← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
30 Days to Take Control and Shape Your Future | Jordan Peterson, Arthur Brooks, and Dave Hollis (Archived Episode)
02:12:39
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- [00:00]
Tom Bilyeu
When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Granger. For the ones who get it done,
- [01:00]
Jordan Peterson
I'm hoping that they find it useful the same way they seem to have found the first one. I'm embarrassed. Actually hurts me. Actually, both of them hurt me, I would say, because I'm very hurt. I'm a very destroyed person in many ways, and so I feel unworthy.
- [01:19]
Tom Bilyeu
Unworthy of what?
- [01:21]
Jordan Peterson
You name it.
- [01:23]
Tom Bilyeu
In the book, you encourage people to think from an evolutionary perspective, which I think is incredibly important. And I think what you offer people is one you make. We all struggle with our own internal demons, and you allow people to see how that's a heroic endeavor, maybe the ultimate heroic endeavor, to conquer that inside of yourself and then going back to the beginning of identity being a function of behavior by helping people begin to identify as the hero. Engaging in relatively straightforward behaviors like cleaning your room, or like in the new book, making an area Beautiful, refusing to give in to resentment. Aim at one thing, which fuck was one of my favorite parts of the book, and see how extraordinarily good you can get at that. Like, when I think about something is
- [02:10]
Jordan Peterson
you gotta aim at something. It's like, otherwise your life is meaningless. Well, what should you aim at? Well, I don't know. Well, pick something. Pick something. Aim at it as you move toward it. You'll get wiser, then maybe your aim will change. That's okay. But at least it'll change in an informed way. It's like, discipline yourself in one dimension. See what happens. Well, that's exciting. And I think that's something that's open for everyone. You can do that. I shouldn't say that because I don't believe that I think you can find yourself in situation that's so dire that you don't. There's no escape from it. But that doesn't matter because this still, this is the hero myth. Might not be the best we have, might not always work, but it's still the best we have. And the fact that it might not work doesn't mean we should throw it away. It's still the best we have. I mean, everyone dies, and so we fail. In some sense. The fact that a symphony ends doesn't mean that it wasn't worth listening to.
- [03:22]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. When you put that in an evolutionary context and you acknowledge that people are compelled by biology to strive, they're compelled by biology to progress, they're compelled by biology to be courageous, that they will be rewarded for being courageous neurochemically, they will be punished for being a coward neurochemically. And.
- [03:46]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, think about, you know, the thing about that biological explanation too, is that we've been social for a very long time. We've been social for so long that our social nature is programmed into our biology. And so you'll be punished if you're not useful to other people. Yes, by your conscience, because you're a social creature. And the question is, well, how could you be most. Here's another question that starts to what verge on the religious. What does the most useful person look like? Well, who is everyone hoping they'll meet? And that's a genuine question. And that's the ideal. The ideal is the person everyone's hoping they'll meet. That's Christ in the Christian culture, psychologically speaking, independent of any religious claims. So that's. This is, I suppose, the essential idea of the archetype. From the Jungian perspective, we have the image of an ideal. And because it is the ultimate ideal, it has a religious element. It's compelling. It's a judge. Why is it a judge? Well, if you fall short of the ideal, your conscience punishes you. So it's a judge and it's merciful. Well, why? Because if you act out the ideal, then your life improves, you know, And I said, well, the question. What is the relationship between these images of the psyche and reality? I don't know the answer to that. I don't know where the archetype shades into reality. It depends to some degree on how you define reality. And, you know, this is. I've been. People don't like that statement. But when you're asking questions that are deep enough, you start to have to ask, what do you mean by true for Example, what do you mean by real? Because the questions you ask get so deep that they're of the same kind as the question what is real or what is true? You know, if think of it this way, reality is what we adapt to. By definition, that's reasonable. If you're a Darwinian, you have to say, that's actually as far as you can go. Reality is that which shapes us. You can't get a better handle on reality than that. Well, when you make a picture of objective reality, it's not the same as that. It's a different picture, and it's not obvious which one should play trump. Now, the hero myth, as far as I can tell, is an evolutionary artifact. And that means that for human beings, that the hero image is the path of optimal adaptation. Does that reflect reality? Well, it does, insofar as reality has selected that. Well, does that mean that reality is a story? Because the hero myth is a story, or at least that's one of the things it is. Does it mean that reality has a narrative aspect? Well, it does. Insofar as we act things out. Does that mean that reality is ultimately a story? Well, I don't know, but the answer isn't obviously, no.
- [07:14]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. Reading the book Beyond Order, there was a part in there that struck me as this is going to be the new battleground that Jordan is going to be fighting on. Do you have a sense of what in the book is going to trigger people?
- [07:38]
Jordan Peterson
No. I mean, I didn't think that the lobster in the last book was going to be so Hillary. I mean, I thought it was really cool. It's like, oh, my God. Serotonin mediates dominance in lobsters and people. How ancient, how remarkable. But, well, that took off in all sorts of directions. You know, people made fun of it. It's like, well, you can make fun of 350 million years of evolutionary history if you want. You can put your social constructionism up against 350 million years of evolutionary history. Good luck to you. I didn't think it was like. And, you know, the idea that. I was trying to insist that because lobsters live in hierarchies, that hierarchies are the source of all moral value. You know, that's. I was trying to insist that hierarchies are so inevitable that you see nervous systems adapting to them across virtually every level of animal. And why? Well, because some things are valuable, and within any given domain of value, some valuable things are more valuable than other things. And so you have a hierarchy. There's no avoiding it. As long as you need something, as long as there's scarcity, a hierarchy is inevitable. Yeah. Nobody cares how many BIC pens you have. It's because they're not scarce. So you can't have status because you have 200 of them. But as soon as there's scarcity, there's a hierarchy, and there's always scarcity of one form or another, no matter how rich you get. You know, if you're. If you have $100 million, Picasso paintings are still scarce.
- [09:28]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, the, the pushback on the, the lobster thing falls into two things for me. One, I don't understand why people look for a reason not to listen to somebody, which to me, most of people coming after you for that one just. They didn't want you to be right or to be heard. And so they went after something that they thought they could memeify and, and shut down on. And then the other one, I understand that.
- [09:51]
Jordan Peterson
Like, I understand that. I. It's obvious why people are looking for a reason not to listen to someone. It's like, how goddamn many people can you listen to? There's 9 billion of them, you know, so you have to not listen to almost everyone. And so you'll fall for any excuse, and sometimes that's not so good, you know, because you have a bias that prejudices you against a viewpoint that you actually need. That's a problem. But the phenomenon itself, like, you know, you mentioned. Sorry to bring this up again, but because it's germane and relevant. Someone said something disparaging about me, and they were on your staff. It's like, well, you have lots of options for guests. You're looking for no. You're always looking for no because you can only say yes to a very limited number of things. So that's another reason we have to be very careful about our prejudices, because we need them, you know, to. I don't mean prejudice in obviously in this inappropriate social sense, but. Jesus. We have to shield ourselves from an excess of information. We're very limited capacity processors, no question. I don't understand, though. I don't understand really. And it's really killing me. I think I might. Might mean that literally. I don't understand why I'm so controversial. I can't figure that out. It's very distressing to me.
- [11:27]
Tom Bilyeu
You want me to take a stab at it? Sure.
- [11:30]
Jordan Peterson
Good metaphor.
- [11:32]
Tom Bilyeu
All right. So my gut instinct in terms of why a certain type of person responds negatively to you is when you think of a person as a blank slate and that we all have this collective responsibility to make sure that everybody ends up the same, then you saying some people are better at something than others already is feels judgmental. And so it is. Oh, yes, for sure. And. But when you have a collectivist view and you believe that everyone should have equal outcome, which, by the way, I think everybody, yourself included, like, if only.
- [12:16]
Tommy Spaulding
Right.
- [12:17]
Tom Bilyeu
Like, that would be amazing. Like, if everybody could live truly in harmony and that didn't violate principles of just the human animal. Which is why I always remind people to remember you're having a biological experience. But you say things that are. They violate a deeply compassionate person's desire to take care of everybody. This sort of no Child Left behind type thing. And when you insist on in your own life, like, I'm only going to say that which is true, and I'm certainly not going to let somebody force me to say something I don't believe is true. So now with that, and by the way, all of that, and this is a key thing, I think you have to understand you're fighting with a level of intensity that makes sense. When you realize your obsession with what happened in the 20th century, the Gulag archipelago, what happened there, obviously, Nazi Germany, Mao's China, like, the number of people that have been killed in these essentially social experiments. So you have this deep, intense thing trying to get people to understand, like, hierarchies are real. There's no escaping them. Not everybody is as good as everybody else at everything. And by the way, you have to shoulder responsibility. And that's where people are like you. Just to them, I cannot. And before I say what they think, I will reiterate, you have changed my life forever and for the better. I will forever be grateful to the things that you continue to put out into the world. And I missed you horribly as a thought leader during 2020 of all years. To be on a Jordan Peterson diet. I was not happy about that. But what they think of is that you're being mean for the sake of being mean, that you're not trying to help them. See, you cannot pretend reality isn't reality. In pretending that the dragon is not there, the dragon does not go away. The dragon grows more powerful, more likely to devour you and your family. And so you get smaller, but they don't see that. And so that's why I'm like. When I see people attack you, I'm like, Jesus Christ. How many times does he have to say, this is about a balance between order and chaos, that you need both of these things, that you have to show the Responsibility, because that is what reality demands that you're in. You're nested in an evolutionary context. There are things like hierarchies that will play out in the body perception. Exactly. And so you may not want to feel bad when you walk in the room and are worse at something than everybody else, but you're going to. You may not want to feel bad when you're rejected, but you're going to. You may not want to feel bad because you're just lazing around your house and not doing anything, but you're going to. And you have peered into enough of human nature to recognize, hey, there are just certain truisms. You've now given us 20 of the. I forget how many were originally in the core article. 49 or whatever.
- [15:05]
Jordan Peterson
42.
- [15:06]
Tom Bilyeu
42. Okay, we've got 24.
- [15:08]
Jordan Peterson
Answer to the life, the universe and everything. Right. Is that all Hofstadter's number?
- [15:13]
Tom Bilyeu
So. Oh my God, that's perfect. Actually, it is this incredible thing once you break free from ideology, and that's where again, this is one of the rules in beyond order not to fall prey to ideology. This is where I thought you were going in the beginning with identity. I thought you were going to say identity has become pathological because it has become. It's been simplified. You talk about this in beyond order. Once you simplify something, and this is how an ideologue gets you, they simplify it, they make it very understandable, becomes very clear who's in and who's out. You can reward and punish based on that. People are grabbing these unnegotiated, self determined pieces of identity that don't necessarily bring value to the larger world, which will create dissonance in their own life because they've got all this substructure running.
- [16:05]
Jordan Peterson
Well, they're tradable value. You know what I mean? It's like, I'm not saying they're like your race, I suppose, is a value, but it's not a tradable value. And your gender and your sex the same thing. It's like, I guess it's partly because there's no scarcity. You know, it's like, we've got enough white people. Being white doesn't buy you anything. So, and I'm not saying that with
- [16:32]
Tom Bilyeu
any pleasure, that's what I think people miss. This is why I think people come after you. They don't recognize that you're not saying it. You're not relishing in this. You want people to be happy. And I'm always so confused Jordan, I don't know why you remain as vulnerable and open as you are. After the time saying, I was like, what the fuck? You sounded so kind, open, compassionate. After, what, four years of, you know, some percentage of the world relentlessly slandering you? And obviously you get people that cheer you on. Probably way more people that cheer you on than don't. But you still remain vulnerable, which is fucking incredible. But the fact that they don't recognize that you're trying to help. Like, I could get it if they said, hey, look, I disagree with you, maybe on this side or the other,
- [17:22]
Jordan Peterson
but maybe they do recognize that. You know, there's a lot of cynicism about the help, and I can't understand why you'd be cynical about help unless you weren't that help. Weren't that pleased about the idea of help. You know, like all these deplorables that I'm helping. These angry young men, you know, they don't deserve help. Well, I don't think that. I don't know anyone that doesn't deserve help. You know, there's this idea in the New Testament that you should love your enemies. It's like, why would you do that? Well, it'd be better if they weren't your enemies. And their unnecessary suffering doesn't help. It's not helpful. It's not like you don't. You know, anyone with any sense, anyone who's human, is liable to take pleasure in vengeance or even in. But, you know, when people go after the journalists that have gone after me, I don't take any pleasure in that. I don't sit back at my home and rub my hands and think, you know, you got what was coming to you. I do think sometimes you've got what was coming to you. But I think of that more like watching someone in the road. You know, they're in the road and they have their back turned and a truck runs over them. It's like, well, you were in the road and there was a truck. And so you got what was coming to you because you were on the road and there was a truck. But I don't take any pleasure in it. I don't see that it's helpful.
- [19:05]
Tom Bilyeu
This is a paid message from GoFundMe. Meet Juan Naula. When his son was hospitalized for a viral infection, Juan started a Gofundme to pay for medical expenses.
- [19:15]
Jordan Peterson
It was 5k to pay the bill
- [19:17]
Ryan O'Neal
for my son, and I need only 22 hours. It was amazing.
- [19:21]
Jordan Peterson
People really trust on GoFundMe.
- [19:23]
Tom Bilyeu
How did Juan raise $5,000 in less than a day. He posted a short video on GoFundMe telling his story in 30 seconds.
- [19:31]
Ryan O'Neal
30 seconds.
- [19:32]
Jordan Peterson
Be specific.
- [19:34]
Ryan O'Neal
Be quick and tell what are you
- [19:37]
Jordan Peterson
going to be using the funds for? I was nervous to do it because it doesn't feel okay to ask money. But you shouldn't be nervous. Sometimes you just have to do it and see the results. We were able to save my son's
- [19:50]
Ryan O'Neal
life thanks to gofundme that we still have my son with us.
- [19:54]
Tom Bilyeu
Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com that's gofundme.com gofundme.com this message reflects one person's experience.
- [20:04]
Jordan Peterson
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- [20:07]
Tom Bilyeu
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- [20:12]
Jordan Peterson
And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering
- [20:15]
Ryan O'Neal
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- [20:17]
Tom Bilyeu
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- [20:24]
Ryan O'Neal
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- [20:30]
Tom Bilyeu
by Grainger for the ones who get it done. What do you want people to get out of beyond order? It is extraordinarily well thought through. It is very well laid out. Each sentence stacks like a brick upon the next. I wouldn't advise. I don't know if you feel differently, but I wouldn't advise people to read them out of order. It's literally this very careful case being made that taken in totality is breathtaking.
- [21:00]
Jordan Peterson
I think you can read them in either order. I think you can read them in either order. I tried. Maybe. Maybe they're better read in order. But I think that if you read the second one first, then it would color your vision of the first one. I mean, the rules.
- [21:16]
Tom Bilyeu
I think you're right. 12 rules for life and beyond order. It doesn't matter. They're yin and yang.
- [21:21]
Jordan Peterson
You mean the rules themselves.
- [21:22]
Tom Bilyeu
The rules themselves just. It stacks so well. So I'm just.
- [21:25]
Jordan Peterson
Otherwise it wouldn't be a book. I mean, each. The thing about writing a book is that you're outside of time and space in relationship with the book. Because chapter one comes before chapter 12, but not when you're writing it. You can go back and modify chapter one because of chapter 12. I did try to tie them together so that they make a book, you know, and they. One builds upon another. That's like. That's the musical element of it as well. Recurrent themes. I'm glad you liked It, See, I can't tell. I can't evaluate it. I'm hoping that it's of the same level of quality that the first book was. And I'm not making any claims saying that about the level of quality of the first book. I'm just. That was as good as I could do. And I wrote the second one under unbelievable duress.
- [22:14]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
- [22:14]
Jordan Peterson
And so I can't tell if it's, you know, whether that was a curse or. Well, certainly a curse. No doubt about that. I don't know how it impacted the book, though.
- [22:26]
Tom Bilyeu
It's hard to say.
- [22:27]
Jordan Peterson
What do I want people to get out of it? Well, I'm hoping that they find it useful the same way they seem to have found the first one. I mean, Order their life actually hurts me. Actually, both of them hurt me, I would say because I'm ashamed, you know, of what's happened to me.
- [22:47]
Tom Bilyeu
What do you mean?
- [22:48]
Jordan Peterson
And they're books about life, and my life is. I'm very hurt. I'm a very destroyed person in many ways. And so I feel unworthy.
- [23:07]
Tom Bilyeu
Unworthy of what?
- [23:20]
Jordan Peterson
You name it. I hope people find it useful. You know, I hope it alleviates some unnecessary suffering. That's the goal.
- [23:36]
Tom Bilyeu
Here's how I read your books and everything that you've put out into the world. The people that should write the instruction manual are the people that have struggled. And in your suffering, you have been able to piece together useful information, which is the barometer by which I judge a book's value. For sure. The reason people flock to your lectures, they buy your book is you have made in modern times the single most coherent and useful instruction manual for life. Period. So I fear that the brokenness that you feel, the heartache that you feel, translates into something usable that couldn't be written by somebody that hadn't gone through what you've gone through.
- [24:29]
Jordan Peterson
Well, I would like to believe that was true. You know, there's a bit too much self justification in it for my taste, but I thought the other day I'd probably do this, too. And I have to record an announcement for this book because it's coming out on Tuesday. I thought the best announcement would be just thank people for all of their kind attention. I'm very fortunate in that regard. I get letters from people all the time that they open up their hearts. You know, it's really something. But I am somewhat nonplussed, let's say for all this work, I'm pretty broken.
- [25:22]
Tom Bilyeu
In general or just in this moment?
- [25:29]
Jordan Peterson
Don't know. I think in general,
- [25:37]
Tom Bilyeu
man. Well, I will say this as somebody whose life you have touched, and the thing I want you to recognize in me, as I imagine countless other people want you to recognize in them more than warm wishes, is I have put to use the things that you're teaching, and they have made my life better, and they have made the lives of those around me better. And, man, it is really heartbreaking to see you go through what you're going through now. And I certainly get it, you know, and I don't know you well enough to offer you any sort of familial consolation. So I will just say that what you do matters probably more than you think it does, certainly as much as you think it does. And I had never met you through 2020, and I started reaching out to people that we both know, asking about you, because I believe that the world needs the insights that you uniquely have, coming from your background of mythology and understanding what is deeply ingrained in the human psyche from an evolutionarily shaped perspective, and that nobody is putting it together the way that you're putting it together. And the fact that you've been. You know, I mean, hopefully it's. It's small in comparison to the people that are supporting you. But, Jesus, like, I don't. I know I would not put up with the amount of shit that you've put up with. And the fact that I think the individual is the only way to approach any systemic problem. Like, you just have to deal with the individuals, and then from there it will echo out into society. And so the fact that that's your approach. I kept telling people, we need Jordan Peterson right now. And I'm so grateful you're back. And I know this book will be very successful because.
- [27:39]
Jordan Peterson
Well, I'm glad you liked it. I'm glad you liked it because, like I said, it's really hard for me to evaluate it. You know, sometimes I. Well, I have every possible thought that you could have about it. You know, sometimes I read it and I think, oh, that seemed to have turned out pretty good. And other times I think, Jesus, I've said this 50 times already, and, yeah, I'm all over the place. I can't. I think that happens. It happens when you write a book, you get so. Because, you know, if. When you read someone else's book, you can kind of tell if the ideas are original, at least insofar as you're concerned. Well, I can't tell because these are my ideas. Well, not all of them, obviously, but they're ideas. I'm at least deeply familiar with. So I can't tell to what degree it's original, none of it. And so I. And it's. It's also, I suppose I'm quite apprehensive about its release in some sense because I've set myself up an impossible second act, you know, because the first book was so insanely popular. I think it's 6 million copies now in. In all the languages it's been published in. So that's impossible. That never happens. Right. It's. It's certainly. It's like winning the lottery. It's probably less probable than winning the lottery. In fact, I'm virtually certain that it's less probable than winning the lottery. And to. To imagine doing that twice is. Well, that's just. It happens, but it's highly improbable. Anyways, it's going to all come and then, you know, I'm in a different space than I was when I released this first book. So this is compared to all this is going to be compared to all my electronic avatars which are busily working out there in the world. I think there's more of me outside of me now than there is inside of me. Weirdly enough, that's another phenomenon. I can't really get my hand, my mind around the power of YouTube. Jesus, that's quite the technology. When I put those first videos up, you know, I was. This was bothering me, this piece of legislation and for a variety of reasons, some of which we've discussed, I talked to my wife and my son sort of casually, I said, well, I'm going to make these videos, see what happens. And. Famous last words.
- [30:11]
Tom Bilyeu
Yes. Yeah, man, look, it's resonated. It will continue to resonate. You have an extraordinary ability to translate what people are feeling into the actions they need to take to get out of. Is not a mistake that you are a very practiced clinical psychologist that is able to scale what you were doing one on one now to the many. It's extraordinary and I think it's really had an impact on society. My fantasy.
- [30:34]
Jordan Peterson
I love being a clinician. It was a great job, you know, I really loved it. There was nothing better than intense conversations about how to make things better when both partners in the conversation are fully committed to that. It's such fun to produce incremental improvement, sometimes more than incremental, you know, collaboratively. There's nothing better than that. I love doing my lecture tour because it was that on a large scale. I talked to Dave Rubin about that this week because of course he was long on the tour and it was such. It was so perfect to be talking to people about making things better and to have everyone, at least in that moment, fully on board with the idea. You couldn't ask for anything better than that was great. And to have the support I've had from people, it just stuns me, you know, I think it's actually traumatic to have that much support.
- [31:35]
Tom Bilyeu
That's interesting. Why traumatic?
- [31:38]
Jordan Peterson
It's not easy to know what to do with, you know, the cheers of a million people. It's overwhelming. It's dangerous.
- [31:52]
Tom Bilyeu
Dangerous because it can seep into your identity, or.
- [31:56]
Jordan Peterson
This is probably not directly relevant, but I don't know. You know, I've thought a lot about Hitler. You know, was it his arrogance or his humility that led him to be the savior, so called, of Germany? He had millions of people cheering for him. How could you not think you were right? How could you possibly think you weren't right? And so there's danger in that. You know, I don't think I've unfairly benefited from it.
- [32:33]
Tom Bilyeu
Money, success, fame, all that stuff is irrelevant. What matters is how you think about yourself when you're by yourself. And I want to know what you think about in terms of self identity, how we construct our sense of self and then how we leverage that to move through the world in a way that makes sense.
- [32:58]
Jordan Peterson
So. Identity, to me, is something that's practical. Your identity is. It's like a dramatic role that you play out in the world. And while playing that out, it has to furnish you with a life. And what that means is that it has to be. It means that it has to be negotiated with other people. When you're a very young child and you first start to play with who you are, you live in a fantasy world. And according to some developmental psychologists at least particularly, this is grounded in the theories of Piaget that very young children, two or three, are quite egocentric in their play. They play according to their own rules, and so they're not social yet until they're three or four, which means that they have their own goals in mind, and then they erect a little fictional world around those goals, and then they play out the role within that fictional world, and that's pretend play. And when they get to be about three or four and they start playing with other kids, they have to bring their worlds together and negotiate because both children have to want to play. And so that means identity has to expand beyond its egocentric focus and increasingly be negotiated in the social world. I studied Developmental psychology for a long time, especially in, relate to, in relationship to the regulation of aggression. And most children learn to regulate their aggression between the ages of 2 and 4. Now, for example, for instance, there's a subset of children, mostly male, who are very aggressive at the age of two, comparatively speaking. They bite, kick, fight, hit and steal. That's the definition of aggressive. And almost all those children are socialized out of that by the time they're four, although a small proportion aren't. And they tend to be long term antisocial children and then criminal adults. It's very, very difficult for that to be rectified. If it isn't rectified by 4. What happens with most children is they learn to move beyond their egocentric presuppositions and include other children in the play. And so they start to negotiate the roles. And, and identity is a sophisticated identity, is a negotiated role. And so it's not appropriate for anyone.
- [35:33]
Tom Bilyeu
Negotiated with who?
- [35:35]
Jordan Peterson
With everyone. With everyone. And of course, you know, this is the case because if you, if you. Well, first of all, if you're a child and you want friends, then you can't insist that only your game be played. So I'll give you an example. There's been observational studies of children in playgrounds. So imagine there's a group of children together, let's say they're six or seven years old, and they're playing helicopter. So they've got their erasers out and they're buzzing around in the helicopters, okay? So they've already established the ground rules. They've got together and they laid out the drama. They say, well, let's play helicopter. And maybe there's four or five suggestions, but the group did. The group develops a consensus that helicopters, the fun game, and let's make our erasers into helicopters. I don't have an eraser. Well, you can use your pencil and it can be a long helicopter. So everybody gets a role and everybody's happy about it. Otherwise play won't continue, right? Everybody has to be happy or play won't continue. And so then the little drama organizes itself and the kids play helicopter. And there's consequences of that that play out like a story. And then maybe another kid comes along and he's got an eraser and a pencil in his bag and he wants to play helicopter too. And if he's a socially sophisticated kid, he'll hang around the outside of the little game and watch. And then he'll take out his eraser and maybe start making buzzing noises with it. And when when he can see that there's an opening in the play situation, he'll swoop in and maybe he'll get integrated. It's like when you're at a cocktail party and you hear a conversation and you're hovering around the edge. You wait for an opening and then you say something that's germane to the topic. And if you're sophisticated enough and the people are friendly enough, then it'll open and you'll be allowed in. Now, even popular kids often get rebuffed when they try to enter an already structured game. Unpopular kids don't watch what's going on, and then they come along and try to impose their game on the entire group. And then they have a tantrum if they don't get let in.
- [37:46]
Tom Bilyeu
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Jordan Peterson
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Jordan Peterson
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- [38:31]
Jordan Peterson
And so that's a good example of how identity is negotiated at the earliest stages.
- [38:37]
Tom Bilyeu
Now, that feels to me something. It feels very different than what I would think of as identity. So I'm going to try to put this in context of what I see as the major movements of your work and what makes you so powerful. Tell me where I go astray. So I look at your two books and I'm literally just paraphrasing from what you said, that they're basically the yin and yang. So you have chaos on one hand and you have order on the other. Both will tend towards tyranny. And as far as I can tell, and this is why I do not understand why people are pushing back on you, why there's so much bizarre backlash, is the moral of your story is, hey, everybody, guess what? You need to find this balance between the two. If you only exist in the creative potential, it ends up being all chaos all the time. If you only exist in the conservatism, the things that are already There and working, they will tend towards tyranny, solidify and cease to be useful and die. And so now it's this game, and you do this brilliant explanation of what happens in a city that shows exactly this with artists. And if you can walk us through that and tell me if the identity of the artist, if that's what you're trying to get at with identity, because I'm understanding what you're saying in terms of, okay, in that moment, we're negotiating, but there's a grander sense of who we become. That is. Seems to me to be a negotiation with the world, so collectively, everybody else, but also a negotiation with how I want to feel about myself when I'm alone and the things that I think are right, the things that I think are wrong.
- [40:06]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, well. Okay, well, that's very complicated. So I'll walk it through. So, as you pointed out, I'm going to hold up these books. So this is the new book, Beyond Order, and it does concentrate on Pathologies of Structure. And the previous book, which is 12 Rules for Life, an antidote to chaos. And the. The underlying presupposition there is that in our phenomenological landscape. So that's the world as we experience it, complete with emotions and motivations and dreams. And so the full range of human experience, including the subjective and the objective, let's say, can broadly be broken into two domains. And one is the domain of things that are beyond our grasp and reach, and that's the unknown. And the unknown emerges. When the unknown emerges, you tend to experience anxiety. And then there's the known. And I've defined the known very specifically and very carefully. The known is the place you are when what you're doing produces the results you want. And I say want because that brings motivation and emotion into the game. So you're motivated to pursue something, you pursue it, and what you want happens. And not only do you get what you want, but you get validation for the structure that governs your perceptions and your actions. Now, if you imagine that you're lonely and you approach a young woman in a social situation, attempting to make some contact with her, you want to alleviate your loneliness. And so you hope you make a good impression and you tell a joke, let's say, in a relatively awkward manner, and you get rebuffed, then you feel you, you. You're no longer where you control, you're no longer where you exercise control. And that brings up all sorts of specters immediately. It's like, well, why were you rebuffed? Well, maybe all Women are to be despised. That's one theory. Maybe there's something deeply wrong with you. Maybe you're having an off day. Maybe it wasn't a very good joke. And so when you don't get what you want, then a landscape of question emerge. Questions emerge. And those questions can resonate through different levels of your identity. From the trivial, oh, I told the joke wrong, to the profound, there's nothing desirable about me, and I'll be alone for the rest of my life. Now, you asked about identity, and I used the example of a child's game. But I could go through an identity. So I do this particularly in maps of meaning. And so, for example, let's say I'm sitting, typing, okay, we could decompose my identity. So at the highest level of resolution, I'm moving my fingers. And so that could be my identity. I'm the thing that moves its fingers. And then slightly, at a slightly broader level than that, I'm typing words. And at a broader level, I'm typing phrases and thinking them up. And then sentences and then paragraphs and then chapters, and then, let's say, full papers or books. That's a productive unit. So I'm the author of a book or the author of a paper. That's an identity. But then that's nested inside. For me, it would be nested inside being a clinical psychologist, being a professor, being a good citizen. And then that's nested inside something that's even broader than that. And I would say that that's nested inside cultural heroism. And I don't mean that specific to me. I mean that for everyone, that's the outermost level, whether you're playing out the role of hero or adversary. Say, that's the highest possible level of identity. That's the level at which fundamental morality is adjudicated. And there isn't really anything beyond outside that is. It's beyond us. It's the transcendent itself. And you're all of those. At. At any one time, you're all of those levels of identity. But those are all practical, right? So those are the roles that you're playing in the world. All of those are a consequence of who you are. But in interplay, like in this situation with the child, all of that's negotiated with other people. And so if you have a functional identity, you see, if you have a functional identity, when you act it out in the world, then you get what you want and need. And if an identity doesn't do that, well, then you should. You either retool your identity or you retool the world, your conception of the world. Well, if you're retooling your conception of the world, then you're retooling yourself. No, you can actually. I mean, what a revolutionary does is try to bring the world into alignment with.
- [44:53]
Tom Bilyeu
Literally change the world.
- [44:55]
Jordan Peterson
Yes, literally. Well, and we all do that to some degree because we are practical engineers, you know, I mean, not only do we perceive the world, but we also interact with it so that it does manifest itself in accordance with our desires. There's limits, obviously, to how far you can go or how far you should go with that, you know. And what are the limits? Well, there's practical limits. Nature won't do what you want it to unless you're very sophisticated in your. In your application of your knowledge. And other people will object. So now you might say, well, you should forge forward regardless of their objection. And, you know, there are circumstances under which that's true, but generally speaking, that's not a very good idea. It certainly doesn't make you popular as a child. And so that brings up one other issue, I would also say, and this. I developed this idea quite a bit in the new book. You go from egocentrism as a child. You have to go through this period where you're socialized as a child and adolescent. And that really means that you allow your identity to be molded and shaped by the group. And, you know, you think about how important peers, friends and peers are to children and adolescents. You know, your mother will say, when you're a teenager, well, if Johnny jumped off the bridge, would you too? And you say, well, no. But the real answer is, well, probably if all your friends are there taunting you, you would in fact jump off the bridge. And not only that, generally speaking, you should, because it's your duty, it's your developmental duty as a child and a teenager to take your. Your isolated self and turn it into a functioning social unit. Now you could say, well, do you. Peterson wants everybody to be a functional social unit, a robot, you know, a cog in the wheel. And I would say, well, that that isn't where development stops. It has to go through that period before you can emerge as a. As a genuine individual, which means you have to know the rules of the game before you can break them. But not being able to abide by the rules is not anything like being a genuine creative individual. Those are not the same thing. And there's plenty of attempt to confuse the two things, because it's much better if you can't follow the rules to view yourself as a avant garde revolutionary than as a failure. And it's not like I don't know that. That social molding crushes. Obviously it crushes. And everyone feels that these are existential problems. Everyone deals with the tyranny of culture and the fact that it does want you to be a certain way and not other ways. And those ways might not be in keeping with your. With your. The deepest elements of your nature. Well, tough luck for you because you're also the beneficiary of culture. And so you have to offer it your pound of flesh. Now, you shouldn't do that at the expense of your soul, but you shouldn't stay an immature child either. So this notion of identity that we're being fed is very, very. It's very thin.
- [48:21]
Tom Bilyeu
What are we being fed? Be very specific.
- [48:27]
Jordan Peterson
Well, there is the idea, for example, that your identity is whatever you say it is and that everyone else has to go along with that. No, that isn't how it works. Partly because no one even knows how to go along with it. Like, let's say just for example, that you're gender non binary. Okay, what am I supposed to do about that man? I don't know. I hardly know what to do if the rules are already there. So let's say I grew up, I want to. Being a heterosexual male, I want to find a woman, fall in love with her, raise a family, have children, have grandchildren. That's a game. I know the rules to it. Not well, because everyone's a failure at that. You know, it's very difficult, but at least you kind of know what the. The goal is and so does the person you're with. Well, you leap out of that, which is already terribly difficult. You leap out of that into completely unknown territory. Saying that I'm. Presenting yourself as something other than those categories leaves everyone around you and you completely bereft of direction.
- [49:40]
Tom Bilyeu
Let me put it in words that I get from your material. So what I heard you just say, tell me if I'm wrong, is part of the negotiation that we do from the time we are little kids and figuring out that play, we're up on the bridge, we jump maybe because we want to, you know, fit in with our peer group.
- [49:58]
Jordan Peterson
It.
- [49:59]
Tom Bilyeu
There is a sense of order to that. Now, you've been very careful and it will drive me crazy if people respond to this interview as if you have not already illustrated that it is the balance between two opposing forces. But so we need enough order so that somebody can find their way through the world and that many. I think a big part of the reason that your work has resonated so profoundly with people is there, excuse me, they are left in a world where they don't know how to move forward in a way that serves them spiritually practically as well, for sure. And so, hey everybody, both of those,
- [50:35]
Jordan Peterson
both of those practically shades into spiritually as you move up into the broader reaches of identity now. And look this, this. See one of the things, I really laid this out in Maps of meaning. It took me a long time to understand that belief regulated emotion. So what happens is that if you act out your identity, if you act out your beliefs in the world and what you want doesn't happen, what happens is that your body defaults into emergency preparation for action. And the reason for that is you've wandered too far away from the campfire and now you're in the forest and maybe you're naked. And so what do you do then? And the answer is, well, you don't know what to do. So what do you do when you don't want know what to do? And the answer is you prepare to do everything. And the problem with that is that it's unbelievably draining psychophysiologically, like it hurts you. And there's an immense physiological literature detailing the cost of exactly that kind of response. And so people need people and animals. People stay where what they do has the results they want. That's partly why you want to be around people who share your cultural presuppositions is because you know that, for example, even in small ways, let's say you're a country music aficionado and you're hanging around with your cowboy hatted buddies and you throw on a tape and everyone says, great tunes, man. And you, you know, you're happy about that, but you know, you throw on a piece by Czechosy and you're, you're in a different subculture and who the hell are you? And people, the people in your group will say, man, who listens to music like that? And like that's a trivial example in some sense, but I believe it's one that everyone can resonate to. We like, we, it's very hard on us not to be where we know what, we know that what we want is going to happen. We hate that, we hate that. And no wonder. So, and then, you know, there are, there are varying degrees of that. Obviously you can really be where you don't know what's going to happen, or you can only be There to some degree. But by and large, we're conservative creatures. Even if we're liberal in temperament, there's not, we can't tolerate that much uncertainty. And you might ask, well, why? And the answer is, well, because you can be hurt, pain, you can be damaged, you can become intolerably anxious, and you can die. So it's no wonder you're sensitive or very sensitive to negative emotion. And so our identities, functional identity regulates your emotion, but you do that in concert with other people. In the first chapter of the new book, Beyond Order, the rule is don't casually denigrate social institutions or creative achievement. That's that balance. Again, I make the case that most of your sanity is socially distributed. And what I mean by that is, well, let's say that you know how to behave, you're well socialized, you can play with others. Now, I said already in this conversation, if you didn't learn to play with others between the time you were two and four, you will never learn. And psychologists have beat their heads against the wall trying to rehabilitate antisocial children. They can't do it after the age of four.
- [54:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Is that because areas of the brain just don't develop?
- [54:12]
Jordan Peterson
Well, it seems to be partly because the kids fall farther and farther behind. So let's say you make the leap from egocentric dependence on your mother at 2 and 3 to immersion in a peer group. Well, then you pick peers that are at your same developmental level and you chase each other up the developmental ladder. And the longer you're out of that, the farther you fall behind. And so you know kids, five year old kids might come across another five year old kid who tends to cry too much if they don't get their way. And they'll say, we don't want to play with the baby. And what they're saying is we have to find someone who's at our developmental level, shares our developmental horizons so that we can mutually scaffold our further development. Now they're not going to say that, obviously, but that's the situation. And kids test each other out when they first meet. So do adults. Game, game, game, game. Can you play? Are you playing at the same level as me? I'm playing my game at the level that will further my development. Can you play along with me? If not, well, maybe you're lower in status and I can pull you up as a mentor. Maybe you're higher in status and I can learn from you. But if you're a peer, we can play together anyways, if you're acceptable to your peers and you behave well, they'll accept you. And then they tell you all the time if you're acting appropriately, you know, if your jokes are funny, if you're dominating the conversation, if you're bringing something of value to the table, and all you have to do is pay attention to the social cues and you'll keep yourself regulated.
- [55:47]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, I want to dive in here, and I'm going to see if I'm tracking all of this because I'm putting this in a larger context of this really matters, and it applies directly to something that's happening in the world. It seems to me that you don't dive into things unless they have real relevance. So is it fair to define identity as the self narrative that emerges from a nearly infinite number of interactions with other people and nature itself?
- [56:19]
Jordan Peterson
Well, I would say yes, but that gets to the point. It's so broad, it's almost. It starts to lack definition.
- [56:27]
Tom Bilyeu
So I can take it finer than that. I am trying to sort of find the borders, and then, Then, then I will work in. Okay, so if we're. If we still remain true at that point, then having in the book, you walk through a lot of some of the people that you've done psychoanalysis with, and so we get a lot of insights into the actual people that you're dealing with and how people can begin to tell themselves a narrative that is very dysfunctional. And you help them out. I don't want to say easily because that sounds like it cheapens it, but pretty straightforward in helping them reframe. And framing is something I'm obsessed with. And so our identity is based on this. It's a self narrative that we tell ourselves based on the interactions we have with other people and nature, such that we begin to solidify a set of behaviors that make sense for us based on the goals that we want to achieve and where we're trying to go. Am I still good?
- [57:19]
Jordan Peterson
Yes. Well, you improved your definition by adding the behavior element, because I would say the fundamental element of identity is what you act out. On top of that, there's the story that you tell.
- [57:30]
Tom Bilyeu
Do I have to be consciously aware of it?
- [57:33]
Jordan Peterson
Well, you're consciously aware of some of it, not of other elements of it. You can't be consciously aware of everything
- [57:39]
Tom Bilyeu
you do and does the conscious and conscious alike make up my identity as you define it.
- [57:45]
Jordan Peterson
It. Your identity is the story you tell about your actions in the world, but it's also your actions in the world.
- [57:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, now why does my identity, and I assume As I understand it, why does my identity, as I understand it matter to the course of my life?
- [58:09]
Jordan Peterson
Because it's the structure of the, it's. It's the structure from which the plans that you implement in the world originates. And you're always acting in the world. You have problems to solve all the time. And you have to solve, you have, you have to solve. There's all sorts of problems you have to solve to stay alive. And you have to solve them for today, but you have to solve them in a way that works for today, that doesn't screw up tomorrow too bad and leaves next week intact and next month and next year. And so there's a continuum of. You see, that's the other reason why your identity can't just be you because, or how you feel right now. Because you're not only who you are right now and how you feel right now, you're this strange entity that exists right now, but that already existed in the past and that is going to repeat itself into the future. And so you're actually a community, individuals stretched out across time. And the plans that you implement have to be beneficial for that entire community of individuals. And it's going to be the case that there isn't much difference between you acting properly with regards to your extended temporal self and you acting properly in relationship to other people.
- [59:27]
Tom Bilyeu
That's interesting.
- [59:28]
Jordan Peterson
So you're stuck with society just because you know that there's a future. You're stuck with society. Even if you're solipsistic, if you think you're the only consciousness that there is, there's still the fact that you have duration across time and that you know you have to take into account what the consequence for your actions is going to be on the 50 year old Tom and the 80 year old Tom.
- [59:54]
Tom Bilyeu
And so now here's a question. Do you think that there's something that has pathologized the creation of useful identities in today's culture?
- [60:09]
Jordan Peterson
Well, I think each person can judge that for themselves to some degree. I mean, the more functional your identity, the better regulated your emotion, the more positive emotion, the less negative emotion. Certainly negative emotion doesn't rise to an intolerable level if you're fortunate your identity is well constructed. I think that any insistence that identity is something other than a pragmatic set of actions, let's say that orient you properly in the world, is sufficiently sparse so that it isn't going to solve the problems that have to be solved. So I might insist I'm whoever I think I am at the moment. And if you were polite, you would go along with that. And to some degree, I would be right. We do that when we allow people to save face. But if I'm right, we go along with their presuppositions, presumptions. We don't call them on their mischief. And a certain amount of that's polite. But that doesn't alleviate the necessity for me of adopting a role that other people find valuable. Otherwise, what the hell do I have to trade? And you might say, well, why should I have to trade? Well, if you can live all by yourself, then you don't have to trade. But if you can't, you have to bring something of value to the table, and you can't insist on its value.
- [61:39]
Tommy Spaulding
Humans are not intended to decline. Decline is hugely painful because happiness comes from progress. Unhappiness comes from regression. And when you feel that something is harder than it used to be. So it's interesting, you know, you see this, the decline in the fluid intelligence curve we just talked about. If you're really a striver, and that's who I'm working with. I'm working with people who want to make the most with their lives.
- [62:02]
Ryan O'Neal
You know, if you.
- [62:02]
Tommy Spaulding
Look, if you never do anything with your life, you're not gonna know it's over. You're not gonna have this big crisis at the end of your life. It's because you never did anything. And I was like, I watched a lot of tv. Awesome. It's like, I can still do that.
- [62:11]
Tom Bilyeu
Don't you think? Their whole life is a crisis.
- [62:13]
Tommy Spaulding
Not really. Really, no. No, not really. No. No, no. Yeah, no, for sure. I mean. Well, here's the thing. It depends on what you mean by happiness and what a good life is. You know, I want my life as a striver, but I also recognize that it's not normal in many ways to strive, not to strive to the extent that you have.
- [62:32]
Tom Bilyeu
But is that what you mean by it's not normal?
- [62:34]
Tommy Spaulding
Yeah, and it creates problems. I mean, you, You. You rain hell on yourself when you're actually doing the stuff that you've done. And there's a lot of ways that you could have had a much easier life, a much more relaxing life, a life with greater peace, frequently, yeah, for sure. So that's all. I mean, it's not a very profound point in that way. But when I, you know, when I was. When things were going poorly and I was deeply unhappy because I was in a state of regress, my wife said, you're unhappy. You just need to quit. And I said, that's insane. I mean, one can't just walk away, but of course. And she said, yes, you can. Absolutely. You can do anything you want. I said, we'll be poor. She said, we're already poor. How do you know? It's multiplying by zero is still zero. And so we did, we bailed. We went to, we left Barcelona, we moved to Boca Raton, Florida, where nobody knew us. I took a pretty easy teaching job and I started studying by correspondence at night. Nobody knew I was doing it. She had a minimum wage job, she spoke very poor English, had not graduated from high school, and so was learning English and making, you know, six bucks an hour or whatever it was. And I was getting paid to teach the French horn while secretly working on my bachelor's degree at night to build my, to rebuild the person that I was. And then finished that and went on to, and started my PhD, which is what I really thought I needed to do. And that took me a little. I came here to Los Angeles, as a matter of fact. I studied the RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica. And then I learned a new trade. I learned, I actually learned who I was as a person again for the first time. But it was like four years of, you know, it was weird. I couldn't, I remember trying to sign a check during that time and I couldn't replicate my own signature. And it turns out that that's actually quite frequent when people are in this period of liminality between phases of their life that they're Handwriting will change.
- [64:27]
Tom Bilyeu
What?
- [64:27]
Tommy Spaulding
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's actually a common occurrence. I didn't know. I'm so like, I'm trying to send a check for the bank. Sorry, Mr. Brooks, this is not the
- [64:34]
Tom Bilyeu
right signature, is it, Is it because there's a subconscious part of you that's like, I'm not that person anymore.
- [64:39]
Tommy Spaulding
It's, I don't, it's, it's not well understood, but there's a, the, the neurophysiology of a lot of this stuff is. We're just starting to understand there's no doubt something that. Where these things are connected, where your sense of yourself is somehow connected to, you know, these motor skills in a particular way. I couldn't replicate my own signature sufficiently. I got like rejected by the bank for cashing a check into my own account at one point. I'm like my, my, my early dementia, early stage something. What's going on here? And what it was, was I was in this profound state of liminality which, in retrospect, was this just fertile period, you know, I tell the story in the book, is a place that you and I both know as Pacific Northwest guys. There's a place called Lincoln City in Oregon that's just north of Newport. And I used to go there because my aunt was the receptionist, a hotel, and she had. She lived in a trailer near the beach. And it was like this bliss. I used to go there. And I remember the first time I was trying to fish off the rocks in Lincoln City, Oregon. I was catching nothing. This old guy lives in a shack, is watching me, and he comes up and says, kid, I've been. I've been watching you. You know, today he'd be arrested, but. And. And I said. He said, you're not catching anything, right? I said, no. He says, because you're doing it wrong. You can't catch any fish unless it's a falling tide. That's when the tide is going out very quickly, rushing out between the rocks. And I'm like, well, all the fish are gone, right? He says, no, no, no. You'll see. It's stirring up the plankton. The fish go crazy. It's happening in 45 minutes. He has his fishing pole. We throw our. We throw our lines in, and we're pulling them out by, you know, by the tens. It's unbelievable. And afterward, he's feeling sort of philosophical. He lights up a cigarette on the rocks. I'm 11 or something. And he says, hey, kid, you know, during a falling tide, you can only make one mistake. I said, what's that? He said, not having your line in the water. And I have learned this, that the time between the tides of your life, the falling tide of your life looks like you're losing everything. Get your line in the water, because that's the most fertile period of your life.
- [66:37]
Tom Bilyeu
So what does it mean to have your line in the water?
- [66:39]
Tommy Spaulding
You must try new things. You must be fully alive. You must try everything you possibly can.
- [66:45]
Tom Bilyeu
I need you to define fully alive.
- [66:48]
Tommy Spaulding
To wake up each day and to live that day full of possibility. Not to nurse your wounds, not to waste your time, not to try to do things that you used to do. To be fully alive is to be alive to the new set of experiences that's coming across the transom. That's super important. Because during this time of liminality, by the way, there's a lot of research on this. This is not just an anecdote about this kid fishing in Oregon. There's a lot of research that shows that this time between periods in your life, which there's a guy named Bruce Filer who writes a book about transitions. And he said during these life quakes, if your spouse just left you, that's a fertile period for you to learn new things. If you, you know, you've lost somebody to death. If you've, if you're, if you're going through chemotherapy, for example, this is. And you, and you're very afraid.
- [67:37]
Tom Bilyeu
You've just been through a pandemic.
- [67:39]
Tommy Spaulding
For example. For example, if you, during the pandemic, many people find that despite the fact that they hated it and were insecure and it was horrible that their lives transformed for the good, that in terms of what we're talking about here, the two curves, fluid and crystallized intelligence, that period between the two where you're declining in one and the other's increasing, but you don't know how to get on it or even what it means, that's your most fertile period. That's when things can be absolutely magic. They're not going to be fun. You might not be happy, but that's when magic can happen. So tell me about this then, because this happened to you. You've been in periods between you get out of your successful, but you're miserable. And so you had to change. What was the time between the tides for you, what happened?
- [68:28]
Tom Bilyeu
You have a concept that resonates with me profoundly, which is that suffering is sacred. You have to do it well, though. And I think there's a few key things that you have to recognize. And when you were telling your story about your wife, a. I don't even know who I would be with without my wife. And as I think so for a period, my wife and I now, I would say are in very a traditional gender roles. But in the beginning of our marriage, it was very traditional in a way that was profoundly transformative. So much of the way that she tried to express herself in the world was through me. So she was a stay at home wife, but very shrewd, very sharp and would push me to be better and was beyond supportive when things were not going well for me. And in a very similar vein of like, I don't care if we're poor. I want to see you happy. That's all that matters to me. And so when I was profoundly unhappy, I would come home and I would say, don't ask me about my day. I don't want to think about it. I have to separate myself from that. And so finally it got to the point where she was like, look, this is starting to damage our marriage, and so I'm gonna need you to work less to figure something out, whatever. And so that's when I went in and decided I was gonna quit. And we were gonna move to a small town in Greece and I was gonna write again. She's Greek. And it was. I was gonna do that. Which made me feel alive. And so that was the refrain. I want to feel alive again. I want to feel alive again. And so I knew what that felt like because I had pursued my art so fervently for years, and it made me feel some kind of way. And so I recognized the decline, was able to associate it with, well, you're just trying to get rich. You've made money. It hasn't changed. So there's something here that you fundamentally misunderstood about the world. And my, I guess, liminal thing had been. It had been going on for a while style. Because when I left film school and did not understand how to break into the film industry, that was a devastating period. And I would just lay on the floor and I couldn't afford to furnish my apartment. And I would.
- [70:41]
Jordan Peterson
The.
- [70:42]
Tommy Spaulding
The plenty of room.
- [70:43]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, like, hilarity was not lost on me. I could feel like that cheap nylon carpet that you get in cheap apartments. And it would leave, like, an imprint on my face because I would just lay on the floor. And I'm like, this is so ridiculous. And I started reading about the brain, and I don't remember where that insight came from. Maybe something I picked up in college, I don't know. But I was like, I need to learn about how the brain works. And so it's late 90s, and brain plasticity is being debated, and it wasn't. There wasn't an answer. Some people were like, yes, it's real. Other people like, no, it's not. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to act as if it's true, because that's so much more hopeful. And so I didn't know the Einstein quote back then, but the quote of the most important decision anybody will make is whether they live in a friendly or a hostile universe. And me deciding that I lived in a world where brain plasticity was real was me saying, I live in a friendly universe, right? And so I started trying to get better. And I was teaching at the time, and so I'm teaching film, and I start noticing I can make the students films better if I can make their films better. Because by this point, I believe I have no talent. That's a whole Part of the story. So I believe I'm completely talentless. I thought I was born with talent. I clearly was not. I don't know how to break into the industry. I'm going to teach because those that can do and those that can't, teach. But I'm reading about the brain, brain plasticity. I'm helping the students make their films better. And I have a question in my mind which is, well, if I can make their film films better, why can't I make my own better? I was like, maybe I could. And so that gives me the hope that I need to be fully alive to start approaching things with, hey, maybe I just need to get better and I can work on this. And I had read the Dao de Jing when I was 16, which plants some very profound seeds in my mind, which I will now call a growth mindset. But back then, like, I didn't really understand how to put them to use in my life, But I start putting them to use in my life, I start getting better at filmmaking. And you couple that with my wife being just incredibly encouraging, not afraid to be poor, wanting to see me happy. And. And that was when I went in, and as I said before we started rolling, I went into my partners and I quit. And I said, look, I can't keep pursuing money anymore. And so I don't know. My version of having my. My line in the water was. Was knowing I wanted to feel alive, believing that if I went and did the thing that I wanted to do, that I would get better at it and that if I got good enough, I couldn't be denied. And so the old Steve Martin quote, this would have been like 28, 29.
- [73:21]
Tommy Spaulding
So you're really on your fluid intelligence
- [73:23]
Tom Bilyeu
curve in a big way, but not feeling it. So I have struggled my entire life. Have you seen Amadeus?
- [73:29]
Tommy Spaulding
Sure.
- [73:30]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so Solieri laments to God, why did you make me? Oh, my God, you're a musician. This will resonate with you. Why did you make me just good enough to realize I'll never be as good as Mozart? Why couldn't you have made me like, just another person in the crowd that can appreciate what he does? But you had to make me just good enough that I want to be that good. And I realize I never will be. That's how I have felt my entire life. I've always had friends that were just enough smarter than me, me that I was like, damn, I'm never going to be that smart. And so I always tried to find a different lane. And in the Beginning it was being funny. And so for a long time I wanted to be a stand up comic, but it was all self deprecating because I had low self esteem. I'm just make fun of myself all day, which only reinforced my low self esteem for sure. And so while I was very funny, it didn't feel good. And so ultimately end up rejecting that. But yeah. So at the height of my fluid intelligence, I did not feel intelligent. I felt the exact opposite.
- [74:25]
Tommy Spaulding
And you were getting tons of material success, thus helping you to understand later on as you increase in wisdom, that if you take the instrumentality of money and make it your intrinsic focus, you're destined for misery.
- [74:39]
Tom Bilyeu
No doubt.
- [74:40]
Tommy Spaulding
Now this is an interesting insight that we can take back to ancient times, but St. Thomas Aquinas in 1265 writes his summa Theologica, the seminal text of Western philosophy. You know, forget just the theology, just western philosophy. And in it he talks about this very interesting thing. He says that man, mankind, humankind, we'd say today has four idols. Everybody pursues one or more of four idols. And he calls them the substitutes for God because his supposition is that we all want God, but God is extremely inconvenient. A lot of one sided couple conversations and a ton of rules. So we look for substitutes that have kind of these divine characteristics. The problem is they're 180 degrees off God. They are money, power, pleasure and fame. Fame, he says honor, which has different connotations. You have a son who's a Marine who serves with honor. That's not what we mean. We're talking about admiration, envy of other people, of you, which people want or just protect prestige or maybe fame. You know, some people actually want to be famous, but let's just call it money, power, pleasure and fame. Everybody, you know, I play this game, what's my idol? And I'll ask people not what's your actual idol, but what is not your idol. You know, of these four, money, power, pleasure, fame, what's the one that least attracts you that you could get rid of with total impunity? You don't care. And then we'll, we'll start eliminating and we're going to find your idol is the whole thing. Now the interesting thing about that is that what he says is not that you'll go to hell if you do that. He says you'll be unhappy if you don't recognize the idol. If you don't recognize the idols in your life, the trouble is the limbic system of your brain. Mother Nature, that tyrant Tells you that you'll actually be happy if you get your idol. And so you chase it and you chase it. You can't quite figure out what you're going to do if you get it. Like tom's going to get hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. What are you going to do with that money that you would actually like? And you can't quite figure out. Well, yeah, because if you articulate it, if I say you'll buy a yacht and you're like, that sounds like kind of a hassle to have a yacht. Maybe it sounds good, but not that good.
- [76:50]
Ryan O'Neal
Right.
- [76:52]
Tommy Spaulding
The real reason you want that is because you want admiration, because you want the validation of what it represents of you to you. You want this transference of social comparison you've always done with other people. You want to actually feel the thing that you felt for others about yourself. That's what the idols do. That's the nasty switcheroo. That's the. That's the despotism of this, of mistaking the intrinsic good for the instrumentality. That's why thomas aquinas was so astute in what he was talking about here. So when we play this game and we see what is actually holding us back and you experience this, absolutely, you were chasing the thing, Chasing the thing and chasing the thing, getting more and more and more miserable because you're actually getting closer and closer to your idol and realizing it will not realize one single thing that you needed for your own happiness. It had no intrinsic worth. Look, there's anything about money. By the way, the research on money is very clear that it doesn't actually ever bring happiness. It lowers unhappiness, which are processed in different hemispheres of the brain. Happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. They're not. They're different experiences. And what happens is at low levels, money will lower unhappiness. So when I could finally go to the dentist, I felt better. The trouble is, I don't know how to do the sums inside my brain. I just knew I felt better. And we always mistake lower unhappiness for higher happiness. And so early on, you're like, wow, I went from $15,000 to $20,000 a year, and I felt better. I actually felt better about myself. I was able to eliminate some of these sources of misery. So I'm happier. And so you get into the pattern early on, you wire your brain when you're a young person working your way up the ladder. More money, feel better. That means more happiness. And you realize that going from 253, $300,000 is not doing it that because it's not big enough jump apparently. So you go and you go and you go and you go and you go and you're basically just chasing a lure. It's a real tyranny.
- [78:52]
Tom Bilyeu
No doubt.
- [78:53]
Tommy Spaulding
And that's what you experienced and that's why you were miserable. Right. Because you couldn't get there from here.
- [78:58]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting. Yes. I put different words to it and I'm curious to see what you think about this. So I think about it from an evolutionary standpoint. So we have directives in our brain brain. That there is going to be a sense of dis ease if you don't do certain things. I think that deep and profound unhappiness can come from pursuing the wrong thing. So that you're spending your time doing things that just they rob you of energy instead of giving you energy. But I also think that people end up profoundly unhappy by not doing things that nature wants them to do.
- [79:28]
Jordan Peterson
Right.
- [79:28]
Tom Bilyeu
And I think one of the things that nature wants us to do and so just not doing doing it will be a problem is work really hard to turn your potential into skill set.
- [79:36]
Tommy Spaulding
Yeah.
- [79:37]
Tom Bilyeu
And so if things come easily to you, even though you're on top of the world and everybody else admires you and wants to be you, that there will be a sense of dis ease for you because you're not working hard.
- [79:46]
Tommy Spaulding
It doesn't feel meritorious.
- [79:47]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. Nature has to find a proxy. Right. So nature wants you to have children. So it makes sure that sex is intensely pleasurable. But that's really just a proxy for have kids. So that I find really interesting that nature is working in these weird proxies. So people end up like, you think you're supposed to do one thing, chase money, power, fame, whatever. You're like, why does this suck? But all of those things actually do have utility. And so the thing with money is people are always going to pursue it. The thing with fame is people are always going to pursue it. Why? Because it actually has utility. So money, for instance, is more powerful than people think, not less. But it isn't what you've been told. So it's never what myself and everyone else included is trying to do is feel better about themselves.
- [80:37]
Ryan O'Neal
Right.
- [80:38]
Tom Bilyeu
It won't help with that. It cannot touch your self esteem. And that's like the biggest like mind ever.
- [80:43]
Tommy Spaulding
Your wife won't love you more. Your children won't respect you more when you have more money.
- [80:49]
Tom Bilyeu
Exactly. And more troubling you Won't respect you more.
- [80:52]
Tommy Spaulding
Yes.
- [80:53]
Tom Bilyeu
Which is ultimately the. Because other people will like people treat me differently because I have some micro fame and because I.
- [81:01]
Tommy Spaulding
It's actually troubling too, because when you know somebody is instrumentalizing you, when you know somebody's objectifying you because of this outside characteristic, it makes you profoundly uncomfortable.
- [81:09]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting.
- [81:10]
Tommy Spaulding
People hate that. You know, it's the one thing where we will allow people to objectify us. You're well known, you're successful, and people will be nice to you because of that. And deep down you know that they don't love you.
- [81:23]
Tom Bilyeu
It's not how it plays out in my head.
- [81:24]
Tommy Spaulding
How does it play out in your head?
- [81:25]
Tom Bilyeu
That I have no ability to be vulnerable around them.
- [81:28]
Tommy Spaulding
Oh, I see. Self objective. That's the same part of objectification. When you're objectified, you can't be a full person. There's another interesting thing that might actually apply. You're a corporate creative. You're fundamentally a creative. When you were doing your work, you were thrown off the creative process. Now why is creativity intensely pleasurable? You get. You've read the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the great social psychologist who wrote a book, a very famous book called Flow F L O W Flow. And what it talks about is how minutes, how hours turn to minutes of sheer pleasure. When you're in this flow state, when you're doing something that you can master, it's not too easy, it requires your ability, but you can master it because of your skill and you can get into this groove. Creatives must create. If creatives are not creating, they will be miserable because they can't attain a flow state. It's very possible, Tom, that when you were in this part of your career, you needed to create. What do you wanted to quit and go to Greece to do creation. You were basically craving that. It's like you had no protein in your, your diet for a year or something. It's like, I don't know, I just can't stop thinking about peanut butter. Because you were craving this macronutrient in your psyche and you were never getting a flow state. And if you're denied the flow state that uniquely comes to you through creativity, you're going to be practically suicidal.
- [82:50]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, it was definitely a rough period. That's interesting. I've never thought about it as being intrinsically a reflection of the pleasurability of flow. You might be right. It's just. I feel. I feel alive. That is the right word. I feel alive. When I'm creating, I am never happier than when I'm creating.
- [83:08]
Tommy Spaulding
It's amazing. People who are fundamentally creatives look, same thing. You know, when I retired as a CEO and I came back to writing, speaking and teaching, I'm a new man. I'm a new man for the past three years. It's extraordinary.
- [83:20]
Tom Bilyeu
You said something a while ago. I didn't want to interrupt you, but I want to go back back to it now. You said you rediscovered yourself.
- [83:25]
Tommy Spaulding
Yeah.
- [83:25]
Tom Bilyeu
What does that mean? Like, you need a sense of identity. Is that a core part of this? Like is when you say you rediscovered, is it a self narrative?
- [83:33]
Tommy Spaulding
It's you know, who you deeply are as a person. You're acquainted with yourself. You're acquainted with your true self. And just as with people who are around you, you can, you can create an identity that's actually not authentic. You can create an identity yourself that's not authentic. You can be giving yourself a self narrative that's not true to actually who you are as a person.
- [83:55]
Tom Bilyeu
What does it mean, who you are, what you're good at, what you love?
- [83:58]
Tommy Spaulding
It, generally speaking, has to do with being in the zone of what you actually love to do and what you appreciate most in your life. When you're in line with your own values, when you're living according to your own values. So Jung would have put it this way. Carl Jung, his definition of his understanding of happiness was that you need to understand your own value. Values. What you value, what you think is proper and correct and moral. And if you know what that is and can articulate it and live according to that, you will be happy.
- [84:24]
Ryan O'Neal
If you agree with that.
- [84:25]
Tommy Spaulding
I think it's. Actually, there's a lot of truth to that because, you know, you have to figure out what you think, what your model of the world actually is, what you think truth is. And then living in accord with your own values, with your own integrity is really critically important. Because when people live outside that groove, they're never in equilibrium. They're just never. The problem is that they're not comfortable. They're not comfortable in their own skin. And I've noticed this. I was working. It was good being the president of a think tank. I was lucky to be president of think tank. I believed in the work, but it wasn't who I was. And so I was kind of out of my groove for ten years, ten and a half years. And when I started going, when I went back to writing and speaking and teaching and doing creative work, I said, is that weird?
- [85:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Always. Who you were. Or was that because you switched into creative?
- [85:12]
Tommy Spaulding
I was always a creator. You know, as a kid, I was painting and writing and composing music, and I just always wanted to be. I was. Creativity is the most important thing in my life. Or curiosity and creativity are the. Or the most important thing that I can not. The most important thing in my life. The most important thing that I can do. And when I'm actually happiest and when I was managing a large workforce, managing a lot of creatives to their best selves, I mean, it was. They had certainly creative moments to it, to be sure, but it wasn't comfortable to me. And when I. My second curve, which was much more crystallized. Intelligence is a lot. Also a lot more creative. So I was kind of out of equilibrium for a long time during that period as well, which compounds the problem of my declining fluid intelligence also not being in a creative role. But it's just so much better. I mean, I. I teach at a great university, which I love. I write for a magazine every week about things that I'm really interested in. I get to talk to you about it. This is, well, be's working.
- [86:11]
Tom Bilyeu
So true. For some reason, I was just thinking today, like, I was pacing, listening to you, and I was like, I'm technically working right now.
- [86:20]
Tommy Spaulding
Weird.
- [86:20]
Tom Bilyeu
I was like, this is cruel.
- [86:22]
Tommy Spaulding
It is super cool. And, you know, there are people that I've met. It's interesting. You know, I talked to lawyers who don't feel like they're working. I talk to a guy who's putting in cabinets in my house and. And he's super into putting in cabinets. He loves making cabinets. He was talking about all the details and he's so proud of his work. And I say, do you, do you, do you like your work? And he said, it doesn't feel like work. You know, I went on a fishing expedition, deep sea fishing expedition, with my son Carlos. He loves to fish. We go fishing. And the guy says, every morning I wake up and he says, today I'm going fishing. And so this is what we all need to find. I mean, we need to each person because we have the blessing of living in an economy where you can do a lot of different things. The problem is that people chase these extrinsic lures, the money, power, pleasure and fame. And they get out of the groove of what they're supposed to do, and then they wonder why they're unhappy.
- [87:22]
Tom Bilyeu
What are some habits that I can easily incorporate into my daily life to accomplish fulfillment? All right, here's the important Thing to understand about fulfillment is that it is a process, and there is a formula. What I call the fulfillment formula, the aptly named and the way that it works is this. First, I want you to understand that there are these imperatives in your brain given to you by evolution, and you are going to be emotionally rewarded for doing certain things and emotionally punished for not doing other things. And that's where fulfillment comes in. When you put yourself in an evolutionary context, you're going to understand why the formula is what the formula is. So I'll quickly give you the formula and then explain it in context. So the formula goes like this. You're going to work really hard to gain a set of skills that allow you to serve not only yourself, but other people. Okay? Now, why is that the formula? So, first of all, it's very important to understand that growing up on the plains of the savannah, you would have had to work really hard to stay alive to feed your family. So you had to face tremendous danger, massive obstacles. And so nature only has two ways to get you moving, and that is pleasure and pain. Punishment, reward. So when it wants behavior, it's going to reward that by making it feel amazing. And if it doesn't want behavior, then it's going to make sure that if you're engaging in it, it sucks. And if it wants you to do something and you don't do it, that will also suck. So this is where pleasure and pain come in and where you have to really understand why this cycle is so deeply embedded in your brain. So, because from an evolutionary standpoint, working hard was necessary for survival, then working hard. Working hard has to feel good. And conversely, if you're not working hard, then you're going to feel a deep sense of unease. So that's why I say that the first step in the fulfillment formula is that you're going to have to work really hard to gain a set of skills. Now, the reason that you're working hard is because if you don't work hard, even now in a modern context, where you can probably get away without putting that much time and effort into something, the reason that fulfillment is going to demand it is because from an evolutionary standpoint, you needed to have that embedded in your brain, the directive to work hard to accomplish these things. So working hard really is its own reward. Dad. Something that he used to tell me all the time when I was a kid, and he's absolutely right. It is truly ingrained in us, even though we sometimes fight and don't want to do it, and we also have the impulse to chill and lay on the couch. But if you're not working hard, you will feel a deep sense of unease. All right, so we're going to work hard to gain a set of skills. Now, the set of skills is really about serving the group. So we know that humans are a creature that leverages culture. So so many other animals are hardwired. And so a horse, when it's born, 20 minutes later, it's doing all the things that a horse can do. But humans are different than that. So we take this long period of gestation followed by this long infancy. And in all of that, we are going through these different phases of development. And around the ages of 11 to 15, you go into this drinking deeply from the culture moment, where it's not just about your environment anymore, it's about the actual culture and taking in that information. So you're going to gain a set of skills that matter to you and matter to the group. Okay? And that's the part of culture. So you're working really hard to gain the set of skills that matter to you and the group. Something that's exciting to you, you just enjoy doing it. That's very important for fulfillment, and then it allows you to serve not only yourself, but the group. Because we're a social creature, we, of course need to be rewarded for doing things for the group, and we're going to be punished for not doing things for the group in our own minds. Okay? That's very important. If you're not contributing to the group, you will have this sense of meaninglessness. And this is where meaning and purpose come in. I'm doing something not just for myself, but for other people. It is ingrained in your mind to do that. Okay? So you get this set of skills. Now, this is where passion comes in. You want to be developing a set of skills that you're deeply passionate about. But understand passion also is a process. So you start with something you find interesting, you engage with it. If the more you engage with it, the more fascinating it becomes, then we're going to go down the process of gaining actual mastery, doing the boring, difficult, repetitive tasks required to truly master that thing in a way that the group values. Now, when you do that, you get into a passion feedback loop. Even though it is boring and difficult at times. As you get better at the saying that matters to the group, the group gives you feedback. And that feedback, when it's positive, feels wonderful. Thank you for whatever your contribution is. Oh, my gosh, it really matters. It's amazing. Thank you. So much, which makes you want to do more, which you know to get that feedback more, you're going to need to go get better at that thing. And that's how you get people in these virtuous cycles. You're working really hard to gain a set of skills that gets the group excited about your contributions, which make you feel good about yourself, which make you want to get even, even better at that thing so that you can contribute even more to the group. And that is fulfillment. There's all this meaning and purpose behind it. You're doing it to serve other people. It's bigger than yourself. And now you get the neurochemical cocktail that you've been looking for by doing that formula. That's fulfillment. Fail to optimize for fulfillment at your own peril. All right, next question. Can you shed some light on how to be self still in times of chaos and focus on working towards fulfillment? First of all, I want to acknowledge that chaos can be very difficult to deal with and it requires a lot of emotional management. And you've got to be able to do many things. Quite frankly, it is going to be a whole grab bag of tricks, my friends, for you to get through and get on the other side of that chaos. All right, first things first. Meditation is going to be huge.
- [93:31]
Jordan Peterson
Okay?
- [93:32]
Tom Bilyeu
Just at a physiological level, you've got to get that background radiation down to zero. Now, this can be very difficult when you're in the middle of something and you really feel like you're fighting for your life. But you need to make time for that. This is a physiological process. By getting into that calm and creative state, you're going to find answers that you otherwise wouldn't see. So we need to get out of that panic mode and into calm, creative problem solving. Now remember, action cures all. So we've got this fulfillment thing that we're chasing. We've got the fulfillment formula. We know exactly what we need to do. We're in the middle of the chaos and the thing that's going to solve for that meditation. So we're thinking calmly and clearly, but also having a plan of attack and then going after it. So there's been really cool studies done by Andrew Huberman and other people about how lateral eye movement can actually pull you out of that stressed and anxious state. Because what it's doing is it's mimicking you moving forward and moving forward on these evolutionary time frames. We've been rewarded for that because it means that you're confronting your problem, you're working hard, you're Dealing with the saber toothed tiger, the warring tribe, the just need to go out and hunt whatever, you're dealing with it. And since nature only has pleasure and pain, if you're dealing with it, nature's going to make sure to give you some pleasure on that. And conversely, if you're trying to hide from it, that's not going to feel great and you're going to really spiral. It is crazy to me how taking action and getting into problem solving mode immediately shifts me out of anxiety. It is absolutely profound. So that's going to be a big part of this. And when you're doing that in the context of the fulfillment formula, now you know that this is going to be something you're working really hard to gain. That set of skills that serve not only yourself, but other people. So you thinking about other people, you're thinking about service. And that has a way of really helping you get through the chaos because it's giving you the emotional energy to have the stamina to fight through, to get to the other side. And as I think it was Churchill that said, if you're going through hell, keep going, but keep going armed with meaning and purpose, around how you're contributing to the group, around getting these skills around, around being in problem solving mode and around taking action because that is going to be the thing that cures all. And then don't forget sleep, hygiene, very important. Meditation important, keep your diet right, don't tell yourself a negative story, don't allow yourself to loop and defeat. Find people that can elevate you. Find people that will in a very real skills based way, help you see the path forward and help you hold on to the only belief that matters that you can figure this out. What are some action steps I can take right away to train my mind to not go after easy pleasures and happiness and instead seek the gratification that comes from fulfillment. All right, the great news is all you have to do is recognize the truth of the human condition. And the truth of the human condition is that chasing momentary happiness won't fulfill you. That's literally what I wanted to say. And I'm not because we're talking about fulfillment. I won't use a just recursive loop, but that really is true. All of that stuff is so transient. What makes fulfillment interesting is that it is this far more stabilizing neurochemical state. So your brain is constantly checking in with you, making sure on a subconscious level that you're doing the things that you need to do to be of service to the Group to be of service to yourself, to make sure that you're taking care of yourself and your family and your loved ones and your tribe.
- [97:17]
Ryan O'Neal
Okay?
- [97:18]
Tom Bilyeu
So there's this subconscious record keeping going on and that's exactly what's happening. That's why you sometimes will feel the unease in your body before consciously you know what's going on and you feel it. Ah, there's something off. You need to take the time to identify what it is to be able to articulate it in a single nice crispy sentence so you can figure out exactly what it is that you need to do to move forward. Okay. Now, once you understand that that is just the nature of the game, that going after these momentary things will be exactly that. It's going to be momentary, it's going to fade. You're going to have a sense of unease. You're not going to be in the shape that you want emotionally. Once I know, oh, going down that road is not going to leave me in the emotional state that I want to be in, then it's very easy to go. Well, this one might be a little bit more difficult, it might take more sustained effort, but it yields these tremendous results. So the example that I always give is eating junk food. I love junk food and truly love it, by the way. It gives me a drug like high. It is so fun to eat sugary foods. The problem is that especially as I get older, it hurts. Literally after the fact, my joints will hurt, I won't sleep as well. I wake up the next day and it's just like I have like a slight hangover. That's literally what it feels like. And because I know that that's the outcome, it's like, well, on the times where I don't mind, and it's like, well, I'm going to enjoy this drug like thing for a minute. I'll sort of walk a fine line, have some fun here, suffer a little tomorrow. But on balance, maybe I come out a little bit ahead on the happiness. But if I try to do it two days in a row, forget it, three days in a row, it really starts to be like a real problem. So even over the holidays now, when I let myself off of the hook with all of my normal disciplines and all of that, even then now I keep myself in check just because I don't like the way that it feels. So once you understand, oh, I can do this thing over here and feel really good or I can do this thing over here, it's very momentary, it's very transient. It doesn't last. I kind of, you know, I'm not where I want to be, and I begin to ask myself questions like, what am I doing with my life? So just knowing that, to me, fulfillment is much longer in duration. It's much more resilient. I can be fulfilled even when things are hard, even when things aren't going my way, even when it's difficult. In fact, the fulfillment I get from contributing to the group is the very thing that inoculates me from the hard times. Being able to knock me all the way down. Because on those moments where you're just beleaguered and you're getting it from all sides and it just seems like everything is crashing on you at once. In those moments, you're going to cling to what you're doing to help other people, and nature will ensure that that is going to make you feel way, way better.
- [100:10]
Jordan Peterson
All right.
- [100:10]
Tom Bilyeu
How do you become fulfillment driven versus achievement driven when everywhere around you see people and society running for the ladder? Okay, one, I want to acknowledge the power of success. Success is amazing. And winning at the game in a way that's recognized by your peers is always going to feel good. So understand that you don't have to be, you know, Mother Teresa in order to be worthwhile and to love yourself. It's okay to want some success. And honestly, if we really look at Mother Teresa, I'm betting that to her it really mattered to succeed in a way that was deeply meaningful. And she certainly seemed to be trying to reach as many people as humanly possible. And so if we can look at someone like that and say, well, that was a worthwhile endeavor, then what we're really saying is, as long as the way in which you're contributing is meaningful, then that's like the double whammy of, you should absolutely feel good about that. So we've got two things. One, it's okay to want to be successful. I want to be successful even more successful than I've been. I want to scale and touch just an untold number of lives. And I don't feel badly about that. I love that it makes me want to go out and help more people. Now, I don't think that everybody should pursue scale in the way that I pursue scale. It certainly has its own complications. But if you know that about yourself and you want to play on that level and you're willing to pursue it, knowing you may never get there.
- [101:46]
Jordan Peterson
Right.
- [101:46]
Tom Bilyeu
I may never get where I want to go, but I love striving to play at that scale. So when you are looking at it from that perspective, it's not necessarily a bad thing. It becomes toxic when you're aiming yourself at something that isn't helping you or it's only helping you and it isn't helping other people. And that again, just going back to this idea of you're a social creature with evolutionary imperatives to help contribute to the group. And when you're not doing that, you will automatically feel a sense of unease that there's something missing. So I say do both. Very cool to pursue like the big grand rewards, whatever it is that you want, but make sure that you're doing that in the context of something that serves other people as well. If you're doing that and trying to pursue fulfillment at the grandest level, that makes sense for you and your personality, I say go for it. So you don't need to artificially downplay yourself or try to be small, like go crazy, be bombastic, be big, do your thing, go as hard as you want. Just make sure that it's in service of something that is honorable.
- [102:59]
Jordan Peterson
That's it.
- [103:00]
Tom Bilyeu
All right. What are ways I can recognize when I am fulfilled? Especially when I am still in the middle of my journey? Alright, so one, this is about taking time to catalog the things we're grateful for. Just really stopping to either journal or think through. What is it that I'm doing? What's my goal? How am I attempting to contribute to the group? Am I actually contributing to the group? And then you can use David Goggins idea of the cookie jar where it's like you remember the times where you meaningfully impacted somebody. You did something, you got amazing feedback, it really helped somebody out, it was aligned with, you know, what your goal is. Then those are the things that you put into that memory bank and you pull on those when things are getting hard and you remember, yo, I did this thing, I can do more things, I can push harder, go farther, help more people, whatever the case may be. And so as you think about that and you recognize you're not where you want to be yet, but you're focusing on the ways in which you've already contributed, that's going to give you the energy that you need to keep pushing through. And ultimately you have to be honest with yourself about whether or not you are fulfilled at this moment. Because it isn't something that you're going to be able to talk yourself into. Because maybe you're not, maybe you're not feeling your contributions, maybe you're not doing things in a way that's Joyful. I talk about goals need to be two things, exciting and honorable. Okay, so if honorable is that it helps not only yourself, but other people, don't forget about the exciting part. You've got to be just amped up. You got to be doing something that you want to do. For instance, is it possible that I could help more people by doing something other than building Impact Theory? It's entirely possible. But Impact Theory is what I love doing on a daily basis. I love doing content like this. I love the people that I get to meet, the people that I get to interview. I love the idea of building film and TV and NFTs. Like, all of that stuff for me is absolutely thrilling. I love it. Maybe I shouldn't, but I love it. And because it's so exciting for me, I have handcrafted my life to make the biggest contribution to the tribe, if you will, that I can, but doing things that I love and want to be the best in the world at. So if you're not doing that, then all of this might feel empty, or you might be serving the group in a way that's sort of by rote instead of. And this is a great example. I'm almost certain this was Toyota. So Toyota was trying to encourage their employees to do charity work, and they found that people were going to soup kitchens and helping feed the homeless and was nice, but the people at Toyota felt like they weren't really leveraging their unique skill set. And this is why I say fulfillment is about working really hard on a set of skills that matter to you and allow you to serve the group. So you go down this, that passion loop of gaining true mastery of something that gets you positive feedback. So what Toyota's employees ended up doing was going and making the soup kitchen more efficient so that they could feed more hungry people faster. And that made them feel extraordinarily good. So figuring out why it is exactly that it's coming up for you that you might not be feeling fulfilled. So one, you might not be doing the right things. So making sure that you're following the fulfillment formula. And then two, making sure that you have that meaning and purpose. You know why you're doing what you're doing. You feel connected to the people that you're serving. It's a big deal. At Impact Theory, every team meeting, we go through and read something that somebody from the community has written explaining how Impact Theory has touched their lives. It's incredibly important to us to reground ourselves around the people that we're actually serving. So that can be an important thing to just take that time. What are you doing? That is helping. That's moving the needle. You know, circle around it, write it down. Like, really focus on that thing and internalize it. And that should help. All right, everybody. Fulfillment is one of the most important things. I'm telling you. The punchline of life, the very thing that you were trying to optimize for is, is very simply fulfillment done in a joyful manner. Fulfillment and joy. Fulfillment and joy. That really is the key. It isn't the grand success. So there's nothing wrong with chasing that. It isn't accolades, it isn't money, it isn't fame. It's none of those things. It is truly working really hard to gain a set of skills that you care about that allow you to serve not only yourself, but. But other people towards an end that excites you.
- [107:45]
Ryan O'Neal
Well, I think there's a through line of change as a thing that's a constant in our lives. There's change that we choose. We've become fed up with the status quo or normal, being okay with being okay. We decide that we're going to finally create the courageous first steps in making that change. A thing that gets us closer to who we're meant to. To be, or the version of what becoming looks like for us. And then there's the change that chooses us, in that we think we have some control. That illusion is a thing that we can connect to until we wake up one day and there's a diagnosis, there's a job that no longer exists, a relationship that ends. And in a world where I had as the pillar, one of the biggest pillars of my identity, husband to Rachel, the change choosing me in this, the end of our marriage was something that I now didn't know who I was. In the absence of not being who I'd been. And in a world where we were also working together, that identity of what I did and what I thought I'd do for the rest of my life was something that in a single swoop was pulled out and now required that I, I, in having been handed this blank piece of paper, go through the work of trying to fill out what next looked like. And I say in the book, and I've said it plenty of times, it's both parts exhilarating and terrifying. At the beginning, it's way more terrifying than it is exhilarating. But that's part of what courage ends up being, a required ingredient for turning the terrifying into the exhilarating. Because when you realize other There is no control. There's only the way that we respond to the circumstances that life presents or the way that we, in choosing change, manufacture new events or a new road, a new map that we ultimately end up sailing off of that still, because it ends up being different than something we've previously been familiar with or gotten the hang of or have comfort with, requires courage to step into it.
- [109:58]
Tom Bilyeu
The whole idea of having to lose things first I find really interesting. And I don't know if I remember when Fight Club came out and the way that it felt and the sort of, I don't know, it made me feel more attached to it. But I lived in the building that he. In the beginning, he showcases and he describes the building. I don't know if he intentionally took it from the brochure, but it's so specific to how they marketed that building that my guess is that he did. And so he's describing a building I actually lived in. And, like, all the ways about how modernity has sort of trapped us in this thing. And then he blows it up. And so there was this sense of, I don't know, it was a real cultural moment. And you going through a divorce so publicly has that same kind of interesting ring of like. And now let me show you the process of building up. So if Fight Club takes a far darker look at, you know, that the process of creative destruction, your life and the book specifically, is this really interesting take on the beautiful side of creative or the creative opportunities that come from destruction.
- [111:06]
Ryan O'Neal
Yeah.
- [111:07]
Tom Bilyeu
Walk me through. Like, as things are falling down around you, I'm sure your first instinct is to try to hold it together. When did you first get the sense of maybe actually letting this fall down is the right place to start?
- [111:22]
Ryan O'Neal
It took a while, to be honest, because I initially was very much in this, well, let's do the work to fix it. Can we? Is there some way that we can keep this thing that has been put on the table from happening? And it was evident very early on that, oh, this is a decision that has been made. There is no negotiating, as it were. And acceptance was a thing that took time for me. And the reality was, in part, one of the first casualties in my life was my imagination, because I, in this thing that I didn't think could happen, having happened, the vision that I'd had for so long of what the rest of my life would look like and who I'd be with and where we'd live and the way that we do work, it being gone, made my ability to see what is not even five years from now. What is a year from now. I just, I had a compromised imagination. It was gone.
- [112:22]
Tom Bilyeu
And you had a sense of that loss?
- [112:25]
Ryan O'Neal
Oh, yeah. No, I was acutely aware of this inability for me to forecast anything beyond what was now a survival, survival mode of sorts, of I just got to get through tomorrow. Like I was in deep grief, just deep grief. And in that sadness of now letting go of what I'd previously thought things might look like. I was trying to find something that I might connect to that would allow me to recultivate or re spark that imagination. And the place I had to start, to be honest, was really getting intimate with my fear because most of why my imagination had been lost was because there was so much fear around trying to figure out something that I'd never contemplated.
- [113:13]
Tom Bilyeu
So that becomes like a screaming voice in your head that stops you from seeing things.
- [113:17]
Ryan O'Neal
Yeah, well, I mean, I ended up having this conversation with fear where I was trying to understand, understand what is it? What are the things that are inside.
- [113:26]
Tom Bilyeu
The reason you feel the need to have this conversation is it's ever present and you don't like it.
- [113:30]
Ryan O'Neal
It's ever present and it is 100% inhibitor from me being able to see anything, hope filled. It's. It's hard for me to see the exhilarating part of the choose your own adventure narrative that I am suggesting I believe exists, but I can't connect to.
- [113:49]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, so sit me down in that moment. So I've known you before divorce, through divorce, after divorce, and there's no doubt that we all sort of present things to the world. But you, from the outside, you handled it extraordinarily well. And that doesn't mean that you didn't process grief and cry and all that. But it's really interesting. I think having read the book, Look, I'm going to step back. You are intriguing to me because you don't see yourself the way that I see you. And while there's no doubt that you know yourself better than I know you, the thing that you've had to like fight and claw to earn your own respect around is from the outside. So self evidently impressive about you. So in the book, you're like, I mean, built through courage. You got to step outside your comfort zone. But I'm the guy that always gets trapped by my comfort zone. No, you're not. You're the guy that for whatever reason is constantly able to reinvent, reinvent, reinvent. When I hear you describe what you did in the corporate world, how Many times you took different jobs and just said yes before you knew what was going on. But every time it's hard for you. Which makes you, in my opinion, the right person to write the user's manual on how to get through this. So now as we sit down with you in that fear, I want to know how. Because most people, they're lost in that forever. I've known plenty of people that get divorced and 25 years later they're still stewing in that same space they were two months after the divorce. You've already made some pretty extraordinary leaps, begun to put things back together. But if you sit me down in that moment of fear where you can't see anything, hopeful filled, what's the first thing that you grab ahold of that allows you to begin to construct a context for how to move forward?
- [115:43]
Ryan O'Neal
The first thing was truly getting to a place of acceptance, right? Like I was in denial that this was even happening. It felt like I was in the upside down. That like the Matrix is a thing now. Like, is this the simulation? I've in some ways at the beginning convinced myself that there was the possibility that this wasn't even real.
- [116:03]
Tom Bilyeu
Really?
- [116:03]
Ryan O'Neal
Oh yeah, because it just, it didn't make sense. And then I got to a place of, no, no, no, this is real. You have the responsibility to parent these four kids. You have the responsibility to show up for your life. How are you going to do it? And the, the question I started asking was what did I need to just become the version of who I'd hoped to be 90 days from now, right? Like the first thing I had to do was really shrink the window of my forward looking vision casting where I'd been a person doing five and 10 years. Here's where I'm going to be. And I could just, like a movie playing in my head, describe what it was going to look like I needed to understand. What did I need to do today to get myself just 90 days into the future? And for me, it ended up going through the question of health. How might I, in the five dimensions that I've identified as being important for me in health, Mental, emotional, spiritual, relational and physical health, how might I have two or three things for each of those dimensions of health every day that might become part of my routine and part of, part of what ends up being my set of habits that will allow me to create just enough inertia from this now standing still, I describe a sailboat in the book that is waiting for wind, right? Like, okay, I got to at least build the Sail. I got to put it up so that when the wind starts to come, I'm actually prepared to move forward. And so for me, it was all right, what do I need in my mental health? I needed to see professional freaking help on the regular. I mean, I was talking to a therapist a couple times a week because I didn't understand why I was thinking what I was thinking, why I was feeling what I was feeling. And that interaction created a little bit of a difference.
- [117:57]
Tom Bilyeu
You didn't understand it or it was erratic one minute, I can make it the next minute. No, I'm never going to.
- [118:03]
Ryan O'Neal
Both. Both. I didn't understand the way that the voice in my head was being so critical of not having had this thing that was so important work out. I'm just an achiever by nature. I've had success in career. I've had success in a whole host of things. And yet I couldn't, at the time see that my marriage not working out wasn't a success. My marriage was a success. It just was the end of my marriage in what had been or the end of our relationship and what had been as we've now transitioned into something new. But at the beginning, I saw it as a failure that I somehow had failed. And I was really, as I'm sitting with my therapist or having a conversation through podcasts or books with myself, trying to understand what could you have done differently or what are you meant to learn from this? And some of that work. Yep. Would allow me just a little breadcrumb. Now I'm taking one step closer to an answer that over what now is almost two years worth of time, had me really come to appreciate I am who I have become, not in spite of what happened, but because of what happened. And that as much as I had this bold declaration at the end of 2019, 2020 is going to be my best year ever. I have, like, publicly declared that 45 was the year of my life, that I was waiting for this best year to happen. And what I couldn't appreciate then that I see so clearly now is that I was not ever going to be the person who could dictate the conditions that would bring my best forward. Right. And so, yeah, if in some ways, I brought on some of what ends up happening in 2020, I apologize for the pandemic and anything else I may have been responsible for. I don't think that for real, but I also. Right. Like, I. I prayed that certain things that happened would never have happened, and I was doing so at the expense of how that cause and effect relationship produced the best. I wouldn't have been brought to my knees in a way that brought me closer to my spiritual walk. I wouldn't have had the way that this divorce created closeness with my kids, the kind of relationship that comes out of it. I wouldn't have spent the kind of time in physical transformation. Really?
- [120:24]
Tommy Spaulding
What?
- [120:24]
Tom Bilyeu
Your physical transformation is crazy.
- [120:26]
Ryan O'Neal
Well, crazy, no, thank you. But like it is, you know, moving my body and pushing myself to do things physically has been an exercise in showing myself that I can do things that go beyond what I believed myself to be capable of so that I could take that experience in the physical realm and believe it in the mental and emotional realm. Oh, you can also handle things mentally, you can handle things emotionally that go wildly beyond what you believed yourself to be capable of because you now have proof, you have evidence in this other part of your life.
- [120:57]
Tom Bilyeu
Dude, body transformation is the most underutilized mental transformation tool ever. And the number of people that I've seen, whether it's in business, whether it's in something like a divorce or your career, whatever, where when you show yourself that you can set an intention, go and lift a progress progressively heavier weight and your body actually changes, you look different, you feel different, and you can actually pick up heavier things like that, there's something that goes on of like, oh, what if the same thing is happening in my mind? You can't see it in such a tangible way, but when you go through a physical transformation like that, it really does leave you with something truly profound.
- [121:38]
Ryan O'Neal
Yeah, there is something too. I describe myself as a recovering, fixed mindset person. And yet the attribution of growth in a gym or inside of the physical realm was never anything that I would have indicted myself for not being good because I was not already someone who could lift a certain amount of weight. But the ability to connect dots and see, oh yeah, you can continue to grow in the space. You can grow whether it's muscle or endurance or stamina recovery, all these things have been been things that have changed the way that I think about growth in every aspect of my life, not just the physical realm, which is part of why it's so powerful.
- [122:15]
Tom Bilyeu
Right? So things are crumbling down around you. We're in grief, we can no longer attach to hope. And we realize, okay, I have these five pillars in my life. And in the book, you have a really great quote that I think is what all this is hanging on, which is the antidote to fear is a plan. And I thought that was brilliant. It's absolutely True, the same idea. I sum up by saying that action cures all. If I'm super anxious about something, all I need to do is start dealing with the problem head on. Like just go start actually executing against it. Because it does that same thing. It puts your brain in a problem solving mode instead of just looping over that it is a problem. All right, so we're there. We recognize that the antidote to all of this is going to be getting a plan. We chunk our life up into pieces and we start putting goals in each of those areas. The cool thing about the Tyler Durden quote that you have in the book is that it has this open ended question of if you can now do anything, what's the anything you want to do? So how did you begin to put that together? The whole vision that you'd had for 45 years is gone. What do you start to piece together and how do you do it?
- [123:32]
Ryan O'Neal
So for me, there were two very, very big things that were somewhat of departure from who I'd been as a more pragmatic, practical person. I began, even though your introduction of me having been someone who's taken more chances or put myself out of my comfort zone is the greatest compliment in something I probably don't see enough in myself. I have been in a season of yes, like just radical yes. So that if opportunity presents itself for me to do something that I have not previously done that might publicly embarrass me, that I will fail wildly and spectacularly at, for the opportunity to fail wildly and spectacularly at, I have just said yes.
- [124:14]
Tommy Spaulding
Why?
- [124:14]
Tom Bilyeu
When did that become a strategy?
- [124:17]
Ryan O'Neal
In part because of what was the byproduct of the learning of now that I can do anything in being somewhat lost from who I am now that I'm not who I was. I had to go on something of a fact finding mission to rediscover who I'm going to be. And so, I mean, one of the questions that was a provocateur of the conversation with around divorce was a simple what do you like to do in your spare time? Which I should be able to answer. And yet there were some codependent things that existed in our relationship. There was some. There was some stuff that kept me from being as connected to myself. And so the discovery of where passion might exist in my life or where curiosity might exist in my life became, well, there's only one way that I'm actually going to get to the bottom of it, and that's by just saying yes to a bunch of stuff I'm going to probably eliminate or disqualify a bunch of things that I am definitely not curious about or definitely don't have passion for. But I have to start by saying yes. So that was the first big thing really fast.
- [125:34]
Tom Bilyeu
I want to tie that to something you say in the book that. That I thought was really profound. So you talk about. You have to be very careful about how you frame something. And I forget the exact example you use in the book, but you're like, let me describe the same thing two different ways. Both are true, but one is like, you failed at this thing, and that set you back at work or whatever. But also this is also true from that thing, you learned this, and that's what ended up giving you the promotion. And it's like, which one of those you want to focus on and tell yourself is really going to determine. Determine your future? Tony Robbins has a really great quote where he says, the quality of your questions will determine the quality of your life. And was there a conscious thing around that? Like, I need to ask a different question around, Okay, I can look at this as everything has fallen apart, or I can look at this as this is now my opportunity to change who I am in a way that I find exciting.
- [126:30]
Ryan O'Neal
It's interesting because it actually ties to what my second thing was going to be, which was this conceit, this belief that good would come from it, which is hard to manufacture at the beginning when you're sitting at the bottom of
- [126:42]
Tom Bilyeu
a ditch of, were you leaning on faith on that, or was there something else that triggered that?
- [126:46]
Ryan O'Neal
Faith, yes, but not just, like, religious faith, but this was, like, belief that the things that I would need in the journey would present themselves along the way.
- [126:58]
Tom Bilyeu
Because that's just how life works.
- [127:00]
Ryan O'Neal
Because I believe that if you look for things, you find them. And I was at a place where I was desperate to find the evidence that good could still come from this. And so I went on the hunt for it. And when I. Even as I'm, you know, Cal Ripken's streak of crying on consecutive days in, like, you know, like, it was hard.
- [127:25]
Tom Bilyeu
Only old people get that reference. Great reference.
- [127:28]
Ryan O'Neal
You know, Like, I. I did have plenty of days where just getting out of bed felt like the win. And yet I'd still start my day with gratitude. Like, finding the good that was already present despite the conditions that I was in was a way to just hack a little bit of how I might, because of that gratitude, practice, go on the hunt for things to be grateful for. And so some of it was Just this conceit of good things are going to come out of this. You will become something because of the post traumatic growth that can come out of the hardest thing that you've ever experienced. And it's of course, way easier to say that and say, see that today than it was in real time. But I just had a little thing here, a little thing there. A text from a pastor that came every day for the first two months of the experience. Eleven really profound words. What small piece of sadness can I hold for you today? Right? He wasn't trying to diminish the pain of grief. He wasn't trying to even do anything more than just offer some solidarity and some empathy for the fact that this is a shared experience kind of thing. I'll walk alongside you while you do it. But the fact that that showed up every day was just a reminder, some evidence of the things you need are going to show up when you need them along this journey. I'm out running and a new neighbor has happened to move in down the street. I had my head down. I was very emotional that day. I was not interested. Like, I got on the plane kind of thing. I don't want to talk to you in the seat next to me. And yet I ran past him. I end up turning around to come back and introduce myself. And they ended up becoming part therapist, part comedy buddy, part guy who was showing up to barbecue every day when I was struggling to remind myself to eat. And they showed up right when I needed them. And so, like, what made you turn around? I. To be honest, I don't know. I mean, like, it felt. Now it feels more like a miracle. Like, oh, wow. I had no concept of what I was turning around for. I'm not, like, close necessarily to my neighbors generally. I live in the middle of nowhere, Texas, on a, you know, parcel of land where I can't see who's on either side of my house. And yet on that day, for whatever reason, that was like, that was the instinct, that was the tug. There's a lot, A lot of what I end up writing in the book is about trusting the voice. Trusting, you know, whether it's Glennon Doyle's definition of knowing or voice of God or intuition or gut. But, like, there have been plenty of times in these last two years where there was something that was tugging and that was something, an intuition that had a sense of what was necessary for me to do that I didn't consciously have an appreciation for. And now that that voice was presenting itself, it was like, okay, I'M gonna try this. I'm gonna say yes to this, even though I don't know why.
- [130:35]
Tom Bilyeu
You've got one voice, so telling you you're a loser, everything is gone and lost. And another voice telling you to do something that ends up being good for you. How do you differentiate?
- [130:45]
Ryan O'Neal
Well, I mean, I first have to give credit to a therapist that does work in self. Right. I, in having lost identity, attempt to find someone who might help me find who I am. And I did this work inside of something called internal family systems, where I am self, my voice inside of my head, or my emotions are parts. And the way that I am able to then develop a relationship between self and these parts allows me to not be them. So the first part with the voice is, all right, you got a voice in your head. Some of it's true, some of it's bullshit. Okay, how do you differentiate? Well, first you have to say, I'm not the voice. That voice that's speaking is not me. I am the witness to the voice in a very untethered soul, Michael Singer kind of way. I am not the voice. I'm watching the voice. I'm listening to the voice. It's my job then as the listener to do the investigative work of understanding which of the things that are being represented are real. Like how many of them are fact based, evidence based. Is there any reason to question the voice? And a lot of the things inside of, like why we believe what we believe or why we do the things we do come back to programming that the voice is actually echoing. And so if we were raised in a patriarchal society, or we were raised inside of a certain religious belief, or we have parents or family of origin that believe a certain way, that voice often is the echo of something that existed from when we're five years old. And the question that I have to go back and ask is, well, did the people who were the originators of that story have credibility? Like, do they have credibility generally? And oftentimes they do. You believe things usually because they've come from someone of authority that's important in your life that you love or crave love from and that you, for whatever reason, have put on a pedestal or respect. But just because someone at some point in your life had credibility doesn't mean that they have credibility on that topic or that there's even relevance necessarily for their opinion that maybe. I was born in 75. My parents were good people. They meant, well. A thing that they were programming into me when I was five in 1980, may not have practical relative to when it was good, then application in 2021 likely doesn't. And going back and questioning if that story that was told then is still a credible story today is part of how when you hear the voice and that bullshit side of the voice is chirping, you get to go and ask, where did this voice come from? I'm not the voice. I'm the witness to it. And does it actually have a credible connection to anything that has practical application in my life today?
- [133:39]
Tom Bilyeu
And so utility becomes the guide as you're assessing all these different voices.
- [133:44]
Ryan O'Neal
Basically, yeah, utility. But also. And this will sound crazy because when it was described to me as a thing to do, I thought it crazy. And then I just started doing it. I actually will name these feelings that I have and invite them to sit at an imaginary table inside of my psyche and have a conversation with them.
- [134:06]
Tom Bilyeu
And it works because you make them the other and not yourself.
- [134:09]
Ryan O'Neal
Yeah. And so as a. For example, I have anxiety as a thing that has Clark. Clark, who is, you know, the opposite of Superman. I was gonna say I have to ask. Of course.
- [134:20]
Jordan Peterson
No.
- [134:20]
Ryan O'Neal
But yeah, Clark, who is the opposite of Superman, is a thing. And I'm talking, like, situational anxiety, not clinical anxiety. Like when I get anxious, I used to try and mute the anxiety. I used to try and push it away. I would become a dick to people, whatever it was. I was not great with anxiety, anxiety. And now Clark shows up. I get to sit Clark at this table, have this conversation. Clark, for what reason do you believe yourself to be here? And Clark, right, as a part inside of me, believes himself to be serving a helpful role. Right. So Clark doesn't realize he's a negative emotion. Clark thinks, ah, I'm here for a reason. And then my job as the observer of Clark having shown up is to sit him down at the table and ask, why are you here? And most often, Clark shows up in my life because there is something in my life that has enough ambiguity around it that a simple plan, or even in some instances, a more complex plan, but a plan being applied in that ambiguous part of my life would give Clark permission to leave. Because his job and having drawn my focus to. To the area is done. He's here as a helper. And so in a crazy way, not that like I celebrate anxious moments or Clark's arrival, I've changed the way I see Clark or anxiety as a negative thing and more as a clue. Oh, this is intel. Information is being presented to me. And if I can sit down and have a conversation with it, I might get to the bottom of why he's here.