Q & A 2018 10 October

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the October version of the QA. Hopefully, all my technology will work; it's amazing that it ever does! QA. Oh, apparently it is good! So let me catch you up to date on some news first; that would be fun, as far as I'm concerned.

So the first thing I want to do is share something with you, and that's this: I got this in the mail yesterday from Penguin UK from an editor, Nick Skidmore, whom I've been working with for several months. This is the 50th anniversary version of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in its abridged form—one volume of abridged form—which he approved. It's also published on the centenary of his birth, and I was invited to write a foreword to it, which I completed and which seemed to meet with the satisfaction of the editors and also Solzhenitsyn's family.

It's about 500 pages long, much shorter than the original book, which was about eighteen hundred pages, and Solzhenitsyn approved the abridgement—I think I might have said that. So it's a remarkable piece of literature and history and arguably the most influential historical document of the 20th century; you could make that case. It was really unbelievably—it was an unbelievable privilege to be asked to write the foreword, and I hope that I did a credible job; we'll see about that. It's on sale as of November 1st now.

I've also prepared a YouTube video for it where I've read the foreword and some of the content of the book to provide people with an introduction, and I'm hoping that this will be something approximating a literary event. So I invite you to pick up the book if you'd like to and prepare to be shocked to your core, I suppose is the proper way of thinking about it. So there you go, so that's that.

Next thing: I was in New York the other day—yesterday literally—finalizing what I hope is a deal for my second book, and perhaps books after that, but certainly for the second book, which is tentatively entitled 12 More Rules for Life. There you go! Originally, there were 42 rules, and I haven't used them all up, so there's plenty of reason for continuing, as far as I'm concerned. I've written a fair bit of it, and it seems to be going well, and I'm hoping that I can do a better job of the second book—that's the goal.

That's what I discussed with the editorial team: I want the next book to be substantially better than the last one was. Hopefully, I can manage that. So that's well and good as well. I'm hoping that I'd have that book done by next September, something approximating that, maybe for publication the following January. Now, I've got a year after that if I need it, depending on what happens this year, but that's the plan.

Then I'm going to tell you a little bit about what's happening with me over the next, I suppose, year really. I might as well tell you that; maybe you'd be interested in knowing. So the first thing is that tonight I'm going with Tammy, my wife, who's been traveling with me this whole time. We've finished 85 cities in the tour so far, and they've gone really well, I would say. We spoken to about 250,000 people.

I've been traveling with Dave Rubin of the Rubin Report, and that's been entertaining; he's very comical and has been a good adjunct to add a bit of levity and also a certain degree of seriousness, so that's good. On Sunday, I'm speaking in Dublin, and on the 23rd—that's Tuesday—I'm in Oslo. I'll just go through the cities; you can look up the dates at JordanPPeterson.com/events if you want: Manchester, Oxford, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Cambridge, Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Birmingham, Oslo, Stockholm, and Helsinki.

So that ends November 11th. Then I'm off with Tammy to Spain and Portugal to talk to book publishers there, and then I'm going to speak to the Trilateral Commission in Slovenia and Lubyanka. After that, we're going to Hawaii; I have a talk in Hawaii, and that's at the end of November. Then to New York—maybe I'm going to talk to Dr. Oz again. That's not finalized, but it seems probable. Then I'm going to Washington to talk to some people there and then to Florida for a bit of a break from the Canadian winter, even though I won't have experienced any of that so far this year.

I have a speaking engagement there as well, and then in January possibly I'll be in California. We've applied for a tech incubator in California to further the development of our educational software, which is already at the prototype stage. I don't know for sure that we'll be accepted into the incubator, and I don't know for sure if we are accepted if that's the route we're going to take because there are other options. We're also working with a private school consortium to test the software as we develop it because, when you're developing a product—this is a good thing to know if you ever do build something—you want to build a product, test it with your potential customers, build it again because you've made all sorts of mistakes, test it with your customers, and so on.

Then after that, I'm going to Australia and New Zealand probably to talk in about a dozen places there and then back to Europe in March and April. After that, I'm going to write non-stop, I hope, from May to September. With any luck, I'm going to start the biblical series again with Exodus. So that's that; that's the plan. It's exciting and daunting and all of those things.

Now you're up to date, and hopefully that was interesting. I really am thrilled about this—this is really something, man; it's really something. The Solzhenitsyn family was happy with the foreword, so that was really positive, and hopefully, it'll bring a whole new audience to the book; that would be a good thing. This is not something that we should ever forget, ever.

Okay, so let's say let's go to some questions here. Any advice for a young counselor soon to finish his degree? What do you wish you knew as a young therapist?

Well, let's start with advice. One thing I would say is you could go to my book list and read the books that are there. There's, at my website, a list of recommended books—fiction and nonfiction—and the nonfiction is categorized in different ways. There's a psychotherapy section. I would say read those books; that would be helpful. Those are people like young Freud, Rogers; I think there's something by Adler, Rüell, and Bug. Some of the existentialists from the 1950s; a lot of neuroscientists, types—very, very smart people—very useful to know what they had to say.

So then the next thing I would suggest—and you've heard this from me before, perhaps—is that it's almost impossible to overestimate the degree to which merely listening is helpful if you're a counselor. Lots of people have no one to listen to, have no one that will listen to them, and that's a real problem because people actually think by talking. For many people who are isolated, they have no one to talk to, so that means they don't think; their thoughts aren't straight and organized.

You might think, "Why does that matter?" But the reason it matters is because the best analogy I would say to do thoughts is: the best way of conceptualizing the structure of your thoughts is to consider it in the same manner that you might consider a map. Your map should be organized, and things should be in the right place because otherwise, when you use the map to navigate in the world, you don't end up where you want to be, and you run into things that you don't want to encounter. It's actually extraordinarily necessary to get your thoughts in order since they help you simulate the world before you act in it.

Don't underestimate how important it is just to listen. Then you think, "Let's think about listening." So someone comes to you, and they come to you because they have a problem. Now, you don't know what their problem is, and neither do they. All you know is that they have enough of a problem to come and talk to you. They might have a problem because really terrible things have happened to them, and anyone with any sense would have a problem.

Then they have problems in life, say, or they have existential problems—not really psychological problems—although it might be psychologically demanding to adapt to the real problems. You want to listen, and you want to find out, "Well, what exactly is the problem space, and how much of that is practical and how much of it is psychological?" The first issue is you don't know what the problem is, and you want to ask a lot of questions to find out what it is and also what it isn't.

Often, people will come in, and they're upset, and they don't exactly know why they're upset. They might be upset about a whole bunch of things, and it isn't until after they talk through all the things they might be upset about that they find out what they're upset about and what they're not. So another reason to listen, especially at the stage of problem formulation, is to help people decide what their problems aren't.

Then the next thing you have to do to listen is, "Okay, well, now we know what the problem is. What would your client view as a potential solution?" So assuming that this could be made better in some manner, what would better look like? You need to co-develop a philosophy of what's better, and so that's a goal, or a name, and it's almost like a personalized definition of mental health.

It might be better to think about it as a personalized definition of a good life. That's the next thing you have to listen about.

Then the last thing you have to listen about and negotiate as well is, "Okay, well, now we know what your problem is, and we know hypothetically what the destination is regarding solving that problem. What are the strategies that are necessary to implement in order to make that positive outcome occur?" Then, that's something that you negotiate by listening every week.

It's like, "Okay, well, here's the goal. What steps could we take that you would implement that would move you towards that goal? Can you take those steps in the world? Will you do that this week?" Then, watch whether or not you do it and come back and report. Also, tell me and yourself whether or not implementing that actually worked, and then we can come back, and we can have a discussion about whether you did it or not. If you didn't, then how we could modify that, and if you did, how we could continue and expand it.

If you did do it, whether it worked, and if it did—and what unexpected things occurred and what, if any, implications there are for understanding your problem and for your goal. So you know you need—it's a map. You have a starting point; you have to figure out what that is. You have a destination point—the desired future; you have to figure out what that is. You have to implement and design strategies that will move the person forward, and then you need to test all those strategies—very strategic thinking—very practical thinking.

That's an outline of how to do effective psychotherapy, I would say—effective, careful psychotherapy. Another bit of advice is people who are young counselors are often afraid and don't know how they can not take their clients' problems home. I've got a couple of things to say about that.

The first is: they're not your problems. It's very important to remember that. You don't want to steal your clients' problems. You might think, "Well, if I could take my clients' problems on myself and lift the burden from them, wouldn't that be better?" The answer is well, no, because someone's problems are not that distinguishable from their life, and what you're there to do is facilitate their ability to learn to grapple successfully with the existential vagaries of their own existence. You don't want to leap in there and steal it.

Let's say you give a spectacular piece of advice, and you're going to give advice now in that, but it's not that advisable. Then, let's say you advise someone to solve a problem in a certain way, and they go do it, and the problem is solved. It's like, well, the problem has disappeared, but they didn't learn how to generate the solution to the problem, and so they're in worse shape with future problems. It's your victory, in some sense, instead of theirs, and so you don't want to steal from your clients' destiny.

That also frees you up to some degree because it means that you're not morally obligated to take on those problems and carry them home. The other thing is it doesn't do your client any good for their problems to sink you. You have a moral obligation, an ethical obligation, and a professional obligation to remain sufficiently detached from the situation so that your head is clear and you remain healthy and your practice remains viable for the long run. So don't forget to protect yourself; it's very, very important. Let your clients sort out their lives; you're there to help. You're there as a sounding board; you're there to offer strategic advice. You're there to shed light on the symptomatology and to lay out potential strategies for treatment—all of that.

That's good enough; you don't take on any more than that.

Okay, procrastination and instant gratification rule me. Nothing seems to motivate me. What do I do?

Well, I'm going to give you some practical advice. I would say you need a plan—you need a plan—and not just a plan; you need a reason to implement the plan. You need both of those.

So something motivates you. You already said instant gratification motivates you, so you'll do things for instant gratification. Now, look, instant gratification is a particular form of reward; it's called incentive reward, and it's mediated by dopaminergic circuitry—the same circuitry that mediates reward as a consequence of using drugs like cocaine or any of the drugs that people abuse.

There are certain short-term activities that are pleasurable enough so they produce an intrinsic—they intrinsically produce a dopamine kick. A lot of that's instantaneous gratification, like, say, eating when you're hungry, at least the taste and flavor of the food, because there's also a satiation element that comes along with food.

There are pleasures that speak for themselves when you're looking at the long-run things that are rewards that are delayed—don't produce as much of a dopamine kick, so they're not as immediately gratifying, and they're not as gripping in the present. The way that you have to overcome that is to generate a vision of—it's really—it's not a plan or a strategy; it's a philosophical vision that justifies your life in some way that you deeply believe.

It has to be that, and it can't be trivial, because otherwise, procrastination and instant gratification are going to rule you. We developed this program called the Future Authoring Program, and it's part of the Self Authoring Suite.

I'll run through it very rapidly because even if you don't use that program—although you could because that's what it's designed for, and I think it makes it easier—it outlines what's necessary in order to overcome the problem that you're describing.

The first question you might ask yourself is, "Well, what would you need to gain?" You have to have a real dialogue with yourself to understand this. You have to take yourself, warts and all, your useless, procrastinating, instant gratification-seeking self, and you have to sit down and say, "Alright, you know, you're talking to your inner badly-behaved six-year-old."

It's like, "Okay, what is it that you would have to have in order to commit to something in the long run? What kind of vision of the future would justify sacrifices for you?" You might say, "Well, I don't know." It's like, "Okay, fine; that's why you have to break it down."

Let me ask you some questions. You might think, "Well, here's some things that people need in their life." Because your life is not going to be solid, grounded, gratifying, acceptable, meaningful, relevant, and devoid of earth-shaking anxiety without managing some of these things. Most people need an intimate, long-term relationship because otherwise, they get lonesome and bored and crazy—crazy in a different way than you get if you have a long-term relationship—worse crazy.

They need friends; they need family. That could be your birth family, your parents, your extended family, your siblings, but also children. You need to know, "Well, where does that fit in your life? What's your vision for that?"

Do you want to get along with your parents? Do you want to get along with your siblings? Do you have a strategy for that? Do you want to have kids at some point? Do you want to build yourself a family? Okay, you need a job or a career. Now a career is intrinsically meaningful and usually very demanding in terms of commitment and hours, whereas a job at least can be engaging and worthwhile. It's usually more time-limited; maybe you have more freedom outside of it, but you need a job because you need something to do and you need some routine, and you need some financial support.

If you can have a career and that's what you want, so much the better. But at least, at least you could have a trade—something worthwhile—not that a trade can't be a career. Believe me, I've got nothing against trades.

You need to take care of yourself mentally and physically. How do you want to present yourself in the world? You want to be healthy mentally and physically so that you're like a light among men—let's put it that way. That would be a good goal. How are you going to handle the temptations of drugs and alcohol, and whatever procrastination and instant gratification are tilting you in the wrong direction?

Those are, you know, seven things that you might consider. Sit down; here's the question: You're taking care of yourself like you're someone you care about. You can design a future that would be good for you if you were taking care of yourself, right? For 20 minutes, you can have what you want; it's three years down the road. You can have whatever you want, but you have to aim for it and work for it, and you have to specify it. What is it? What do you want? What would make your life worthwhile? What would be good enough so that instant gratification would be an obstacle instead of a means for proceeding?

I can give you an example. To some degree, when I was a kid in my early 20s, I did quite a bit of drinking and partying. I came from a hard-drinking background up in northern Alberta, and, you know, I was out three times a week even when I was in graduate school, and I was beginning to write seriously scientific papers and also the work that became Maps of Meaning and eventually Twelve Rules for Life.

It came to the point where I couldn't do both. I couldn't go out and be that social and have that much instant gratifying fun and be in good enough shape so that if I was annotating something complex, I was making it better instead of worse. I was really interested in what I was doing; I was learning a lot about the brain. I was learning a lot about alcohol and drug abuse. I was laying out the platform for the relationship between narrative and neuroscience, and it was really engrossing and engaging, but it was hard and it was long-term.

I mean, it was a long-term plan, though I had to make a choice. It was either continue the fun—which was fun; I really enjoyed it—or do this thing that I really believed was more worthwhile. It was more worthwhile to do the more worthwhile thing, which is why I stopped—the instant gratification. A lot of stopping. This is true for most people, especially young men who tend to drink a fair bit and carouse around a lot. Most young men stopped that sort of thing, at least to some degree, around 25 or 26, and the reason they do that is because they pick up other responsibilities.

They get a real job that has some future, and they get a relationship that's permanent. They have a family, and they decide, "Well, that's more important than the procrastination and the instant gratification." So make yourself a damn plan; make it into a strategy. You could use the Future Authoring Program if you like; I would highly recommend that. Do it badly; you might be intimidated by it.

You know, "I don’t know how to plan," it’s like, "Yeah, we know you don't know how to plan; make a bad plan. It's better than the one you've got." So do it badly, and then try and modify it as needs be and see if that works. You need a philosophy, Cody; that's the thing. You know, you're living a shallow life, and short-term avoidance—that's procrastination—you're going to do that because you don't think it's important enough. You don't think that the negative consequences of not doing what you should do are severe enough. You're not afraid enough of it.

The other thing you do in the Future Authoring Program, by the way, is write about just exactly what kind of hell you'd be likely to descend into three to five years in the future if you let your bad habits, procrastination and instant gratification, let's say, rule you and take you out of the game completely. Because you also need to be terrified as well as hopeful about what you might do if you got your act together.

You need to be terrified about where you might end up if you kept being like lazy and useless, you know, and shallow. None of that's good, so you need to be deeper, and you need to look deeper. You need to—Nietzsche said, "He who has a why can bear anyhow," and you need a why. The why is something like, "Well, imagine you could have the life. Imagine you could have a life that would be worth giving up some of the instant gratification for, even in principle. What would that look like?"

So, alright. What do you think the feminine hero journey is? Do you believe females have their own archetypal story to follow?

Well, yes, they certainly do. I think, first of all, they have the hero story like men do, but I think—in the classic hero's story—imagine it this way: the classic hero's story is the archetypal male story with the feminine lurking in the background; because like men are adventurous heroes, all things considered, fundamentally, but they're also very maternal. Like men take care of children and families for very long periods of time.

As far as if you think about this from a purely biological perspective, human males are very maternal. So both males and females have an aspect to them that's archetypally masculine and archetypally feminine. I would say in the typical male, the archetypal masculine dominates with the archetypal feminine in the background, and in the typical female, it's the reverse.

Although there might be some variation in that—you know, you get the relatively rare female who's more archetypally masculine in their orientation to the world, and you get the relatively rare male who is more archetypally feminine. The dragon—the conflict with the dragon—is the archetypal male story: go out, confront the dragon, get the gold, bring it back to the community, rescue the virgin, noble the community, why? Make yourself wise as a consequence of the adventure and develop your character; that's a great story.

The archetypal feminine narrative, at least to some degree, is Beauty and the Beast, which is to encounter the monstrous masculine and to tame and civilize it so that a joint relationship can be established. That's part and parcel of the development of long-term intimacy, and that would be partly for the purposes of intimacy, which is particularly important to people, say, who are high in agreeableness. Women are higher in agreeableness, but also as the platform for raising children successfully.

Now, you get a male variant of that, which is one of the male variants of the same story that Eric Neumann—in particular—talked about. He was a Jungian commentator; he wrote a book called Origins and History of Consciousness, which I would highly recommend; that's on my list of recommended readings. And another one called The Great Mother—another brilliant book. Neumann talked about something called the crystallization of the anima from the great mother archetype.

You might say that that men who've been dominated by women—a young boy who's been dominated by his mother, for example, or a man for some reason is dominated and intimidated by the idea of the rejecting feminine—and if you're interested in that idea, you could watch a documentary called Crumb. You'll see exactly what I mean by dominated by the archetypal rejecting feminine. I've never seen a better example of it than once laid out in that documentary.

It's a brilliant documentary! So the female is a hostile judge and very critical of men—the feminine speaking archetype—and so the man has to steel himself to face that reject to develop his character just like Bill Murray does in Groundhog Day; exactly the same story. Then free the individual woman with whom he has a relationship from the archetypal judgmental feminine; so that's like the male version of Beauty and the Beast.

And the female version, obviously, the hero archetype is the fact that women do have a heroic role to play in the world as well because they confront the unknown just like men do and garner wisdom, knowledge, and riches as a consequence. But the way I look at it is that, for females, the feminine archetype is at the forefront and the masculine in the background, and it's reversed for men.

So that's how it looks to me.

So you caught some Twitter flack for your comment on Brett Kavanaugh; care to address your comment and the blowback?

Well, I addressed the comment because I wrote a blog post, and so that was probably the right way—not only to address it, but that would have been the right way to handle it to begin with. So I'll address it, sure; I'll address it and I'll address the blowback as well. Look, just because you have an idea doesn't mean that it's the only idea, and just because you have an idea doesn't mean it’s right.

It's weird for me, in some sense, to engage in public discourse, especially politically, because you see, I've been a researcher for a very long period of time. Most of the people that I've talked to about serious ideas—most of them, many of them have been researchers, graduate students for example—and when you're talking about a problem, whatever it might be, if you're research-oriented, what you do is kind of what you do if you're a therapist.

The way I laid out advice for a young therapist earlier—it's like, "Okay, well, what does everybody think the problem is?" So you assume that you don't know. It's like, "Okay, well, we have a big discussion about what everybody thinks the problem is." What do you think the real problem is? What's the real problem with the Kavanaugh situation?

Well, one might be, "Well, Kavanaugh was accused of sexual impropriety when he was a high school student, and because of that, his suitability for the Supreme Court is in question. Maybe that's the problem." Yeah, maybe; and maybe that's not the problem; who the hell knows what the problem is?

Here's a bunch of possibilities. We haven't had a reasonable discussion about what constitutes an acceptable statute of limitations with regards to accusations of misbehavior between individuals. It's like, can you accuse someone reasonably five years later, ten years later, fifteen years later, forty years later? Is there a limit? Do you have a more…do you have a moral obligation if you're going to accuse someone, or even seek justice, to do that within a reasonable period of time? Who knows? We don't, so that's a problem.

What exactly are the rules that govern the conduct of men and women when they're young, when they're drinking? Are we going to have that conversation? No, we're not going to have that conversation either because no one wants to think that through, and they especially don't want to think it through with regards to the complicating additional feature of alcohol. Think about alcohol: the reason that people drink is so that they can act stupidly and have fun.

Now, the problem with acting stupidly and having fun when you're sober is that it makes you anxious, and so you don't do it; but alcohol—especially for people for whom alcohol is a good drug—ramps up the excitement of impulsivity and quells the anxiety. People often drink because they want to go out and be stupid and have fun, and look, I understand that there's something to be said for stupid fun.

But one of the things that also needs to be said about it is it's bloody well dangerous. We don't want to have that conversation; we don't talk about that on campuses. We talk about the rape crisis; nobody talks about the alcohol sexual assault crisis. If men and women didn't drink together, there'd be virtually no sexual assault, and in fact, if people didn't drink at all, there'd be almost no violent crime, because alcohol contributes to violent crime in a manner that you can hardly imagine.

About 50% of people who are murdered are drunk, and about 50% of the people who do the murdering are drunk. That's probably an underestimate, because the stats aren't kept that well. It also depends on how you define "drunk," so that could also be a problem.

Well, the liberal, left types—let's call them the left-leaning progressive types—don't want a conservative on the Supreme Court. Now, the left-leaning types aren't happy that Trump won the election. The conservatives want to rush our candidate onto the Supreme Court come hell or high water because of the November election.

Then there's another problem—well, is this about Kavanaugh at all, or is this about Roe and Wade and about abortion? Well, who knows, right? It's about all those things. So it's an unbelievably complicated, god-awful situation. Eric Weinstein and Brett Weinstein were tweeting about this, and it was late at night. Eric said, "As far as I can tell, either way, this is not gonna end well." I thought, "Oh, he said is there an alternative? Is there a way out of that?"

I thought, "Well, Kavanaugh is in a rough position because he can't withdraw, obviously, and perhaps shouldn't, without his reputation being shattered. If he doesn’t get nominated, the same thing; his life is basically over." But on the other hand, he’s tangled up in a scandal that’s of sufficient murk and mud so that it isn’t self-evident that he can serve as a Supreme Court Justice without having every single one of his decisions—especially in contentious cases—produce a tremendous amount of social upheaval over the next two or three decades.

It isn’t obvious that that’s a great move forward. Now, it might be fine; I mean, there have been controversy around other Supreme Court justice nominations, and that seems to have basically sorted itself out. I already said just because you’re thinking something through doesn’t mean you're right; it's a simulation.

I thought, "Well, if I was in Kavanaugh's position and I felt that my candidacy had been compromised, perhaps through no fault of my own—I’m not saying anything about his innocence or guilt—but that my candidacy had been compromised by this interminable and ugly scandal, and that meant my tenure on the Supreme Court might be marked by culturally divisive controversy in the long run, then maybe it would be better for me to be nominated to say, 'Look, it's too murky, it's too muddy, and I don't think the country is best served by my accepting the nomination.'"

Then the conservatives can nominate another candidate, get their person on the Supreme Court, so there's no necessary loss there. Perhaps we could move forward with a minimum—relative minimum—of divisiveness.

Look, in my blog, I laid out all the reasons why that isn't a good idea. "Here maybe, if you just give me five seconds, I can read some of them, because I tried to make a steel man case for why my idea wasn't a good one, my idea about him withdrawing. So just give me one second, and I'll read all the potential objections just so you know that I've thought them through."

So perhaps the Democrat opposition would mount a similar campaign against my putative successor. Well, that's certainly possible. I said, "Well, that would provide virtually unassailable evidence for the purely manipulative and political motivation of the accusers, forcing them to duplicate their strategy a second time. That would help reveal the machinations for what they were in a manner that would be virtually undeniable."

"Perhaps time is of the essence, and there'd be no way to place another candidate of conservative leaning on the bench before the November elections," as they say. "However, act in haste; repent at leisure."

Okay; and then other arguments against my position. Here they are.

"Oh yes, if Kavanaugh withdrew after being nominated, here's what might happen: it would be read as an admission of guilt on his part. It would embolden those who would use reputation destruction as a political maneuver. It would weaken the generally and vitally important idea of the presumption of innocence. It would indicate weakness on the part of the Republicans at a key moment prior to the November elections. It would mean that an innocent man has been successfully pilloried by a mob. It would validate the use of allegations of past behavior well past any reasonable expiry date as a weapon. It would destroy the Republican opportunity to choose a Supreme Court Justice hand the Democrats an unearned victory and bitter a large percentage of the conservative base who would regard the withdrawal as a betrayal. Last and perhaps least, it would violate my own personal adage—for what that's worth—of don’t apologize if you haven't done anything wrong."

Okay, so I understand the weaknesses of that position. I was putting it forward as a potential third alternative. Now look, it's perfectly reasonable to put things to doubt—to put things forward as alternatives—that's thinking.

Now, having said that I've made some mistakes. Okay, so the first mistake was: don’t tweet complicated ideas in 140 characters about contentious issues in the midst of a controversy at 2:00 in the morning. Right? Bad idea. One of the consequences of this for me is that I've withdrawn quite a lot over the last three weeks from Twitter. Twitter is a very dangerous platform, and so I'm taking a break from it while I'm reading its utility and so on.

I talked to my son about this before and other members of my family, and we had agreed that I wasn't going to post anything on Twitter that should be made into a blog. The problem with Twitter is that it—and/or the problem with me—who knows where the problem is; is that Twitter invites and facilitates impulsive responding.

I'm not convinced that it's necessarily a good platform for me; of all the places that I tend to get into trouble, Twitter is sort of at the top of the list. Now, I laid out in my blog why I still use it—I feel some moral obligation to the almost a million people who follow me on Twitter, for example—and there's an addictive quality to it too, you know?

I'm following a lot of these people in the intellectual dark web, seeing what they're up to and trying to keep an eye on the cultural climate, let's say, and it's not easy to figure out for me— as it sure is the case for all of you—exactly how much you should be exposed to such things and how much you should protect yourself.

I mean, a case could certainly be made that I should stay the hell off Twitter and do nothing but write for the next year because it's not like I have any shortage of things to write about. So I'm trying to sort that out.

So that's my explanation, and it could easily be that, as I said, it could easily be that the idea that I put forward wasn't the best idea. You know, who knows what the best ideas may be. The best idea was for Kavanaugh to do exactly what he did—we'll see. Good luck to him and to the Supreme Court; I hope it all stabilizes; that would be lovely.

It has happened before, and so maybe it will again.

Okay, I took the Understand Myself test and have a question.

Okay, so the Understand Myself test at UnderstandMyself.com, for all of those of you who don't know, is a personality test. It's based on the Big Five—extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness. It breaks each of them down into two fundamental aspects that have been empirically validated, and so you can take that test.

I put a code in the description of this video; I think the code is October. You can use that code for Self Authoring and for Understand Myself, and there's a 20% discount for that. If you want to do that, it only takes about 15 minutes to do the Understand Myself test, by the way.

The Self Authoring program requires more effort; you have to do that over a number of days, but you can do it badly, as I said, and you need a plan, man. You need to know where you are—that's the autobiographical part—and you need a plan for the future, so it's worth it, even though it's hard.

It's not as hard as stumbling through your life blindly.

Okay, I took the Understand Myself test and have a question: Should I take the results as is and live trying to cope with them, or can I try to change them to some degree?

Alright, so the first thing is, I would say, "Well, take the results as they are to some degree." Now, it depends. Look, you got to be careful because if you take a personality test like this and you're depressed, so, you know, the future looks really bleak to you, the present looks bleak, when you look into the past, almost everything looks negative. You know, you're not taking any pleasure in things; you feel bad, perhaps even worse in the morning.

You can't see any light in your life; you're very self-critical—perhaps you're depressed. If you're depressed, your personality scores are going to look—they're going to be skewed as a consequence of that, and so they might be more negative because of the mindset that you have when you take the test than they truly are.

So, I'm assuming with this answer that you're not depressed. Should I take the results as is and live trying to cope with them? Well, one thing is, you should at least give yourself some credit. It's like you're a particular way, so let's say you're low in openness just for the sake of argument. Let's say you're low in openness and moderately high in conscientiousness; you're a more conservative person. You're probably going to be happier if you take a more conservative path in life. You're not—if you're low in openness, you're not that creative; you're not going to be interested in aesthetics; you're not going to be interested even in ideas to that great a degree; it's not your area of fascination.

You're more practical and concrete and perhaps—and also less flighty and less prone to creative error. There are advantages to—you know, because most creative people are fonts of ideas that won't work and that will occupy a tremendous amount of counterproductive time in their implementation; that's the downside to creativity—false positives.

If you're disagreeable, well then you're going to try to work somewhere where competence and competitiveness is useful; if you're high in neuroticism, then you're probably going to have to find a job where the stress levels aren't too high. If you're introverted, you want to find a place where you could work and spend a fair bit of time by yourself. You know, you want to match your environment to your personality—that's adaptation to some degree.

Now, if you're really high in neuroticism, for example, and you're too anxious, and then there are things that you can do about that. You know that that's something you might want to. If it's really out of hand—say if you're in the 98th percentile or above—something like that, and it's also making you suffer because you're too anxious and too risk-averse and too volatile, you might want to consider something like counseling to see if you can get your anxiety levels down or to learn to meditate or to learn to control your breathing, or to talk to someone to see if there's some physiological reason for that.

Now, you can change, but if you're introverted, you can develop social skills, but you kind of have to do them one at a time, you know? Because it's not something that comes naturally to you, and it might not be something that you developed as a child. You have to consciously plan a social strategy.

You might say, "Well, I'm introverted; I should go out with someone for lunch once a week; I should see friends twice a week," right? You should; you need to make a plan for social interactions. If you're extroverted and you can't stand being alone, well then you might practice being alone a little bit so that you can learn how to spend some quality time on yourself and not be so dependent on the company of others.

If you're an agreeable person—too agreeable—then you'll need to figure out what it is that you want, what you're resentful about, and what you need to negotiate about on your own behalf.

If you're really disagreeable, then you might want to think hard about consciously deciding that once a week or so, you're going to try to do something for someone else, and there's a research literature on that, actually. It indicates quite clearly that if you consciously plan to do something altruistic on a regular basis, it does seem to improve overall well-being, and I think that's particularly important for disagreeable people because they don't do that naturally; it doesn't come to them naturally.

So I think that you—the general advice is find an environment where your temperament works, and then the more specific advice is, while having said that, it doesn't hurt to expand your tenet.

If you're introverted, you should be able to do what extroverted people do; and if you're extroverted, you should be able to spend time alone. You should develop those as skills. If you're an agreeable person, you should learn how to negotiate for yourself in a tough-minded manner, and if you're disagreeable, you should learn to take other people into consideration more.

If you're conscientious, it wouldn’t hurt to have a schedule—like a Google Calendar—to start working on that because low conscientiousness is going to interfere with your long-term success. And if you're hyper conscientious, well, you might need to learn to relax a little bit and to make that a priority.

And if you're high in openness, well, I don't have a quick answer for what you do if you're high in openness... Oh, I do! I guess I do, to some degree. Try to focus it on one thing, to some degree, on one thing and get good at that. Because when you're open, you're flying out all over the place laterally, and you can easily become a dilettante.

So, one of the things you have to do if you're high in openness is develop true expertise in at least one place—you can even pick it somewhat arbitrarily—given that you're interested in everything. Commit to something. If you're low in openness and a little closed off compared to what you should be—a little narrow-minded, let's say, and conventional—maybe you should read a book a week; join a book club; that's a good thing to do.

That's a good start; join a book club, and open yourself up a little bit—go see a movie now and then as well; that would also be helpful, you know? That'll widen you out a bit, and that's important, you know? It's important for your career and all that sort of thing.

You want your temperament to put you in a certain place in the distribution, and it isn’t so much that you want to move the place, it's that you want to move the variability so that you can be what you need to be when the situation demands. That doesn't mean to blow in the wind; it means to be adaptable instead of constrained tightly by your biological predisposition. You can learn that; it's painstaking; it requires a lot of effort, but you can learn it.

So my daughter's school is now teaching gender as a social construct, avoiding naming boys and girls. What do we do? Leaving is not an option.

Well, I guess the first question is—I’ll just take you at your word that leaving is not an option; it certainly might not be an option. I would say your best bet—and this is casual advice because I don't know your particular situation—is to find out how many parents there are around who are also not happy about this, and then start to strategize.

I mean, look, to some degree, what people just define as gender is a social construct. So let's look at it this way: there are things that make men men and that make women women that are universal across cultures. So let's say—except for tiny variations—external genitalia. But then there are things that do vary across culture with regards to whether they're regarded as masculine or feminine, male or female, and those are more learned.

So let's say that external genitalia is not a social construct; it's not learned. If we can't agree on that, then we're not going to be able to have a discussion at all. But there are some things about male behavior and some things about female behavior that are culture-specific and learned, and so to that degree, gender is a social construct.

So, you know, you have to give the devil his due, but the problem isn't teaching that gender is a social construct; the problem is teaching that gender is only a social construct, and that's just wrong. It's absolutely wrong.

As soon as someone's doing that, then you know that you're dealing with an ideologue, and the research evidence on that, for example, is crystal clear. Apart from the fact that there are morphological differences between men and women—which is quite obvious—you could name a variety of ways: men have wider jaws, larger teeth; they can bite harder, they have thicker skulls—women certainly can attest to that from a psychological perspective.

They are more powerful in the upper body; they can punch a lot harder, they can throw more naturally. They tend to weigh more; they tend to be taller. That sexual dimorphism—human beings are relatively sexually dimorphic as far as primates and other mammals go. There are differences in obviously waist-hip ratio—women's elbows are at a different angle; they have finer bones.

Women have a subcutaneous layer of body fat that men don't have. Women are a little bit more pain-resistant, made more pain-tolerant. They're also—they also have very high levels of stamina. Women tend to have a little edge in verbal ability; men tend to have a little edge in spatial ability.

Then there are, apart from the straight physiological differences, there are psychological differences; there are a variety of them. Women are more enthusiastic; men are more assertive—that's extraversion. Women are higher in withdrawal and in volatility—that's on the neuroticism front. Women are more agreeable and more polite—that's on the agreeableness front.

Men are more industrious slightly, and women are more orderly—that's on the conscientious front. And women are higher in openness proper, and men are higher in interest in ideas—that's on the openness front. Those differences aren't huge; there's more overlap between the genders—the sexes—than there is lack of overlap, but the differences magnify at the extremes, and they also maximize in societies that are egalitarian.

The biggest difference between men and women that we know of psychologically is that men are more prone to be interested in things, and women are more prone to be interested in people, and that's actually quite a large difference by psychological standards. There isn't any evidence that that is socially constructed.

The evidence is that as you make societies more egalitarian, those differences actually get bigger rather than smaller. Even the London Times, three weeks ago, wrote an editorial describing yet another study that demonstrated that. So that's like six, and they're huge scale studies pointing out that the fact that the differences between men and women get bigger in more egalitarian societies is now one of the most well-established findings in all of the social sciences; thus demonstrating, for example, that poor James Damore was correct, despite the fact that Google fired him for being accurate in his analysis of the scientific literature.

Okay, so you've got the facts on your side. The problem is you don't know what to do. Well, write down exactly what you're annoyed about. What bothers you about this? Okay, what would you like to have happen? Because you need to know what the problem is, and you need to know what the solution is. Then you have to start thinking about strategy, and one strategy is you need some allies. You need some people on your side.

Now, if this is bothering you, the probability that it's bothering most people is very high. It's very rare, especially with something like this. I mean, I would say—and I think the data supports this—that the overwhelming majority of people do not believe that gender is a social construct, that there are four sexes, and that avoiding naming boys and girls is a good idea.

So you've got—unless you're in a very progressive place, in which case, mmm—that's its own problem. You've got to find some people who would be willing to go to bat with you, and then you have to find—it's a political struggle; it's a bit of a war.

It's like, "Okay, who's pushing this? Who's the ringleaders for this? You know, it's certainly possible that most of the teachers don't want to do this either, but they're afraid to say anything."

So I would say this is probably a two-year campaign. You have to decide if this is something that you want to put your time and effort into, and if you do, you have to conduct it like a war. You know, without the violence, obviously, but it's the right metaphor; it's like, "What's the set of problems? Who's causing them? What do you want to have happen as an alternative? How are you going to tackle this?"

Are you going to talk to your local public authorities, school authorities? Are you going to talk to the local politicians? You know, talk to the principal; are you going to face down the teachers? Are you going to do that with more than one of you? Are you going to have your arguments in order?

Then on a more personal front, what are you going to do with your daughter? How are you going to educate her? Let's say you decide not to take this on the political or public front; then you have to have conversations with her and find out what she thinks. You know, because she'll be doubtful and dubious about all of this, so a lot of that should be asking her questions, you know?

So yeah, that's the best I can do with that. Would you consider adding a realist of recommended movies to your website?

Yes, I've thought about that. Also, a recommended list of books for young people. It's on the hypothetical list of things to do, but I haven't done it yet, and I don't think that it's likely to make it up the priority list for a while because I'm pretty booked out for the next, who knows how long, a while.

Can I understand myself or other Big Five tests be retaken after some time—e.g., one to two years—and be fairly accurate? I ask because I believe I have changed.

Well, you might have changed. I mean, look, first of all, people do change as they mature. Personality is relatively stable across time, but relatively stable doesn't mean completely stable. It means that, you know, if you were extremely extroverted, the probability that in five years you're going to be extremely introverted is very low.

But if you were extremely extroverted, it's conceivable that, you know, in one or two years, you'll be moderately extroverted. You can move, and some of that's situational, some of it's learning, some of it's maturation.

One of the most reliable findings in the personality literature is that as people get older, they get more conscientious, more agreeable, and more emotionally stable—less neurotic—and that those three traits clump to make a supertrait we call stability. So people get more stable as they get older.

I've seen people learn to be more conscientious—that's for sure. That happens anytime you take people who are young and sort of flighty and put them through a rigorous apprenticeship program, where they discipline themselves. I've seen people become certainly become less lower in neuroticism and less agreeable, for that matter.

So yes, you can take them; sure, take it again two years later and see. You know, the other thing you can do if you’re really curious about your personality is have some other people take the personality test about you. Because, you know, some things about your personality, and they're accurate to some degree. Self-report has some degree of accuracy, but then you can get information from other people as well, and that's another way of determining, you know, of helping get an accurate picture of who you are.

So you can change. The more dramatic the change, the more effort is required; that's a good way of thinking about it. So we know, for example, that you can change IQ with a shift in socioeconomic status.

So imagine that you have identical twins separated at birth, and you know you put one twin into a relatively well-off family and one twin into a relatively poor family. Let's assume that being rich has some advantages with regards to intellectual development. You need a three standard deviation—might be four, but you need a three or four standard deviation move upward in socioeconomic status to produce a one standard deviation increase in IQ.

So you have to move from something like the fifth percentile—I might have the stats a bit wrong because I'm trying to do this on the fly. You have to move from the bottom fifth percentile to the top fifth percentile in wealth to move from average intelligence to—the eighth fifth percentile in intelligence.

So you can change as a consequence of the situation; but the bigger that change, the more costly—and that could be costly in terms of resources or effort.

So wouldn’t you like doing a podcast with Elon Musk? Let's start an initiative for this.

Yes, I would like to do a podcast with Elon Musk. I know people who know him, but we've never met. Yes, I'm sure that would be ridiculously fun! So if you want to start an initiative for that, you go right ahead, and who knows? Maybe it'll bear fruit.

I am going to be concentrating more on my podcast in a few months. I'm contracting with a professional company to develop it for a variety of reasons.

So that it moves higher up on the priority list. So I have a better studio; so that I have some staff to help me schedule interviews. There are lots of people I want to talk to: authors, scientists, politicians, and so on. So I'm quite excited about that.

And I would love to talk to Elon Musk. So I'm sure that would be ridiculously fun. I would love to find out—I’d like to ask him about his thought process, and also I'm really curious about how in the world he manages to do multiple impossible things.

Because doing one impossible thing is impossible, but doing like five impossible things is the product of five impossibilities. And that just seems like hyper impossible, but he's managed it. You know? I mean think about it. Think about what he did. He built an electric car, which is like hard.

Then he built a rocket, and then he blasted the car into space on his rocket. Like, that— that's not real; that doesn't happen. But it did happen, and he did it! And so I would really—I would love to talk to him. I think that would be extremely, extremely interesting.

How do you fight a monster without becoming one yourself?

You don’t. You become a monster by fighting with a monster. But it’s actually a good thing to become a monster. You see, the difference is—and really, this is the answer to your question—you could stay naive, and that's not good because you're vulnerable, and you're not useful if you're naive, so that's a bad situation.

So let's say—well, instead of being naive, you decide you're going to go confront the monster. Okay, well, the problem with that is that you become the monster. Alright, so how do you deal with that? And the answer is to do it voluntarily—to do it voluntarily.

Because if you develop your monstrousness voluntarily, then perhaps you can bring it under civilized control, right? You can integrate that capacity for mayhem and destruction that you develop within yourself. You can integrate that within a comprehensive and properly directed practical philosophy.

So that means that you're disciplined. You know, like a warrior isn’t a monster. So you have to align; you have to discipline your monstrosity, and you do that by developing it voluntarily. Look, you see this sort of thing happening all the time in classic hero stories.

Like, if you look at the story of The Hobbit, for example—like Bilbo. I think Bilbo is the Hobbit, right? Frodo's the next one. Let me just look that up. Yeah, okay, it's Bilbo. Good; that's what I thought. Now, Bilbo, when he starts—when this Hobbit starts the book, he lives in this little protected area, so it's like the castle that the Buddha grows up in. All the bad things are outside of it, and the reason for that, actually, is because the kingdom is guarded by these descendants of great kings—the Striders, who the hobbits have some contempt for because they kind of look like tramps.

Aragorn is one of them, so the descendants of great kings patrol the borders and keep the naive inhabitants of the Shire safe. They're naive and they go about their day-to-day work, and nothing really threatens them, and because they don't have any real challenges and they're peaceful in their wealth and security, they think they're good, but they're not. They’re just naive and undisciplined and relatively weak.

So they're not prepared for anything when all hell breaks loose. They're there; they're like bait; they're like prey. You know? So, of course, the wizard Gandalf knows this. Now, despite the fact that the Shire-folk are rather small and a bit comical and tremendously naive, they do have a latent ability for courage and forthrightness, and Gandalf can really see this in the one Hobbit, Bilbo.

And so he tells Bilbo that darkness is brewing on the outs—in the outlands, outside of protected territory. Absolutely classic mythological representation. It's the same in The Lion King, where Mufasa tells Simba that his kingdom is everything that the light falls on and that he's not to journey outside of that domain, right? That’s the elephant graveyard and death and all of that— that's outside of the Shire, let's say. It's outside of paradise; it's outside of the walled city; it's outside of your domain of knowledge.

Well, that's where— that's where malevolence and chaos brew. Now, you see that again and in The Lion King because that's where Scar and the hyenas go off to conspire and turn into what are essentially jackbooted Nazis before they take over the Pride Lands; same idea!

Okay, well, so what happens to Bilbo when he goes off to confront the dragon? He has to become a thief, right? Which is very picky; it's very strange ethically because while Bilbo wasn't a thief, and you think, "What's better: to not be a thief than to be a thief?" And the answer to that is: it's a very hard answer, a very complicated answer, and it's not one to be dealt with lightly.

It's not good to be moral if the reason that you're moral is because you cannot be otherwise. That's the naivety issue, right? So naivety is not morality; and if you're terrified to be a thief and you have no skill at it and you're not a thief, that doesn’t mean you’re good.

Now, if you could be the best thief in the world, man, you were one sneaky character, and fast on your feet, and a real strategic thinker and capable of breaking rules when necessary and scaling walls and climbing houses and infiltrating parties and plotting for the long run, and then you decided not to do it, well then that's a whole different story! Then you're a moral animal.

Right? So you need that capacity for criminality—you need the capacity for criminality; you need the capacity of evil, and you need to have mastered that—and that's what makes you good. So, well, that's what happens in The Hobbit is that Bilbo has to develop his dark side, his shadow, and he does that, you know?

And well, he's a thief in a variety of ways; he ends up stealing the ring, which is really interesting, and of course, that leads into The Lord of the Rings. But, you know, look, he doesn't get away scot-free from developing his dark side. Like, he's touched by evil from then on in; he's got the ring problem, and that's a big one—that thing might possess him because he's gotten too close to it.

It's like Harry Potter and his scar and the fact that he has a bit of Voldemort in him; it's exactly the same idea, or the strange affinity that the Joker insists upon in Joker in Batman.

When Bilbo comes back to the Shire, like, he's never one of the hobbits again; he's always an outsider. He's got a glimmer of magic and danger about him, and that makes people respect him, but they also think that he's unconventional in an unacceptable way, and, you know, kind of make a wide berth around him because now he's contaminated with evil and the unknown, even though that makes him a much better character, all things considered, and a real fighter in the battle between good and evil—the person who's gone out and confronted the dragon and got the treasure, all of that.

So, well, the pathway to, from naivety to the full development of character is associated with the development—in the Jungian sense—of the shadow, and that’s that capacity for mayhem and malevolence that needs to be brought under control. So yes, it's complicated, and that doesn’t mean that you're justified in going out and breaking rules because you think you’re building your character; you know, it's not that simple.

If you look at stories like Harry Potter, you know, all of Harry's crew breaks rules, but they only break a rule when not breaking it would break a higher-order rule, and that's still morally ambivalent, right? Because the best pathway forward is to violate no conventions, to do the right thing and violate no conventions.

But now and then you're in a terrible situation where you can do a small bad thing or a large bad thing, or you can allow a large bad thing to happen by failing to break a rule.

That often happens in Harry Potter, so then you're in trouble, and part of being wise and oriented towards the good is to know when breaking a rule is the right thing to do, even though you shouldn't break rules.

So Canada has legalized marijuana. What are your thoughts?

It's about time; that’s my thoughts! I think that once a certain number of people break a law, then it's not reasonable to have the law. That's part of it. It isn't obvious to me that it was irrational in some sense to have marijuana to be illegal, especially given that alcohol is legal; because they all cause way more danger than marijuana.

I'm more or less libertarian on this front; it's like, "Smoke your damn pot, and try not to act like too much of an a**hole when you're stoned." That's what it looks like to me.

And I kind of feel that way across the spectrum of consciousness-altering substances. It's like you—I think that the danger of restricting people's freedoms unnecessarily is more dangerous than the danger of not restricting them.

And so you're entitled to go to hell in a handbasket in your own manner. But I do think that if you're going to engage or indulge in your favorite drug of abuse, that you should be as little annoying to everyone around you as you possibly can be.

Then I would also say, with regards to the drug trade in general, here are a bunch of consequences of the war on drugs—a lot of them unexpected. First of all, terrible incarceration rate—especially in the United States—that's not so good. Secondly, the dumping of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars into the hands of, like, serious criminals and the destabilization of much of Central America as a consequence—tremendous violence as a consequence.

Then the enrichment of people who are these are seriously committed dangerous criminals, and to give them that much power is a bad idea.

So maybe the government has to tax and regulate like it does with cigarettes, and it does with alcohol, and to some degree, it does with gambling. Then the next issue is one of the consequences now of the classification of certain drugs as illegal is that the chemists are faster than the legislators.

What they do is they keep making variants of addictive drugs, and now instead of a dozen drugs of abuse—which is what we had, say, twenty years ago—we have like 300, and some of them are way more addictive than the original drugs. So it doesn’t look like good policy to me, and I know that places like Portugal, for example, have decriminalized every drug of abuse, and it doesn't look like it's been a catastrophe!

So, well, we'll see, right? We legalize marijuana yesterday. There's no—the streets aren't full of stoned people bumping into walls; nothing's changed. I hope it works. I hope that the government regulates it properly, that they derive tax revenue from it, and that people use pot and that people use alcohol a little less; that would be good because alcohol is a very dangerous drug.

So, okay, so I'm going to go for eight more minutes. I have to stop comparatively early today because I have to pack, and then I have to go to Dublin.

Just to warn you all: do you have any advice on how to vet a potential marriage partner during the dating relationship phase? God, that's a hard question!

Okay, so while I can tell you what I've observed as a consequence of watching all the married people—successful and unsuccessful—who I know, but also watching all my clients and giving this a fair bit of thought, here's some of what's necessary for a successful marriage: you have to trust the person.

That doesn't mean they can't make mistakes, because you're going to make mistakes, and so are they. But fundamentally, you have to trust them, and what that means is that you have to trust that if things go wrong, if they make a mistake, they’ll do what was necessary in conjunction with you to set it right.

You have to be able to negotiate with the person, and those two things are tied very, very closely together. So if you— you guys have to be able to have a conversation about what it is that you want to do, come to a conclusion, moderate your differences, move forward, and have that work—you have to be able to fight and make up.

Both of those—if you can't fight with your potential marriage partner, then you're not communicating, because there's just no bloody way that you're going to get along; there's no way you're going to agree on everything. That's just not going to happen.

So you have to be honest with one another enough to have some conflict, but then you have to be able to make up—that's a huge deal, man. Because, well, then you get to have conflict and solve problems and make up.

So trust, negotiation, conflict resolution. The next thing I would say is, well, it’s kind of nice if you're attracted to each other, you know, if there's a strong sexual attraction there. It isn’t obvious to me that that's something that can be conjured up; it doesn’t exist.

I haven't seen that happen successfully. It seems to depend on factors that aren't really under voluntary control, you know? I mean, obviously, people can modify themselves to some degree to be more or less attractive—staying in physical shape and that sort of thing, dressing nicely, and having a certain amount of sex appeal and charisma and provocative enough stats are all there, but that's all well and good, and it's important.

I do believe that that spark—that's outside of voluntary control—is a necessary precondition for a long-lasting relationship. I do believe, though, that if it's there, you still have to work very hard to maintain it as hard in your marriage as you would when you're dating, and you need to know that.

Then it's also helpful if you actually like the person, you know? If they're your friend, that you actually like to go do things with them sort of independent of the romantic element, you know? You don't need to want to do everything together, but you should have some things that you like to do in common.

So some similarity in personality is useful—the personality scale is useful for that. Here’s the thing: it's really hard for an extreme extrovert and an extreme introvert to live together because the extreme extrovert wants to be with people all the time, and the extreme introvert is immediately exhausted by that. Neither of those things are precisely under voluntary control.

It's really hard for someone super agreeable and super disagreeable to get along together because the agreeable person isn't going to be able to stand up very well to the disagreeable person, and the disagreeable person is going to think that the agreeable person is a pushover. That's rough; it's very hard for someone high in openness and someone very low in openness to be together because the open person is like fascinated by ideas and really interested in aesthetics and art and philosophy and poetry and all that.

The person who's low in openness is like—they're colorblind to that; it's not in their realm of involuntary interest. Conscientiousness is the same thing. If you're a very conscientious person, very diligent, nose to the grindstone, industrious and orderly, and your partner can while away the time with no problem whatsoever and doesn’t mind a mess and disorder, then the conscientious person is going to think that the unconscientious person is useless, and the unconscientious person is going to think that the conscientious person is an uptight tyrant, and that's very, very hard to overcome.

It's like a fatal flaw. The only place where that might be different is that, you know, you probably don't want to both be high in neuroticism. So like if one of you is high in neuroticism and the other isn't, that's kind of a nice balance because one of you will be a little alert to threat, and the other one will calm the one who’s alert to threat down.

If you're both low in neuroticism, well then, that's not going to be too much of a problem, although you might be a little bit less risk-averse than you should be. But mostly, you want a fair bit of similarity in terms of personality.

Then I guess the other thing is that—well, do you have something like a shared vision of the future? You know, like how are you going to mediate the inevitable conflict between whose career takes priority? What about kids? Do you both want kids? And if you do want kids, when do you want them? How many do you want? What's your sense about who's responsible for what when it regards to the kids and the same when you're running a household?

It's like do you have some sense of—do you have enough shared belief so that running a household together is something that with a peaceful household and a productive household is within the realm of possibility?

So that's what it looks like to me. That's a lot of things. So, you said you act as if God exists; do you also act as if the devil exists?

Man, I think I probably act even more as if the devil exists. Because, in some sense, it's a lot more easy for me, and I think it is for most people. It's easier for me to believe in the reality of malevolence and evil and to be terrified about that getting a grip on me than it is to be optimistic and naive about the possibility of transcendent good.

It's just that it's not that I am skeptical about the reality of transcendent good; I mean, fundamentally, I believe that good is more powerful than evil. I do believe that. But there's something palpable about evil that is—and it's also undeniable. It's like, well, you can debate about whether or not heaven exists, you know, and you could even be skeptical.

But you can't debate about whether the Gulag Archipelago exists, and you can't debate about Auschwitz, and you can't debate about the fact that people's proclivity towards blindness and malevolence produced those horrors. The horrors that people often encounter in their day-to-day world and in their relationships!

So it's very easy for someone like me to be a believer in evil and to try to turn away from that. And so—and, through deep contemplation, you know, I’ve come to the conclusion that the ability of human beings to turn away from evil and to pursue good is more powerful than malevolence itself.

But that's more of its funny; that fills me with hope and awe. I guess is the right word when I can bring it to mind and think that we can, in fact, defeat malevolence. But sort of on a moment-to-moment basis, the malevolence is so palpable and so real that it's a more powerful motivator for avoidance.

I don’t mean avoidance of responsibility; I mean avoidance of walking down that path. I think that's probably in keeping with the well-known psychological doctrine that people are more loss-averse than they are gain-sensitive. You know? So a loss upsets you more to lose five dollars than it does make you happy to gain five dollars. That's a well-known psychological fact, and it's because we're more sensitive to punishment and negative emotion, and that's because, well, you can die in agony, but you can only be so happy.

So yes, I certainly act as if the devil exists, I would say. I think I probably believed in the devil, so to speak, speaking metaphorically, before I believed in God—speaking metaphorically. I became convinced of the reality of evil and that really—and not only that—not only convinced of the reality of evil, but also convinced that everyone was destined to play their part in that—including me—and that it would be better if I played the least part in that as possible.

You know? And that sort of brings us back to this book. You know, as Solzhenitsyn said, "The line that divides good from evil runs down the heart of every individual," right? It's an internal thing, not between states; it's not between groups; it's between elements of our psyche.

Our individual responsibility is to work to ameliorate suffering and to constrain malevolence and to start with ourselves. And so that's a good place to end. So thank you all very much for your continued support, for paying attention to this QA, for everything that you've offered to me over the last few years.

It's been an absolutely overwhelming experience to, for example, go out and do these lectures. They’re unbelievably positive experiences to see all these thousands of people come out to engage in a serious discussion about vision and strategy and responsibility and individual sovereignty, and the possibility that we could all aim together, acting individually, towards at least a less hellish future.

That's really something, so that's good, guys. Till next time, until November, and I'll put out this video on associates and preface. I'll put that out before November 1st; that'll probably be next on the list. So it's off to Europe, and we'll talk to you all soon. Thanks very much; bye for now.