Q & A 2019 01 January

It's January 13, 2009. Teen, Happy New Year to you all and thank you for joining the Q&A.

So I'll start with a couple of announcements. First I suppose is that I'm leaving Patreon January 15th. Some of you may know that that's, I suppose, in protest over their treatment of Carl Benjamin, perhaps better known as Sargon of Akkad. Patreon, like many companies, seems to believe that their role now is to act as censor for speech patterns or speech content that they regard as unacceptable. I think that they made a big mistake with Sargon, and so both Dave Rubin and I, and also Sam Harris have decided to leave Patreon, and that's going to be official as of January 15th.

So those of you who are my Patreon subscribers, if you're interested in continuing with that subscription, you can go to my website at Jordan V Peterson dot com, and there's a support button there in the menu, and you can use that system. I'm also trying to design a system that, at least in principle, might work as a reasonable replacement for Patreon. That's a couple of months away, but we're working hard on a ton. We're getting legal advice, we're going to set up multiple payment channels so that it won't be easy for people to be kicked off by credit card companies or, let's call them virtue signaling ethical types who think that their role is to police free speech.

So I think this is a very bad precedent that Patreon's made and the credit card companies. I can't imagine, it's difficult to imagine a more dystopian scenario than to have the large tech companies in combination with the credit card companies monitor your spending to decide when what you're doing is sufficiently ethical by the standards of the people who are running their, let's call them safety and security speech monitoring programs. It's just such a terrible idea.

So, mm-hmm, there's that. I'm also working on my new book quite a lot, but actually it's tentatively titled "Beyond Order: Twelve More Rules for Life," or perhaps "Beyond Mere Order." I haven't decided on that yet. I can tell you what the rules are, maybe you'd be interested in that, so I'll give you a list of them.

The first one is: Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.

Rule 2: Imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that.

Rule 3: Work as hard as you can, work as hard as you possibly can, on at least one thing and see what happens.

Rule 4: Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.

Rule 5: Abandon ideology, abandon ideology.

Rule 6: Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.

Rule 7: Do not do things that you hate.

Rule 8: Try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible.

Rule 9: If old memories still make you cry, write them down carefully and completely.

Rule 10: Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship.

Rule 11: Be grateful in spite of your suffering.

And then Rule 12: Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant.

In principle, that book will be published in January 2020. I'm supposed to have the manuscript in sometime within the next six months, and I have a first draft done and I'm working hard on the repeat edits. It's going to be published simultaneously in the UK, the US, and Canada. I'm working with three different editors and so that's that part of the announcement.

So I'm hoping—I'm really hoping that I can make the next book better. There’s going to be a paired copy with the first one. I'm probably going to publish it with a black cover to go with the white cover of "12 Rules," and I'm hoping that I can make it into a better book and that the two together will make a very complete set, so that's the plan. We'll see how it goes.

The last announcement, I guess—no two more announcements. I'm going to Switzerland tomorrow. My daughter is having surgery there to get her ankle fixed again. We're hoping that that will go well. I'm also doing a talk in Zurich. Then I have three talks in California. Information for them is at Jordan B Peterson dot com forward-slash events. And then in February, my wife and I are going, my wife Tammy and I are going to Australia and New Zealand, and I believe we have 15 talks scheduled there over the course of about a month.

Then I think in March and April, I'm going to concentrate mostly on writing, and then perhaps we're going to go to Europe, and so that's for a month or two. That will depend to some degree on the writing schedule, but that's the plan at the moment.

I have some good podcasts coming up. I talked to General Stanley McChrystal last week about his new book on leadership and the myths that surround it, and some of the initiatives that he's been working on in the United States. McChrystal was the commander of the American forces in Afghanistan, and so it was very interesting to talk to him.

Well, there's a variety of other things going on too, but I won't tell you any more about those for the time being. I think what I'll do instead is turn to some questions. So I guess maybe I could also give a bit of a recap for 2018.

So, Tammy and I have gone to about fifteen cities now, something like that. Her Google trip tracker showed that she had gone six times around the world; mine said twenty, and so that's obviously wrong because I traveled mostly with her. But there was a lot of traveling last year, and I spoke to about two hundred and fifty thousand people, and that was a very— all of that was a very positive experience.

The lectures have been really well heartwarming, to use an old term. I mean it's really something to see that many people gather together and listen and happen and participate in a discussion about psychological, philosophical, and spiritual issues. That's as deep as I can manage, anyways, and it seems to be quite gripping for the audience and good for everyone, and so they're very, very positive experiences, which is partly why we've been able to sustain this speaking pace. So that's been good.

Oh, we also have a discount, by the way. My partners and I decided to encourage everybody to make their New Year's resolutions in a sophisticated and comprehensive way, and so we have this program. Some of you have heard about this at self-authoring dot com called future authoring, and the future authoring program helps you write out a vision for the future to think through what you'd like your life to be like if you were taking care of yourself properly—to consider your friends and your family and your career and your education and your use of time outside of work—and your ability to resist temptation, the kind of temptation that might drag you down, and how you might take care of yourself mentally and physically, and to write about that.

Then to write a counter story, which was where you might be three to five years down the road if you let all your bad habits get out of control, and then to write a strategic plan. It's a very useful program. We've used it with lots of university students in particular, although it's for adults of all ages.

If you're a university student and you complete the program, it seems to increase the probability that you'll stay in university by about twenty-five percent, something like that. It seems particularly useful, by the way, for men, for reasons that we don't exactly understand—maybe because they're underperforming women academically. It also improves people's grades.

But there's a large literature in the industrial organizational area also indicating that if you're working and you make a personal plan of this sort, then your overall productivity increases by about ten percent, which is a lot. And you're more likely to be physically and mentally healthy.

And so I would really recommend trying this—even you can try the program. You don't have to do a perfect job at it; it doesn't really matter because you're trying to set out a bit of a vision and a plan for your life, and you need that because you need direction and you need purpose and you need the constraints of a vision to help you be less anxious and uncertain.

And you have that. Anxiety and uncertainty reduction does occur if you have a decent map of where it is that you're headed. The coupon code is MY2019 New Year's 2019 NY2019, and if you go to the self-authoring site and click on the products menu item and go to future authoring, you can just enter in that coupon code, and it's 50% off.

So I think the total price is seven dollars and forty-five cents, which is actually pretty damn cheap if what it does is help structure your future. And I really do think this is a helpful program. We've worked on it a lot and tested a lot, and it's based on solid behavioral psychological principles allied with, I would say, a certain degree of optimistic philosophy, and it's a good thing to do, and this is a good time to do it. So if you're interested, all that information will be in the description of the video as well.

So that's basically that, as far as I can tell. I don't think I have anything else to tell you. Oh! "12 Rules for Life" has sold about 3 million copies now, so I guess I'm telling you that it's become very popular in Korea, where it's sold about 200,000 copies, which is quite interesting and something I wouldn't have necessarily expected.

So, alright, so let's answer some questions and see how that goes. Can you talk about your own specific experiences/methods used with integrating the shadow?

Yeah, well, I can actually. I think a tremendous amount of what you might regard as shadow integration, which in the parlance of behavioral psychologists would be something like assertiveness training. Alright, it's training in how to stand up for yourself and for your, let's say, your better self, which would be the self that you could use productively over a medium to long period of time that would be of use to you but also of use to people around you. So it's a self that's founded by the necessity of taking care of yourself but also simultaneously taking care of the people around you.

I think that the simplest way to start that work is to consult your resentment. You know, it's easy to become bitter about life and to become angry because, of course, life is difficult and it's full of disappointments and people are also subject to betrayal on the part of themselves and on the part of people that hypothetically care for them.

And so it's easy to get bitter and to be resentful, and resentment is a very useful emotion, even though I think it's one of the most damaging emotions if it's not dealt with properly. So if you're resentful, it basically means only one of two things: it either means you should grow up and quit whining and get on with your life, or it means that you're being subject to tyrannical forces of one form or another—maybe emanating, you may be a consequence of the natural environment, may be a consequence of society.

You're being subject to tyrannical forces, and you're not putting your own best interests forward, like in that broader sense I described. I don't mean your selfish narrow interests that only serve the purposes of instantaneous gratification. I mean your own best interests in terms of developing your character over the span of your life.

If you're resentful, it either means that you're immature and that you should grow the hell up, and so you need to figure out how much of your resentment is that, and maybe allied with the desire to find other things or people to blame. But the other possible option is that you have something to say or do, right? Because you're in a situation where you're violating your own internal ethical standards and you're being required, pressured, let's say, to say things you don't believe or to do things that you believe to be wrong.

You need to determine—you need to start to strategize and plan how you can rectify that so that you can say what you mean. Like if you're negotiating with a marital partner, for example, and there are issues in your marriage that aren't making you happy, well, the first thing is you have to take note of that, right? To see that you're actually unhappy.

The second is you have to be willing to engage in a certain amount of conflict because in order to sort out what's disturbing you, you're going to have to lay your concerns out on the table and say, "Well, look, this is bothering me." You don't have to say, "Well, I'm right and you're wrong," and "You have to fix this." You have to say, "Well, I've noticed that this pattern of interaction, or lack of interaction, say in our relationship, is making me resentful and angry."

And the danger of that, of course, is you're going to take it out on yourself and your partner. The danger is passive-aggressiveness. You know, you're not going to respond to your partner positively when they do something good if you're resentful about them, and you're not going to respond to yourself properly.

And so you have to lay it out on the table, but sort of in a spirit of ignorant humility. It's like, "Look, I'm frustrated; I'm feeling this way about our relationship. Here's what I think might be going wrong, maybe on my part and maybe on your part, and here's what I envision as a possible solution."

That's also really necessary if you're going to say what you have to say, which is to manifest yourself properly in the world, is you can't just complain about what's wrong. You have to think, "Well, what would my minimal preconditions for satisfaction be?" You have to offer that to the person that you're negotiating with.

And so then you learn to abide by the truth, to the degree that you can do that, and no one does it perfectly. You know, but it's very useful because you're not storing up a whole sequence of memories about how you were unfairly treated and abused and betrayed; instead, you're trying to stay on top of it and to note your unhappiness and dissatisfaction when it manifests itself, and to accept that that's the case.

Then to analyze that to see if it's your problem, like I said with regards to maturity, or if it indicates that there's an injustice in the manner in which you and the world are interacting, and then to work to set that right, even in small ways. And so it's a matter of characterological development, and that makes you stronger over time.

Partly what you need, you know, in order to do that is you have to really understand. This is why we built in the future authoring program; we built this section where you have to outline your most dismal future, right? What your future would be like if you let all your bad habits and characterological weaknesses have the upper hand.

The reason we did this is because you can't be—you can't straighten yourself out merely as a consequence of hope, let's say. You lay on a vision for the future and you think about what your life would be, what you'd like your life to be like, and then that makes you hopeful and it motivates you because it gives you something worthwhile and higher order to work for, right?

And that's useful; that's positive emotion working for you because positive emotion is experienced in relationship to goals. But it's not as useful as also being chased by something you're terrified by. If you have a good sense of how you can fall apart if you stay weak and just exactly what kind of hell that would be, then when you determine to do something like to tell the truth and to say what you think and to not do things that you hate, then you're going to be pulled along by the purpose that your vision has provided for you, but also pushed along by your desire to avoid the worst forms of hell that you've already outlined for yourself personally.

That can also help you be brave enough to stand up in the situation that would require a conflict because if you have something to say and you have something to negotiate about with someone, then there's going to be a certain amount of conflictual dialogue that accompanies that, right? To lay out a set of problems and to forthrightly describe the fact that those problems characterize a relationship and then to seek for solutions is quite stressful in the short term, and it's really easy to avoid.

So people avoid it all the time, and then they store up grievances across the span of the relationships, and eventually the grievances mount to the point where they return in monstrous form and just eat everything up. That's where you get divorces, or that's where you explode at your boss and end up fired, or that's where you develop high blood pressure over 15 years because you can't stand all the accumulated months—all the accumulated monsters in your closet.

You drink yourself into oblivion because you can't stand your life. That's all very counterproductive, but it's easy to avoid that necessary conflict on a moment-to-moment basis because it's very stressful to speak forthrightly about genuine conflicts, especially when you're dealing with important parts of your life.

But otherwise you don't straighten them out, and then you have to carry all that forward. So you need to be terrified of the consequences of not speaking your piece, and that can counterbalance the terror of actually trying to have a conversation.

So, well, you know, and you also have to look with regards to the shadow ideas. Like, you have to get in touch with the depths of your anger. You know, lots of people are resentful about all sorts of things. They're resentful about, oh, women, and they're resentful about men, and they're resentful about the patriarchy, and they're resentful about the left wing, and they're resentful about the right wing, and they're resentful about politicians, and they're resentful about the cataclysmic force of nature and its ability to make people sickened and suffer.

And they're resentful about their own inadequacies, and the list is just bloody endless, and that can make you very, very angry. And that's part of that resentment, and cynical and bitter and dark and full of fantasies about destruction and the desire to bring things down and the wish that everyone else suffered and the desire to shake your fist at God.

All of that's really dark, you know? Jung said, "Well, the shadow of the human shadow extends all the way down to hell," and he really meant that, you know, because all the terrible things that people are motivated to do are associated with that shadow domain.

None of you are saints in any likelihood. You have a terrible capacity for destructiveness, and when you start to consult your resentment and to see how angry you are, it can terrify you to see the depths of that anger. Sometimes that will manifest itself in very destructive fantasies, you know, which you might not want to become conscious of because they're so brutal, let's say, and so aggressive that you can't even believe that you generate them, the nice person that's you.

It's quite frightening to open that door and see all that, and that also associates you with the entire dark shadow of mankind, right? The satanic element of the human character. But it opens the door to understanding as well, to understanding how people can do terrible things because you can see yourself as one of the people who could do terrible things. That's really useful, you know, because then you—well then maybe you start to be motivated to be the sort of person who wouldn't do terrible things.

You know, if you can really come to terms with the fact that that's part and parcel of you, it also is, in a perverse sense, it's also a discovery of your own strength, though, because you know if you have that desire for aggression, that desire for destruction, that ability to fantasize in that aggressive manner, it also means that you can incorporate some of that into your speech and into your actions so that you're a lot more movable, right?

And a lot more of a force to contend with. It can give you some respect for yourself when you realize that you're a force of destruction as well as creation. You're also more likely to treat yourself with a bit more intelligent caution, you know, to know that part of you is a ticking bomb in some sense that can go off.

And so you try to tread a bit more lightly around yourself, and maybe you encourage people to tread a bit more lightly around you as well, which isn't such a bad thing. And all the people that I really admired that I know have a clearly dangerous side, and you don't want to get, you don't want to have that activated any more than necessary, but it's also what makes them respectable and strong, especially if they have that under control.

So, well, that's a bit of a dialogue about shadow integration. It's a very challenging undertaking, you know, to pull in that dark side of your character and that would be all the things that you've repressed or failed to develop as a consequence of trying to be a harmless, let's say, a harmless citizen who looks virtuous on the surface. That's the union persona, and you need that because everybody needs a mask that they wear in public, like a suit, you know, so that we can tolerate seeing each other on the street; we don't have to look right into our depths every time we interact.

We need that persona, but that has to be transcended, and the way to transcend that is to integrate the darker parts of the character. They're very useful, that aggression—that sexual demand, for example. All of that's very difficult to socialize, that competitiveness—but unbelievably useful in terms of force of character if you could manage it.

Richard asks, "How can I help my parents to sort themselves out?" That's question one. "How can I talk about the resentments of my childhood in a way that benefits them instead of giving them guilt?"

Yeah, well, those are two very difficult questions. How can you help your parents to sort themselves out? Well, I guess the first question would be: do they want to sort themselves out? Because it's not that easy to help people if they don't want to be helped.

If they do want to be helped, like listening is really a good strategy, you know? People—you've got the question right because you said, "How can I help my parents to sort themselves out?" which is very different than "How can I sort my parents out?" You help people to sort themselves out once they have decided to do so by giving them the opportunity to talk about their concerns and also to outline what potential solutions might be.

And you don't want to offer too many pieces of advice while you're doing that because it turns out that people are much more likely to implement a strategy of improvement if they generate it themselves. Then also you don't steal the accomplishment from them.

Like let's say you came to me with a bunch of problems and I said, "Well, here's what you can do about that," and then you went out and did it and it worked, and in some sense that's not your accomplishment. I mean, it is insofar as you implement it, but it's not insofar as it was something that I planned, and your intubation of the fact that the delight in success and the responsibility for success might have been stolen from you by well-meaning advice is going to interfere with the probability that you'll implement the solution.

So it's best to let people talk through their own problems, like, "Well, what's the problem? That's what you ask. What's the problem? What do you think is not right about your life?" Then people will throw up a bunch of things that they're complaining about or resentful about, and it might be quite an extensive list and they'll feel guilty about it because they don't want to burden you with it.

But they need to get it all off their chest, right? They need to get the cards on the table. So, also, some things—you know, when you're talking to your wife or your husband or your intimate partner or a child, for that matter—so when you have a close relationship, if they've got some things to complain about, which they undoubtedly do, they're going to complain about a lot more things than they're actually upset about because they'll have gathered up irritations that have been unspoken and aggravations and fears, and they'll all be upsetting them emotionally, and they don't know exactly what they are until they articulate them.

You know, we say, "Well, what are you upset about?" "Well, I don't know." "Well, how can you not know?" The answer is there's all sorts of things that you respond to emotionally before you can articulate them, and then you get upset, and you explode, and you yell, and you lay out all the things you might be angry about, and you're impulsive and you overstate your case and you accuse people of things that you don't even believe.

All of that's part of the process of laying your cards out on the table. You have complex situations that are disturbing you and you don't know what they are exactly; you have to kind of guess. So you say, "Well, it might be this; it might be that; it might be this; it might be you." And this is why it's your fault, and you get accusatory.

Then, if you're listening to all that, you have to just be patient and let the person get all their cards out on the table, even if some of that involves accusations about you, which you don't have to immediately—to immediately jump to the conclusion that those accusations are accurate or that you have to defend yourself.

You know, and I'm not—believe me, I'm not saying this is easy because it's not, but you listen to the person lay out their deck of complaints, and the first thing you'll find is that they will take 50 percent or maybe more—75 percent of the cards off the table right away, because once they've articulated those concerns, they'll find that they're not really central; they're not really the issue.

And so that leaves a smaller number of genuine problems, and then you can ask people again, "Well, here's the problem. Can you think of any way, if you could conceptualize, how would it be better in relation to that problem? What would a solution look like, even in principle?" And then they might say, "Well, I don't know," and then they have to guess and lay their cards out on the table about what a solution might look like.

If they say they don't know, that often means they don't want to think about it, and a little bit of encouragement isn't in order, and maybe a little bit of pressure. But you want people to formulate a vision of what the situation would look like if the problem was solved.

Then they might find it very daunting because the solution looks so difficult that they don't see any pathway to it. And so the next part of the discussion is, "Well, are there some things that you could do that would be small steps that you would be interested in doing that you think you would do that would move you to the solution?"

And maybe those things could be implemented tentatively, and behavioral psychologists call that collaborative empiricism. So you'll come and see a behavioral psychologist and lay out your problems and then the two of you will negotiate towards the beginnings of a solution, "What could you do this week that might make this problem slightly better?"

And so you talk through what's practical and what's implementable. You have to be honest about that because you don't want to set yourself up with a plan that's so complicated you won't implement it. Then you say to the person, if you're the psychologist, you say, "Well, look, we've got a couple of ideas about what you can do this week that might make this situation slightly better. Why don't you go and implement them, and then come back next week and we'll talk about whether or not that worked?"

And work would be you did implement it and that it did have the desired solution, and if it didn't work, meaning you didn't implement it or the solution didn't emerge, then there's the opportunity for renegotiation. So you can think about it strategically.

The first issue is, well, if something needs to be sorted out, the first question is: What the hell is the problem? And the answer that you probably don't know, "The problem is I'm upset and disturbed and angry and resentful and bitter and unhappy and anxious and in pain and lonesome. I'm suffering from an excess of negative emotion and perhaps from a certain amount of hopelessness."

So the problem is the emotional circumstance, and that might be associated with some real problems, right? Some real practical problems. So you lay all that out and say, "Okay, well what does the problem landscape look like?" So that's the strategic move.

Then, as I said, that will generally simplify the problem landscape. Then you do think the same thing with a set of potential solutions: "Well, what would the solutions look like? Because you're not going to be able to solve a problem unless you at least know what a solution might look like that would actually—you would say that you would find acceptable."

Then the next pro issue is to lay out the strategies for the attainment of that solution. You know, sometimes it might be some of these solutions might be dismal, like, you know, if you've got someone who's ill in your family, the solution might be, "Well, we need a cure, you know, that's the only solution that will suffice."

But you don't know how to pursue the cure, or maybe one doesn't exist, so then you have to think of, well, a lower order and less satisfying solution, which would be, "Well, maybe we can cope. We're going to learn to cope with this so that it's the least amount of hell possible," and maybe that even—that might be too much. You might have to say, "Well, we're going to try to make this next week when we're coping with this better than the last week," you know, and maybe you can't even do that; it has to just be the next day.

You look for whatever small steps forward you can take that will make things less wretched and horrible than they currently are, you know, to put it rather bluntly. And that requires the willingness to face the problem, the humility to know that you don't have the solution at hand, the willingness to listen to how the other people that you're talking to formulate the problems, and formulate the solutions.

It's crucially important, right, to have them do that work themselves. It's also—you could think about it this way too: if you listen to someone come up with a solution, you don't undergo the neurological transformations necessary to change your character.

But if you come up with the solutions yourself, you know, if you articulate the problem, you articulate the solutions, then you've changed your own character in a way that increases the probability that you're going to act out what you do. And that requires real patience, to let people stumble through to their own problem solutions.

Because someone might lay out a set of problems, and you think, "Oh my God, I know what you could do about that," but it doesn't really matter if you know. You know, and I'm also not saying that sometimes advice is helpful. You know, sometimes you can give someone a hint, but man, you have to be careful with that because there's a real element of theft that's associated with it.

Now, Richard also asked, "How can I talk about the resentments of my childhood in a way that benefits them instead of giving them guilt?" I don't know if I can answer that question, Richard, because it's not a question that's—I see what I would ask if you came to talk to me, and you had that question, I would say, first of all, "Well, what resentments? List them out, man, write them down."

Okay, so that you know what they are because all those—each of those resentments is going to be a different thing, and the strategy that's associated with each might vary as a consequence of the particularity of the resentment.

So I would say you should start by writing them down: "What's your problem exactly? Here's all the things that I can think of that I'm angry about with regard to my childhood. Write that down."

Then see which ones are still living, and then you have to figure out: "Well, what do you want from your parents exactly? Do you want them to apologize? Do you want them to understand what they did wrong? Do you want to punish them? Do you want to get—let them learn to know you better? Do you want to change the way they're interacting with you now? Do you want to learn your own lessons from your bad experience so that when you're a parent you don't make the same mistakes? Do you merely want to have a chance to express yourself?"

It's very difficult to answer your question because I don't know what your goal is, right? So, and I don't need to know—you need to know what are the resentments so we can walk through the process where to describe, lay them out comprehensively. You might want to make a list of everything that you think you might conceivably be annoyed about with regards to your parents, no matter how trivial.

Because that way, you scour your memory for things that you're holding onto in a bitter way, and maybe you have your justification. I'm not suggesting that you don't, but you need to discover what baggage you're carrying. Then you have to figure out: "Well, what can I let go of? And what score?"

And I would say what's really core is if there are ways that your parents treated you that are still affecting you or that are affecting your relationships with them now, those really need to be dealt with because they're not done; they're not in the past, right? They're not even resentments of your childhood; they're still part of your ongoing life.

And so, okay, so now you have all your resentments laid out. I guess I would say something like, "Look, Mom and Dad, there's something I need to talk to you about that's been bothering me for a long time."

And I’d pick one of the more trivial things to begin with, like, "Here's a memory I have," and don't get all high and mighty about it because, you know, you might have misconstrued the situation as a child. It's highly probable.

And they may have had their reasons, and you may not even remember the situation, let's say, correctly or the way they remember it. You say, "Well, here's something that happened when I was a kid, and it still bothers me. Do you remember what happened? That's an open-ended question: Do you remember what happened? Why did this go this way?"

And then I would do an awful lot of listening, you know, because you are trying to gather information, and the more your parents can tell you about what happened in those situations, I would say, the better off you're likely to be.

So that's about all I can say about that. That’s a fairly delineated approach to general discussions about difficult things, right? But I would say don't be more afraid of engaging in this process than you are afraid of not engaging in it. Like every relationship you have is going to have problems in it.

And you know, you don't want to jump to an intense psychological discussion with every little bump, but if there's something of medium to long-term permanence that's disturbing you or a pattern that repeats itself at least three times, let's say, well then that might be something that's worthy of discussion or your discovery that you're very dissatisfied with the way the relationship is going and you have to have the conflict necessary to sort that out.

It's going to be conflict with you and the car and the person that you're talking to, but the aim should be the establishment of something like fully informed, fully negotiated, medium to long-term peace. That's what you're aiming at, if you have any sense.

Oh, Cody said, "It took me seven months, but I completed all the self-authoring suite in July. I'm still not motivated to do anything and waste all my time. What do I do?"

Well, the first question is, is it true that you're not motivated to do anything? And is it true that you waste all of your time? It seems highly unlikely to me that both of those things are 100 percent true. So one of the things you might notice is are there any— is there anything that you're motivated to do?

Presume you're motivated to eat, although perhaps not. And I'm not being smart about this. Partly what I would say is two things: you might need some smaller goals. Like you have to shrink your goals to the point where you’ve established a plan forward that consists of steps that not only you would be willing to take, but that you would take.

Some of that humility is like, "Man, I'm stuck; I can barely do anything." It's okay. Like, "Well, I'm laying in bed for seven hours a day." Well, could I lay in bed for six hours and six and a half hours tomorrow? You know, or while I'm in bed, could I do something somewhat useful?

Could I read a book? Can I read one page of a book? Can I read a paragraph of a book? You have to find those steps forward that you would take.

I really think it's useful to make friends with something like a Google Calendar, you know, or whatever calendar program you might want to use and start designing days that you would like to have, because that's the right way to use a calendar.

And everyone out there that's listening, you should use a calendar to structure your days, because if you know what you're doing tomorrow, it decreases your anxieties substantially, because you need that kind of structure; you need a pathway.

You need to know—you need to have a map; you need to know where you're located on the map, and you need to know how you're moving forward, and that gives you hope because you're moving towards goals that you regard as worthwhile.

And it stops you from being anxious because you're not entirely directionless and lost. And so learning how to manage your time is useful; you can start with a calendar. You can start with simple things, like you can put in when you're likely to go to bed and when you're likely to get up, and regulating that's useful.

That should be relatively ritualistically consistent. It's very difficult to get your life in order if your sleep-wake schedule is completely random or if it's not aligned with day and night and if it's not aligned with the normative practices of other people.

And so you may have to learn to get your sleep-wake cycle regulated properly. And then the same with your eating schedule. Those are very basic things, and you can do that badly, but that's what you want to approximate—three meals a day, let's say, because that's what people do normatively.

And then you have to add small goals. Now, if that doesn't work, like if you can't make the goals small enough to achieve, you know, it might be that you're not being humble enough with regards to your conceptions of your own abilities.

But you can tell if the goal that you put forward is a reasonable one if you're actually implementing it, because if you're not, then by definition it's not a reasonable goal. You know, like let's say you're sleeping all the time, and your room is just a bloody, complete disaster, you know, and you think, "Well, I should clean up my room."

It's like, "Well, maybe you can't, but maybe tomorrow you could hang up two shirts, you know, or you could—we could move two shirts from your bedroom to the laundry room, or you could bag up a bag of dirty clothes that you could conceivably take to a laundromat, and you just do that one thing."

You know, if you do—if your room's a catastrophe and you do that one thing, and then you did one thing like that for 15 days or 20 days, maybe your place would be in order. And so the trick is to get the trajectory right.

And, Cody, if that doesn't work, then you're going to need to talk to somebody. You know, maybe you need a partner that you can discuss these things with where you both have a commitment, like a mutual commitment to attaining a certain set of goals.

You know, that could be a friend; it could be somebody that you find online; it could be a professional. But if you find that you self-cannot—you just can't get this going, then you're going to have to reach out to someone else to give you a hand. Maybe you need to sit down with a parent or a friend or somebody that you love and go over the self-authoring suite with them to go over the future authoring plans and discuss how that might be implemented.

You know, because if you can't do it on your own, then maybe you shouldn't have to—then you have to reach out to other people. And so make your goals smaller; see if you can make friends with a schedule or a calendar. This is really important. All of you out there who aren't doing this, I would say all of the people that I know who have become successful in any way use a structured means to organize their time.

They have lists of things to do; like, they have—every day, there's a list of things to do that day; every week, there's a list of things to do that week; every month, there's a list of things to do that month. You know, at every level of temporal resolution, there's a sequence of plans, and those plans are implemented on a day-to-day basis.

You cannot be, and "successful" isn't the right way of thinking about it, because I'm not thinking about—you know, I'm not really thinking about rising up the corporate ladder. You know what I mean? And that's sort of what "success" has come to mean in our culture. That isn't what I mean.

You can't have a life that you're going to find acceptable without that because you need the vision and the plans to give you purpose and direction. That's where all your positive emotion comes from, all your motivation, is laying out plans that are worth attaining and then observing yourself moving towards them. That's the source of most positive meaning.

And then also, without that structure, you're so lost that you're going to be anxious and overwhelmed. It's really like being in a foreign country—like isolated and alone with no map. I don't know where the hell I am; I don't know what the hell I'm doing. You know, the rains are going to come and the storms are going to come, and maybe it's winter, and I don't know where I am or where I'm going.

And then the last thing, Cody, is rely on some other people, man. You know, maybe you'll be able to return the favor in the future. I know you'll feel bad maybe that you have to go to someone else; you feel weak and you know that you're taking advantage of them. But people like to be helpful; they really do.

And it's a mark of trust in someone and confidence in them that you would ask to have a serious conversation with them. And so, and if you don't have someone like that, then you need to find somebody like that.

And maybe that means you have to interact more in online communities, or maybe you have to get the hell out there in the world. There's lots of meetup groups and that sort of thing online that have organized themselves, and you can go there and hide in the back for a while and not talk to anybody, but you got to get the hell out there and, you know, make some social connections, because you cannot live alone.

We're social creatures, and you need help. And maybe you'll be able to offer some help at some point in the future too, so. Well, okay.

Rose says, "I'm consumed by envy. I can hardly stand to read or watch or listen to anyone more successful than myself. In what directions have I aimed wrong?"

Okay, well, look, Rose, it's pretty damn useful to figure out that you're consumed by envy—that's a good start, you know? That's a real self-realization and an important one. Okay, so the first thing we might ask is, well, it's likely reasonable for you to observe that that's not optimal for you, right? Because envy—that's that resentment that I was talking about earlier, or even worse than jealousy.

It's like, it's not a pleasant phenomenological state; it's not a pleasant state of experience. Okay, so look at it this way: well, what are you envious of? You know, you say, "I can hardly stand to read or watch or listen to anyone more successful than myself." Well, that's pretty vague, Rose.

And you want to tighten up your envy a bit. It's like, you'll find that there are certain people that you're particularly envious of; other issues accomplishments really don't disturb you, let's say.

So the first thing you want to do is figure out which people it is that you're particularly envious of, and then you want to figure out, well, what is it that you think they have? Now, you know, they probably have a lot more problems than you think, and so part of the pathology of envy is that you look at someone who's successful and you assume that that success defines them across all the important dimensions of their life, and that's rarely the case.

And so, you know, there's a naive optimism in envy, and that's reflected in the fact that you think that the person you're jealous of has everything that a person would need, and that's rarely the case. But that's somewhat besides the point.

Look, in your envy lurks the beginnings of a structure of ambition. You wouldn't be envious of something if you didn't believe that that was a value that you should possess.

Okay, so the first thing is make a list of all the people you're envious of, and then figure out what it is about them that you envy, okay? Now those are your goals, all of a sudden, right? Now you might be doubtful that you can attain those goals, and I don't know what the goals would be, you know?

Like, maybe it's beauty for God's sake. Maybe you're envious—maybe just for the sake of argument you assume that you're not a very good-looking person. We can assume you're not blessed by the same set of physical attributes that a Hollywood starlet might manifest, you know? And maybe you're envious of that.

It's like, "Why?" You might start to think, "Well, first of all, you might think about whether or not there are dimensions of evaluation along which someone might be judged that are as important or more important than physical attractiveness, right?" Because there's multiple dimensions along which a person's positive attributes might be rank-ordered and considered.

So you might want to broaden out your conceptualization of what constitutes the good in human action.

But then, like, if it is a matter of attractiveness, then you may have to—and I'm picking this one because it's a particularly difficult one—attractiveness—it’s like, well, what could you do? How often do you get your haircut? Is it flattering? Do you have someone professional doing it?

Do you know how to use makeup properly and carefully? You know, are you in reasonable physical condition, or are there other steps that you could take to put yourself in reasonable physical condition? Do you have some nice clothes?

Like it's a matter of decomposition. So let's assume we'll be optimistic about this: you're envious, okay? Well, that means there's some things you value. You don't have them, but it's the beginnings of a philosophical stance.

So you lay out what it is that you're envious about, and you think, "Well, these persons, these people have this and this and this and this, and I don't, and that's unfair." And it might be unfair; it's probably not an unfairness that's specifically aimed at you.

It's probably more a general reflection of the unfairness and the inequality that's part of life, and that's worth knowing. But in any case, you lay out your envy, and you delve deep into it, and you find out, "Well, here's what I want," because you're in this envious position because you see other people that have what you want.

Okay, good. Now all of a sudden you know what you want. Well, that's useful. Terrifying, because you might see that it's so distant from you, but you can at least lay out, and then maybe even admit to yourself what you want, because the other thing is—you’d be unlikely to be so envious if you weren't hiding from yourself what it is that you truly want.

You might be terrified to admit it because, well, once you admit it, then you know what you want, and you know when you're failing. And by hiding what you want from yourself, well, then you can hide, to some degree, the fact that you're not getting it. And that you're failing, and it's no wonder that people do that.

So make a list of what you're envious of. Extract from that the virtues that you would like to pursue. Understand clearly that unless you pursue those virtues, you're not going to get what you want and the envy will consume you more, and that's like a good pathway to hell. That's not a good thing.

So perhaps make a plan. "Here's some things that other people have that I want. How can I start to move towards having some of that myself?" And that's the right way to deal with it, so because—what's the alternative? You're going to tear these people down or manifest hatred for them and maybe take your revenge when you can on the people around you because you're so angry?

You're going to tear yourself into pieces, like you said, consumed by envy, right? And that's like— that's a predator metaphor. Envy is something that's eating you up. God, that's not good, you know?

But it's really good that you've at least admitted it. That's a start. Part of that confrontation with the shadow so you can see your dark side there, you know? You can look at your fantasies because if you're consumed by envy, no doubt you have some pretty damn brutal fantasies: "I wish this would happen to that person. God, they think they're so smart. It's like I hope they fall, and I get a chance to kick them while they're down."

Well, maybe you could join a Twitter mob and take them out if they make a mistake, you know? But that can also get you in touch with the dark side of you that maybe has the ability to put forward some commitment to moving forward in the future that can make you tough and strong.

And so you might also start with the consideration that you could move in the direction that you desire, right? If you are willing to make the proper sacrifices, I'm willing to do the work. And maybe if you can find out what would truly motivate you, which might be the desire to cease being consumed by envy, that would be a good start.

Then to pursue these goals that are implicit in your jealousy, well, then you have a direction for your life. So in what directions are you aiming wrong? Well, you're assuming that you're being unfairly treated and that there's something personal about that. Now, you probably are being unfairly treated in some sense because that's just the human condition, I would say.

Like there's a real arbitrary element of life: you're subject to the depredations of nature and the tyranny of culture and your own appalling shortcomings, you know? And that's life; it's not personal exactly, and that's worth knowing. It's part of the standard human condition.

You should aim at rectifying your envy, and some of that's going to be dropping that bitter resentment, and the other is going to be pursuing what you need to pursue to allow you to view your life as at least acceptable, right?

So there's hope in the envy once you admit it, because it gives you a moral direction.

Hello, Dr. Peterson, what would you advise to a person who has the courage to defy the crowd but doesn't have the verbal skills to debate in real-time?

Well, look, there's lots of ways of defining the crowd, let's say. I mean you could live your life the way that you want, live it. That's a matter of action; you know, and they say actions speak louder than words. One of the best things you could possibly be is an inspirational example, so that's not nothing.

That's something: live properly in your defiance of the crowd, right? Make your own course; allow yourself to be guided by your own genuine principles. You don't necessarily have to advertise that, which is in some sense what you're doing when you're debating because you're taking the manner in which you act—like if you're an integrated person and you're articulating that, but maybe you can't do that because you don't have the verbal skills.

Well, then the question would be maybe you should develop some more verbal skills. Like, I don't know this for sure, Dave, you know, but generally it's useful—how do you do that? It doesn't hurt to read; it really doesn't hurt to write. You know, a little bit of writing every day clarifies your thinking.

It's a hard thing to do, and it’s an unlikely thing; most people won't do it. But, man, you know, you wouldn't be asking me this question if you didn't think at some level that some improvement in your verbal ability would be useful to you.

Well, so how do you do that? You read, you think, you write. The reason you write is because writing forces you to articulate your thoughts. It organizes your brain around whatever it is that you're writing about. One of the easiest ways to write—there isn't any real easy way, but the easiest way to write is to write down a problem.

It's like, "What's the—the problem is bothering me." We can write about that first of all to get the problem clear, because that's a hard thing. Then you start to write about what my possible solutions would be, and if you fight with those solutions because, you know, you want to kill off the stupid ones.

Then, you know, maybe you need to learn to speak more fluently. Maybe you need to, what might we say, you could try a class in improvisation. Maybe that's too daunting. You could join a speaker's club like Toastmasters. You could try talking more at dinner parties a little bit more once you formulate your thoughts.

You have to be willing to be somewhat of a bumbling fool to begin with, right? Because you're going to—not if—and maybe your verbal skills are better than you think they are, you know? And you're just self-conscious, but you have to practice putting yourself forward a little bit, tentatively.

You can do a lot of that initial learning how to interact with people, though, by asking them questions about what they think and then responding instead of being too concerned about putting your own point forward.

So, alright, so what's the answer? What would I advise to the person who has the courage to defy the crowd? Good. Live according to your principles, right? And that's not a verbal thing, and you can be a good example, and that's a major accomplishment.

But then if you need to improve your verbal ability—which is generally a good thing—then those are the ways to do it. Read, write, speak, and understand that developing those abilities might be of tremendous use to you, you know? Because it's one thing to live properly, and that's not a trivial thing, but it's another thing to be able to articulate yourself and be able to negotiate.

And generally speaking, there's nothing about that that isn't advantageous. Even introverted and anxious people can learn to do that, you know? Those are learnable skills. It's not easy, but you can manage it.

You can also—you can also speak carefully, you know, and listen to what you're saying and only try to say things that you think are true. That's also unbelievably useful. You have to feel that out, like is this really what I believe, or am I putting it forward well because I want to look good, or I want to dominate, or I want to express obliquely an emotion that I'm too cowardly to come out and confront directly, or am I being manipulative?

There's lots of reasons that people use language, but what you really should use it for is to state what you believe to be true and then to let the consequences of that unfold. And so that can also help you: simple truths bluntly stated can be very powerful. You don't need a lot of verbal fluency under those circumstances if there's evidence of strength of character behind it.

So the Daodejing speaks of acting naturally. Well, I don't know if that's true if it's acting naturally. It depends on what you mean by naturally. The Daodejing speaks of acting in a manner that balances yin and yang, that balances chaos and order, and that means that you're speaking in the right place at the right time about the right things.

That's allied with part of what I just discussed with regards to speaking the truth. How is one to put their foot down and change/better their condition without unnaturally manipulating their world?

Well, the fundamental answer to that is to speak the truth and to let the consequences of that unfold. But then the trick is, well, how is it that you come to speak the truth?

Well, in order to do that, as far as I can tell, you have to be terrified of the consequences of not speaking the truth. And part of that is, well, look, do you want the truth on your side or not? Do you want to be facing the truth as an enemy, or do you want to have the truth behind you as an ally?

And the truth is reality, and I—I don't see that you want reality as an enemy. So if what you do is use your language to represent reality as accurately as you possibly can, now given all your inadequacies and biases, you're bound to make errors, but that's the goal.

Then you have the force of reality behind you. It's as if you've—you know where you are. You might not like it, and maybe you know—maybe it's a terrible, craggy chasm full of lava and water, but at least you can see where the obstacles are, and you can pick your way through it.

So, and then the naturalness is, well, from the Taoist perspective, in some sense, you're aiming at being at peace with the world, and that means accepting it in some sense for what it is. And you can't speak the truth unless you're willing to do that, and that means to a large degree— that means what?

It means exploring the depths of yin and yang, of order and chaos. The order—to know that there are tyrannical forces afoot, and some of them are operating in you, and some of them operate in the social world, and some of them operate, for that matter, in the natural world too.

There's too much crushing order and on the chaotic side, there's the possibility of nihilism and hopelessness and depression and that—a complete cataclysm. And so, you're—there's cliffs on both sides of you; you have to be aware of that, because you don't want to fall into those cliffs, and there's a thin pathway between them that you can walk down, if you're careful, and you feel your way down that pathway by noting how what you say— noting whether what you say puts a foundation underneath you.

There's a New Testament injunction to that goal to build your house on a rock and not on sand. What's the rock? Well, the rock is the truth and integrity of your character and of your voice; that's what it is, and you see—you want to aim at something noble.

That's the alliance with God; that's one way of thinking about it. You want to serve the highest good, and you have to think very hard about what that is. I mean, we know what it is to some degree, or we have some collective conception of that, you know? It would be peace; that would be something.

It would be the willingness and desire to treat other people like you would like to be treated if you were treating yourself properly. It's that as well; it's characterological nobility; it's the desire to serve the good; it's truth and beauty and all of those classic virtues all integrated into a single thing. You want to serve that, and then having aimed at that, you won't do—and that governs how you're going to see the world, right?

That's senseless, and that sets the lens or sets the frame through which the world manifests itself to you, right? So it's as if you're getting your spectacles adjusted properly and then the world reveals itself to you, and then you use your language to articulate that and that's— that’s the—that’s naturally—it’s not natural; it’s very difficult, now, you know.

If you don't do that, what you do is you end up—end up using your language to manipulate people into giving you what you want, and that's not helpful because, you know, what do you know about what you want?

Give me one second; give me one second. Sorry about that. My son—I'm in my son's basement; my house is being renovated in Toronto for, well, till this afternoon, and he's got a new puppy, and he was rolling a bone upstairs on the floor for this puppy. It's very cute, by the way, this puppy. Yeah, that's making quite a lot of racket, so I just had to take care of that. So just give him a good cuffing?

No, I just asked him. I just told him that the ball was rolling around. So look, part of this is faith in truth, you know? Like, really, it's hard to emphasize this, importantly enough. You have to make a decision in your life at some point, look, about how you're going to use your words. Like you can use them instrumentally, and you can use them to manipulate people.

You say, "Well, this is what I want from this situation, and here's how I'm going to have to craft my words to get it," or you can think, "Well, I'm oriented properly in the world, and I'm going to say what I think and let things happen."

And those are two different—they're really two different modes of being. I wrote about this in "12 Rules for Life." They're really two different modes of being, and the latter one, which is faith in truth—that's the same as faith in the logos, by the way, from a symbolic perspective—it's the faith that truth is that which turns uninhabitable chaos into habitable order. It's the truth that is—and so you tell the truth and you throw caution to the wind.

And it doesn't mean you tell the truth stupidly because telling the truth stupidly isn't truthful. You have to do it very carefully and very strategically. Well, the strategic part—the goal is to get better all the time at carefully articulating what constitutes the truth, you know?

It seems obvious to me in some sense, it's like you got to really think this through. It's like, "What do you want on your side? You want falsehood on your side?" It's like who thinks that? You really think that you're going to be able to lie and manipulate your way through the world and that you're going to get away with that?

Like, there's an arrogance that goes along with that—an arrogance in belief, that arrogance of belief in your capability to deceive and that you're going to pull the wool over everyone's eyes, right? You're going to deceive yourself because you're going to believe in your own maliciousness and mendaciousness of other people because they're stupid and they won't catch on, and you're going to see—that you're going to deceive God and reality itself because it's not going to snap back and take you out if you bend and distort it like that.

That's so foolish. You don't have a hope—none of that. You might get away with your lies for a certain amount of time, but they're going to aggregate and take you out, man, at every level—not least your own guilt and your own self-contempt.

So, where was I? Well, that's good to answer that question. I agree; we don't live in a tyrannical patriarchy. Can you provide a better explanation for the inequities women face, especially lateness of the right to vote, etc.?

Well, you know, a hundred and thirty years ago, let's say, let's take 1895 just as our starting point, and the world wasn't the same place as it is now. You know, rights and privileges spread as the social and economic conditions make their manifestation possible to some degree.

And I'm not suggesting that men haven't oppressed women and that women haven't oppressed men. Christ, we've been at each other's throats in many ways throughout the entire course of human history—men at the throats of men, men at the throats of women, women at the throats of men, women at the throats of women, parents at the throats of children—like there's no shortage of contentiousness and tyranny that characterizes human history.

But in 1895, the average person in the Western world lived on less than a dollar a day. They survived in today's money way below the current UN standards for poverty. Life was very, very hard. There was no reliable birth control. Like you can't underestimate the radical consequences of reliable birth control.

Know that opened up the world to women, and it's not just birth control, it's a whole variety of technological transformations and also an increase in the safety of the street—a hundred contributing factors that have opened up the world to the freedom of women.

But a huge part of that was the collective striving of men and women to free themselves from the absolute tyranny of hand-to-mouth existence. You know, what woman was—well, let's say sexually mature back at that time, around 15 or 16, very likely to be married soon after that, partly because sex outside of marriage was so unbelievably dangerous—very high probability of pregnancy and then death in childbirth and then the death of children and then continual pregnancy.

Women weren't the same even biologically speaking—the birth control pill is a biological revolution, and it took a long time to extend the full coterie of rights to people, even men. It was like, Jesus, most men in Eastern Europe, for example, were serfs until the late 1800s—fundamentally slaves.

It's not as if the common person has had the right to vote for any substantial amount of time in some countries for a couple of hundred years, and that's all. Like, we're clambering out of the great darkness of biological history and creating a culture where people have enough freedom to exercise what would optimally be their full set of rights.

To say that that didn't happen at the patent in the past primarily because of the patriarchal dominion of men is, I think, an escape from full confrontation with the absolute dreadful horror of biological history. It's a wish that all of the things about life that are deeply troublesome and terrible are a consequence of the errors made by those who control the social structure, and God, it would be really something if they had that much power.

You know, it's like, "Well, we can make things bad or good by women by Fiat." It's like no, you're facing the terrible dragon of nature, and she's something awful to behold, and your tyrannical patriarchy is a relatively ineffective force in the face of the absolute depredations of Mother Nature.

I mean, even now, we're powerful technologically compared to how we have been in the past, and you know, we've extended our life a lot, but we still only manage about 80 years, and a lot of that is still characterized by mental and physical illness, you know? We're still subject to the limitations, the awful limitations of biology, in ways that are almost too terrifying to behold.

And so we shy away from that and say, "Well, it's all—it’s all the suffering as a consequence of something that's oppressive and under the control of human beings." It's like, I know I wish that was the case, but it isn't.

And that's not to say that social structures lack corruption, but it's not as if a hundred and fifty years ago all men were free and all women were enslaved. The truth of the matter is, a hundred and fifty years ago, virtually everyone was enslaved.

It's a long, bloody hole out of that, you know? What a tremendous amount of that has taken place over the last 130 years with the absolutely revolution in living standards and an availability of food and proliferation of consumer items and the construction of the formulation of labor-saving devices, you know, that freed women from the grinding misery of constant domestic work for tens of hours a week at extraordinarily low pay.

And the provision of universally accessible hygienic facilities—toilets everywhere, it's a big deal—allows people to move around and to operate out in the world, and tampons and sanitary products and birth control and all of that—Jesus, women were oppressed because people were oppressed, and perhaps women were more oppressed than men, although even that's not obvious, because, you know, men suffered brutally in warfare—absolutely brutally—and died at a rate—if you eliminate childbirth deaths from the equation—at a rate that exceeded the rate that women died at and were required to sacrifice themselves for the protection of women and children.

It's like human history's a nightmare, and that nightmare involves incredible difficulty in struggling forward to survive. And we emerged out of that—men and women together—and have been attempting to free each other to the degree that that's possible in the course of that struggle.

And so that's how it looks to me.

You have talked about earning your knowledge. How do you define it? How do you earn it? When is it okay to debate ideas like yours if they are not your own?

Well, I would say it's okay to debate them right away if what you're trying to do is to test them and learn more about them, right? But it's not okay if you're trying to put them forward as if they're your own and to obtain something approximating unearned moral superiority by doing so.

So that means to have the ideas and to discuss them but not to identify with them as if they are defining characters that defining features of your own personality.

How do you earn knowledge? Well, all your elementary school teachers when you're writing an essay said you got to put it in your own words. Think: well, what does that mean? You can't just copy a sentence; it has to be in your own words.

To me that was never very well explained to me, but there was something to it. It's like for knowledge to be yours, you have to integrate it with your own experience. You have to see how that applies to your own case and then have story to tell about how that's the case—that’s personal, right?

So it's the intermingling of the abstract with the personal that makes it real. It's the intermingling of the epic with the particular or the archetypal with the concrete that makes something real.

And so if an idea is still an abstraction if you're just parroting it, it also means that you haven't learned to use it as a tool; you haven't started to apply it in your own life because you could say, "Well, here’s an idea that I came across, and here’s how I implemented it, and here’s what I learned when I implemented it," and then that's definitely yours, right?

Because you're—you can kind of tell because you're recounting your knowledge in a manner that no one else could do, and that’s what gives it that ring of genuineness, right?

That's what it means in some sense to speak from the heart. It's like, "Well, here's my experience with this idea."

And you can say too, "Well, here's how I understand this idea," and you reformulate that in your own terms, and that means that you associate it with your own but only with the unique particularity of your own experience.

Then I would also say it means that you've acted out the ideas and tested them, like in the world, and that you have your own stories to tell about that.

And that's how you make it your own. It's like you go to the tool store, the hardware store, and you buy a hammer, you know, and then you start to use the hammer to hammer in nails.

You learn how to use the hammer; you learn how to use the saw, and then, you know, at some point, that saw sort of becomes yours. You know how to use it, and it's the same with these ideas. It's like you don’t just—you don't just say the words; you're not just a puppet mouthing the words. They've become part and parcel of your own philosophy, the way that you perceive the world, the way that you construe things, and the way that you act in the world.

You've tested them, and you have your own—you have something to add to them that's yours personally. You know, and if you're having a discussion with someone and they're talking about things that don't have those characteristics, right? That they haven't made personal, then the conversation is almost never interesting.

It's because the person is—it's just an—they really are an empty shell through which ideologues’ slogans are pouring. There's nothing about that that's compelling because you don't see the grappling. You don't see that the other person has grappled with the ideas and come to their own unique conclusions.

And it really is in that mingling of the abstract and the particular that compelling wisdom is to be found.

So, how have you ever thought about engaging in a public debate with Slavoj Žižek? He has many interesting observations on the topic of ideology, and that would be a good conversation.

Yes, we have a tentative—we have been speaking tentatively about the possibility of having a public discussion in Toronto in April. And so we're negotiating, and we'll see how that goes.

We'll see if he's available and if I'm available, if we can agree on a set of topics, if we can undertake all the complex detailed negotiations necessary to make something like that successful in the public sphere.

I'm confident enough that this will occur that I've already downloaded about six of his books because I really want to start understanding what he has to say and think before undertaking that. So yes, I have thought about it—more than thought about it; the offer is out, the negotiations are underway.

How do you maintain a stable identity when you are plagued by bouts of depression and anxiety?

Well, the first thing we might say is that you can't. You know what I mean? If you're plagued by bouts of depression and anxiety, that does destabilize your identity, so it's almost by definition.

But having said that, look, this is when habit and plan and strategy are so useful. So in the periods of depression that I've had—what sustained some of them were long and certainly the most unpleasant experiences of my life.

You—you need a philosophy, let's say, that's aligned with your vision and your strategy to sustain you, because what would happen to me is that I know I have these—a vision, and I suppose the vision is of a world that's better and that's less likely to descend into ideological catastrophe and where people are more responsible and more awake and more educated and healthier—all of that, a vision of a better world, you know?

A world that's less hellish at least, but also a better world and some sense of what role I might play in that. And then that's very motivating. Like, it's a profound goal to try to make things better, and you can do that locally; you can do that for yourself; you can do that for your family; you can do that for the broader community.

And all of that's worth it, man. It's worth making some sacrifices for; it's worth suffering for to some degree. And then you decompose that into the day-to-day and week-to-week strategies and actions that you're undertaking—the plans and the activities that you're putting forward to make that dream a reality to realize it.

And then when the depression and anxiety come along, you think part of it, with depression, it's just bloody endurance. It's like you get up and you work through the next hour. You try to stay on track; you try to implement your strategic plans to the best of your ability.

And you hope and you pray that you'll get through it—you know, you'll get through it and that the darkness will recede, and you stay on track. You eat even though you're not hungry; you get up even though you want to stay in bed; you interact with people even though you'd rather be alone.

It's the benefit of disciplined habits can sustain you. It's like the boat you're rowing in through a terrible storm, leaks and all, and maybe you'll be overwhelmed, but you have the boat, and you can row forward, and that's what you've got. It's just an endurance.

It's a huge part of it, and then I would say with its anxiety—the same thing. It's like you're terrified and uncertain, but you move ahead to the best of your ability, and again, you operate at least to some degree on hope.

And if you haven't got hope, then you've got blind bloody endurance, and that's all motivated by some sense that you're working towards something that's worthwhile—working to work, you know?

And that is, well, that's your own long-term well-being to treat yourself properly. It's the stability and productivity and harmony and health of your family; that's a huge deal. And then it's whatever benefit you can be to the community.

And if you have to limp along and drag yourself forward in order to maintain that pathway, then so be it because it's better than the alternative.

And I'm not—and I know that you can become depressed enough so that, you know, you're virtually immobilized, but you do what you can to fight it. Then you do what you can to treat it. You know, it's like, have you tried the antidepressants? Have you gone to speak to a professional?

Have you done what you need to do to investigate the causes of your depression and anxiety? Because often there's physical