In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson talks about the surprising popularity of his recent lecture series, "The Rules for Life," and explains why he thinks it s a good thing that so many people are tuning in to his lectures. Dr. Peterson also discusses the protests he encountered at his lectures, and how he managed to keep a cool head in the face of them. This episode was recorded on June 25, 2018, at the Keller Auditorium in Portland, Oregon. It was produced by Michaela Peterson, who is working with her father on many of his projects for the last year and a half, and her husband, Michael Peterson Sr., who is also working with his son on the podcast. If you're struggling with anxiety or depression, or if you've ever felt like you can't seem to get a handle on it, or you just don't know where to turn to turn for help, this episode is for you. With decades of experience helping patients with similar conditions, and a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, he offers a roadmap towards healing. He provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that, while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you are suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. The podcast will feature discussions with scientific, literary, and political thinkers of the highest quality we can manage, so that you have access to honest, reliable, and engaging information that you can manage to make the most of your day-to-day life. The podcast is a podcast that can be a lifeline to help you feel better, not just for you, but for you and your day to feel better. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. And we hope you enjoy it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Jordan Peterson Podcast. -Micheal Peterson -Michaela and I hope you find it helpful, and that you enjoy the podcast as much as we do. Thanks for listening and share it on social media, too! -Podcasts: -The Jordan Peterson Project: and
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420Welcome to the third episode of Season 2 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.
00:01:04.140My name is Michaela Peterson, and I've been working with my dad on many of his projects for the last year.
00:01:09.100We've decided to run this podcast as a joint project.
00:01:11.820We thought that might be something fun and meaningful to do together.
00:06:39.960Yeah, and I see Dave mentioned that you guys have generated the largest number of protesters so far.
00:06:47.700So apparently they're opposed to violent men, which seems like a reasonable proposition.
00:06:53.080So I don't know where they expect to find them here precisely, but that's okay.
00:07:00.960So I thought I'd start by just laying out a couple of things I've been thinking about the last couple of days.
00:07:09.300I use these lectures to think, you know, and so I guess in that sense they're not exactly lectures.
00:07:17.540I really think about them more as a discussion.
00:07:20.680You know, you might think, well, it's kind of funny to term this event a discussion because I'm talking and you guys aren't talking.
00:07:28.640But that's not really true because I can look at the audience constantly and do specific people in the audience and I can see if what I'm saying is making sense and if people are following me.
00:07:41.720And I listen to everyone in some sense and I try to make sure that everyone's quiet because then I know I'm on track, right?
00:07:51.380Because if you're rustling around and moving and whispering to each other and so forth, then I've lost the track.
00:07:56.220And so then the discussion isn't proceeding properly and so it's a discussion.
00:08:01.180And I've been trying to figure out, you know, I was in Vancouver, I think Dave mentioned that, talking to Sam Harris.
00:08:07.640And it was so strange because we were there two nights and it sold out and the venue was about, not quite as big as this one, but pretty close.
00:08:15.920And so that meant that there was 5,000 people in Vancouver who came out to see two, you know, guys who are basically scientists slash intellectuals.
00:08:54.860But it was so interesting to see that so many people were interested in that, you know.
00:08:59.920And we talked for an hour the first night and then we were going to go to Q&A, but the audience didn't want us to go to Q&A.
00:09:07.100They wanted us to continue the discussion.
00:09:09.120And so we talked for about two and a half hours, which is a long time for an intense discussion like that.
00:09:13.940And then the same thing happened the next night.
00:09:16.000And so it's really made me think, like, what the hell's going on?
00:09:19.000Why is it that this has become popular?
00:09:23.760Because it's not obvious at all why this is happening or what's happening with this group of people that has been termed by Eric Weinstein, this intellectual dark web.
00:09:34.500And so I've been trying to think it through.
00:09:36.240So I'll tell you what I think is happening and you can, maybe it's useful.
00:09:40.680Because obviously here you are all too participating in whatever this is.
00:09:46.200And it's certainly a discussion about ideas.
00:09:48.260There's absolutely no doubt about that.
00:09:49.920And hopefully about crucially important ideas as well.
00:09:53.040So the question is why, one question is why in the world is a market opened up for this all of a sudden?
00:09:59.760You know, and so I was thinking, one of the things, Dave interviewed Sam Harris about two or three weeks ago on his YouTube channel and his podcast.
00:10:11.360And one of the things Sam said, he was talking about the difference between YouTube and the podcast world, say, and the classic media, especially TV.
00:10:20.880And so TV is a really interesting medium.
00:10:23.660You know, and it's been accused of dumbing people down.
00:10:29.840The television has made people more intelligent.
00:10:31.600And I think the reason for that is that it's taken the people who would have been most deprived without television and given them something.
00:10:40.640So imagine that your parents don't take care of you very well when you're a little kid.
00:10:53.820And, you know, it might not have been the best educational tool imaginable, but it was a lot better than no educational tool at all.
00:11:02.620And so I think it pulled up the bottom end a lot.
00:11:05.540But the problem with TV, so Sam made this comment.
00:11:08.360He said, you know, if you go on John Anderson on CNN and you want to have a discussion about something important, you've got seven minutes.
00:11:15.640And then it'll affect a million people, say.
00:12:23.700And by that he meant that the technology shapes the discourse, right?
00:12:27.860Is that it has a profound effect on what can be discussed and what can't be discussed merely because of the format.
00:12:35.120And because television, the bandwidth for television was so expensive and so narrow that it forced everything through this tiny little channel.
00:12:44.180I kind of stopped watching TV news about 25 years ago.
00:12:49.720And the reason for that was that I noticed increasingly that when the journalists were covering politicians,
00:12:57.280they had the politicians in the background talking with no sound.
00:13:01.040And then the journalists were saying what the politicians said.
00:13:03.820And I thought, oh, that's interesting.
00:13:05.560I don't really want that kind of mediation.
00:13:07.560But the politicians became an excuse for the journalists to have an opinion.
00:13:12.360And that didn't seem to me to be very useful.
00:13:15.180And it's far worse now than it was, inconceivably worse now than it was then.
00:13:20.340Well, but now, so John Anderson gives you seven minutes and you've got a million people.
00:13:42.540Because, well, the other thing that TV, TV, TV really serves the commercial market.
00:13:47.700Now, there's nothing wrong with serving a commercial market.
00:13:49.840But the commercial pressure for TV, because the bandwidth is so expensive, the commercial pressure is completely, what would you, overwhelming.
00:13:58.980The whole, the whole medium twists to serve the commercial market.
00:14:04.580So, it frees you up from the demands, the instantaneous and continual demands of the commercial market.
00:14:12.540And so, but, so, you know, I said, well, Joe Rogan gives you three hours.
00:14:15.460And look, and all, a bunch of you applauded.
00:14:18.040It's like, isn't that interesting that you're so happy for some reason about the extension of the format to three hours, which is really like a big chunk of time.
00:14:30.480You're so happy with the extension of the forum that just a mention of it makes you applaud.
00:14:36.220And so, it looks like we're, what we're doing, what we're, what we're doing is sort of, I think we're celebrating the dawn of a, a new educational medium.
00:14:45.640Like, so one of the things that happened to me about a year and a half ago was that, like, I had put my YouTube, my, my class videos up on YouTube, eh?
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00:35:28.440So, I'm going to start with, I'm going to move now to discuss rule one in 12 Rules for Life, and I'm, I'm, it's a rule I've hit multiple times because I've been working on it a lot, but it's also, there's things about the way that I've been conceptualizing this rule that have actually changed as a consequence of the discussion that I had with Harris.
00:35:52.900So, I'm going to twist some of that into this tonight.
00:35:55.980So, in 12 Rules, in the book, the most, the chapter that's received the most satirical attention, let's see, and the most vicious criticism in some sense, is the first chapter, which kind of surprised me.
00:36:12.780I thought the fifth chapter was going to be the one that would do me in, and that's the one that's don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
00:36:20.020I figured I was dead in the water for, for publishing that, because, well, first of all, I've made the claim that children can be dislikable, which is self-evidently true, but not something you're ever supposed to say.
00:36:32.100And then, the other thing that's completely taboo about that title is that you could be a parent and not like your children, which is also obviously true, but another thing that you're not supposed to say.
00:36:47.740So, I thought the combination of those two would be just dead, deadly, but I got a whole pass for Rule 5, but the whole lobster thing, man, people have been up in arms about that.
00:37:00.160So, and I didn't expect that at all, but I do understand why, I do understand why, I think, and talking to you, Harris, made it even clearer.
00:37:08.840So, I'm going to lay out the underpinnings of Rule 1, and tell you, first of all, why I wrote it the way that I did write it.
00:37:16.040See, I've been trying to figure out what our fundamental political debate is about.
00:37:21.840Now, one of the things that psychologists have learned in the last 10 years or so, we sorted out the space to describe personality about 30 years ago.
00:37:31.740It started in the early 1960s, but we had a pretty stable model of personality by the early 1990s.
00:37:37.760And so, the model is the standard big five personality model.
00:37:41.820Extroversion, it's a positive emotion dimension.
00:37:44.580Neuroticism, it's a measure of sensitivity to negative emotion, especially anxiety and emotional pain.
00:37:49.960Agreeableness, which seems to be on the pro-agreeable side, sort of compassion and politeness, and on the less agreeable side, sort of toughness and bluntness.
00:37:58.460That's conscientiousness, that's dutifulness, industriousness, and orderliness, and openness to experience, which looks like a creativity dimension.
00:38:07.580Now, those dimensions were extracted out from large-scale surveys using blunt force statistics.
00:38:15.120No theory, except the only theory that underlies the big five is the idea that the structure of personality might be encapsulated in language, right?
00:38:25.200That personality is so important that we've actually built it into our linguistic system.
00:38:29.400So, if you analyze the language, you can extract out the dimensions of personality.
00:38:34.460And then it was brute force statistics that did the extraction of the dimensions.
00:38:38.380And then, so, and that was all sorted out by about 1992, 1993.
00:38:42.360And so, and most psychologists, we were debating still about the precise details of the big five model, but most people accept the notion that insofar as you can measure personality with questionnaires, then it has approximately a five-dimensional structure.
00:39:02.060And so, maybe it's six, maybe it's seven, but it's certainly at least five.
00:39:08.160And then, once we got that sorted out, we could look at other issues like, well, were there personality differences between men and women?
00:39:16.140And then we could decide whether those were biological or cultural.
00:39:19.620And they're both, but there's certainly a heavy biological influence.
00:39:23.380And we could also start looking at political belief.
00:39:26.420And so, there's been a burgeoning field, probably about 10 years in development now, showing that you vote your temperament.
00:39:34.540Now, it's quite interesting, because what you think is you look at the facts, and then you have a rational discussion with yourself, and you come to your reasoned conclusions, and that's why you're a Republican or a Democrat, let's say.
00:39:46.540But it doesn't really look like that, because being a Republican is actually heritable, so it's under biological influence, which is quite interesting, same with being a Democrat.
00:39:55.360And it's also very tightly associated with your temperament, not perfectly, and it's not like you don't think about things politically, but you see the thing about your temperament is it tends to serve as a screen for the facts.
00:40:10.020So, you think, well, I look at the facts, and I derive my conclusions, but what you don't take into account is, well, where do you look for the facts, right?
00:40:19.640Because you just don't look randomly everywhere for facts, you have your places to go for facts, and that sort of biases what facts you'll see.
00:40:28.100And then, something in you highlights certain facts as worthy of your attention and others as not, and that's your temperament.
00:40:35.240So, it's really hard to get access to the facts independently of your temperament.
00:40:40.520And your temperament basically provides you with a quick and dirty way of interacting with the world.
00:40:45.520So, like, if you're extroverted, for example, you're going to exploit the world insofar as the world is social, and you're a social being.
00:40:53.080And if you're agreeable, then you're going to orient your life around relationships.
00:40:56.720And if you're conscientiousness, if you're conscientious, then you're going to orient your life around duty.
00:41:01.120And if you're open and creative, then you're going to organize your life around entrepreneurial and creative activity.
00:41:16.520And if you have children, especially if you have a couple of them, you can see how different their temperaments are right from very, very early.
00:41:24.960You can really see it, I think, right away, but you can certainly see it by six months.
00:41:28.980So, anyways, it turns out that your political choices are very heavily influenced by your temperament.
00:41:37.440So, if you're liberal, you're likely to be high in trait openness, which is the creativity dimension, but low in trait conscientiousness.
00:41:45.900And so, that's industriousness and orderliness.
00:41:48.420And if you're conservative, it's the reverse.
00:41:50.320You tend to be high in conscientiousness and low in openness.
00:41:54.140And then that has occupational significance.
00:41:57.800So, what that means is the liberals tend to be the creative types.
00:42:02.420Artistic, writers, you know, the whole artistic domain.
00:42:06.220Plus, they tend to be the entrepreneurs.
00:42:09.240Whereas the conservative types tend to be managers and administrators.
00:42:13.160And so, there's an interesting kind of economic rule that goes along with that, which I think everyone should think about for like about ten years.
00:42:19.520Which is that you, conservatives and liberals actually need each other in an economic sense.
00:42:25.600Because the liberals think up all the new companies, but they're too scatterbrained to run them.
00:42:44.640And so, those are different niches in some sense, right?
00:42:47.180So, the liberals are the people in some sense who are out on the fringe.
00:42:51.220And they're dealing with new ideas continually.
00:42:55.160And the fact that they're low in conscientiousness is actually somewhat of a plus in that domain.
00:42:59.340Because one of the things that characterizes entrepreneurs is that as they're pursuing their new technology, they have to be willing to break rules.
00:43:07.920Because, you know, if you're doing something new, you can't do it the old way.
00:43:11.920But if you're a conscientious person, dutiful, industrious, and orderly, then it's really going to bother you to break rules.
00:43:18.440Because you think those damn rules are there for a reason.
00:43:32.480And then you need, of course, you need the conservative types to kind of mop up behind you and make sure that you implement things properly.
00:43:39.840Because if you're really liberal, and, you know, you see the world through that lens, you still might think, yeah, yeah, but we need these damn annoying conservatives.
00:43:46.640Because we would never be able to implement something.
00:43:49.180We'd never get something running stably.
00:43:51.580We'd never have anyone to pay attention to the details, the painful details, if we didn't have conservatives.
00:43:57.860And the conservatives need to think, well, yeah, you know, it's really good to do things the tried and true way, and by the book, and so forth.
00:44:04.680And in a disciplined and militaristic, say, patriotic, orderly manner.
00:44:09.380But now and then, we're going down the wrong path in a very efficient way.
00:44:13.420And we need someone to, well, that happens a lot, man.
00:46:15.780Actually, if you do random selection, that's about as good as you can do.
00:46:21.560So this has been tested over and over.
00:46:23.420So like if you take, say you take a cohort of money managers, money managers, and you look at how they do in terms of stock market investment over a five-year period,
00:46:35.780you find that if a random selection process will beat them on average, money managers do worse than random on average.
00:46:42.940So, and the reason for that is because the stock market is actually unpredictable.
00:46:49.020And the reason for that is that even if you got an edge and you could predict it for like a minute or let's say an hour,
00:46:57.220someone is going to figure out that you're predicting it and they're going to change their behavior and that'll screw up your prediction model immediately.
00:47:02.880So the stock market is twisting around and moving.
00:47:06.320And the reason I'm using it as an example is because it's a good analog of the environment as such.
00:47:58.120It's like, you've been in that agonizing position.
00:48:01.120When you want to change partners, let's say, when you want to change your educational pathway, when you want to change your career, should I keep doing what I'm doing?
00:48:10.020Or should I do something new and better?