#502: Jordan Peterson on Rules for Life, Psychedelics, The Bible, and Much More

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Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is normally my job to deconstruct world class performers of all different types. from all different disciplines. And I am thrilled to have as my guest today a polymath. I would certainly consider him a polymath. Jordan B. Peterson

He has taught mythology to lawyers, doctors, and business people, consulted for the UN Secretary General. Helped his clinical clients manage depression. Obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety, and schizophrenia, served as an advisor to senior partners of major Canadian law firms. and lectured extensively in North America and Europe with his students and colleagues at Harvard and the University of Toronto. doctor Peterson has published more than one hundred scientific papers transforming the modern understanding of personality, as his book, Maps of Meaning, subtitled The Architecture Belief Revolutionized the Psychology of Religion.

His book Twelve Rules for Life. An antidote to chaos was published in 2018 and has sold more than four million copies internationally. His newest book is beyond order. twelve more rules for life. You can find him. Online at Jordan B Peterson dot com on Twitter at Jordan B Peterson Instagram at Jordan.

B. Peterson Facebook You guessed it, Doctor Jordan D. Peterson. YouTube Jordan Peterson videos, and you can find his personality assessment. at understanding myself dot com and the self authoring program at self authoring dot com.

Jordan, welcome to the show. Thank you. God, it's hard to hear my name so many times without becoming somewhere. my own playback in this podcast and uh I'm thrilled to finally have you on the podcast. We are going to run out of time before we run out of material.

That'd be a good thing. That would be a good thing. And I wanna start in maybe an odd place, and that is asking If you could Describe.

To my audience who Sandy Knotley was. Go. Well, I grew up in a small town in northern Alberta. Uh, I heard you and my producer talking about cold in Minnesota and I was sort of smirking in the background. I thought You guys don't know what cold is.

When I went to college there about sixty miles away, we had thirty days In a row one winter where it didn't get above minus forty. So anyhow, I grew up in this small town and In a in the province of Alberta. So that's the Canadian equivalent of a state.

And uh We had a provincial government. the equivalent of a state government, and it was all conservatives, progressive conservative party. Every seat in in the House was Progressive Conservative, except one new Democrat Party member. Socialist. Grant Naughtley, who was the leader of the NDP and

He wasn't elected so much because he was a socialist, I don't think because most of the people in my small town were conservative, but because he was a really good man. Anyways, he was the only opposition in the entire province for like decade, a decade or more. Um His wife, Sandy Notley, was a New Englander. And uh

Somewhat of an anomaly in our small town and she She was quite outspoken. New England Intellectual And

She Was our librarian in our junior high school. And All the delinquents and me as well, and maybe I was in that category, hung out in the library, weirdly enough. Because she

Treated us like Adults. And I w started to work for the NDP when I was fourteen. Um, I ran for vice president of the party when I was fourteen. That was my first sort of public exposure, but

She Was a good guide for me. She introduced me to a lot of Books. I was an omnivorous reader, but mostly I read science fiction. I didn't know what the hell to read. I used to spend all I'd hide my The books I was reading behind a textbook in class and read away during school.

But I was reading mostly science fiction. And she started to hand me books that she thought would be good for me. Um she introduced me to Anne Rand. Interestingly enough, despite the fact that she was a socialist, um not N Rand, obviously, but Sandy Naughtley, she said she thought I would be smart enough to see through Randy.

Uh Huxley, Orwell, Soljanitson. A lot of serious material and I developed a real friendship with her. And her husband and I worked with the NDP for four years. So She was a

Pronounced. influence on me and uh That's Sandy Notley. Oh, and her daughter. Rachel Naughtley, who was a friend of mine, A girlfriend of one of my close friends at one point

Became premier of Alberta. Many years later, she was defeated in the last election, which was only about three years ago, but She followed in her father's footsteps and And became premier of the province. So that's that story. On your website you have

an extensive list of recommended books. Yeah. I've looked at it. Looked at it multiple times. It's it's close to a hundred, I would say. And they're they're put into different Categories, different genres. Are there any books on that list? Or can you think of books that were introduced relatively early in your life? Some of the early exposures that have stood the test of time for you. Hoxley and Orwell. I would say Solzhenitsyn as well. I read one day in in the life of Ivan Denisovich when I was thirteen or fourteen. That was one of the books not le recommended.

So they They certainly had an impact on me. What was that impact, if uh if you if you don't mind, you know, I started to think in broader terms as a consequence of being introduced to books like that and started to think more seriously. M a political perspective and a psychological perspective, I I suppose. It was my first introduction into serious thought. And so

And it was extremely exciting. I mean, I I I I read a lot of English literature till I was about twenty-five, and then I started reading nonfiction more once I started my graduate studies. But um It opens up a world of ideas and that was really exciting to me. Incredibly exciting to me. And and the reason I'm asking so much about books is is I'm

I I am really fascinated. by you and I'm fascinated by everyone I have on the show, but the formation Well that sort of decreases my my uh pleasure at being the object of current fascination. Well, right now you're the most fascinating person in the world to me. And I find that books

are a sort of a wellspring of value for listeners because it's something they can model very well. Something that they can reach out for. Well people can get a whole education if they read those hundred books that I have on my website. mean you're not gonna get an education in every every discipline, but There's a whole education there.

under recommended books. Mm that's been fun because lots of people have that that's been an unbelievably popular list. It sells hundreds of books a month, that list. I believe it. And people email me constantly and say, Well, you know, you introduced me to Dostoevsky. Thanks a lot. I'm I'm I've been s they're they're so enthralled. If you're psychologically minded And you like dark. The darkness to some degree, you know, if you like.

Gothic imagery and and film noir and that sort of thing. Dostoevsky's an unbelievable treat. And easy. So Incredibly deep psychologically. Enthralling crime and punishment is an absolutely engrossing novel.

As well as being an um Stunning work of philosophy. Another name that shows up Not once, but several times in that list is Nietzsche, if I'm pronouncing that remotely correctly. I never knew. I s I pronounce it like Northern Albertan. Nietzsche. I know that's wrong. It's Nietzsche, I believe, but I never get it right. So yeah, I've I've read you

highlight in a sense or at least mention that uh Nietzsche pointed out that most morality is cowardice, if we're making the leap from So this list of books to specific ideas. Could you please elaborate? On that. If you don't have the courage to commit a crime, it doesn't mean you're moral for not doing it.

It just means you're afraid. You can see this, I suppose, to some degree in in mob violence. People will riot because they don't think they'll get caught. So they're not law abiding under normal circumstances because they're moral, they're law abiding because they're afraid of punishment. And so

Mm nature was very uh careful to distinguish Mere obedience from morality. And He thought of obedience.

Not always as a form of cowardice because it can also be a source of discipline, but Not committing a crime because you're too afraid to I mean it's probably better than committing a crime. But it's

It doesn't speak to the essence of morality. You know and I I've talked a fair bit about this is that There's a certain utility. in being able to do virtually anything and then to control yourself. And that's something I learned in part from Nietzsche, I suppose.

You know, the best people I've ever met are dangerous people. But they keep themselves in check. I have a close friend who's been real. Rock to me over the last каплов єр. He was also

Born in northern Alberta. He came from a pretty poverty stricken background. Tough guy, worked in lead smelters and oil rigs and He went to university, which is where I met him and then he was a social worker for a long time and He's tough as nails, you know, he's worked with delinquents all over Canada and he's a good disciplinarian, but he's

He's also a very compassionate person and He's a moral person as far as I'm concerned because there's a real danger to him. But He keeps it under control. And it's he's not a coward.

He's not afraid, he's not weak. How do you cultivate or suggest people cultivate? You can you can tackle either Both the ability. Two Keep yourself in check or under control.

And to be courageous and is just to provide a little context for the question. When I see you in the many interviews that you've done, there are instances where people are very Adversarial. And aggressive. And one thing that has struck me is your ability to

maintain composure While still standing up for not rolling over with respect to your your arguments or your positions. How do you cultivate that or how have you cultivated that? Well, I have an advantage, I suppose, in that I'm a clinical psychologist and I've spent twenty thousand hours, although I'm not practicing anymore.

I've spent twenty thousand dollars listening to people and maintaining my composure. Sometimes under very stressful circumstances. And so I've had a lot of practice doing that. And then I did do some T V work. Um at a local station here.

For a couple of years and I had a good producer. And he helped me. Realize that Anger plays very badly.

In a public forum like video and Particularly. Now I didn't have a tendency then, I suppose, to fly off the handle either. But It's not useful.

To lose your temper it's not useful. I mean I'm boiling inside. I'm a very emotional person, way too much. So it's not like it's not stressful. It's unbelievably stressful, but I can detach myself from that to some degree. And I'm really curious, I suppose that's another part of it I like to watch.

And when people really go after me This is where the clinical Practice is handy. I can snap into a different mode, which is okay, I don't know what you're up to. So I'm just gonna watch you and then I'm gonna figure out what you're up to because I can usually figure out what people are up to. If I want to, I

I don't do that all the time because I actually don't want to know sometimes what they're up to. I mean look peop lots of people have treated me Extraordinarily well, don't get me wrong. And normally, you know, when when you talk to someone

You accept their persona. You don't look behind. But if people mistreat me In some way, or Or become adversarial.

Then I'm Able to look behind the scene. And think And see what They're up to.

If I can remember to do that. Do you look behind the the mask or see What is behind By deducing where they're trying to leave

Where where they're trying to lead you with the breadcrumbs. I mean I see I've seen you do that very effectively. But what uh what other What other forms does that take or might that take? Mm, it's really hard to describe. I I guess I I I think it's useful to draw a distinction between thinking and paying attention. If you're thinking you're kind of walking down a

Programmatic trail. If you're paying attention You just open your eyes and Let your mind Go where it will, and ideas will occur to you. They'll pop up in your field of consciousness and

For me, that's often informative. I'll I'll get insight. That way I suppose I'm paying more attention to Nonverbal communication and to Facial expression and posture and

And tone of voice and I can pick up patterns. I suppose. You mentioned earlier. that at times you're you're boiling inside.

Uh I certainly have experienced that personally. Now Anger h how would you distinguish And and then I sort of intuitively

are different, but I would struggle to maybe on the spot. Separate the two. Anger and resentment, because uh one of your quotes that I have here in front of me with my notes. is consult your resentment. It is revelatory. And I'd love to unpack that, but if you could walk us through

Yeah, well in my new book. I have a chapter. Which is rule eleven. Do not allow yourself to become resentful. Deceitful or arrogant.

It's kind of the evil triad as far as I've been able to determine. Resentment in particular. It's a bad emotion. It's useful. You can learn a lot by noticing that it occurs. Resentment tells you one of two things. One is that um That someone's treading on your territory and something needs to be done about it. Or that you need to grow the hell up and

Stop complaining. And It's hard. It isn't necessarily obvious. When you feel resentful, Which of those it is.

But you need to figure it out. You know, because you can You can harbor resentment for For unlived life. For very, very long period of time.

And All it does is corrupt you. Yeah. Hurt you. Hurts you physically because it's a stressful emotion.

Anger's a stressful emotion. Because your body Hyper prepares for action if you're angry, because you might get into conflict. So That's a dangerous situation, and so you burn off a lot of psychophysiological resources.

In anger. If you're resentful There's probably something you need to say. There's certainly something you need to figure out. And so you can

You can use it as a guide to further development. It's very much useful. to aim at a resentment free existence. And that means I suppose that you're taking up enough space There's always a struggle between your domain and

Everyone competes for everyone else's attention, everyone competes for everyone else's time. You compete for your own time. And if you're resentful. It's highly probable that well, as I said, either you're not standing up for yourself

Sufficiently. Or someone is legitimately On your case, in which case You well, you need to do something about that.

Or You know, live with the consequences, which It's very unpleasant. It's not optimal. Sometimes I suppose it's unavoidable. But You know, and generally there's something that can be done about it.

Maybe you need a new job. Maybe you need a new partner. It's easy for people to think that they're better than they are. It's not surprising that everybody wants to think that. I probably want to think that about me.

So then you'll get angry about something. You know, maybe your partner puts you down. In public. Doesn't show you the respect Maybe you're married, say and husband and wife owe each other

A certain amount of categorical respect. Sort of independent of the individual personalities. You know what? If you have decided that you're going to devote your life to someone and vice versa They're now in a category that

Requires a certain amount of respect. Over time. It's good for your partner and it's also good for you. Maybe you've taken a shot in public. And you're really angry about it, and but you don't notice it because you want to think that you're better than you are. That sort of thing doesn't upset you.

And so you don't say anything about it, you don't do anything about it. And Then you don't fix it. And That's a mistake. It's much better you could say to your partner, Look, you know, we were out for dinner tonight And uh you said something snarky, which I didn't think was appropriate. Now I might be hyper sensitive and touchy and immature, and maybe you hit me in a weak spot.

Or maybe you're playing some power game. Why don't we figure that out? Now that's messy. People don't like conversations like that. And I think that's one of the things that's peculiar about me. For one I don't know why exactly, but I don't

Like that. Right. I won't let those things go. So the peculiarity is that you're you'll open those conversations. You don't have an aversion to it.

Well, I have a horrible adversion to it. And I don't like Conflict. But I've learned And I this is partly, I suppose, clinical training, but it's not just that. Some things

If you don't address them, they just get worse. And I've I've been able to see where things are going to go. It's kind of like what I mentioned to you earlier that if I Watch someone. I can generally figure out what they're up to. I also can see where things are going.

If someone's house and There are things out of Order in a particular way. If I pay attention to that That's often indicative of something not right in the relationship.

You know, maybe the kitchen's a mess. Like There's no there's food that isn't Fresh in the fridge, for example, or Or there's packages up in shelves that haven't been opened for like two years.

Or since the wedding, let's say. That's too much chaos in the kitchen. Something's wrong. Well what's wrong? Well there's something wrong in the domestic relationship. They're the bargaining About who does what in the kitchen hasn't been Fought through. And so

You have to have those Fight to put things in order and If you don't then You end up with a worse fight in the future. And so the reason that I call things out

As far as I can tell. The positive reason, who knows what the negative reasons are. Is because I don't want more conflict. I'd rather have genuine peace, which is very, very, very hard to obtain. People generally obtain peace by sweeping things under the carpet. I have another chapter in this new book called Don't Hide Things in the Fog.

And That's what it concentrates on is Pay attention to your negative emotions. Resentment particularly, it's like it's so uh Informative. You find out where you're immature. Well, do you want to?

Probably not. Who wants to find out that? Or you'll find out who's oppressing you. And maybe then you can learn to stand up for yourself. Let's dig into the new book. I wanna do it in a particular way.

Uh which is Starting with a quote of yours that a close friend of mine has has committed to memory now. Please fact check me on this. Perhaps it's Abraham Lincoln or Oscar Wilde or one of the other Ubiquitous attributions on the internet, but But here we go.

And I'm fond of this as well. Quote, It seems to me that the purpose of life is to find a mode of being that is so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant. Uh now I have a I have a follow up just a Segue from that. But

Is that an accurate quote? Well, I don't know if it's an accurate quote, but it sounds like something I probably said. Accurate sentiment. It's accurately attributed. Accurately attributed, all right. It seems to me that it's true. I mean it isn't necessarily the case that you can do it. All right. Right. It's hard to do. I mean, and it that of course it's hard I suppose in proportion to the suffering that you're undergoing. It isn't necessarily the case that you can always manage it, but sometimes you can manage it and It's good if you can.

So I want to Use Your book as a Prop isn't the right word, a vehicle for exploring this. One of the books that you often reference is Man Search for Meaning. Sorry, I'm gonna I'm gonna stop just for a sec'cause I thought about some other things.

So This is part of me. Why I have A certain

Conservative bent, I suppose. See People Need to search for meaning because th they get corrupted by suffering if their life isn't meaningful. That's how it looks to me. Because you can't torture an animal.

Forever without it lashing out. And so if your life is nothing. If there's nothing in it that speaks to you. There's still going to be suffering. You can't talk yourself out of that.

And so then I see people tearing down Traditional structures, let's say. They're casual about them. Another rule in this new book is uh

Do not casually denigrate. Social institutions are a creative achievement. Well why social institutions? Well I've counseled Lots of people who were lost. And so If you came to see me.

And I was your therapist. I'm very practical, I'd say to you, Okay, well let's look at your life for a minute. Um Do you have a Intimate relationship.

What about your family? And that could be, you know, married with kids, or it could be the family of your birth, your siblings and your parents, and so on. How's that functioning? Do you have anyone there? Do you have a job? Or maybe a career even if you're fortunate, but at least a job that keeps body and soul together and maybe Where there's some chance of advancement and hope. Do you know how to use your time outside of work productively?

You take care of your mental and physical health. Do you manage? the temptations, drug and alcohol use and that sort of thing, do you manage those temptations effectively? Are you as educated as you are intelligent? Those are standard

Patterns of activity. In the world. Do you have kids, do you have a wife, do you or a husband, do you have a job? I mean it's mundane in some sense, but And you can look beyond all those standard answers for meaning. But if you're

Overwhelmed by life, anxious and and suffering. That's a good place to start. Put that together. Why? Well the answer to that is because that's what people do. That's what people do. That's the best we've been able to manage. And so and if you don't have that, because you're a human being like other human beings. You're gonna suffer for it.

And so attacks on that, assaults on that aren't that helpful. Unless you have a better like I have this friend, he's an atheist, or and he's wavering about this. He was born a communist, he was raised in Poland. And he Had objected at one point. To the Christmas

traditions of his family. Who were also atheistic. And uh You know He objected on the grounds of logical coherence.

Why are we doing this? Well Don't do it. Well then what happens? Well then you have another weekday. You lose Christmas. Well

Great. It's like now you're logically coherent. Wonderful. But you've lost Christmas. You don't want to throw these things away. You know, and pa y I see this sometimes with young people when they're talking about getting married. We don't need to get married. We don't need a piece of paper.

It's like Really? That's your That's the depth of thought you've put into this? It's like You're not gonna mark this

Permanence with Conscious awareness and uh social celebration and the sanction of your community and a beautiful ceremony. That's just nothing. You let that go? Well, what are you gonna replace it with?

Nothing. You know, you can say it's it's I don't want to be married in a church. I don't believe in God.

Fair enough. But Good luck filling in the hole. So what is the template for constructive criticism of a social institution. In other words, if there is a wrong way to do it.

Where you're creating a void. And not offering a better solution. What is the better? approach or what might be. You know, I got

Well known. I suppose in part Because of my injunction to people that they clean up their room. My closet, by the way, is a mess. I haven't been able to clean it up for like three years.

So Um There's this English common law principle with regards to the distribution of power. I think it's English common law. Th there are certain responsibilities of the family and

The community and the town and the state and the And the federal government and the international organizations and but you want to Have the Most proximal level

possible take responsibility for a given enterprise. And I think that's a good Philosophy personally. You want to Make changes start with what's under your control.

Start with changing those things that will hurt you if the changes go wrong. There's a good one. You know, and it it's better, I think, to put your life together than to go worry about Parading around.

And being a social activist. I think Most of that's fraudulent. And I I think it's appalling that People learn to do that mostly at universities.

Fix up your own life. And that doesn't mean you shouldn't be involved in the community, but I believe that you You have to earn that right. Not because there's something More wrong with you than wrong with anyone else. It's just that

If you if you operate it at a level that's beyond your competence, all you're going to do is make catastrophic mistakes. Practice locally till you're competent. And then if you dare Well move out a little bit, you know, as you mature. You gain some.

When I when I used to work for the NDP, the socialists back when I was fourteen or fifteen. One of the things I came to realize, I think I realized this when I was sixteen and went to university. It's like I woke up one day and I thought I have this ideology in my mind, you know, about how the world should be structured. I woke up one day and I thought What the hell do you know?

You don't have a family? You don't have any experience, you don't have a job. Like You're a PUP! Mean I was smart enough, I verbally

I could hold my own and My head was full of ideas, I could defend them. But you know at the same time that I was a socialist. Kid I was I sat on the board of governors for the local college.

And almost all the people on that board were Локол бізнесмен Most of them immigrants because Northern Alberta was an immigrant. Like it was only fifty years old. Everybody had moved there. It was a new place. It was the end of the frontier. Literally. We we were at the end of the railway, the northernmost tip of the North American Prairie.

And there was all these conservatives. Sitting on this board and me And What I found was I actually respected these people. My ideology, my explicit ideology was antithetical to theirs, but when I interacted with them one on one

I thought. These people have made something of themselves. And uh When I talk to the activists I never got that impression. I thought you guys are resentful as hell.

You don't know anything, you've never done anything. But you're noisy and Self righteous and so that put a lot of Cognitive dissonance that filled me with cognitive dissonance. I

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I was gonna go to Victor Frankel. Mm-hmm. But I'd like to pull a hard left. Just always a dangerous thing. I it is a dangerous thing, especially depending on the country you're in, especially

And we'll come back to Victor Frankel because I would like to ask about about him. But first I'd like to go to Aldous Huxley and possibly Hunter S. Thompson. So I was Oh yeah. I was interested to see Fear and loathing in Las Vegas. By Hundred S Thompson on your list of suggested books and Island or The Island. I don't know if there's a d the in the title by Aldous Huxley. And

Going into We're down the rabbit hole. with your videos and interviews I noticed that you seem to have quite a familiarity with the

research done by Rick Strassman with intravenous N N DMT and also the Sil7 research at Johns Hopkins with Roland Griffiths, Matt Johnson and and their entire team. But in the clips that I've seen, there isn't really a lot of context. There's snippets that I've found. What has been the context for introducing those to your classes or in your lectures? Well

I did my PhD in Alcoholism So psychopharmacology. I mean I'm I've got a PhD in clinical psychology, but my research was for years Eight years, nine years? Was all

drug and alcohol abuse. I concentrated on alcohol, but that was okay because Alcohol is like water. It crosses the blood brain barrier. Like water, it bathes every cell. It has Poly systemic effects. And so if you study alcohol

From the psychological and And pharmacological perspective. You have to learn the function of the systems that all drugs affect. You know, all drugs of abuse affect fundamental motivational or emotional systems. That's why we take them.

Although with the hallucinogens it's more complex, you know, like the benzodiazepines and barbituates and alcohol, they're anxiolytics, they reduce anxiety. Alcohol also has a dopaminergic effect for some people, kinda like cocaine or amphetamines. There's the analgesics like heroin or cocaine is also analgesic, so well the the psychomotor stimulants are analgesic as well. But The big categories are pain relieving, anxiety relieving, and and psychomotor stimulant. And most drugs of abuse fall into those categories. And then there's the hallucinogens, which are their whole other

Universe. And so I'm well versed in The psychology of And the physiology of drug and alcohol. Use and so that's the context.

That's part of it anyways. I'm I'm also interested in Religious experiences and For one reason or another. And it's a bottomless mystery.

There are agents that reliably produce Religious experiences. And No one knows what in the world to do about that. That's for sure.

Ha ha. There's a study ongoing at Hopkins also that that's looking at the effects of uh serotonin two A agonists like Silocybin's effects on worldview of religious leaders of different faiths.

Which uh Oh, is that right. And how are they doing that? Well they're d they're doing it with, as I understand it, administration Probably thirty. Milligrams of synthetic. Silocybin.

Should be il illegal or illegal. In what respect? What would your what would your concerns be? With that particular Pandora's box. Well, look what happened when psychedelics were introduced into the culture in the nineteen sixties. You know, it was it was revolutionary. No one knew what new one know no one knew how to regulate or control it. And and I don't mean control by clamp down. I just meant

No one knew what to do with it. I m it it knocked Timothy Leary off to the side. Sideways, you know? And I had Timothy Leary's old position at Harvard. He had the same position as me. Yeah, so that was kinda interesting. I think the I mean the social dynamics are very different in in the sense that yes, there are a lot of risks psychological, uh in rare cases physical.

Uh With psychedelic use, but um I'm I'm very involved with the phase three trials, both for psilocybin and uh MDMA assisted psychotherapy. Griffiths is involved, so they would be one site for the scientist.

He's great. He's a he's a close he's a close friend. Uh and uh he's I met him at a conference on awe. He's an excellent excellent scientist with a lot of a lot of exposure to Um Mm. psychoactives, uh

Expert in caffeine. metabolism and all things caffeine, uh among other compounds. Uh The I mean you've spoken in in the videos I've seen at least of the changes in openness and personality to Would that not be a positive thing if that is a consequence of opening Pandora's box? Depends on how neurotic you are.

No, I mean it technically. This is a technical discussion. Openness isn't much fun if you're high in eroticism. 'Cause you'cause you continually undermine yourself. Like openness is creativity, but let's let's not be all Pollyani ish about this. There wouldn't be variation in creativity if it wasn't dangerous. There's lots of people who are very low in openness, and there's a reason for that.

Now it has advantages, you know, open people occupy a particular niche. They're on the edge. Jordan, would you mind defining openness in this particular people who are open There's creativity, essentially. Creativity and verbal fluency together make up openness. Now it's also associated with verbal IQ. So it's the one there's five personality traits extraversion, positive emotion. Neuroticism.

That's negative emotion. Agreeableness. That's compassion versus Predatory aggression, something like that. Conscientiousness. That's dutifulness. Orderliness um

And then openness, which is Intellect, interest in ideas, and creativity. You know, you might think the more of that the better, but No, that isn't how nature works. You can undo yourself by being open. People who are open have a hard time catalyzing their identity because they're so.

Protein, they shift shapes constantly. They're interested in everything. It makes it very hard for them to pursue one thing. My observation is that if people are high in negative emotion, so they're prone to anxiety, for example. Then being open can be a curse because When you expose yourself to something that's unknown

You know, the extraversion and openness can drive you forward. as a function of of curiosity and engagement, but The uncertainty is also The uncertainty. You pay a price for physiologically.

Because When you face something uncertain, your body like when you're angry, your body has to prepare for anything. And that's expensive and physiologically demanding. And so and open people, they flip things upside down all the time. And

That's dangerous. Like it isn't like it's not necessary. Don't get me wrong. It's necessary. This chapter I made allusion to, I said don't casually Criticize social institutions or creative achievement. I picked those phrases very carefully. We need social institutions. But they become corrupt.

Yeah. And so we need creative revolution. But it can get out of hand. And so there's this constant War between The strictures of tradition and the transformation of creativity.

And you can't say Who's right? You can just talk it out. Yeah. But You know what the psilocybin you take one dose and have a mystical experience and you're

You move from fiftieth percentile openness to eighty fifth percentile. With one dose. It's a major neurological re rewiring. It's it's stunning. It's stunning. And you know you could say well that I'm sure there are things about that that are good.

But Jung said Beware of unearned wisdom It's a good quote. It is a good quote. It and I you know you really puzzles me because it's never clear to me how he knew the things he knew, and that's one really good example of that. On the openness. Just to

Explore this a bit further. Again, I'm not a clinician, but but speaking just as a As a as someone At least involved. On some level what

The science. And as an open person. I try. Oh no, there's no doubt about it. Given what you do, you're entrepreneurial. And you're interested in ideas, like your your cardinal personality trait undoubtedly is openness and You know, if if you can manage it, it's a great trade.

On the one hand, you have Disqualifying. criteria for becoming a subject in these psilocybin studies, schizophrenia being one of them, or a family history. Of schizophrenia. Which

you know, seems to overlap with some of what you were saying earlier, right? There are risk factors. Uh if if you're sort of swimming Closer to the The bank of the river to the black. If you're schizophrenic if you're schizophrenic, you should stay away from amphetamines. It's pretty obvious that the um Whatever the hallucinogens do Isn't the same as schizophrenia.

Uh that's people think that but you can induce paranoid schizophrenia in normal people by overdosing them on amphetamines. So but still it might not be a good idea if if you have a family history to, you know. To mess around. Yeah, it seems it seems to possibly accelerate the onset. Not that they're the same thing, although these Drugs used to be referred to as psycho mimetics, but that's

Somewhat. disproven in terms of Neurological correlates just looking at MRI f f MRI scans and so on. Now on the other hand, You have acute anxiety, in some cases chronic, but acute anxiety in say terminal cancer patients, which Hopkins has also is a population Hopkins has worked with. Yeah and in those cases, the shift to openness can be

life changingly positive. Well I don't know if it's the shift to openness exactly or if it's the religious aspect of the experience. True. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean if you have ego dissolution, that can do something for fear of death. Oh yeah, I I think I also think that's that's phenomenal research. It's unbelievably interesting.

You know, and it's certainly the case that like I firmly believe that The world is not The way we perceive it, it's deeply It's deeply strange. And I do believe that the hallucinogens reveal that.

And I uh you know, I don't think that attempts to drive them underground have been particularly fruitful. One of the consequences of the war on drugs is now we have like five hundred Psychoactive chemicals instead of twenty or thirty, you know, because chemists keep chasing the laws and So

Making it illegal isn't Doesn't look like a good solution. I wouldn't I wouldn't uh That doesn't mean we have a good solution. Yeah, hundred percent agreed. I mean if you just look also at

black market synthesis of something like MDMA, you have deforestation in Cambodia, where you have chemicals being dumped in Holland, which is a real nexus for production. If you l legalize and regulate and tax that as you would any other industry, then many of those problems cease to be problems, not to make it sound easy. Uh, but I agree with you as I suppose what I'm saying. I have to ask before we go to Victor Frankel.

If you're able to put words to it, in what ways Do you think reality is deeply strange? Can you elaborate on that in any way? There's a narrative aspect to it, there's a religious aspect to it. There's an a meaningful aspect to it.

That we don't understand, we can't understand it scientifically, or we haven't been able to. The scientific viewpoint excludes that to some degree. And I think the best evidence for that probably does come from hallucinogenic experience. Now People have clearly people have A biologically instantiated religious instinct.

Now it's possible that that Only speaks of our peculiar biological nature. That it doesn't reflect Broader reality as such, but If you go deep enough into the psyche

What you It becomes increasingly difficult to Separate what you discover from reality. Now People

Can clearly have individual subjective religious experiences. Most Scientific phenomena are objective. Many people have to experience the phenomena at the same time. You have these religious experiences that can be induced by Hallucinogens, let's say.

Each person has their own particular experience, but everyone has an experience that's similar. And we don't know what to do about that category of experience. And then You know, we think in stories, and we see the world through a structure of value. I think that that

Has been proven beyond a doubt by Neuroscientists and psychologists. And The fact that we see the world through a prism of value seems to indicate that there's something about value that's real. And so

That's partly why things are deeply mysterious. I mean Rick Strasband he terrified himself right out of the DMT research, as far as I could tell, because all his subjects came back and said Well, you know, I went somewhere else and saw aliens. It's like, well, it was a dream. No, sorry. Wasn't a dream was way more real than any dream. In fact it was actually more real than life.

Well, what do you do with that? What do you do? Especially when it's all when it's every subject or almost every subject and not one out of thirty. Yeah, exactly. Dude no one knows what to do with that. We don't know what to do with that. At all. And

Yeah, I I mean it it's it's beyond comprehension. It is deeply, deeply strange. You know, what are the Images that I paused on in one of your lectures online. It was an older lecture, I believe, was A side by side comparison of two drawings. One of

Yeah. A piece of artwork of the Scandinavian Tree of life and the Peruvian Amazonian tree of life. And uh if you want if you don't mind taking a moment just to describe that, or I could try to recall it. Uh it it was it was really striking. And then you and then you shortly thereafter had a had a drawing your sonhead.

And the overlap. was really hard to wrap your head around in in the drawing my son made, yeah, I have it in my office. He was about six when he made it. It's stunning. On one side there's a forest. Full of pine trees.

And then there's a river running down the middle. Then on the other side there's A town, but the town is all mushrooms like Like uh Aminita Muscaria mushrooms, so all the houses have mushroom caps. And so there's an order There's order on one side and chaos on another, and the river runs between them.

And then out of the river grows a bean stalking. And the beanstalk stretches up to heaven, the clouds are there, and Saint Peter's there by the gates. And like it's not like my son had any particular Christian religious education. Like he didn't. We didn't go to church. And I I saw him draw that and I thought, That's unbelievable. I can't believe you drew that because it's It's a shamanic

Drawing. It's Chaos and order, those are the two subsets of existence, right at the point they meet. Out of the river grows the tree of life, it reaches up to heaven. That And the the shaman they crawl they climb the tree of life.

When they go to heaven. You know, when M Merce Elliott people who studied the shaman Many of them thought that If the experience was drug induced that somehow it had been pathologized, that wasn't part of the Actual tradition, but

I think that's completely wrong is that People have been using psychoactive drugs. Two Transcend their consciousness for God only knows how long. One of the most interesting hypotheses I ever encountered, I think that was Terrence McKenna.

He thought that psilocybin mushrooms and human beings co evolved. So Who knows, you know? The stoned ape hypothesis, yeah. It's What's further more interesting is that we are not the only species

Who Seeks altered states. That's why I need a muscle. It's called uh what is it, the fly. Fly a Garrick.

Raindeer Even flies. Yeah. It's very strange. It's very, very strange. It is very safe to say that w we do not know what to do with that. We also don't know what to do with things we don't know what to do with.

You know, that's the Problem with opening Pandora's box is that if you have your life reasonably well conceptualized, And then you have an experience that indicates to you that you just don't know what the hell's going on at all. It's like, Well what do you do then? Yeah.

And In fairness, this is uh Maybe a subset of what you're describing, but a term I was introduced to by Roland was ontological shock. Yeah. The fewer those the better. Yeah, for that reason.

These are not Compounds to be taken casually. Well, ontological shock produces post traumatic stress disorder. There's a whole literature on ontolog they don't call it ontological shock. It's generally termed something like disruption of fundamental axioms, but it's exactly the same idea. You know, and one half of that's terror, and the other half is awe. And

That's why trips can go bad. Because you can you can get the terror side of the ontological shock. Which is also why the therapeutic rapper. that is used by, say, Hopkins or by Maps, who is working with the MDMA assisted psychotherapy is so important because these compounds can re traumatize or traumatized if you or

if used in an irresponsible Context or even if used responsibly, quite frankly. They can certainly decrease the probability that the trip will be negative, but that doesn't mean they alleviate the ontological shock. They do it at the moment, so it doesn't go astray during the trip, but There's still the long term sequelae to

To consider I need to use that word more, sequelae. That is a great word. Uh You mentioned your son was not Uh y these are not the exact words you use, but brought up religious You've also described knowledge of the stories in the Bible as quote vital to proper psychological health. And you have a lecture series called The Psychological Significance

Of the biblical stories. So people can dive. in there. But for those who have not studied the Bible. Is this A study you recommend to everyone.

And if so, why? Well I I don't know if I would recommend anything to everyone. Our culture grew out of the Bible. It's grounded in the Bible.

For better or worse. And so if you want to know who you are. Why you think the way you think. Like you think you know the way you think. You think you think. You don't.

Or very rarely. Thoughts are greater than you are in some sense. Mean it's very rare that you don't think that you think something that someone else hasn't thought, you know, wh I I can't remember who said it might have been Alfred North Whitehead that Th everyone is the unconscious proponent of some philosopher. So

No Thought exists in a hierarchy value. Especially in relationship to value. And The more profound the thought, the more it deals with

fundamental values and the fundamental value is one upon which many other values depend. That's a kind of the technical definition of a hierarchy. I can give you an example. So for example, imagine you're in a committed relationship. Um and you're You know, you and your wife have an arrangement to do the dishes and it's her turn and she doesn't do them.

Well that's a minor league ontological shock because Well, it has implications possibly for her honesty, you know, and perhaps not. Maybe she was tired that night, God only knows, but it's a deviation from what's expected. And you know, generally those things are knitted up pretty quickly, and whether or not your wife does the dishes when she's supposed to once really doesn't destabilize you that much because not much else depends on it. Now if she did it ten times or something like that, well then you might start to question her commitment to your agreements and then you might question her honesty and then you might question your relationship. And you know, the you can go down a rabbit hole pretty quickly. But

If your partner has an affair That tends to be quite a shock because You've Modelled You're

plans for behavior and even for perception of the world on the assumption of fidelity. And if that assumption is demolished, then all those plans dissolve and then the uncertainty comes rushing in and that's Very hard on you psychophysiologically. And so anyways, there's a hierarchy of values. And

The deeper you go, the more the values look Religious. Almost by definition. It's it in fact you could say that that's a definition is that The deepest values are religious. This is something I tried to impress upon Sam Harris. Now, you know, he didn't didn't like the terminology religious, but it doesn't to me it doesn't really matter because You could replace it with okay deep then.

You know, like have it your way. We have a word for the deepest of values, and that's religious. And so what happens when you encounter those values? Well you tremble. And you might think, Well, not me. It's like well All that means is that you're protected to a degree you cannot possibly imagine. And one day Maybe not. Maybe you'll be lucky and you'll go through life without being knocked.

Ass over tea kettle, so to speak. But but perhaps not. You m run into someone malevolent, for example. And then The scales will fall from your eyes. So

Anyways, the deepest values are religious and Our religious document is the Bible, and the Bible is an absolute mystery. So I don't care if you're atheistic or not. I mean and this lecture series was for everyone and lots of Lots of people have watched it, weirdly enough, it packed the theaters that I was lecturing in of all the bizarre things.

And you know, it was mostly young men coming to listen to Some half baked Psychologists talk about religious matters for an hour and a half. The deepest questions are religious questions, and the Bible is the best answer we have, and if you don't like that, well Fine, do better, said

Good luck. I mean there's wisdom in that book that's it's unbelievable. The story of Cain and Abel. I have a whole lecture on Cain and Abel That story is one paragraph long and you can think about that for the rest of your life. You know, it's the first two human beings. Fratricidal murder with a genocidal twist. All packed up into a story one paragraph long.

And it's all resentment. It's like Cain's sacrifices are rejected by God. Okay, what does that mean? That's easy. You make sacrifices to improve your future. And you do that. On the basis of faith.

You believe that if you conduct yourself in a certain way Fate. Is likely to smile upon you because why else would you make the sacrifices? And sometimes that doesn't happen. You make the sacrifices and

The reward isn't forthcoming. And Will that make you bitter? Well In all probability

How bitter. How about bitter enough to destroy the ideal? That's all packed into that story. I don't understand it. I don't understand how that's possible. I have a hypothesis, you know, that A scientific hypothesis is

As a story is transmitted across time, everything that's superfluous gets stripped away because it's not memorable, and then all that happens after Thousands of years of playing telephone is that what's absolutely not forgettable is retained. But I don't think that's a comprehensive hypothesis. It's partially true. And I think the story of Cain and Abel, it's like when it opened itself up to me, it just knocked I've never recovered from that.

I don't think. When you think of stories. And you use stories and you tell stories very effectively. I mean you talk about, say, Pinocchio. You use biblical stories. You're very engaging.

Uh sort of interpreter. And transmitter of stories. When you're working on say Beyond order. This new book.

How do you think of composing? your stories or your messages so that they Are not lost. So that they have some Durability or transmissibility. Mostly when I'm writing I'm trying to figure something out.

As the period of time over which I've been writing has lengthened, I'm spending more time communicating the ideas and less time figuring them out. When I wrote my first books, which was Maps of Meaning. Pretty much all I was doing was trying to figure something out. It was Just an exercise in sustained thought. And I worked on it.

for from nineteen eighty five to nineteen ninety nine, about three hours a day and I thought about it. Especially when I was in my twenties. All the time. I was thinking about it like Thirteen hours a day and The ideas were just running through my mind at

At a rate far higher than I'm capable of now. I was trying to figure something out. I was trying to figure out I was trying to understand malevolence, uh, I suppose, among other things. But when I wrote The last two books. I was trying to communicate some of what I thought I had learned and so

But it's still a lot of it still Trying to solve a To to answer a question. When I lecture, for example Not usually do that without notes. I have a question in mind. It's like okay, well in the biblical lectures, for example

The first one is I think it's about two hours long on the first sentence of Genesis. The question is, well what does this sentence mean? And so the lecture is an exploration of what it means. And I'm trying to think it through and

At the same time I'm communicating that process of thinking it through and That's what I'm doing with my books. And I uh the the books are written to me, you know, d which is why I think I've gotten away with giving advice. The books aren't really advice. Or if they are, I'm included in the population of idiots who needs the advice. So You know, these are things I haven't there's a the last chapter is be grateful in spite of your suffering.

You know, I've had real struggle with that. So although I know perfectly well that Resentment. regardless of the cause is not Productive.

It's certainly understandable. You know, gr grabbing what you just said. And maybe going to a a somewhat meta level, I am gonna shoehorn in Victor Frankel,'cause I I don't wanna leave that loose end for for listeners. Frankel talks about the desire to finish his book as one of the sources of meaning that got him through the concentration camps. Did your book and I don't know the timeline for having worked on it serve a similar purpose over the last eighteen

To twenty four months. Absolutely. Absolutely, it was life raft. I was I was devastated when I finished it. Which is common experience, you know, be we people and it speaks to the nature of human motivation. We often think, Well, once I get to point B, that's where you're headed, everything will be okay. It's like no, that's not the case at all. It's that now you need a new point B.

So and that was really you know, because I don't work at the university anymore. And I don't have my clinical practice anymore. And So that those are losses of structure for me and now I have the book too.

Anchor myself while I was so ill. And It was invaluable. And still is, for that matter. I wanna ask you about the title Beyond Order, but before I get to that, I'm just planting the seed.

I'd love to ask you, and this is a question that a friend of mine, several friends of mine, wanted me to ask some version of. And I would like to hear your answer. And that is How would you recommend someone think about meaning or constructing or finding meaning? If they have reached

The pinnacle. of competence or a high level of competence. In a certain area. Uh, I have a friend. I won't name him because I don't know if he would want this public, but I asked him some version of this and he said, Well, at some point you have to either find God Or have kids and having kids is easier, so I had kids. Uh well that speaks to what we discussed earlier. It's like there's many domains in which to obtain competence you can find a new domain.

But Kids for sure. That's like Huh? Life is quite straightforward in some ways. Find a partner.

And stick with them. You know that's hard. Try to make yourself into better people. If you can. It's a challenge.

Have kids, have grandkids. Thank God I have grandkids. Thank God I have kids. They're of unquestionable virtue. And so Then if you're lucky you have other projects. And you're healthy enough to

To undertake them. With regards to how people should search for meaning, well it's The first thing I do, like I said, with my clients is I do uh And uh scan of their life.

And we have po you mentioned it at the beginning when you introduced me. I have a program, self authoring, at self authoring.com that helps people with this. It helps you write an autobiography, sort of figures out who you are. It helps you assess your personality traits, positive and negative, and then it it helps you make a plan for the future. And that's that People have found that useful.

Why beyond order? What is the genesis of that? title. How did you arrive at that title? Well The first book

As far as I can tell. In the world of value. So let's think about value for a minute. If you move towards something, you value it. Otherwise you wouldn't move towards it.

There's an old joke about the chicken, is why did the chicken cross the road? And the answer to that is well, he thought the other side was better. Well that's That's the case, you know, and We need a gradient of value to organize our action.

And what you have to prioritize because you can't do everything at once, and so you do the thing that's most important right now now. And that means you're in a world of importance. And that's a value that that's a value world. And the value world As far as I can tell, has two broad components. The Taoists talked about it as yin and yang and

Broadly speaking, it's order and chaos. And order tends to be represented with masculine symbols and chaos tends to be represented with feminine symbols. That doesn't mean order is male and chaos is Female And you know, I've been pilloried for this, even though it's hardly my proposition but

The idea of the patriarchy. It's a it's use of s masculine symbolism to represent order. You're in order when What you want to happen happens when you act. And so that's reassuring because not only do you get what you want, but the fact that you get what you want indicates that your theory about how to get what you want is true.

And every time you fail, you don't get what you want, but you also undermine the validity of the theory that you're using to organize your perceptions and your actions. That's partly why people don't like to fail, because you don't know how far back that can Echo how far down your hierarchy of presuppositions that can echo. If you're clinically depressed, every minor failure means you're worthless human being. And you never know when a failure is going to demonstrate that. You know, it it can. In any case

There's chaos and order. They're the two great domains and You have to contend with chaos because Too much of it overwhelms you. You drown in it. It's the flog.

And that happens when your life It's beyond you. And you're somewhere where no matter what you do, nothing you want happened. It's a domain of terror and pain. Now it's also a domain of unlimited possibility. Because outside of what you know is everything you don't know.

And There's untold riches to be gathered from the domain of everything you don't know. But that doesn't mean It still needs to be managed. It's dangerous. Now the domain of order is the same way. It's like If order becomes too extreme, then everything becomes cramped.

It becomes totalitarian, and then that starts to. Pathologize, that's the dying king. The king who's dying for lack of the water of life is the old tyrant who can no longer see beyond his own presuppositions. And so my first book concentrated more on Pathology z of chaos.

And And the second book more on pathologies of order. And They're they're a match set in in that regard, insofar as I was successful at doing that. And you know the liberal types.

They're very sensitive to pathologies of order. And the conservative types are very sensitive to pathologies of chaos. But they're both right. It's just There's no final solution to that problem. You're stuck with it. It's an existential.

It's an eternal existential concern. That's why mythological language is standard across people, is no matter who you are, no matter when you live, you always have to deal with the fact that some things escape your competence. And no matter where you are, no matter Who you are, you have to adapt to the fact of the existence of a value structure that's sharp a social group.

It's the fundamental so those are fundamental constituent elements of human experience. And we have symbols for them. And we all understand the symbols. So for example, in Pinocchio, this is I'm not going to go into this because it's too complicated, but No one balks at a puppet. Going to the bottom of the ocean and being swallowed by a whale.

Why? It makes no sense. There's nothing about that that makes sense. Right, it's not it's obviously not an empirical description of the objective world. But it's so

Clearly. Real that a four year old can Follow it. It's a mystery. You know, the whale breathes fire.

In Pinocchio. It's a dragon. Why? Why is that? Well We face dragons forever. That's what a human being is.

It's a creature that faces the dragon. The dragon can burn you to a crisp, but it has It has what you need. That's the world. It'll burn you up.

But it has what you need. And so then the question is, how do you stop from getting burned up and get what you need? And the answer to that is that you mold yourself into the hero. And that's a religious story. And you m say, Well is it true? And the answer to that is

It depends on what you mean by true. And y you know, that's a weasel answer in some ways, but it's not. Question that it can't be put forth without discussing The definition of true

So it's as deep a question as what is true. I would say that part of the cultural war. Is a criticism of the motif of the hero. That's Darrow does Felogo centrism

Western culture is phallogocentric. I would say human culture is fellow go fellowgocentric. I think Derek was wrong about that. It's human culture. It's man, so to speak, against nature. Oh Although sometimes it's man against culture and sometimes it's man against man. It's man against nature, and we triumph as the hero, and maybe that story isn't true or isn't correct. But

That's us. And if it isn't correct, well then We're um evolutionary abortion. Because that's who we are. And I would say, Well, before you throw it aside, maybe you should try it.

You don't have a better option, anyways. What does it mean to try it? Mostly I would say it means It means two things. It means two Practice love.

And that means Assume that things are valuable and act. According to that assumption. And it requires truth, which is Don't

Say what you know to be untrue. And you know, when I tried to unpack The first sentence of Genesis. In the context of the broader biblical narrative What appears to be happening is that

There's a proposition that God is guided by love and uses truth to create. It's something like that. And Maybe love is something like the wish that all being would flourish. There isn't a better story than that.

What effect do you hope your New book to have. I know that's that might seem like a lazy question, but I'm gonna keep it broad. I'd just be interested to hear Your thoughts. What's what would what would be success, a successful effect.

For this book. Looking back twelve months from now, twenty four months from now. It would be lovely if it had the same effect on people as the last book appeared to have. You know, I'm I mean It's comforting to me to

Read through my YouTube comments. Oddly enough, because that isn't generally a place people would go for comfort. You know Untold numbers of people. Have said to me in

Person, but publicly in in that way. That They've put their lives together, at least in some ways. And

You talked about Victor Frankel. You know, when I wrote maps of meaning I said, Well I was interested in malevolence. I was deeply affected by the accounts I'd read of what happened in the Second World War and In Germany and what happened in Soviet Union. And in China.

Horror shows. That characterized the twentieth century. Constrain malevolence. And so If you study malevolence, you start to understand what the opposite of that is.

The opposite of malevolence is something like the hero's journey. You know, and it's it's easy to be cynical about that, but Well, it's not that easy because if you're cynical about that then you undermine your own life. And everyone knows this. This is the other thing that's so interesting. Everyone knows this. You never teach someone you love to lie.

You're always appalled if you have a son. Or daughter. You're appalled if they don't tell the truth. You know, in the deepest Part of your heart.

That if you don't tell the truth The world falls apart. And that's actually true. You know, I talked about unearned wisdom. It's no

Trivial matter. To understand that. You know, Dostievsky said everyone is responsible for everything that happens to them and everything that happens to everyone else as well. And you know, that's an insane statement, and he was a very extreme person, but it's also true.

And I think that's part of what people Get a glimpse of when they have a Hallucinogenic induced religious experience. It's like there's a lot more resting on you than you think. And you know that.

You don't wake up in the morning. Berating yourself for telling the truth. You wake up at four in the morning berating yourself for violating your conscience. You know, and classically and And

At least in some strains of Christian thinking. Conscience is associated with Christ or with the Holy Spirit. It's the it's the voice of God within. I'm aware of all the criticisms of ideas like that, but you know it's pretty It's really something. But you can't.

Control. Your conscience. So what is it exactly? It's not you. You're responsible to it.

It holds you accountable. It transcends you. So what is it? Well if you think it's nothing, well Violate it for a while and see what happens.

So you know I hope What I wrote in the Beyond order. Is true. You know, and if it's true.

It should do some good. Because what's true does good. At least that's the hope. Jordan, I Think we're

running up on time. I want to be respectful of your schedule. I have Sincerely enjoyed. This conversation. I'm glad you exist. I'm glad you write. Yeah.

I'm very excited. For You and your readers with respect to Beyond Order. twelve more rules for life and I encourage people to check it out. Is there anything That you would like to

Add. In terms of closing remarks or a question. to my audience, a request of my audience. Anything that you would like to say? My book is coming out on March second and I've been thinking about what to do about that.

And I think the most appropriate thing to do Is to thank people. The people who've Watched my

Lectures and listen to them and Who have bought tickets to my lectures and Move. Bought and read my book. My family has

received an unbelievable outpouring of support. It saved my life. So Appreciate it. Thank you so much, Jordan.

And thank you to you too. I appreciate the conversation. Um Onward and upward. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share

The coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up. in the uh the world of the esoteric as I do, it could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite. of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out, just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Sleep is super important to me in the last few years. I've come to conclude it is the end all be-all that all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions.

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