March 2019 Q and A

Sorry everyone, a little more light on the situation here. Welcome to the March Q&A. Glad to see you all here, thanks for tuning in. So let's see if we can get somewhere reasonable today.

I guess I could update you a little bit, if you'd be interested, tell you what has been going on. My wife Tammy and I came back from Australia and New Zealand at the end of February. We had a really good tour there. I would say about a dozen places, maybe 15. Hard to keep track as we went to a number of places more than once. Large crowds! Some of the bigger venues, Melbourne for example, is 5,500 people. So I think that was the biggest audience that I had spoken to independently of the discussions with Sam Harris. So that was very interesting to see that crowds of that magnitude would show up.

Got to speak at the Sydney Opera House, which was extremely exciting. You know, it's such an iconic building, so that was a real honor. It's been like that for lots of the theaters that I've been in, you know, these old iconic buildings that so many people have performed in. It's quite a privilege to be able to get backstage and take a look.

We enjoyed Australia and New Zealand a lot. The company Tag a Tea that hosted the tour did an outstanding job, and the press even was reasonably welcoming, I would say. At least in Australia and New Zealand, it was a bit of a different story. They seem to be more polarized there, as recent events have clearly indicated.

So since I've been back, well, I haven't been particularly productive. I've mostly been sleeping, as it turns out. So I guess I've worn out after a year of touring. But I'm hard at work on my next book, tentatively entitled "Beyond Order" or "Beyond Mere Order: Twelve More Rules for Life." I'm up to chapter nine, and I would say I'm pretty stuck on it at the moment. I'm having a hard time slogging through it. My brain isn't as sharp as it could be, and I have to be sharp to edit.

So anyway, I set up some new offices this week to get my team together for the online education project, so that's exciting! About five of us that will be working together in some offices with a company called Post Media, who I'm also working with writing journal newspaper articles. So that's exciting, and we're hoping for good things from the online education program. No timelines or anything like that still; it's a complicated system.

I've been working as well on the Patreon replacement. That's looking really good, I would say. I met with the developer this week. We're hoping to have some of it functional by April 1st, and there'll be a little bit more information about that available on April 1st.

I have a talk in New York on April 17th at the Beacon Theater. I think it's sold out. I have a talk on April 19th at the Sony Centre in Toronto with Slava Dziedzic, who’s probably the world’s most famous Marxist philosopher, and so that should be interesting and challenging and hopefully productive.

And then for those of you who might be watching from the UK or from somewhere reasonably accessible to the UK, I am doing a "12 Rules for Life" lecture tour show May 8th in London, which is the same time that the paperback version of "12 Rules for Life" is coming up.

So that's basically that for updates, I guess. Now maybe there's a bit more. I've videotaped a number of my lectures in Australia, which is the first time I've done that. Professionally videotaped them, I think I taped six. So we'll be releasing them in some form yet to be determined, maybe on the new platform in the relatively near future.

I have about 50 of them, 55 of them audio taped and transcribed, and so I've put together the transcriptions. It's about a million words, and I'm hoping that there’s possibly books I can derive from that. But if there's not, folks, there's certainly podcasts and that sort of thing. And I have a lot of interviews coming up as well.

So that's what's happening on this end of the universe. So let's take some questions and see how that goes.

I don't know why this question is so popular, but, and it's completely ridiculous, but that's okay. Stephen Shudders, who obviously hasn't got anything better to do, wants to know what is my favorite soup. And apparently, 333 people are also interested in that particular topic. And I would say it's actually irrelevant, unfortunately, because I don't eat soup. I'm on this crazy all-meat diet that some of you know about, and that doesn't go along very well with soup. But if I had to pick a soup that I ate at one point, my favorite soup was a clam chowder that I used to make with corn, and I was a dish I was particularly proud of. I was actually not a bad cook. I spent a lot of time cooking in restaurants and really enjoyed it and miss it a lot, the diversity, you know, of cuisine. And so it would have to be clam chowder.

So now you know the most important thing about me that you could possibly know.

When will you be starting back up your Bible series? Well, that's a good question, and it looks like it'll be the fall. Now, what's happening in October is that I'm going to Cambridge University in the UK for two months and I'm going to be a visiting fellow there at the Divinity School. That should give me an opportunity to talk to religious experts of all types for a couple of months as well as students.

The plan at the moment is to do that at the same time that I start recording the lectures on Exodus. So I figured I could kill two birds with one stone that way. I could start the biblical lectures again, which I'm really looking forward to, and also update my biblical knowledge substantially, as well as having the opportunity to spend some time in Cambridge, which I think would be really exciting. I was there a little bit this summer, and it's known as an absolutely beautiful university, and it's quite a thrill for someone who's academically minded to be there, period, but also to be invited there to sit in and participate for a couple of months.

So anyways, maybe I can get 10 or so lectures out in that period of time. Let's say if I did one a week, I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to do it. If I'm gonna rent a public theater like I did in Toronto, I think that's probably the plan. But anyways, assume October or November. That's the plan at the moment.

What I'm trying to concentrate on right now is finishing my new book, which has a relatively sudden, or you know, relatively, it has a due date that's in the relatively recent future. So I like to stay on top of those things. It's easy to get behind when you're writing a book and to rush it and to do it badly. So I'm trying to make sure that I've got my priorities straight.

So anyways, that's the situation with the biblical series. I'm really looking forward to it. I think one of the most worthwhile things I've done in my academic career was that series on Genesis, and I learned a tremendous amount.

And so I'm assuming the same thing will happen with the Exodus stories, which I know better, so that should be slightly easier on me from a rate of learning perspective. And hopefully, I'll be able to go deeper because they are really remarkable stories.

So I've also been struck by the, you know, the reception to those biblical stories. I've read a surprising number, for example, of letters from Islamic viewers who've been watching them, and the letters have been very positive. And so that's made me think very hard about the overall potential effect of delineating the meaning of all these old stories.

I think that to the degree that we want to preserve the understructure of our culture—and I regard that as grounded in Judeo-Christian tradition very, very firmly, as well as other traditions obviously—the Greco-Roman tradition probably foremost among them—the stories have to be brought alive again. And I don't think there's any more effective way of demonstrating their utility than to make them come alive.

Your profession of belief and value isn't sufficient. One thing you might guys might be interested in is, too, is this is a video or a an audio. I think I don't know if I videotaped this one or just audio recorded it. I did a lecture in Australia on this question about belief in God and why I'm not very happy about the question and unwilling, in some sense, to answer it. So I did a two-hour, 70-minute lecture on how that question—why that question is problematic for me and what can be done about it, what the proper answer is to it.

I think so hopefully you'll find something interesting in that when it's finally released.

I do not attend church. How can I teach my children the biblical stories in a productive way without the dogma or little and literal interpretation of organized religion? Well, that's an unbelievably complicated problem.

And I actually don't know the answer to it. I'm not sure that I did a particularly good job of teaching my children the biblical stories in a productive way without the dogma or literal interpretation of organized religion. I think that you could start by just reading them the stories. You know, there are decent plain English translations of the biblical stories, and you might find that just reading the stories to them, at least they're familiar with them that way. And you'd have to pick and choose obviously, because they're not going to be too thrilled by sitting through endless genealogies.

But there are also biblical translations available that put the stories out in prose form and do a pretty good job of editing out the genealogical material and the other things that might not be so, what might not capture the imagination of children particularly well. I can't think of any better way of doing it than just reading the stories to them and perhaps to the degree that it’s possible to discuss them and see if that works. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't.

I mean, I didn't take my kids to church, you know, having stopped attending really when I was 13. And I have my reasons for not attending; maybe they're good and maybe they're not. I'm very back and forth with that one of the downsides of that was that though they didn't develop the same familiarity with the stories that I had developed when I was a kid because I did go to church fairly regularly until I was 13, and it's definitely a loss.

My cynicism about church organization, it's cynicism—I don’t know what it is exactly. Well, I didn't do my children's education on the biblical front any good, so I'm still at sixes and sevens, let's say, about that and about exactly what to do about it. But you could try reading the stories to them and see how that goes. And there are children's versions available as well.

You know what I suspect? If you look carefully on Amazon, you could find ones that were well-reviewed, and so that might be another way of approaching it.

What question are you asked way too seldom? Oh, well, that's pretty easy, at least if the question is what question am I asked by journalists way too seldom. And the answer to that would be, "Dr. Peterson, what the hell is going on?" And what I mean by that is why are so many people coming to your lectures, let's say, and why did your book strike such a chord?

I think the first one is the most important one. You know, generally, what happens with journalists is that they're very cynical about what is happening at my lectures and also who's attending, and it's really very pejorative, demeaning, thoughtless, prejudiced, and I would say cruel all at once because the first assumption is that, you know, I'm talking primarily to angry white young men, and there certainly isn't a lot of evidence for that. I would say the average age of the people in my audience is 30s, and that's not exactly young.

And then I would say, well, it's at least 30% women, and that's been increasing as the book has sold more. And you know, the reason it was men primarily to begin with I think is because, well, there are many men starving for an encouraging voice. And also the fact that YouTube, which is where I picked up my primary audience to begin with, skews about 80-20 male to female in terms of its viewership, which really doesn't have anything to do with me, right?

That's just a, what do you call that? That's a baseline phenomenon that has to be taken into account before you draw any conclusions about the nature of someone's audience. But the presumption is that I'm speaking politically and in a divisive way to the people who show up to my lectures and to my talks, and it's just not true.

The lectures aren't political, except peripherally. I mean, you now and then throw a critical comment or two out about the manner in which this strange alliance of post-modernism and neo-Marxism has been dominating the university, but I think that's a perfectly reasonable thing to point out.

Apart from that, the lectures almost all concentrate on psychological self-improvement, and it seems almost impossible for the media to be not cynical about that. You know, I think it's partly because almost everything that the classic media covers has to be politicized.

And I was on a show, for example, called Q&A, an Australian show which was—it’s their biggest political show. It's modeled on one in the UK, which is also quite big, which I was also on a while back. Every issue immediately becomes discussed among polarized political lines.

It's as if our discourse has degenerated to the point where the only possible response to a question about anything important has to be ideological. So left or right, and it has to be political. And so I think part of the problem is perhaps that the phenomenon that constitutes the attendance at my lectures doesn't fit the standard news media narrative, which is driven by journalists I think who had political ambitions fundamentally or still have political ambitions of one sort or another and who tend to view the world through a political means.

But for me, the experience of my lectures is actually an unbelievably positive one and not particularly stressful. Like it's nowhere near as stressful as almost any interview I have had with almost any journalist because again, things get politicized very rapidly.

What happens in the lectures is that you know, 3,000 people show up and they're happy to be there, and so it's a very welcoming atmosphere. And I get to talk to them for 70 minutes about some psychological problem I would say often associated with one of the chapters in my book, like what it means to what a human competence hierarchy might look like, say if I was talking about chapter one.

Because we do organize hierarchies, human beings naturally organize hierarchies like other animals too. But we tend to organize hierarchies to achieve valuable goals, you know, valuable in that they're goals that people assume would be usefully achieved to decrease some amount of suffering in the world or maybe to bring happiness to people or a bit of luxury or something, generally something of at least limited use and often far more than limited, you know.

And I talked to people about the fact that the best way to make progress in a human hierarchy has nothing to do with power but everything to do with reciprocity and responsibility. I just read this or watched this really cool TED Talk, I think it was a TED Talk by Frans de Waal—F R A N S de Waal—and he studied political behavior in chimpanzees.

So I wish I had the URL for it; maybe somebody can post that if they would. But one of the things that de Waal pointed out was that the most important chimpanzees in a chimpanzee troop are actually the most dominant—the most dominant males. They're the ones who do the most comforting and the most care. Like the females are more empathic than the males on average, but across all of the chimpanzees, the most dominant males are the ones that show the most empathic responses.

And that's part of their roles as leaders. And he's not the only animal ethologist, someone who studies the natural behavior of animals—he's not the only person to point this sort of thing out, you know.

Is that the ability to move forward in a hierarchy is dependent on far more than power and aggression, and it's dependent on reciprocity and friendship, but also especially in the case of human beings on skill because hopefully when we organize our hierarchies and we're attempting to solve complex problems by setting up a hierarchy that allows for competition and cooperation, that the hierarchy organizes itself so that the most competent people rise to the top.

And I actually think that generally speaking that's true. I mean the selection process isn't perfect and it's marred by, you could say, the proclivity to select people for reasons other than their fundamental competence, and that might be their attractiveness or their extraversion or their height or their charisma, their self-confidence.

It might be their race or their gender, their sexuality—situations where true prejudice plays a role—but that only happens when the hierarchies have become corrupt because obviously, it's in everyone's best interests if we're trying to solve complex problems that the most competent people are the ones that have the opportunity to rise to the top.

And I actually think we do a damn good job of that in the West, which is why almost everything that we do in the West works—why everything is reliable and why the power is always on and why our electronic technology works and why our society in general works. You can be cynical about that if you want, but I don't know what you would compare the functionality of our societies to because things are way better than they were 150 years ago.

They're getting better very, very rapidly as Western ideas of production and private property and honesty and integrity, I would say as well, spread around the world, especially now that the more radical socialist ideas that were pushed by people like the Soviets have declined at least to some degree since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Well, anyways, this is the sort of thing that's discussed at the talks. You know, that's rule one. And we know rule two, I talk to people about taking care of themselves like there's someone who they have responsibility for, and that's not a political issue; it's an injunction—assuming that you have a certain intrinsic value.

You know, and that it's necessary for that value to manifest itself for you to push yourself against the world, to challenge yourself because otherwise what you're capable of won't manifest itself. It has to be developed; it has to be called forth by necessity, right? You have to pick a hard problem and try to solve it and push yourself against it in order for—and you have to try to do that truthfully and responsibly—in order for what it is that you're intrinsically capable of and composed of to come to the forefront.

And that seems like a very positive thing, as far as I'm concerned, to encourage people to be responsible for themselves and for other people and also to point out that you have a moral responsibility to do so for yourself just as you do for others. And I think that that message has been very helpful to people, at least that's what they've told me.

And it's predicated the rule is predicated on the old Judeo-Christian idea, the oldest idea in some sense that, you know, that there's a relationship between logos, which is truthful speech, and communication and bringing things into being from chaotic potential. That's the idea that's put forward in Genesis.

And also the idea that men and women alike are made in the image of God, which suggests that like God, we have the capability of affecting potential, affecting the possible future and turning it into the actual present, and that we do that at least in part as a consequence of our ethical choices.

You know, and then I'll give you one more example, in rule 10, which is "Be precise in your speech." I point out that the tremendous, that the aims that you have in your life, the ethical aims—and those are the aims that direct your actions—also direct your perceptions.

That this is true at a neurophysiological level and that much of the way that the world manifests itself to you is a consequence of the structure of your ethics. So it's your ethical structure that's instantiated neurophysiologically that serves as an intermediary between the world of phenomena, let's say objective phenomena, and your perception of that.

And you see the world through an ethical lens, and one of the things that that suggests, and I outlined this in rule 6, is that if the world looks to you like a dismal and terrible place and you're nihilistic and depressed and hopeless and all of that— I mean, there can be physiological reasons for that; you might be ill. But if it’s a psychological issue, it's certainly possible that at least part of the reason that everything appears to you in that light is because your ethical structure is not well formulated—it's incoherent, it's nihilistic, it isn't predicated on the idea, for example, that people have some spark of divine virtue, and that everyone is valuable in that right.

And that we all have the possibility to make a genuine contribution to the world, or at least to stop it from degenerating any more than it has to into a kind of hell. So anyways, that's a very long answer to that question, but it is—it's so interesting to me that the journalists who interview me have no curiosity about why it is that so many people are coming to watch my lectures.

It's like the curiosity has been boiled out of them in some sense because it certainly makes me curious. I've every time I go on stage and there's 3,500 people there, I'm curious about why they're there. And so we have a discussion about all these things that I've been talking about.

And I can tell you too that the one thing that really brings the house to a dead silence—which is very much worth attention to—is the discussion, anytime I have a discussion about the relationship between responsibility and meaning. You know, because one of the fundamental theses of "12 Rules for Life" and also of "Maps of Meaning" is that because life is essentially tragic in its fundamental essence, you need a sustaining meaning that's deep and profound enough to get you through bad times, because there will be very bad times in your life.

There'll be death and there'll be illness, and there'll be disappointment of all sorts, and there'll be just the standard difficulties of life in the world to contend with. And you really must have something that's profound and powerful to set up against that.

And I think that your voluntary adoption of the struggle to improve being is the proper antidote to that. And that the best way to do that is to live responsibly and truthfully. I truly believe that, and I think that people know this, you know, because when I talk to my audiences about exactly this, about who they admire for example, you know, it's like, well, you don't admire people who lie and cheat and deceive. If you don't teach your children to do that, you admire people who keep their word, who are honest and reliable, and you want them around especially in times of trouble.

And you want people who are capable of being responsible for themselves and to take care of themselves properly as if they matter, as a moral duty. And then you also want people who have extended themselves past that so that they can take care of their family and regard that as a noble and appropriate enterprise.

And who are reliable for their children and for their husbands and wives. And then you want people who are capable of extending themselves even beyond that and taking care of the community. And when I talk about that, and that's meaning—find the meaning in your life if you're looking for it. It's not in happiness, and it's not in impulsive pleasure. None of that works for any length of time.

Well, it tends to kick back hard, and it’s certainly not something that's going to get you through rough times. It's the ability to pick up a heavy load of responsibility and to move forward with it.

And what's so interesting is that every time I talk about this with my audiences, they're reduced to complete silence. And there’s, I think there's something—and that's, you know, I've noticed that in 150 different cities now. And it’s something you really have to take seriously when you see it happening over and over.

And I do believe that a huge part of the reason that people are coming to watch my lectures and to buy my book—the lectures of course have more direct impact on me than the book sales, although the book sales now have approached three million copies, which is quite something in hardcover around the world, and they're not translated into all the languages they're going to be translated into. That's I think 50 languages is what they're slated for now.

But the lectures have more impact on me because I get to see the audience, and then to talk to people afterwards. You know, when they tell me the same thing: many people who come up to me in the meet and greets, because people can come and talk to me after the lecture—there's special tickets arranged for that, that's handled by a particular company—and they tell me, you know, they've been trying to develop a vision for their life and to act more responsibly and to speak more truthfully and to take more responsibility.

Maybe I already said that, and that the changes in their lives have been overwhelming as a consequence of merely trying to just speak the truth or not lie. Has had a huge effect on many of the people that I've talked to. And it's not a simple thing to do, you know.

And it's a risky thing because the consequences of speaking the truth in the short term, especially if you're not very practiced at it, can be quite devastating, which is of course why people don't do it. But the medium to long-term consequences are extremely beneficial, and it's what sets the world straight.

And so what question are you asked way too seldom? Well, "Dr. Peterson, don't you think that it's interesting that so many people are coming to your lectures that are fundamentally psychological and philosophical in nature and apparently doing so because they're really trying hard to get their lives together?" It’s like, yeah, I think that's really interesting, and it's a question that's really worth pursuing.

It's the only question that's worth pursuing as far as I'm concerned because it's a real mystery that there's such a demand for this. I can’t fathom it. I think it's being a source of tremendous optimism to me that people have that burning desire for a more profound dialogue.

And you know, it's not necessarily the people that you expect, too. The journalists, you know, they're very cynical about my hypothetically angry audience, for example. And you know, I've spoken now to, I think, 350,000 people, right? 350,000 people in 150 cities, and we haven't had one episode of misbehavior from anybody in the audience, except for one person who stood up in some city and had a few, you know, rebellious things to say.

But that person wasn't a partisan of mine by any stretch of the imagination. The lectures have been very, very peaceful and they're very, very positive. And that's part of the reason why I've been able to travel around so regularly over the last year with my wife and do 150 lectures. You know, cause it’s quite well demanding, all that traveling and all that thinking because each of the lectures is different, at least to the degree that I can make it. But they're so positive and it's so exciting at a fundamental level to see people want to engage in serious dialogue of that sort that it's unbelievably sustaining.

Let's call it that. It makes up for the inner—it used to use Australia tired me out. I think I've maybe did do a bit too much traveling around. And you know, there were some other issues in my family that had to be dealt with in January and March that were quite serious, and so that was another issue that was draining, let’s say.

But I'll tell you, both my wife and I and Dave Rubin and my tour manager John O'Connell, who’s been a really good guy; you know, we've all found this entire experience extraordinarily positive. And the same thing happens with the people who are arranging the tours. Their experiences are the same.

So how to balance between making peace and speaking the truth in intimate relationships? What if truth hurts the other or two sides conflict? Well, you can be absolutely certain that that's going to happen. I mean, look, the first thing that’s a really good question, that's from Vincent. It's a really good question, it's a really difficult question.

The first thing you have to decide is, this goes back to what I was discussing about 10 minutes ago about what your aims are. You know, your whole, the whole way you perceive the world is dependent on what you’re on—the aim of your ethical structure.

And so that ethical structure is a hierarchy with something at the top that's of crucial importance. And Carl Jung would say that whatever is at the top of your ethical hierarchy functions psychologically as if it's God for you. It's because it’s the highest of all possible values.

And you can think of God in that sense as a personality that perhaps—a personality that you're trying to mimic, because a value structure actually constitutes a personality that you're trying to act out or mimic.

And so the highest element in that personality structure would be the most valuable portion of that personality. You might say, "Well, what do you want? What do you want?" If you could have what you wanted. If you could knock and the door would open, so to speak, and if you could ask and you would receive, what would you want?

And that means what would you give, what would you be willing to give up important things for? How would you prioritize? Which is the same as giving up important things, and it's not easy to come to terms with what you want. Because you might be angry and resentful and bitter, and you might have your reasons for that, and that might contaminate your ethical structure, let's say, and make it so that there's large parts of you that would be the shadow part from the Jungian perspective who’s actually that are actually after conflict and harm and cruelty and suffering out of spite and revenge.

And then the probability that part of you is like that is unbelievably high because it's very hard to be pure of spirit, let's say, given how much suffering and malevolence there is in the world and how much we're exposed to that.

So it's very easy to take the low road. If you are married, let's say, or you have a close relationship with someone and you want that relationship to be good, then the first thing that you have to figure out is, well, what do you mean by good? You know, so, and I would say, well, good would be loving, let's say.

And what that would mean is that each of you would be trying to take care of the other and yourself as if you're of equal import and that that import is high. And so I think that once you're married to someone, for example, or once you have children, and then maybe this—the same thing applies to your immediate family, your parents and your siblings, somewhat less so for them, although still significantly—that you have to treat your spouse and your children as if they are yourself.

And I know that's an old idea, and it's not often explained well, but you—you well, that also assumes that what you want for yourself is something approximating what would be best for you. And you'd have to figure that out as well.

And I don't know, it seems to me that, well, you want to like the people that you're with, and so you have to treat them well. And you want them to love you and to love them, I would say, at least to the same degree that you'd want that from a pet, you know?

It's very nice to come home if you have a dog or another animal that loves you to have something there that's really on your side, that's happy to see you. It's one of the wonderful things that can happen, well, in a marriage, but also when you have children.

So you want to like the people you're around. You want to love them. You want to support them when they're having a hard time and vice versa. So you want to make your—the vessel in which your family's ensconced watertight and capable of withstanding storms. You want to discipline yourself so that you're not doing things that you're ashamed of.

You want to tell the truth. You want to work responsibly and be a good provider, whether you're female or male, in whatever capacity you can manage. And I would say that also goes for children, to the degree that they're capable of contributing to the family environment.

And you have to think that all through. You want to embed your family in a healthy social life too, and in a healthy community life. But that all has to be conscious and thought through before you can start telling the truth.

Know how to balance between making peace and speaking truth in intimate relationships. What if truth hurts the other or two sides conflict? Okay, so the first thing you have to do is with the person that you're communicating with, you both have to figure out, well, what is it? What are you aiming at?

You know, I think it's in rule 9, which is "Assume that the person you're listening to knows something that you don't," that I outlined a number of different conversational types. You know, and there's the conversational type that's designed to mutually amuse, and that can be lots of fun, and there's the conversational type that's designed to win.

That's where I have a point of view, and you have a point of view, and we engage in a power dispute—especially essentially a dominance dispute, where the goal is for one of the positions to come out on top and win. And then there's another conversation where the goal is to explore a problem and to jointly further the understanding of that problem.

And I would say that that's how you balance making peace and speaking the truth in intimate relationships. You know, the first thing you have to do is, well, you have to have a conversation about just exactly what the problem is, and that might take a long time and a lot of listening because when people are upset about something, they don't always know what it is that they're upset about.

And what they're upset about might be associated with a hundred other things that they're upset about that they've not dealt with, and some of those can be directly germane to the issue at hand, but some of them can be a consequence of, oh, old family trouble or old trauma, to use a very overused word, but trouble in the past that hasn't been dealt with properly.

And it all amalgamates into a complex, that's the psychoanalytic idea that consists of all the problems that the person is dealing with that haven't been resolved. And then any new problem gets—it's poorly separated from that entire complex of problems.

And so when the person is upset, then all the things they're upset about can sort of manifest themselves in a incoherent and chaotic manner, and that’s really hard. And so if someone's upset about something, you or the other person might take a tremendous amount of listening before you can even get to what the problem is.

And often during that process of listening, there's a lot of mutual recrimination and accusations as each person tries to work—because if you're annoyed at someone and maybe all the other things that are wrong with your life are in the background driving the annoyance but you don't really know it, you're gonna accuse them of all sorts of misbehavior, some of it with some justification, no doubt, and all sorts of inadequacies.

It's not a good way of communicating, but it happens a lot. And then that person has to defend themselves like mad just so that they can not be the target of all that vitriol that's stored up for such a tremendous length of time.

So anyways, you have to listen to each other a lot. It's like, okay, what's the problem? And then a rule there might be, well, what's the minimum problem? It's like, "Well, our relationship is no good." It's like, that's a non-starter for a discussion, man, because you can't fix your whole relationship.

You have to be more precise. You have to think, and maybe your partner has to help you figure out what it is that you're upset about right now that could be rectified. I mean, maybe you made a nice dinner or even a dinner that wasn't so nice, and you got treated casually and with a certain amount of contempt while everyone was eating it.

You know, they came in and grabbed the food, scattered to the four ends of the house, and ate it and didn't bring their dishes back and didn't say thank you, and you know, you're very irritated about that, and you have your reasons. And you know, the way you might respond to that is, "Well, this relationship isn't working," but it's not precise enough.

You think, "Well, I have this specific problem." I'm trying to make it a specific problem, then I'm trying to come up with a specific solution that might make this relationship—this part of the relationship work better.

And so look, you have to aim at peace, and you have to aim at love and responsibility and mutual support. You have to want that for the people that are important to you in your life, and then you can start to talk to them because you're gonna listen in the proper way.

You're gonna listen in a way that's aiming at that higher good which is mutual peace among the members of the community—something that I learned, for example, from Jean Piaget. He called that an equilibrated state. And the equilibrated state is like a game that everyone wants to play.

And so if you set your household up properly, then it's a game that everybody is participating in voluntarily, and that's going to be predicated on the desire for peace and the willingness to speak truth and the ability to take responsibility.

So that has to be part of your higher order—more lame. And then when you're having a difficult discussion with someone, the discussion is going to be affected by that higher-order moral aim. It's not going to be contaminated to the same degree by your desire to inflict pain and attain victory and crush your opponent and punish them for their previous sins and indicate your disappointment on things they've done over the years and all of that.

And so you can tell, if you've got it balanced—by the way, Vincent, if the conversation continues. You know when we used to sit down for family meetings, which happened on a bi-monthly basis, something like that once every two months when we return to David divide up economic and practical duties amongst my wife and I and the kids, we had some rules.

And the rules were, well, you know, there’s a certain number of things that have to be done in the house to keep it running in a manner that anyone with any sense would want it to run. And there are certain responsibilities that everyone has to undertake to facilitate that, and there’s difficult discussions that have to be had about who’s going to do what.

And so here’s the rules: we have to make a list of what needs to be done, we have to agree on that, and then we have to each accept the responsibilities that go along with that in some sort of order. Maybe you choose one, and then I choose one, and then someone else chooses one, assuming that everybody's mature enough and capable of doing the jobs that they pick.

And that you have to negotiate until you come to the best solution that can be negotiated, which isn't necessarily a perfect solution, but it might be the best one that can be done. And then you have to stick with it until the next negotiation.

And if you get upset during the negotiations, which you likely will because these are difficult topics—how to divide up responsibilities in the house, and people get mad because they feel they've been taken advantage of or being listened to—one of the rules was, well, you can leave the discussion, but only until you calm down and then you have to come back.

Because these things have to be pushed through; they have to be negotiated through. Because the alternative is, well, important things don't get done or people do them resentfully because they're sort of forced by their own orderliness or their own conscientiousness or, you know, by force—psychological or otherwise—on the part of other people.

These things have to be negotiated through. You can tell if you've got the balance between making peace and speaking the truth right if the conversation continues.

And it can be emotional and will be, and can be difficult because important things have to be dealt with. But as long as the people are still in that conversation and communicating, then you've got the balance right.

You know, and you might have to take a break. Maybe you have to hold off till the next day. Maybe sometimes when you're negotiating something that's difficult, you have to offer the other person the opportunity to sleep on their decision—which I think is often a very good idea.

If you have to make an important decision in your life, it's very useful to tell the person that you're negotiating with, "Look, I'm interested in this, and it seems good, but I'm not gonna agree until I sleep on it." Gives you—well, lots of things happen when you sleep. You organize your brain when you sleep, at least to the degree that you can organize it, and you can often be more solid or more doubtful about a decision if you sleep on it.

So that's good. That's a good question, Vincent.

Dan says, "I have many friends but feel lonely from the outside. I'm Mr. Popular, yet every single friendship feels shallow. How to transition to fewer, closer friends?" Well, it's hard to say, Dan, because I don't know the specifics of your situation.

And you sound like an extroverted person, and extroverted people like to be in the center of a large group of people, and you know, they like parties, and they like to tell jokes, and they're energized by social interactions. And so they can have a fairly large group of friends where their attention is spread across many people.

Now, and you know, that can perhaps be a contour or one of the consequences of that can be this feeling that you have—that the friendships are shallow because there's not much to them. The first question might be, well, you know, do you have an intimate relationship?

Because a fair bit of depth of human interaction comes as a consequence of long-term committed relationships, right, with your wife or your husband or your parents or your siblings or your children. And so I would say the true depth in relationship is generally to be found within family.

That doesn't mean that friends aren't important. And the next issue is, well, are there things that you're doing with your friends? Are there activities that you're undertaking with your friends that are more significant than mere casual amusement? You know? Or is it just casual amusement?

Because if it is, you know, the bar scene or that kind of party life, let's say, the friendships aren’t going to be very deep because they're predicated on shallow activities. And maybe that you need to find some activities that you feel are profound on your own and find people that you can share them with.

Because a fair bit of friendship is in fact the engagement in shared activity. And so the more profound the activity, at least in principle, then perhaps the more profound the friendship. Certainly, the people whose friendships I would regard as most crucial to me are people with whom I'm involved in complex and difficult endeavors.

As well as friendships, there are things that we are doing together that we both regard as crucial importance. And I think that's necessary because I think that a fair bit of friendship, apart from, you know, the part that's amusement and fun, which is important, is a consequence of the profundity of shared activities.

And so you might want to ask yourself, you know, are you doing anything with anyone that you regard is important?

And then the other thing I would ask is, well, you know, do you have an assortment of intimate relationships? Do you have a partner, a wife or a husband? Do you have children? I don't know how old you are, because—and are you spending enough time attending to your parents and your siblings to keep those relationships alive with holidays and with visits and that sort of thing?

That's where you find that relationships that, generally speaking, are deep and meaningful and lasting, even though they're often the ones that are also the most problematic.

Disney has taken a direction towards promoting SJW agendas, yes. Well, you can say that again. This has been reflected, despite backlash, in the Marvel and Star Wars movies. Thoughts?

My sense is that self-limiting. I mean, I know that one of the things that's—I know some people in the comics industry, comic-book industry, and I know that the superhero types that have been put forward to manifest a diversity agenda have generally been colossal failures. And that tends to be the case at the box office as well.

And so look, here's something that I think is universally true. As soon as you subvert art, and I would regard movies as art. They're a form of literature, and they can be a very profound form of literature. But even if they're not, even if they're, you know, like a well-paced and well-written action thriller, if the story—which is the art in the movie—part of the art in the movie, if the story is subverted to a political agenda, then it's going to be punished for that at the box office.

Because no one, except for the odd acolyte, is going to be the least bit happy with that. And even they're not—they'll mouth their approval, but they won't want to watch the movies because they just hear what they already know. There's no mystery; there's no investigation in a good story. The storyteller should be trying to figure out the story as he or she writes, and the audience should be participating in that process.

The moral of the story shouldn't be stamped on the story right from the beginning, because what you have then is not art; you have propaganda. And when people are out to see a movie or to watch something on television that that has an artistic—a fundamental artistic nature, if it's subverted to propaganda, then it's going to fail.

And thank God for that! So that’s, I think it’s self-defeating. We’ll see—there’s nothing that beats a good story. You know, there’s no propaganda that can compete with a good story, so I think it’ll burn itself out.

Oh, here’s a simple one: what is the soul to you? That’s a hard question. I would say, like theologically, a soul is that aspect of the human—that aspect of human being—that's akin to divinity, that's made in the image of God.

And so, and I think that that’s a very, very important concept. I don't think a society can survive; I don't think that you can survive a relationship with yourself, and I don't think you can have a relationship with another person, and I don't think a society can organize itself in a productive and sustainable and peaceful manner without that idea as the core idea.

And so the core idea is that there's something of irreducible value that characterizes each human being, and that it's of the highest value, which is what makes it, say, akin to God or akin to divinity. And so that's the soul.

And then the question is maybe how does that manifest itself in the world? So what are its hallmarks? And I would say that that's very tightly associated with what modern people describe as consciousness, and there's more to it than consciousness because it's also character.

But I would say character is a manifestation of consciousness. What consciousness does, as far as I can tell, is confront unformed potential. This is partly why I think it's improper—I'm writing a fair bit about this right now in my new book—why it's improper to think of people as deterministic.

Once you've established a habit and you've practiced something for a very long time, you become more deterministic in your actions, because you're expert at reacting, and there are neurophysiological circuits that are laid down to facilitate your action under those conditions and to run with some degree of automaticity.

But most of the time, much of the time, what you confront is the changing future—the future of potential. Right? And it's like a—not a place of multiple pathways, and your consciousness is that part of you that confronts those multiple pathways and decides which one to walk down.

And it does so according to its ethic. We talked earlier about the fact that you need a value hierarchy; it's inevitable that you have a value hierarchy and that you look at the world through it and that it should be well-structured and that there should be something of divine importance at the top.

I would say what should occupy the top position is the realization, for example, that each person is of divine value and that the most appropriate way of interacting with potential is by embodying and speaking the truth.

That’s not a bad way of briefly conceptualizing what might be at the highest pinnacle of the value structure, I would say that's what the logos is. And so the soul is what manifests itself in the choice between different pathways, in the choice between different ways of transforming the potential of the future into the actuality of the present.

And it does that by making ethical decisions, by choosing between good and evil at each choice point. And to the degree that it chooses good, then it takes the raw potential of the future and it transforms it into the being of the present that is good.

And to the degree that it does that in the manner that’s evil and contaminated by malevolence and hatred and vengefulness, then it takes a pathway that corrupts the world and makes things worse. And it's the soul that's doing that, and it's the soul that's responsible for that.

And it's also that active part of the soul that's shaping the deeper soul, in some sense—which would be something like the cumulative consequence of all those choices, something akin to what people more classically have referred to as character.

Now, I don't know what to say really about the metaphysics of the soul except that it's very mysterious that we have this capacity for consciousness, which is completely, I would say beyond our current understanding. We have no good reductionist accounts of consciousness except those put forward to deny the very existence of something like consciousness and free will.

And the problem I have with those arguments is that, well, the first thing is that you don't look deterministic until you've built habit sets, and that's a consequence of consciousness because consciousness builds habit sets.

And the second is that it doesn't seem to be possible to organize a relationship with yourself or an intimate partner or a family or a community without the concept of the divine value of the individual and the capacity of that divine spark, let's say, to manifest itself in free will.

I don't see how societies can organize themselves without those principles and to me that indicates that there's something about them that's profoundly true. Now, you know, we all have our definitions of what constitutes sufficient proof for truth, but I think that's powerful. Those are two powerful arguments.

So it's hard to say what the soul means metaphysically because, you know, say beyond the confines of a single human being, we do have this sense that the soul can expand itself into something that's greater than—I don’t know, greater than it has been. It has this capacity for growth, and we do have the sense that the soul can expand itself to the point where it's enlightened, for lack of a better word, that it's working as efficiently as possible to transform everything that's unnecessarily painful and malevolent about the world into what's positive and good.

And that it does that as a consequence of confronting the world with courage and truth. And I think that's right. And I do think that that means that the soul participates in something eternal, which is the attempt of being itself to transform what's unnecessarily painful and malevolent into what's good, and that human beings actually do participate in that.

And that that's part of the reason that our ancient tradition insists that we're made in the image of God, and I think that it's a mistake to underestimate the importance of that because I don't think that you can live a life of sufficient profundity to protect yourself from being corrupted by suffering and malevolence without adopting a responsibility that's commensurate with that set of ideas.

I think that you either orient yourself upward, you know, to the star above the horizon and try desperately to improve the structure of being, or you work at counter-purposes to it and make things worse. I don't think there's a middle ground.

In fact, to the degree there is a middle ground, it tilts towards the negative because people who try to occupy the middle ground try to generally try to accrue the benefit, let's say, without adopting any of the risk, and that's not acceptable, not helpful.

So that's a soul to me, and I guess I would say one more thing about that. A soul is also the center of the world, which is a frightening proposition and not one that's easily caught. Principal Solzhenitsyn’s were in the Gulag Archipelago is particularly enlightening in this regard because he insisted that it was a preconception of our Judeo-Christian heritage that each person was the center of the cosmos.

And you can think of that as a center of consciousness, right? Center from which being itself is not only reflected but also generated. And it was Solzhenitsyn's belief—and Dostoyevsky's as well, and I think you would have been in accordance with this—and Nietzsche as well, for that matter— that in some manner that we don't fathom because we don't understand the structure of the world very well, the outcome of the world is dependent on our choices and equally on all of our choices.

And I don't understand. I know that to be true, or feel that to be true. It's part of the doctrine that each person is of intrinsic and equal worth. The part of that doctrine is that each person has intrinsic and equal responsibility and that we're each capable of generating a fair bit of hell around us and for other people, but also capable of generating a tremendous amount of good.

And that the fate of the world, as it careens through eternity, is actually a consequence of the ethical decisions of each of us. It's a terrifying idea. It's no wonder people flee from it into hedonism, let's say, and ideology because it's a very frightening possibility that the choices that you make day-to-day or fail to make have this profound and lasting effect on the structure of reality.

But I don't really see any way out of that conclusion.

So what are some practical ways to organize people interested in reinforcing Western values in culture without attracting extremists? Well, that's a good question!

Reading group might not be a bad idea, you know—there're lots of ways of pick a classic of the Western canon. Pick Dante’s Inferno or Paradise Lost—something difficult—or maybe not, or to try to try something that's more straightforward. I mean, Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil" is a difficult book, but it's easier than those two I just mentioned.

Start a discussion group! Start a book group. That's a possibility. Live out your values properly and see how that works, you know? If you're organizing—if you have your own organization, your own business for that matter, try to organize it along the principles that you describe.

Try to organize it for truth, and try to organize it so that it's predicated on truth and courage and responsibility and the reduction of unnecessary suffering and the elimination of malevolence—like seriously do that and see what happens to your organization.

I mean, I've seen people now go into large-scale organizations that were collapsing quite badly under the weight of accumulated sins of omission, let's say, so lies, a failure to attend and to listen to everyone in the organization—these are large-scale organizations.

To listen to everyone in the organization and say, "Look, I'm here to find out what the problems are. You can actually tell me like a real high-alpha male—like, you know, real empathy. You can tell me what the problems are." And I don't want any—I don't want it; it's sugar-coated.

And the reason I don't want it sugar-coated is because I want to know what the problems are. And the reason that I want to know is because I think that if we face them, we could fix them, and that that would be better for everyone.

And then to start to gather information about what it is—in the instance that's corrupt, and functioning improperly—and to start to set it right. And that works! And like the evidence for this I think is solid that it works.

There's good evidence that—there's a good book, for example, called "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations," written by a Harvard emeritus professor whose name escapes me momentarily—but he talked about the unbelievably high economic value of interpersonal trust, which I think is the most fundamental natural resource.

And we know too that one of the best predictors of long-term success in complex organizations isn't agreeableness or compassion—which is the only virtue that seems to matter at the moment—even though its status as a virtue is highly debatable in my estimation, because compassion has to be tempered with judgment otherwise it’s devouring.

But conscientiousness is an excellent predictor of long-term success for individuals, and conscientious people are truthful and reliable and industrious and orderly. You know that can be a problem because it can lead to a kind of rigidity, so it's not the only virtue that's necessary.

But it does seem to be the case that honesty is a productive policy, and I would also say that if you look around the world, the cultures that are the most corrupt are the cultures that are the most poor.

And you could say, "Well, the reason that they're corrupt is because they're poor," but I don't believe that. Because then you'd have to also agree that if you're poor, you're corrupt, and I don't think that's true. I think the corruption drives the poverty.

Now, there's no doubt, somewhat of a feedback loop there, but you get rid of corruption, you get rid of poverty—that's my sense. And like I said, you can make the opposite argument if you want: while poverty causes corruption, well, really? So your claim is that the poor are more corrupt because they're poor? That's your fundamental claim?

And that the poverty is driving the corruption? And I'm afraid I don't believe that. I don't think that the poor—there may be more corrupt people who are poor, but that's because they're corrupt, if you take poor people as a group of people who are relatively deprived materially.

I don't believe that there's any evidence that they are more corrupt than people who are more materially, what would you call it, satiated.

So practical ways to organize people interested in reinforcing Western values and cultures: I don't think you have to attract extremists. I think that if you reinforce Western values and culture, you turn away the extremists.

I mean, what sort of extremist is gonna believe in personal responsibility and individual culpability? Those aren't extremist ideas; they're anti-extremist ideas! You can't group together around the notion of ultimate personal responsibility.

So I think to the degree that you are reinforcing genuine Western values and culture you eliminate the extremists. Look, you can look at the historical record. You know, if I remember correctly, I believe this to be the case: no two democracies have yet gone to war—no two modern democracies have yet gone to war with one another, you know?

And the relationship between modern democracy and high standard of living, high equality of opportunity, and genuine improvements across the decades I would say is extraordinarily high.

And so I would say intrinsically if you're promoting Western values—the most fundamental values, especially the doctrine of the sanctity of the individual and the associated responsibilities that go along with that—that just drives the extremists away. That's my sense of it.

Friendless: How to find friends as a traditional woman attacked by friends I loved by saying I'm not a feminist and judged saying I want kids? Feeling hurt and confused.

Well, that's too bad, really. I'm very sorry to hear that because the idea that you'd be judged for saying that you want kids is a kind of radical insanity, as far as I'm concerned.

The first thing I would suspect is that you're probably rather young. I could be wrong about this, but you know, we do everything we can to delude 19, 20, 21-year-old women into thinking that there's something inappropriately patriarchal and subordinate about wanting children.

And so many young women are firmly convinced that the last thing they want is to have children, and they're not disabused of that foolish notion by their—by people who should be mentoring them properly because the truth of the matter is, the vast majority of women start to realize in their late 20s and early 30s that there isn't anything more important to them than having a family.

And that's how it should be. That doesn't mean that their careers aren't important or that career isn't important; it means that family is more important. And if you look at, I think it was the Pew Research Foundation that recently conducted a poll looking at what Americans felt brought the most meaning to their life and what was most important, I believe it was 76% of respondents indicated that it was family.

And family is more important than career. And you know, I say that someone names "name" is very grad if and meaningful career. I've done many things, you know. I've been a professor and a clinical psychologist and an author and many—and a businessman.

I've been involved in an extraordinary number of high-quality career-level pursuits as well as jobs, and I found a fair share of my fair share of gratification in those because I like to work. I'm an industrious person.

But it's certainly the case that for me, my marriage and my kids have been of paramount importance, and that that actually becomes more true as I get older and hopefully wiser.

And so the first thing you need to do is stop feeling guilty about it. Like, you’re in the right! You want to have kids? More power to you! And if people are telling you that, you know, you shouldn't bring kids into a planet like this or that you're adding to the carbon footprint of the world, you can invite them politely to step themselves off and allow some space for some new life if they're that concerned about it.

It's cruel to speak to women in that manner as far as I'm concerned—to leap to the conclusion that adding an additional soul to the world is going to be somehow harmful when the possibility is very high that if you have a child and you raise them carefully, that they're going to have a net positive impact on the world and that that impact could be incalculably large.

And so there's no excuse whatsoever, except a kind of vicious self-righteous malevolence that would drive people, and maybe jealousy, that would drive people to insult and belittle a woman who wants to have children.

And you know the other thing you have to realize is that it's not like you're alone. You know, every single one of your ancestresses going back three and a half billion years have had children. And that's the way it needs to be. Any way it should be.

And it's a source of extraordinary deep meaning in life. Now if you're gonna have children, then you have the responsibility to do it responsibly, you know, and to make it a priority and to treat it as if it's important.

But you need to find some new friends, I would say, because these friends aren't your friends if they're belittling your admirable desire to do what everyone who's participated in the process of continuing life has done since the beginning of time.

And anyone who's anti-child is confused so deeply that they will—a confusion that will definitely cause themselves a tremendous amount of trouble in their own lives. And the only thing that you can hope for, for people who are that confused, is that they sort it out and decide what's important before they're too old to make the right decision.

And the right decision is almost inevitably having children. You know, I've met people who haven't, and I would say it's not easy for them to fill the void in their life. And these are often people who have had high-powered careers and have been very successful and admirable people in many regards, but I'll tell you, as you get older, that space that your family should occupy becomes more and more difficult to fill.

You need, as a person who's getting older, well, first of all, as a younger person, you need that spark of life and responsibility that having a small child brings to you. You require that—it matures you! Because as soon as you have a child, then you're no longer the most important thing in the world, and you're still sadly immature if you're the most important thing in the world.

That's very difficult to get over that without having a child. And then you need that life and responsibility that the child provides to bring out the best in you, to grow you up and to make you awake and aware, like you might be on behalf of someone who's fragile and needs your support and development.

And then as you get older, well, you need to see life continue to manifest itself in the possibility of youth and the adventure that young people go on when they start a family. You need to see that continuity. And it helps ground you in the world and gives you hope for not only for your future but for the future itself.

And so—and then with regards to saying that you're not a feminist, I guess probably what I would recommend there is just stop saying that. All it sounds to me like is that it gets you in trouble.

I mean, I think what you mean, given the way that you wrote your question, is that because you have some traditional ideas about family, it's difficult for you to reconcile that with the rhetoric of modern feminism. And that's perfectly understandable, because one of the one group that modern feminists seem to be particularly antipathetic towards is mothers, which is really quite a remarkable achievement given that they're supposed to be on the side of women.

But I would say if you want kids, you talk to people who are positively inclined to your motivation and ambition, and you don’t discuss it with people who are inclined to put you down and denigrate that because they're deceiving themselves; they're acting cruelly, and they're doing no one any favors, least of all themselves and maybe not you.

So you carefully find people who are willing to support you in your desire, and more power to you as far as I'm concerned. So it's a very courageous thing to bring a child into the world, you know? And then it's a very responsible thing to do it properly, and you can't grow up—you won't grow up and take your place in the world properly until you do that.

And you know, it's certainly possible too that the people that are attacking you are even unwilling to come to terms with their own internal desires—that would be my guess. They're denying something that they regard as inappropriately subordinate for ideological reasons.

That to have a child is to damage the world; that would be one part of it. Or to subordinate yourself to the oppressive patriarchy; that would be another part of it. And that no alert and women would dare to have that as an ambition.

But that's so shallow and so superficial, all of that, and so self-damaging, you know, because there aren't that many things that you have to do in life that will sustain you in life in a necessary manner, and having a family is definitely one of those.

It's maybe half of your life—it might be more than that—but it's definitely at least half your life. You figure intimate relationship— that's a big part of your life. Your career and the useful things and productive things that you do outside—that's another part.

But fundamentally, fundamentally it's family.

Paula: How do I stop emotional eating? I am prone to addictive behavior, makes me feel in control. I would appreciate your thoughts on this.

Look, Paula, the first thing that I would suggest is that you probably eat because it makes you feel better, I mean physically. So lots of times I've had clients, this has happened endless numbers of times I've seen it, where people are extremely anxious and nervous, and they eat something, and they feel way better.

And the reason they feel better is because, well, they've either not been eating enough or they're eating wrong. Now I constantly recommend it to my clients, if they were arguing with their spouses, and this is something I could generally recommend to everyone that's out there.

If the two of you are involved in a particularly stupid argument, then break and have something to eat. Have some cheese. Have something that's protein and fat-heavy, like a snack, and wait 10 minutes and then talk again and see—you might find that you're endlessly more reasonable.

And so I would also say, generally speaking, Paula, you should eat a fat and protein-heavy breakfast and a lot of it—probably more than you want, probably more than you would feel comfortable with. It's the most important meal of the day. And it's possible that you're dysregulated psycho-physiologically so that if you get stressed, your body overproduces insulin and takes all the blood sugar out of your blood system, and that makes you anxious and irritable and makes it difficult for you to think.

And then if you eat something, and it could be something sweet, although I wouldn't recommend that because it's a bad medium to long-term solution, if you eat something, you probably feel way better—literally, not psychologically.

So the trick there is to eat a big breakfast and then not allow yourself to get hungry during the day. You know, so eat three meals, make them a decent size, and if you need to carry a snack or something like that—nuts are really useful—can be really useful if you can tolerate them, or something like beef jerky, which I think is actually better.

So try that. Try eating a big breakfast, and then try not letting yourself get hungry and see if that so-called emotional eating decreases.

Now, what you could do along with that is see to what degree you can decrease your intake of carbohydrates and sugar because that may be causing you a lot of trouble.

And I would say if you are inclined to eat emotionally, don't eat carbohydrates and sugar because it'll fix it temporarily, but it'll make it worse like an hour later!

So assume a problem with eating habit before you're assuming a psychological problem.

I'm a Silicon Valley founder and find that whatever happens here happens elsewhere fast. What can we do, and you do, to start by the entity politics here?

Well, don't play the identity politics game! No diversity initiatives! No inclusivity initiatives! No equity initiatives! No quota! No discussion of systemic racism! None of the tropes that are associated with politically—with the radical political left.

Because to the degree that you let any of that into your organization, you let it all in. And so higher on the basis of competence using objective tests, and let the cards fall where they're going to. And don't be afraid to tell people that that's what you're doing!

Watch your HR department carefully and make sure that they're not pushing diversity, inclusivity, and equity initiatives—that they're not requiring people to take implicit association tests that hypothetically reveal their unconscious bias—that they're not doing seminars on systemic racism and prejudice, and that they're not making the assumption that unequal outcomes, let's say, in terms of hiring, in the STEM fields or in terms of employment in the STEM fields—which by the way are radically overestimated if you unless you gerrymander what constitutes the definition of a STEM discipline—you just have to—you have to not participate in any of that.

And you have to make it known to your peers, which would be other Silicon Valley founders, I would presume, that you're not doing any of that. And so that's the best advice that I have: don't start playing the game!

And really keep an eye on your HR people because that’s their pathway to unearned power and influence, and not of an appropriate sort.

So you know, you might think as well what your values are. I don't mean in a mish statement sort of way because I tend to think that that's often casual to the point of virtue signaling, but you know, you need to think through what sort of organization that you want to have and what the principles are going to be and make those clear as an alternative story to the diversity, inclusivity, and equity rhetoric.

So that's what I would recommend.

Dan: I habitually procrastinate on important tasks, CV writing for example, for months on end waiting for the right time. It is severely holding me back. How to avoid this?

Well, I covered that in chapter four in "12 Rules for Life," so you could read that; that would help. It's called comparing yourself to who you were yesterday instead of who someone else is today.

Look, if you're procrastinating on your CV writing, then you're biting off more than you can chew. And I would say to some degree it's a reflection. And I don't mean this in a pejorative way; it's a reflection of a lack of humility.

You think you're capable of taking on larger tasks than you actually are, and the proof of that is in what you said. You take on these large tasks and then you don't complete them, so obviously you're not capable of taking on the large tasks and completing them.

So with regards to CV writing, you have to sit down and negotiate with yourself. You have to ask yourself, like seriously, okay, I need to do something about this CV. I need to at least start it because obviously you're not going to finish it unless you start it.

And then you have to ask yourself, like you're asking someone that you don't know and that you can't negotiate with very well, what you might be willing to do.

Like, so if you come to see a behavior therapist and the problem was, "Well, I can't get started on my CV," the therapist might say, "Well, why don't you just bring your CV next week and we'll take a look at it? Just, just, you know, bring it rough form. Don't—all you have to do is download it on disk or email it."

And then the person may or may not do that. And if they don't do it, well then you have to find out. Huh. Then you may have to say, "Okay, well I notice you didn't email my CV to me this week, so how about this? How about we make an appointment by phone tomorrow at 10:30, and I'll phone you or you phone me and you'll be on your computer, and you'll go through your files with me, and then you’ll email me the CV. Do you think you can do that?"

And then usually people will manage that. But maybe they come back the next week and they haven't even done that. And so then you say, "Well look, why don't next week, why don't you bring your computer or your disk and we'll go through it together and find your CV and bring it up on screen and just take a look at it!"

You know, because actually a CV is quite a daunting thing to work on because it's your whole past and your whole future, and so it's a pretty big dragon.

The trick is to find a piece of the solution that you would be willing to engage in that you would actually do! And so, you know, I might also recommend to one of my clients that all they do is go onto their computer and find out which folder their CV is in and open it.

Just open the file, or sorry, open the folder. And then if they—that’d be one day's work—is just go open the folder. And then maybe the next day is, "Well, drag the file onto your desktop so it's there."

And then the next day's job? Just open it! Just open it and just like glance at the first page and then close it! And I know this seems ridiculous because you think, "Well, I'm an adult and I should be able to do more than that," and maybe you can, but it sounds like you can't.

So you have to start where you can start. And I also recommend to my clients that once they make themselves a deal about what they're gonna do, they stick to it.

So if the deal is, "Well, I'm just going to drag the file with my CV in it onto my desktop," and that's today's task, I'm not going to open it or start working on it because once you make a deal with yourself, especially with regards to something you're afraid of and you're avoiding, if you push yourself farther than what you've negotiated with yourself honestly, then you'll find that you won't get back to the work because you don't trust your negotiating abilities anymore. You don't trust yourself.

So if the deal is you drag the file onto the desktop and that's today's job, and that's a lot better because it's more than you've done for two months, then you give yourself a pat on the back and you say, "Look good enough, man! Like it's no big act of heroism that I can go out and show about in the street, but I'm farther ahead than I was."

And then, well, then maybe the next day's task is, "Well read it!" Just read it! Just familiarize yourself with it again, close it, good enough!

Then you can think that night, "Well, where are the holes? What needs to be updated?" Then the next thing might be to do, to say, "Well, here's a list of 20 things that might need to be done with this CV!"

And you know, they don't all have to be that accurate, but you might have some sense of what it need—what needs to be updated, where the holes are and, you know, where it ends and what you'd have to do to get