

How to balance that? Well, that is the modern conundrum, isn't it? We want to figure out how to maximize our access to the talents of women but also to set up a situation where it's possible for talented women, and women of all talents, let's say, as well, but talented women who have options in the workplace to also have a family. And this is a tremendously complex problem, and it isn't clear how it's going to be solved.

You know, there is data showing, you know, we say, "Well, men should pick up more of the feminine role." And I suppose that's possible, but there is good data showing, for example, that if you show women pictures of men engaged in classically masculine endeavors, you know, fixing a roof or fixing the plumbing or so forth, or in feminine endeavors, doing the dishes and vacuuming, that the women rate the men who are doing the female tasks as less sexually attractive.

And so it's not all on the men with regards to the utility of them picking up a more feminine role, you know. And it isn't necessarily the case that women will find men who are more domestic also maximally sexually attractive, and those things don't necessarily go together. So this is very, very complicated.

So I'm quite shy, and when asked questions in public, I find it hard to articulate a good answer but will come up with a strong response hours or days later. Any advice? Yeah, I have some advice. One is that, or you're probably introverted—A, so you're not as verbally fluent as an extrovert would be, and not quite as fast on the draw verbally. But you know, that means you need some more time to contemplate.

And maybe you're high in negative emotion too because shyness can be a combination of introversion and high negative emotion. It can be one or the other, but technically shy is introverted. Anyway, what I would certainly recommend for you is that if you're faced with a complicated question, especially one that has to do with an important decision in your life, that you say, "I need to sleep on it," or "I need a couple of days."

And not to answer on the draw. I mean, I think that's true even for extroverts. I think if you're called upon to offer your opinion about something complex, then it's perfectly reasonable to say, "Look, that's a really hard question. I'm not gonna give you a casual answer; I need to think about it for a couple of days." So the advice would be, because you find it hard to articulate a good answer, don't allow yourself to be rushed.

And the second is to understand that this is part of your temperament; there isn't anything wrong with it. It's just how you're wired. So what causes a person to hoard? Is it due to low conscientiousness? What is generally the best course of treatment? It's usually a consequence of relatively high neuroticism, and it's tangled in with disgust sensitivity as well.

People who hoard have a hard time. They feel guilty if they throw things away because the things still have some residual utility. The best course of treatment is—well, behavioral therapy is probably the best course of treatment—and to plan what needs to be thrown away, and to work with a person that can help you make the hard decisions that need to be made. If you're hoarding, all that hoarded material is on decisions that have been put off.

So a lot of that is high neuroticism. Some of that can be a consequence of low conscientiousness as well. So the best course of treatment is to find someone to help you plan how to approach the hoard. Very complicated.

So all right, which Hogwarts house would you be in? Well, I think I'd have the same issue as Harry Potter when the hat was first put on; it would think that I might make a perfectly good denizen of Slytherin. So although that probably wouldn't be where I would end up.

So what is your take on an astrological basis for significant dates and religious stories? Example: Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun. Well, it's certainly not a parody. Religious systems, as they expand, tend to incorporate everything that's quasi-religious in the culture. And there's certainly no shortage of solar symbolism in Christianity.

I mean, it's not fluke that Christ is the sun, and there are 12 disciples just like there are 12 astrological houses. And it's not fluke that the birth of Christ takes place essentially at the same time as the shortest day of the year and the rebirth of the sun. All of these things line up.

Now, whether that's synchronicity or whether it's the attempt by the collective imagination of human beings to align everything under a single truth, that's a very difficult thing to say. Or maybe there's a single truth at work. But the idea that Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun is definitely not the case. It's more like it's incorporated elements of the worship of the sun over thousands and thousands of years.

And that's a very complicated issue. If you're interested in that, you could read "Ion," a book by Carl Jung, which is like the most terrifying book I've ever read. And so you could—there's a deeper analysis of the relationship between astrological speculation and the emergence of complex religious stories.

So my brother, 29, is sick at home with burnout. He's a perfectionist, has anxiety, has trouble dealing with stress. How can I help him become stronger? Well, you could encourage him to go talk to a therapist. You could tell him to go find broadly, make an appointment with three of them, go talk to each one for an hour. And if he likes one of them and he finds one who listens, then he can go back a couple more times.

But it isn't gonna hurt him to go once at least to go talk. It's also possible that he needs someone to talk to him about medication. You know, antidepressants, if he's in real trouble—antidepressants are often very helpful to people, not always, but often. And so that is a lot better than taking an antidepressant; it beats the hell out of being sick at home with burnout and its attendant cognitive dangers, dangers of stress-induced illness, dangers of suicidal ideation—all that sort of thing.

I would also recommend that he try the self-authoring program. If he's at home, he can write about his past, he can write about his present, he can write about his future; he can do a bad job. He can do it over days. I think— I mean, we have evidence that the program is extremely helpful to people. And there's evidence from other researchers that such programs really help.

So that would be something that he could do while he's sitting at home. And it's not gonna hurt him. Going over some of the more complex material might make him feel slightly worse in the short term, but the long-term payoff is very, very high. So that's what I would recommend. Encourage him to go talk to somebody, and he needs to make the plan. He needs to come to terms with what's happened to him, and he needs to make a plan.

And he might need to talk to somebody for a long time to figure out what the hell's going on. You know, and we also don't want to rule out—neither does he—the possibility that there's something physical wrong, you know? Because there's increasing evidence that the depressive disorders—and that would include anxiety—are a consequence of such conditions as generalized inflammation, and that's really worth looking into.

So I think a lot of the things that we think are psychological have a more pronounced physical basis. So, yeah. How do you dress so well? Any tips? Well, you know, thank you. I started buying nice clothes, let's say, this year really. I had some decent suits before that.

I did some research online to find out who good suit manufacturers were; you can look that up. But before this tour, I went and talked to a good tailor—expensive place. I felt terrible spending so much money on clothing, but I felt that if I was going to go talk to, it's been 200,000 people, that I was going to do it right and that I was going to invest in some decent clothes.

And even though it hurt my cheap northern Alberta soul to do it, it was definitely worth it. So you go talk to someone who knows what they're doing; go talk to an actual tailor, and you can do some research online. There's lots of resources online that are devoted to helping figure out how to dress. Three-piece suits look really good. I've got them tailored and fitted, so they're not bespoke suits; they're off the rack, but they've been tailored, and that makes a big difference.

All these subtle things that tailors do—they tuck it in around the waist; they cut it to your body—all of those things help. It's really good to have a good pair of shoes, a couple of nice ties. I learned how to tie a full Windsor knot recently, and that actually helps. You don’t want your tie to look too skinny.

Lots of people have been dressing up to come to my talk, so it's nice to see a lot of young men come well-dressed, often in three-piece suits but not always, and it's really good to see them dressed like grown-ups. I think that's a real plus. I had a rule that I didn't write in "12 Rules," which was dressed like the person you want to be. That's—I kind of took that from Nietzsche because Nietzsche said every great man is an actor of his own ideal.

So it's a very nice aphorism, and basically what it meant was that sometimes you have to act out what you want to be before you become it. You have to pretend; it's not a lie; it's really pretense—like children pretend to be a father before they grow up and become a father. It's a form of practice.

And so tip one might be, figure out who you want to be. Tip two might be, well, then dress like that person. That's a good start, and because I think if you want to become who you want to be, then no detail is too small to overlook. And certainly it isn't exactly that people judge you by your clothes, by your clothes—although they do to some degree. It's that if whatever you can have going for you, you might as well have going for you.

That's how it looks to me, and certainly, my experience has been that the response to my improved wardrobe has indicated that the investment was clearly worth it—indisputably and clearly worth it. And it's nice to be dressed sharply to go in front of an audience; it's a sign of respect to the audience. There are other ways of showing respect to an audience, but that's certainly one, and so it's been extraordinarily worthwhile.

I would say if you're going for a job interview, if you're at any critical point in your life, then you should dress the part because you want to do everything you can to tip the scales—not in your favor exactly, but in favor of having the right thing happen.

So you have written an article on how to write; can you do the same on how to speak well? I suppose I could. I could tell you a little bit about it. If you're gonna speak about something, you need to know a lot about it. You need to know three or four times as much as you're gonna speak about, at minimum.

So first of all, you have to do your background research. You have to have multiple stories at hand that you can use to illustrate your point, and you have to have a point. You have to organize what you're talking about around a problem. So before I go onstage to speak on my tour, I always sit for half an hour; some of which involves usually about five minutes of anxiety.

And I think, okay, there's a problem I'm trying to address tonight, a central problem or a theme. What is it? It might be courage; it might be responsibility; it might be meaning, I think. And that serves as an organizing principle. So that would be the point.

And then basically, I organize, say, a dozen stories around that. And I can kind of arrange them as a journey, and it's a journey that circles the main point. And so I'm trying to explore it to say what I think about courage, let's say, but to take what I'm thinking farther than I've taken it already. And so then I can plot out, you know, little five-minute stories that I have that are associated with courage.

And then I can talk to the audience, and I would say, talk about what you know; use your personal experience because that's something that you're actually a master of. You can bring in other material, but it has to be tied to the real world through your own experience; otherwise, it's not real.

It's also very good to speak directly to the audience, to the individuals in the audience, because I'm always looking at a single person one after another and focusing on them and talking to them just like you'd have a conversation with someone. And that way, I can see if they're following along. And I'm always listening to the audience. What I really like to hear from the audience is no noise at all—silence—because if the audience, especially, you know, if it's a couple hundred or a couple thousand people, if the audience is dead silent, then I know that I'm on the right track.

And so the other thing I would say is you're telling stories. So every fact that you relate or every set of facts has to be tied to a story; there has to be a meaningful output, which is something like, "Why is it important to your life that you know this fact? How is it related to how you're going to conduct yourself moving forward, or how are you going to see the world?"

So because that's kind of the essence of meaning: how does this fact change the way you perceive the world or act in the world? That's the meaning of the fact, and facts without meaning are dull. So you need to know that you need to tell the truth, that's for sure.

And I mean, for me, my talks are really—they're an attempt to explore a set of ideas in the most truthful way that I can manage. And that's also an adventure because letting yourself speak freely about a topic, you don't always know where it's gonna go. And so, but that also hooks in the audience because they're not there along for the ride, right?

And there's a risk. That risk is you might forget where you are; you might lose the thread; you might say something you regret; you might get confused. And it's—the talk should be a process of exploration, like a journey that you're taking the audience along on. It's the same when you're reading a novel; like a great novel, isn't exactly plotted out from beginning to end to begin with.

The author is taking himself or herself—and you—on an intellectual adventure through the character development and the characters have to be allowed to live and to express themselves. And the novel needs to unfold; it's like a colloquy between the conscious mind and the unconscious source of inspiration.

And the novel is actually a journey through a characterological landscape, and the author shouldn't know where he or she's going to end up at the beginning. Same with an artist who's writing a song or a piece of music or a piece of visual art. There has to be play and exploration along the way, and so you also don't want to deliver an over-prepared talk, in my estimation—or at least that's not how I do it.

You want to have a theme; you want to have a body of knowledge from which you can draw on, and then you want to be actively exploring the idea in front of the audience. And that's very gripping for everyone, including you. And so, you should learn something from the talk. It's an opportunity to think on your feet.

And anyways, that's my style of lecturing. It's a trapeze act without a safety net, I would say. And that's part of what makes it gripping is that there’s a high probability of failure, and I would say with any performance that's going to be gripping, that on-the-edge-of-the-seat gripping, there has to be a high probability of failure. And that's why I don't speak with notes.

If you speak with notes—which you might have to if you're a beginning speaker—then you cannot fail because you can always read the notes. And so there's a net; you'll fall in the net, but you won't die, but you'll never do anything spectacular.

So that's the thing: if you're gonna do something spectacular, you have to take the risk. And if you're gonna take the risk, you have to think on your feet. And then you also have to have something to think about; you have to have been working on this material. You know, I've been working on this stuff I talk about for 30 years, for tens of thousands of hours.

And so I have that reservoir of knowledge, I suppose. And you know, whenever I read something new, I'm slotting it into the knowledge structure that I use to generate my talks, and I'm reading all the time. And lots of the things I read, I forget; they're not relevant to my central mission, whatever that happens to be—it looks something like the delineation of the relationship between responsibilities and meaning and maybe responsibilities, meaning, and perception; it's something like that.

And so I have a central concern, or deeper than that—in some sense, my central concern was how to ensure personally that if I was tempted in a situation like the situations that arose in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany that I wouldn't fall prey to those totalitarian systems and act in the reprehensible manner that so many people acted in.

That's really been a driving concern of mine, and that bleeds over into the relationship between meaning and responsibility and perception. So there's a core set of problems that I'm working on, and every talk is an attempt to further develop those. So you also have to have a problem. You think, well, you don't want to have a problem; it's like, yeah, you do. You want to—you've got problems anyway; if you're alive, you've got problems; pick one of them; it can be your problem, and that can be the problem you try to address, whatever that happens to be.

And then you grapple with it. How am I going to address this problem? How can this problem be addressed? So you need to have a problem, too, if you're gonna talk, just like you need to have a problem if you're gonna write because the writing is an attempt to solve the problem, and so is their talking. If you're not trying to solve a problem, what the hell are you doing talking? Why should anyone care?

It's got to be a real problem too, like a nail-biter of a problem, a dragon of a problem; and if it's a problem that everyone else shares, so much the better. So then you grapple with it.

So thoughts on the Eastern idea of moving away from excessive thinking into awareness beyond thinking, removing it from the driver's seat to be used more as a tool? Yeah, well, I've thought a lot about this in relationship to a couple of ancient ideas—the one Mesopotamian idea, characterization of Marduk, who is the highest Mesopotamian deity. It was Marduk who carved up the goddess of chaos, Tiamat, into pieces and made the world out of her pieces.

So Marduk is the force that confronts chaos and builds habitable order, like the logos in Genesis. And one of Marduk's attributes was that he had eyes all the way around his head and that he could speak magic words. Those two attributes—but it's the eyes that are of most crucial importance with regard to this question.

Then there's Horus, the Egyptian god who's the famous eye, and Horus is really a, what would you call it, a designation of attention, I would say. And there's a difference between attention and thinking. Like, let me give you an example. So thinking seems to be instrumental mostly.

So if you think—people also often say to me, "Well, what's your strategy when you go into an interview?" And the answer is, well, I don't have a strategy when I go into an interview because I'm there to have a conversation, and I'm not sure where the conversation will go. And I'm willing to let it go wherever it goes. I'm not there to sell books, although I'm perfectly happy if more books sell because, well, obviously, I wrote a book, and I want people to read it, and there's a whole enterprise behind it.

And so it's also my responsibility to do the marketing properly. But I'm not gonna do these interviews to sell books, or to promote myself, or—or it. I don't have a strategic goal in mind except that I'm gonna have a conversation, and I'm going to say what I think and take the consequences because I assume that if I say something and I believe it's true, then the consequences are as positive as they can be, regardless of how they look at the time.

And that's an issue of faith because I believe that the habitable order is generated by spoken truth. I believe that; I think that's the truest thing I know. And so I go into the interview, and I did this in my clinical practice, and I try to do this when I'm talking to people too, is that I'm not thinking about where the conversation is going or what point I want to make or what I want the outcome to be, any of that.

I just let that go. You know, it's within this broader framework of assuming that the truth is the most effective means of progressing. And then I pay attention. And what happens when you pay attention is that, well, you're watching a person; this is a great treatment for social anxiety, by the way, because if you're socially anxious, you tend not to pay attention to the person.

Pay attention to who you're talking to; watch them like a hawk, like not paranoid or anything like that. And not too intently because you make them uncomfortable, but intently pay attention to what they're saying, to how they look, to their facial gestures—all of that. Look at their face and watch and listen and try to understand what they're saying.

And what you'll see is that, well, questions pop into your mind. Like, well, I didn't understand what you said; can you clarify that? And it sounds like you mean this—Is this what you mean? But not in a "I'll put you on the spot because I think you're wrong" sort of way, but in a clarification sort of way. And all of that attention—that's a good control for social anxiety.

And so when I was doing clinical work with people, this is the reason I quit, by the way, about a year ago, is because I was starting to get distracted. I had a rule, which was, you have an hour with me, and I do nothing but pay attention to you. I'm not thinking about what I want to accomplish; I'm not thinking about the problems in my life. I'm not distracted, and I listen to you, and I ask questions when I don't understand.

And if a thought occurs to me while I'm paying attention to you, then I'll tell you what it is, you see. And that's using awareness primarily and thinking secondarily. Like, I don't think, well, here's what I want to cure this person, and I'm going to maneuver them into certain responses by using these communicative tools. I think I'm going to pay attention to this person; we're going to discuss where we're going and why.

I'm going to listen to what they say, and then when they're talking, things are going to occur within me. I'm gonna see images, and thoughts are going to emerge from the background, and then I'll share them—not always because I usually have more thoughts than can be shared—but if a thought comes up and it seems like an interesting reaction to what the person just said, then I'll just tell them, and sort of without commitment to it.

And it's usually okay—it just—you just said this, and so this question emerged. So we need to straighten that out because I'm confused. Or you said this and I had this image, or you said this and this thought came to mind, and it seems to be this, is this, so that's one person's reaction to the way that you're conducting yourself at the moment.

So thinking is instrumental. I outlined this in I think it's rule 7, "Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient." If you do what's expedient, you have a short-term conscious goal in mind, and you try to bend everything towards that end. But if you're pursuing what's meaningful, then you just pay attention to what's going on and you react with truth, and I think that's a much better way of living, as far as I'm concerned.

It's a much more powerful way of living. It means you have to confront things right then and there, which is, I suppose, why so many of my interviews have been, in some sense, confrontational, because people will impose a thinking agenda on the flow of the conversation. This is especially true in the mainstream media; it happened again recently with BBC's "Hard Talk" that they imposed an agenda in the conversation, and then that just doesn't work out very well because I'm paying attention, and I will object to the agenda, not because I have a different agenda except for what I said, which is that I want to say what I think; I want to say it as truthfully as I can.

What I actually am thinking, in this more abstracted and detached sense, and see what happens. So it's a hard thing to clarify because you might say, well, Dr. Peterson, you just said you want to say what you're thinking, but it's not exactly the same thing. It's not like I'm thinking strategically; I'm listening; thoughts will emerge, and I say them. I'm not trying to manipulate; I'm not putting spin on things; I'm not trying to manipulate the conversation in any particular way.

And again, the reason for that is because I decided a long time ago, probably thirty years ago, that there was no more effective way of dealing with a complex situation than to try to say what you believe to be true and not to manipulate it. None of that—it's just doesn't—because that's all—those are all lies, as far as I'm concerned, that kind of manipulation and spin.

So if he is invited to the largest possible number of games, he's also the person that goes out to conquer the unknown. Could this lie in reciprocal altruism? That's a really good question. I would say it almost certainly does. You certainly see the reciprocal altruism in being invited to the largest possible number of games.

So a little background here: it's like, well, what's a winner? Well, a winner is someone who wins a game. It's like, no, a winner is someone who gets invited to play the largest possible number of games. And that means that you have to be a good sport. And so the good sport is the winner in the broader game—in the metagame.

Now, I've put forward the proposition that the winner of the metagame is also the person that goes out to conquer the unknown. Now let's see if we can take that apart a little bit. Well, one of the attributes of being a good sport, let's say, is that you're trying to extend your skill during the game. And so you are confronting the unknown in the game because you're trying to get better at playing the game.

And then you're also doing that in a way that's of benefit to the team. And so then you can imagine that being a team leader in the metagame, which is the game of extending your skill across the broadest possible set of games, is analogous to leading a team into the unknown.

So if you're gonna go confront the unknown, you're probably not gonna do it alone, although you could. And to some degree, you have to be alone, but you're generally gonna do it in a cooperative and competitive way. I mean, that's why, in stories like "The Lord of the Rings," "The Hobbit," for example, and even Harry Potter for that matter, none of those people are alone. They lead or are part of a broader social group, and they're important, and they're team players within that group.

So the team player element seems to be something that's common to conquering the unknown and to reciprocal altruism and to being invited to play the largest number of games. The question then is: what makes an effective leader? And an effective leader is someone who's able to synthesize the group and to lead it forward towards the goal.

Yeah, that's it. And you know, in a game, obviously, the good player is leading the team forward towards the goal, and that's the same in a quest. The good player is the leader who's leading the team towards the goal. So there's a deep analogy there, and it's not just reciprocal altruism.

I don't think that's quite the right terminology, though, because there's an element of pragmatic competence that goes along with it too. You can't merely be willing to engage in reciprocal altruism to be a good player or to conquer the unknown; you also have to have skill and discipline. So I would say reciprocal altruism is a necessary but not sufficient precondition. Right? Talent, skill, ability, all of those things—creativity—all of those things are also important.

So that's a bit of an answer to that, but it's a very, very good question. So please confirm if your Harry Potter Patronus would, in fact, be a frog. We need answers, Doctor! Well, you'd certainly think that, wouldn't you? A frog? Well, I think that's obvious; it's got to be a frog or maybe a lobster. I wouldn't—I wouldn't have guessed that it would be a frog, but that certainly seems to be how things have developed.

And I suppose, you know, a frog is at home on dry land and in the water, and that makes the frog a kind of psychopomp. And I've strived to be at home in the air and in the water and to bring up the gold ball from the bottom of the lake like the frog prince. Yeah, yeah, definitely frog.

Okay, so you've got your answer. I've got my answer too, I guess. On completing understandmyself.com, I scored exceptionally low—zero—on conscientiousness, industriousness, and orderliness. What can I do for motivation? Well, Dean, the first question is: how old are you? And you're gonna have an easier life if you're still young because if you're older and you have that score, then that's gonna be rough.

Perhaps you're high in openness, in which case you're going to derive your motivation from engaging in creative endeavors. Perhaps you're high in agreeableness, which means that you might find meaning in caring for other people. Perhaps extraversion, which means you're going to find engagement in being with other people.

So those are potential sources of motivation. You may have to look elsewhere then—duty, let’s say, and achievement, ambition, for your primary sources of motivation. One thing I would caution you, though, is that you likely need to make friends with a scheduler like Google Calendar. Try to design days you want to have and to learn to structure your time because even if you're high in openness, which makes you creative, yes, you're gonna have a hell of a time sticking to things.

And so maybe you need to partner with someone who's high in conscientiousness. But I would really recommend trying to discipline yourself. Use Google Calendar to design the days you want to have and learn to schedule and regulate your time. Because zero is very low, and my suspicion is you'll pay quite a high price for that.

So what do you think about Alice Miller's thesis—that most psychological diseases and aberrant behavior are the result of some kind of childhood trauma? Some are, but some forms of childhood trauma are also a consequence of psychological diseases and aberrant behavior. So this is very, very complicated. I'm more on the existentialist front with regards to these sorts of theories.

So Alice Miller's thesis is basically Freudian. Freud certainly posited that many forms of psychological distress were a consequence of childhood trauma of various sorts. I think the existentialist take on that is more accurate, which is that life in and of itself is sufficiently harsh and full of betrayal and other forms of malevolence to cause any number of psychological diseases and produce any amount of aberrant behavior.

So I don't think it has to be—it’s not as if we all had childhoods without trauma that we would have grown up to be perfect adults. It's—that's also a disguised form of Rousseau and philosophy, and Rousseau's philosophy is people are basically good but culture makes them evil. And that's not true; people are basically good and evil, and culture fortifies the possibility of both, adds strength to the possibility of both.

So I don't— I think that people are sometimes damaged in childhood in ways that need to be addressed in adulthood, but that there are plenty of other reasons for psychological and physical disorder—genetic causes, causes related to all sorts of physical diseases. No, it's way too simple. It's way too simple of a hypothesis, and it's caused an awful lot of trouble because a lot of simple-minded therapists always assume that if someone is having psychological problems in adulthood, it must be because they had childhood trauma, and everybody has an unhappy childhood to some degree, so you can always find something.

And often the childhood trauma that they're looking for has to be sexual, and so they dig and dig until they find or invent often—invent something that allows a single causal attribution. And it’s just—life just isn't that simple, man. There's lots of reasons to be ill—way more reasons to be ill than to be healthy.

So what if the truth could unravel your entire life? Yeah, well, first of all, it would. And, second, yeah, I know what you mean. You mean, what if—I suppose the cardinal case there would be that you did something really terrible, and then if that was revealed, it would be a catastrophic situation. It's like, without knowing the details of that, I can't provide a generic answer.

You know, I think that there are some sins that are so egregious that you don't get to confess to them. You know, like if you've done something terrible—and I'm not recommending this—it's just an example. If you've done something terrible, and you know that if you revealed it, it would blow the lives of many people around you apart, it isn't obvious to me that you have any moral justification for confessing just to free your miserable soul.

So what if the truth could unravel your entire life? Well, maybe you need to go to Catholic confession and let someone know exactly what happened so you're clear about it. And then maybe what you need to do is to swear to whatever God you worship that you're gonna try to walk the straight and narrow from here on in, and that'll be sufficient to atone for whatever terrible thing that you did. And that's a form of prayer, and it sounds like one that you desperately need, at least in principle.

So without knowing the details, that's about the best I can do. I think what put you over with so many of us was the constructive message of how to be a good man—well, a good person, I would say. Do you think that's where the media want you to go? I don't know. Generally, not. They—I mentioned this earlier—is the media, as it disintegrates—and it certainly is disintegrating at an incredibly rapid rate; everything is political.

That it's as if the philosophical and the psychological and the theological don't exist, and you know, increasingly in my interviews, I've been talking about what's been happening at my lectures on my tour and describing the fact that the vast majority of the audience isn't there for political reasons at all; they're there because they want to figure out how to have a responsible and meaningful life.

And it's as if that story just doesn't exist. The framework, which is basically a political framework, and increasingly a politically correct framework, doesn't allow that to exist as a reality. And that's why, well, I'm much more comfortable lecturing to the crowds that have been coming to see me than I am talking to journalists. It's become—I have been limiting my interactions with journalists, even though that might not be self-evident yet.

I have been trying to do that. The demands have been increasing, so the proportion of media invitations that I'm responding to has fallen dramatically, even though the absolute number hasn't declined as precipitously. And the reason for that is that while I find the—I find the typical interview very stressful, very, very stressful. I'm on guard, and I would say also my attitude isn't as good as it could be anymore because I've been—because I'm on guard so much.

It's easier for me to get a bit snappy and unpleasant, and that's bad. That's bad; I don't want to do that. I want to stay calm and detached and try to, you know, tell the truth and be happy that I'm there regardless of the circumstances. The fact that the mainstream media, let's say, is not very receptive—oh, sometimes there's exceptions—not very receptive to the idea that I could just be going around talking to people who want to get their life together is quite saddening.

And I think it's definitely a commentary on the fundamental corruption of our media apparatus. I think it's better to talk on YouTube, to speak on my podcast, to do these lectures, and I think it's increasingly better to do that. The long-form discussions on YouTube though with people like Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin and so forth—that works just fine.

So a new media form is emerging, and I think it's going to be a lot more productive. It won't be as scripted; it'll be much longer form; it'll allow for much more thoughtfulness. And I'm—but it's okay; it's not like the media exposure, although it's been stressful, it's not like I'm not grateful for it, even people who've put me on the spot very badly have ended up doing me a tremendous favor.

But the problem is that—because I'm becoming too much on guard, and I've noticed a developing sense of impatience within me and some suspicion, and that's not good. I don't want to be in situations where those are my fundamental orientations. It's a sign of a certain amount of internal corruption on my part, and I want to be in situations where I'm speaking with people, speaking honestly to people who are honestly listening—that would be—that's a good situation.

So would you agree with C.S. Lewis that if you look for truth, you may find comfort; if you look for comfort, you will find despair? Oh yes, that's definitely the case. It's quite an intelligent phrase because he says, if you look for truth, you may find comfort; he didn't say you will find comfort.

Yeah, well, sometimes if you look for truth, you don't find comfort to begin with—that's for sure. You find a lot of trouble. But sometimes you have to go through a lot of trouble to set things right. If you look for comfort, despair—well, the reason for that is that you can't look for comfort in life. Life isn't about comfort. Life is a deadly game; it's a game of life and death. It's a game of good and evil; it's everything's on the line—your sanity is on the line, your freedom from pain is on the line, your freedom from despair is on the line, your family's on the line—there's no comfort.

Life is an adventure. And I think the greatest adventure that you can possibly have is one is the one that you find if you look for the truth. And that's a good place to stop. That's been 90 minutes, and I've been reasonably sharp and with it for the full 90 minutes, and so I think I'll bring it to a close.

Just a couple of reminders for those of you who tuned in late: if you want to try out the self-authoring program, I made a code, "August," and that entitles you to 20% off. There's a two-for-one special, so you can give it to a friend as well. If you want to try understand myself— which is a personality test, it only takes about 15 minutes, it's quite a bit easier than the self-authoring suite—the code for that is also August. That also gives you 20% off.

Self-authoring helps you read about your past, present, and future, and you can do a bad job at it. And if you haven't