Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. 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. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. In his new series, he provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan Peterson's new series on Depression and Anxiety. Season 3 Episode 22: Maps of Meaning, Part 7, Images of Story and Metastory, a Jordan B Peterson Lecture. Michaela Peterson, by the way, if you didn t know that, you ll know that! The Petersons are coming back to Canada, which is a relief, because living out of a suitcase in a foreign country really is quite stressful. I hope you are doing well. I m so excited to be home. All Form. All Form is a new company that makes premium, customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door, delivered directly to you door. Check out All Form by All Form and All Form, All Form And All Form Is a Good Start. by Jordan Peterson Thanks to All Form Plus for sponsoring this episode. And to find out more about the new All Form sofa, check out the All Form Furniture by clicking All Form by AllForm. , All Form & All Form s Good Form And Sofas by the Good Form by The Good Form, And So Much More! by Check it out at All Form Now! . And they have a 20% Off For Yours Truly by Jordan And I Can t Wait To Help Me Make It Better By Me And I ll Make It So Much Better Than That, And I'll Make That Soap And More Soap & I Can Help Me Say That So Much Less So Much So Much By So Much In That And More Eff Eff Effeed And More Like That And I Have A Better So Much And A Few More So Much by So Much Of That And A Less Eff Effee That I Can Say That & A Few Things Like That
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.
00:00:50.980Season 3, Episode 22, Maps of Meaning, Part 7, Images of Story and Metastory, a Jordan B. Peterson lecture.
00:01:04.040So I'm back in Toronto. I came back two weeks early to set up everything for Dad coming back.
00:01:09.560I'm Michaela Peterson, by the way, his daughter, if you didn't know that.
00:01:12.680The Petersons are coming back to Canada.
00:01:14.600Being home is such a relief. Living out of a suitcase in a foreign country really is quite stressful, even if you pretend it's not.
00:01:21.640I could feel my body relax when I got home.
00:01:23.860So that's incredible news. We haven't been home since January 4th.
00:02:30.180Even though drunk driving fatalities have fallen by a third in the last three decades, drunk driving crashes still claim more than 10,000 lives each year.
00:02:39.960Drunk driving can have a big impact on your wallet, too.
00:02:42.720You could get arrested and incur huge legal expenses.
00:02:45.900You could possibly even lose your job.
00:02:47.380So what can you do to prevent drunk driving?
00:02:50.160Plan a safe ride home before you start drinking.
00:02:53.140Designate a sober driver or call a taxi.
00:02:55.600If someone you know has been drinking, take their keys and arrange for them to get a sober ride home.
00:03:00.420We all know the consequences of driving drunk.
00:03:07.780If you've been listening to the show for a while, you've probably heard me talk about my Helix mattress, the best mattress I've ever had, the one I currently sleep on.
00:03:17.180So exciting news, Helix has gone beyond mattresses, and now they're making sofas.
00:03:22.080Helix launched a new company called All Form, and they're making premium, customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door.
00:03:28.900You can customize your sofa using premium materials at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores.
00:03:33.580You can pick your fabric, the sofa color, the color of the legs, sofa size, and shape to make sure it's perfect for you and your home.
00:03:40.160The fabric's really durable, so you don't need to worry about making a mess when you eat on it, assuming you still eat things that crumb up the universe.
00:03:46.820It's a modular design, which means you can set up the exact shape you want from an armchair to a sofa to a giant sectional.
00:03:53.820All Form sofas are also delivered directly to your home with fast, free shipping.
00:03:58.480You assemble it yourself in just minutes with no tools at all.
00:04:01.880These are really high-quality, made-in-America pieces.
00:05:08.240But seriously, just go to helixsleep.com slash Jordan, take their two-minute sleep quiz, and they'll match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life.
00:05:16.900Right now, Helix is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders at helixsleep.com slash Jordan.
00:05:23.720Get up to $200 off at helixsleep.com slash Jordan.
00:05:27.520All right, so I want to go through a lot of material today, and hopefully that'll work out.
00:05:53.860So, so far what we've been doing is laying out an argument that you inhabit what you might describe as a frame of reference or a story,
00:06:05.640or that you're occupied by sequential sub-personalities.
00:06:11.420That's another reasonable way of thinking about it.
00:06:13.740That might be the most reasonable way of thinking about it, really.
00:06:16.280And that these frames of reference or sub-personalities have a point of view and associated thoughts and associated memories.
00:06:24.700And that most importantly, perhaps, as well as directing your behavior and emotions, they also structure your perceptions.
00:06:33.720And I think that's the most critical, that's the most critically important realization about the frames that you bring to bear on the world.
00:06:43.500Because they, it's through them that the world manifests itself.
00:06:49.580And what that means, to some degree, is that you have an indeterminate role to play as a consequence of your moral choices,
00:06:58.540because these are essentially value-based structures.
00:07:01.000As a consequence of your moral choices, you determine, to an indeterminate degree, the manner in which the world manifests itself to you.
00:07:09.880So in that sense, you're a co-creator of your own being.
00:07:12.580And then, you're also a co-creator through your action and your communication for the being of other people, as well.
00:07:20.440And for the external world, insofar as you act upon it.
00:07:24.760So, it's a non-trivial realization to understand that, to what degree your value structures filter the world for you and shape it.
00:07:36.200And so we've been talking so far about the structure of that world.
00:07:39.140And I introduced some neurophysiological ideas last time.
00:07:43.440The idea being that you come into the world, obviously embodied, with a set of inbuilt, we'll call them sub-personalities, at hand.
00:07:51.820Most of those are regulated by very archaic, ancient brain systems that you share with many other creatures on the evolutionary chain.
00:08:02.200Which is partly why you can communicate with and understand other creatures.
00:08:06.620Because if you didn't share that underlying biological structure, they would be opaque to you, in the same way that perhaps an octopus is relatively opaque to you.
00:08:16.520You know, you can't understand it because you don't share an embodied platform.
00:08:20.220And its experience is, therefore, entirely foreign to you.
00:08:23.740But you share your embodied platform, certainly, very specifically with all mammals.
00:08:30.340And, of course, you can understand mammals quite well.
00:08:32.740But you can even really understand lizards, to some degree.
00:08:38.060And so, there's this tremendous degree of inbuilt biological structure and biological commonality.
00:08:43.720And we talked about it, most particularly in reference to the hypothalamus, which seems to be the built-in initial sub-personality generator.
00:08:54.580And the hypothalamus is responsible for regulating what you might regard as the most fundamental biological elements of behavior.
00:09:02.420The things, the systems that not only keep you alive, which is obviously very important, but also impel you to do such things as defend yourself, obviously part of survival, and also to reproduce and to explore.
00:09:17.660And the exploration element's quite interesting, because you think of that as a very sophisticated form of behavior, and it is.
00:09:23.560But it's rooted in an unbelievably archaic neurophysiology.
00:09:26.680So, the hypothalamus roughly sets you into motivated frames.
00:09:32.680And then, when those frames either fail, or when they're all quiescent because they've been satiated, it pops you into an exploratory state of mind.
00:09:40.300And you wander around exploring, foraging for information, roughly speaking, so that you can update all the sub-personalities that you use to organize your perceptions and frame your emotions and so forth.
00:09:53.780Now, so the hypothalamus throws up these frames.
00:10:03.000It helps regulate your temperature through behavior and all of those things.
00:10:06.800Now, the problem with that is that it's a set of impulsive unidimensional systems.
00:10:12.780Each one operating in the moment, and each one only concerned with the satiation of its particular aim, we'll say.
00:10:21.840And the problem with that is that while you live for more than the moment, you live across many moments, you stretch yourself across time.
00:10:29.480And we know, human beings know that they stretch across time, and so actually have to consider not only the organization of their behavior in the short term,
00:10:39.700but also the organization of their behavior in the short term, so that it also works across weeks, and across months, and across years,
00:10:47.440and maybe even for longer spans of time than that.
00:10:49.760And also, equally and similarly, it has to work across people.
00:10:54.580And one of the things that's kind of interesting about that is there actually isn't much difference between establishing a value structure that works for you now,
00:11:04.280and next week, and next month, and into the future, and establishing a value structure that works for you and other people simultaneously.
00:11:11.360Because you could say that whoever you are in a year is sort of like another person.
00:11:17.880And so insofar as you can organize yourself so that other people find what you're doing, let's say, acceptable and valuable,
00:11:24.520you're also organizing yourself so that perhaps you're acting in the best interests of your future self.
00:11:29.360And so then you might say, well, if the hypothalamus can organize your being such that you can satiate, satisfy your most basic needs,
00:11:43.420why do you need the rest of the brain?
00:11:45.640And the answer to that is, well, it looks like it's to solve the problem of more complex forms of being.
00:11:52.300So these fundamental biological subsystems have to interact with each other in a productive way.
00:11:58.960They can't just cycle unidimensionally from motivated state to motivated state.
00:38:47.120But seriously, just go to helixsleep.com slash Jordan, take their two minute sleep quiz and they'll match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life.
00:38:55.120Right now, Helix is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders at helixsleep.com slash Jordan.
00:39:02.120Get up to $200 off at helixsleep.com slash Jordan.
00:39:06.120Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:39:15.120Most of the time, you'll probably be fine.
00:39:17.120But what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:39:23.120In our hyperconnected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:39:28.120Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know how to intercept it.
00:39:37.120And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:39:40.120With some off the shelf hardware, even a tech savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins and credit card details.
00:39:47.120Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:42:19.120So, so far what we've been doing is laying out an argument that you inhabit what you might describe as a frame of reference or a story.
00:42:32.120Or that you're occupied by sequential sub-personalities.
00:42:37.120That's another reasonable way of thinking about it.
00:42:39.120Might be the most reasonable way of thinking about it, really.
00:42:42.120And that these frames of reference or sub-personalities have a point of view and associated thoughts and associated memories.
00:42:51.120And that most importantly, perhaps, as well as directing your behavior and emotions, they also structure your perceptions.
00:42:59.120And I think that's the most critical, that's the most critically important realization about the frames that you bring to bear on the world.
00:43:09.120Because they, it's through them that the world manifests itself.
00:43:15.120And what that means, to some degree, is that you have an indeterminate role to play as a consequence of your moral choices.
00:43:24.120Because these are essentially value-based structures.
00:43:26.120As a consequence of your moral choices, you determine, to an indeterminate degree, the manner in which the world manifests itself to you.
00:43:35.120So, in that sense, you're a co-creator of your own being.
00:43:38.120And then, you're also a co-creator through your action and your communication for the being of other people, as well.
00:43:45.120And for the external world, insofar as you act upon it.
00:43:50.120So, it's a non-trivial realization to understand that, to what degree your value structures filter the world for you, and shape it.
00:44:01.120And so, we've been talking, so far, about the structure of that world.
00:44:05.120And I introduced some neurophysiological ideas last time.
00:44:09.120The idea being that you come into the world, obviously, embodied with a set of inbuilt, we'll call them sub-personalities, at hand.
00:44:17.120Most of those are regulated by very archaic, ancient brain systems that you share with many other creatures on the evolutionary chain.
00:44:28.120Which is partly why you can communicate with and understand other creatures.
00:44:32.120Because, if you didn't share that underlying biological structure, they would be opaque to you, in the same way that, perhaps, an octopus is relatively opaque to you.
00:44:42.120You know, you can't understand it, because you don't share an embodied platform.
00:44:46.120And its experience is, therefore, entirely foreign to you.
00:44:49.120But you share your embodied platform, certainly, very specifically, with all mammals.
00:44:55.120And, of course, you can understand mammals quite well.
00:44:58.120But you can even really understand lizards, to some degree.
00:46:55.120And we know, human beings know that they stretch across time.
00:46:59.120And so actually have to consider not only the organization of their behavior in the short term, but also the organization of their behavior in the short term, so that it also works across weeks and across months and across years.
00:47:13.120And maybe even for longer spans of time than that.
00:47:15.120And also, equally and similarly, it has to work across people.
00:47:20.120And one of the things that's kind of interesting about that is there actually isn't much difference between establishing a value structure that works for you now, and next week, and next month, and into the future.
00:47:32.120And establishing a value structure that works for you simultaneously.
00:47:37.120Because you could say that whoever you are in a year is sort of like another person.
00:47:43.120And so insofar as you can organize yourself so that other people find what you're doing, let's say, acceptable and valuable, you're also organizing yourself so that perhaps you're acting in the best interests of your future self.
00:47:55.120And so then you might say, well, if the hypothalamus can organize your being such that you can satiate, satisfy your most basic needs, why do you need the rest of the brain?
00:48:11.120And the answer to that is, well, it looks like it's to solve the problem of more complex forms of being.
00:48:18.120So these fundamental biological subsystems have to interact with each other in a productive way.
00:48:24.120They can't just cycle unidimensionally from motivated state to motivated state.
00:48:31.120And not only that, you have to learn to operate in a world with time and with other people.
00:48:36.120And so that makes the adaptation problem much, much more complex.
00:48:41.120And it's for that reason, as far as I can tell, and no doubt for other reasons as well, that there's utility in the provision of extra subcortical and cortical resources.
00:48:53.120And I think the right way to think about the cortex in some ways is actually as living space for the hypothalamus and the subcortical structures.
00:49:00.120So, you know, what happens when you develop as a young child, especially in the very early stages of development,
00:49:07.120the underlying subcortical systems, including the systems for the senses, more or less compete for dominion over the cortical territory.
00:49:17.120So, for example, if you take a kitten and you close one of its eyes shortly after birth and you leave it covered for a number of months,
00:49:24.120what will happen is the remaining eye will invade both hemispheres' visual representation systems.
00:49:32.120So that eye becomes... this single remaining eye becomes much more acute and more cortically dominant, like an invader, really, like an invader, than the other one does.
00:49:41.120And then if you uncover the other eye, the cat, after a critical period of development, the cat will never learn to see out of that eye.
00:49:47.120And so, you know, you've got these underlying biological systems, motivational and sensory,
00:49:53.120and they're looking to expand themselves as the organism manifests itself in the world,
00:49:59.120and it does that by occupying cortical territory in a competitive process.
00:50:03.120So, for example, if you're deaf, your visual cortex will become occupied by auditory and tactile processing, because why not?
00:50:15.120You know, I mean, you can basically see with your hands, you know, and you can...
00:50:21.120Well, I wouldn't say it's not so easy to hear with your eyes, that's harder.
00:50:24.120Although you can hear to some degree with touch, right, because you can feel vibration.
00:50:28.120All of your senses overlap to a substantial degree, and if one of them is missing,
00:50:33.120it's perfectly reasonable for the others to occupy the territory that would otherwise be given over to that sense.
00:50:40.120And this actually has some practical implications, even.
00:50:43.120So, silent reading is actually a relatively new ability, evolutionarily speaking.
00:50:51.120Certainly, literacy is a relatively new invention from an evolutionary perspective.
00:50:56.120But to silent read is to use your eyes as ears.
00:51:02.120So, you know, when you read silently, you can hear the words, so to speak, in your head.
00:51:06.120And the reason for that, as it turns out, is that the part of the brain that you use to read silently with
00:51:11.120is right between the visual and the auditory cortexes, right where they overlap.
00:51:15.120So you are literally, literally, you are using your eyes as ears.
00:51:20.120And so that's quite the thing, that you can figure out how to do that.
00:51:23.120So, anyways, so you can think about these hypothalamic systems being in place, more or less ready to go at birth,
00:51:31.120and then having to organize themselves into a sophisticated and integrated single ego that acts across time and in the social environment.
00:51:40.120And, you know, when Piaget originally started talking about child development,
00:51:46.120he regarded the child as something that was born into the world with just a set of very primordial reflexes,
00:51:52.120mostly sucking reflexes and some primary motor reflexes.
00:51:56.120He was very much a constructionist, but I would say, you know, had he been alive now, his constructionism would have been modified
00:52:04.120by the relevant neurophysiological data showing that there's a lot more built into us right from the beginning than Piaget expected.
00:52:11.120You still might need experience to catalyze the development.
00:52:15.120But obviously, children are born with the ability to hear and to see and to sense with touch.
00:52:21.120And they're hungry and tired and angry.
00:52:24.120And like, they have the whole range of emotions at hand.
00:52:27.120And they also come into the world with their motivation already in place.
00:52:32.120Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to form a relationship with them.
00:52:34.120And that's modified by the development of the higher cortical systems through play and through social negotiation.
00:52:41.120But the biology is there to begin with.
00:52:43.120And so that's a good way to think about it with regards to understanding how the fundamental biological systems operate
00:52:55.120and how they manifest themselves in personality and in story.
00:57:50.120And these, by the way, these neural network models produce output that's analogous to the output that's produced by sections of cortical tissue.
00:57:57.120It's not identical, but partly they make the same kind of mistakes, which is an indication that they're functioning in the same way.
00:58:04.120So one of the things that a neural net does when you're training it is learn to figure out which things it can ignore.
00:58:10.120And that's mostly what you're doing, is what can be ignored.
00:58:13.120And that's a tremendous realization, too, because it highlights, again, how important the structure within which you exist...
00:58:22.120How importantly the structure within which you exist determines what manifests itself to you as you move through the world.
00:58:41.120And the reason they're valenced is because they're conceptualized in relationship to the journey.
00:58:46.120You know, if you run across a tool or something positive, an opportunity, we could say, which is like an abstract tool, then that moves you forward.
00:58:54.120And the fact that it's moving you forward is signaled by the incentive reward system, dopaminergically mediated incentive reward system, that's grounded in the hypothalamus.
00:59:04.120The same system that you use when you explore, the same system that's activated by psychomotor stimulants like cocaine and heroin and most of the drugs that people abuse.
00:59:13.120And that system indicates to you that this entity is non-ignorable because it's positively functionally related to the transformation of the world that you're attempting to accomplish.
00:59:26.120So that makes you happy. That provides you with hope and incentive to move forward.
00:59:34.120A fundamental motivating force of life for human beings, with the possible exception, say, of aggression and sexuality, which I would say operate much more sporadically.
00:59:43.120This is pretty much continual. And then, of course, the negative emotions are generated when you encounter something that gets in the way,
00:59:52.120which can require a small detour, let's say, or can blow apart the frame that you're inhabiting completely.
00:59:58.120And part of what we're trying to do is understand how you compute how emotional to get about certain classes of events.
01:00:08.120And the reason that it's so complicated is because often when you run into a tool or an opportunity, generally speaking, it's not too hard to compute how useful it is.
01:00:19.120Although sometimes something can happen to you, like let's say you win a lottery, where the possibility space is so great that it's of indefinite positive significance.
01:00:29.120You know, and you're going to be overwhelmed by that sort of thing. It's pretty rare that something like that happens.
01:00:34.120But it does happen. Maybe it happens when someone that you're desperately chasing for amorous purposes agrees to go out with you.
01:00:41.120That's another place where that sort of excitement occurs.
01:00:44.120It seems to occur to football players, you know, when they make a touchdown on TV, too, because they do their little touchdown and dance around like mad dogs.
01:00:51.120And, you know, scientists never do that when they get a paper published.
01:00:55.120So there's something about scoring a goal that's really got that incentive reward blast, you know.
01:01:00.120So anyhow, the positive emotion systems are operating, roughly speaking, because you have encountered something that moves you forward on your path.
01:01:11.120And we could say that given, as we've discussed, that your value structure is a nested entity, right, with small goals nested inside larger goals, or small personalities nested inside of larger personalities,
01:01:26.120a positive thing that's really positive has implications for what you're doing right now that are positive, but also has positive implications higher up the abstraction chain.
01:01:35.120You know, so for example, let's say you study really hard for an exam, and you get a really good grade on it, and you're surprised.
01:01:42.120You think, well, that's extraordinarily useful. I passed the grade, I passed the exam, I did well in the course, but that means that maybe I'm a better student than I thought.
01:01:51.120And given what I'm aiming for in the future, maybe I'm a more competent person than I had believed.
01:01:56.120And so you can see that the positive emotion would echo through those levels of analysis, because it has implications on each level.
01:02:03.120Now, you're also trying, when you encounter something negative, to constrain its propagation across those levels.
01:02:11.120Because let's say you study really hard, and you fail, dismally, and so then you think, well, I messed up this course, I messed up this exam, I messed up this course,
01:02:21.120I'm not as good a student as I think I am, maybe I'm a failure as a person.
01:02:25.120And that can take you out completely, right? And of course, there are certainly more traumatic events that can befall you than that.
01:02:33.120A typical one that really will wipe someone out, imagine someone who's naive, and dependent, and over-sheltered.
01:02:40.120You know, and they, and so they're off into the world, although they're not prepared for it.
01:02:45.120And, you know, their axiomatic presuppositions aren't sophisticated enough to allow for the existence of radical uncertainty or malevolence.
01:02:56.120And then one day they're attacked, when they're, maybe they're out, they get mugged, or maybe they get raped or something worse.
01:03:02.120And they develop post-traumatic stress disorder from that.
01:03:05.120And the reason for that is that the event is so anomalous, especially combined with its malevolence,
01:03:11.120that it demolishes the interpretation frames from the local level, all the way out to the superordinate level.
01:03:18.120And then the person is cast into this chaotic state, and they're terrified and angry and vengeful and paralyzed and depressed,
01:03:27.120and all of those things simultaneously, and maybe they never put the pieces back together, right?
01:03:32.120They descend into chaos, and that's that. And if you're in a situation like that long enough,
01:03:38.120you know, the cortisol that's produced can produce permanent neurophysiological changes.
01:03:43.120Shrinkage of the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that moves information from short-term attention to long-term storage.
01:03:50.120Shrinkage of the hippocampus, and growth of the amygdala, which is something that seems to tag stimuli, roughly speaking,
01:03:57.120with emotional significance more or less permanently, right?
01:04:01.120Because if you really encounter something traumatic, the hippocampus restricts information with regards to its application in a certain time and place.
01:04:36.120What you really do with someone who has a problem like that is you try to walk them through a recontextualization process.
01:04:43.120So, you know, maybe if they're afraid of snakes, so afraid of them they can't even really think of snakes.
01:04:48.120You have them, well, first maybe you have them sit for one second and think of a cartoon snake.
01:04:53.120You know, and what happens is their brain notices that they can hold that image and nothing negative happens.
01:04:58.120And so then in some sense it's built an inhibitory structure that partially inhibits,
01:05:06.120which is what inhibitory structures do, that partially inhibits the otherwise context-independent fear that would constitute the phobia.
01:05:12.120And so you basically build up contexts of safety around the phobia until the context signifies lack of danger and the person can progress forward.
01:05:22.120If they're really damaged, it's really hard to do that, especially if the trauma was really severe.
01:05:26.120So, okay, so you see, you don't see irrelevant things.
01:08:24.120Because you can't deal with, you can hardly deal with anything, let alone with everything.
01:08:29.120Now, and often what you see, and it's rarely conceptualized this way in the training of clinical therapists,
01:08:36.120but often what you see when you are dealing with people who are in crisis isn't people who have a mental illness.
01:08:44.120In fact, in my experience, that's actually quite rare.
01:08:47.120What's far more common is that the person that you're talking to has become overwhelmed by catastrophe.
01:08:53.120So their life has fallen apart in some way that makes what they're doing actually impossible.
01:08:58.120You know, so maybe someone very close to them in their family that they were depending on has developed a very serious illness.
01:09:04.120And that's thrown their entire financial state into utter chaos.
01:09:08.120Or maybe they've developed a condition that makes it impossible for them to work.
01:09:12.120Or, you know, you can imagine the potential range of catastrophes.
01:09:15.120And they're coming to see you because they're anxious and depressed.
01:09:19.120But the reason they're anxious and depressed is because everything they have ignored has popped its head back up and is hell-bent on their destruction.
01:09:28.120And often you see people who are being attacked by five or six of these monsters at the same time.
01:09:33.120And it isn't their mental illness that stops them from being able to deal with it.
01:09:37.120Although that, you know, whatever weaknesses you have are going to interfere.
01:09:41.120It's the fact that what they're facing is no damn joke.
01:09:44.120And if you were facing it, you'd feel exactly the same way.
01:09:47.120So then you're trying to come up with practical solutions to these tremendously complex problems.
01:09:53.120And that's a very, a very, well, it's extraordinarily difficult, generally speaking.
01:09:59.120People often don't come to a therapist until they've exhausted their entire range of resources.
01:10:07.120And so, you know, in a situation like that, you can administer antidepressants.
01:10:11.120And maybe that'll help the person increase their stress resistance.
01:10:15.120But as a, and it may be that because they're depressed and have been brought down that they are, in fact, exaggerating the danger of some of the smaller monsters that are after them.
01:10:24.120But making the person more stress resilient doesn't give them, for example, a new job.
01:10:29.120And it certainly doesn't bring back the person they've been living with for two years who has a degenerating neurological disease or some form of cancer.
01:10:37.120Like, these things are major, you know, I often see people who, well, they're in a relationship.
01:10:43.120Maybe they're rather isolated, older people.
01:10:46.120One of the partners is dying, and their entire financial situation has become catastrophic.
01:10:51.120It's like, that's not a mental illness, man.
01:10:55.120I mean, they may have got into that situation because of one inadequacy or another.
01:10:59.120But you don't even want to push that too far, because that sort of thing can happen to anyone.
01:11:04.120And will, in fact, happen to most people in one form or another, at least at some point in their lives.
01:11:09.120So you want to be damn prepared for that.
01:11:12.120You want to be prepared for that, because it's bitter and harsh and anxiety-provoking and painful.
01:11:19.120But if you're not ready, then it's also hell.
01:11:22.120And often you can stop things from becoming hell, even though you can't stop them from being bitter and painful and anxiety-provoking and all of that.
01:11:30.120You can at least delimit the catastrophe enough so that it doesn't permanently bring you and the people around you down.
01:11:50.120It's the same question as how big is the predator that's lurking outside the door of our cave.
01:11:56.120It's exactly the same problem, except conceptualized abstractly.
01:12:01.120And I would say exactly the same systems that your distant ancestors used to conceptualize the lurking predator are the systems that are activated now when you encounter the re-emergence of all the monsters that you've ignored.
01:14:01.120We go out into the unknown, the terrifying unknown, and we gather things of value.
01:14:06.120It's not much different than squirrels foraging for nuts, really.
01:14:11.120And we use exactly the same biological systems to go out and forage for information that squirrels use when they go out and forage for nuts.
01:14:21.120I guess the system developed in part because we were fruit eaters as well.
01:14:28.120And so, we found trees that had ripe fruit in them and learned where they were and how to gather them.
01:14:34.120And then you see a tight relationship there between information and food, right?
01:14:39.120There's almost no difference between eating and knowing where the food is.
01:15:43.120And if the person is particularly cold and distant to you, and maybe even insulting,
01:15:48.120then half of you is going to be very upset because this is happening.
01:15:52.120And the other half is, roughly speaking, is going to be saying, oh, this is just the opportunity I wanted.
01:15:57.120And what that means is, you're in your frame that constitutes the relationship, let's say,
01:16:02.120in the story you've laid out about it, the novel event occurs, and it produces activation in two competing systems.
01:16:09.120One is the positive system that explores for new opportunities,
01:16:13.120and the other is the threat system that paralyzes you because your current mode of conceptualization is no longer valid.
01:16:20.120And so, anomaly has this deeply ambivalent nature.
01:16:25.120And one of the things that I've tried to understand for a long time is how you compute that.
01:16:30.120And it seems to me that you need to consider it in relationship to this hierarchical value structure that we've talked about before.
01:16:37.120So you might say that, imagine your nervous system is tuned,
01:16:42.120so that if anomalous things happen at high-resolution levels,
01:16:48.120you produce a very small amount of negative emotion and a comparatively large amount of curiosity.
01:16:56.120Because the thing that's being threatened by the anomalous event isn't that big,
01:17:00.120and so the possibility that information lurks there, that might be useful, is high compared to the threat.
01:17:07.120Whereas, generally speaking, if you encounter something, maybe you, I don't know, maybe you go into a store one day,
01:17:14.120one day, and on a whim, you shoplift something in a, you know, a fit of stupid impulsivity, and you get caught.
01:17:21.120That happened to a, there was an NDP member of parliament, 20 years ago, who did exactly that.
01:17:28.120You know, he had a pretty good reputation.
01:17:30.120He went into a department store, swiped something, some gloves or something, I don't even remember what it was, and got caught.
01:17:36.120Like, well, you know, that's a sufficiently anomalous behaviour, or occurrence, to make you question whether or not you're actually a good person.
01:17:44.120And so, it's almost as if, at the higher resolution levels of the value structure, if something anomalous occurs,
01:17:50.120then it's either neutral or tilted slightly towards positive, and at the higher levels, at the more abstract and comprehensive levels,
01:17:58.120if something anomalous happens, then it's more likely to blow out large portions of your, of the systems you use to organise the world,
01:18:06.120and it's going to be experienced as negative.
01:18:08.120And partly what you're trying to do when something anomalous occurs is to do a search up and down this value structure.
01:18:13.120You have an argument with someone that you love.
01:18:50.120And my advice would be, unless there's strong reason, presume it's a minor event, and start operating in that level.
01:19:00.120Because otherwise, every argument becomes a catastrophe.
01:19:03.120And if that's the case, you actually can't solve any problems.
01:19:06.120You won't be able to discuss anything, right?
01:19:08.120Because as soon as you bring up an anomaly, something unpleasant,
01:19:11.120the other person will assume that everything's over, and get so shorted out that you won't be able to talk with them.
01:19:18.120So those are the sort of people who will cry if you bring up anything negative, right?
01:19:23.120And so they're threatened by their value, you might say, their value structure so fragile-y constructed,
01:19:30.120they're not standing on enough pillars, so that anything you toss at them that's a question is enough to shake the entire structure to its foundations.
01:19:38.120Or maybe they're acting that out just to manipulate you, that's another option.
01:19:42.120So, anyways, partly what you seem to be doing, when you're thinking about something, is to shift your frames of reference up and down your value hierarchy,
01:19:51.120to constrain the occurrence, and to determine the degree to which it's positive, and the degree to which it's negative.
01:19:58.120It's also complicated, too, because whether something is positive or negative depends on the frame of reference that you bring to bear on it, right?
01:20:05.120And so that's why I was saying earlier about the relationship, if you're ambivalent about the relationship and something negative happens,
01:20:11.120you know, something disruptive, it's certainly possible to adopt a frame of reference almost immediately that makes that into something positive.
01:20:18.120You say, well, I was done with this anyways, I'm glad you said that, because it gives me the excuse I needed to terminate this.
01:20:24.120And so, it's a very strange thing that you can shift the emotional valence of almost anything, almost anything, by shifting your frame of reference.
01:20:34.120There are boundaries. You can teach animals pleasure to electric shocks, painful electric shocks,
01:20:43.120if you pair them reliably with the provision of something intensely rewarding, cocaine, for example, or hypothalamic stimulation.
01:20:50.120They can learn to associate pain with something good, and respond positively to it, to work for it.
01:20:57.120So when you see this in you, even a little bit, some of you have no doubt learned to eat foods that aren't really edible,
01:21:02.120like olives are a good example of that, or coffee. They're bitter.
01:21:07.120And generally speaking, bitter, poisonous things tend to be bitter.
01:21:11.120And people don't really like bitter things. But if you train yourself, you can get to the point where...
01:21:17.120I taught my daughter how to eat olives when she was very young. And like the... I bet her, I think...
01:21:23.120I think she was only three. I bet her that she couldn't eat 20 olives over the next week or something.
01:21:27.120She'd always respond to a challenge. And so, you know, the first three olives, it was not a fun experience for her,
01:21:33.120because her face... kids have a lot of taste buds. Her face would get all crinkled up, and she just wasn't enjoying it now.
01:21:39.120But I paid for that desperately later in my life, because I used to go to this specialty shop and buy these particularly good spicy olives,
01:21:46.120you know, by the court. And if they were in the fridge, she'd come home and just devour the entire court like a mad bulimic.
01:21:55.120I mean, on olives, for God's sake. And so then I never got any of them. So it served me right. Exactly.
01:22:00.120But the point is, you can rewire yourself quite completely by placing negative things in a positive context.
01:22:07.120And the degree to which you can do that is quite remarkable.
01:22:10.120You know, you can't... there seems to be limits beyond which your ability to turn pain into pleasure, for example, is compromised.
01:22:17.120I don't think anybody's ever going to learn how to associate being seriously burnt by something hot with something pleasurable, right?
01:22:25.120There's... and I don't know how the systems exactly adjust themselves so that there are limits to, you know,
01:22:31.120how you can transform an emotional stimulus, because you can transform them quite remarkably.
01:22:36.120But obviously, there's some boundaries that we don't understand very well.
01:22:40.120So... all right. So... no, so roughly speaking, we could say that the degree to which something is experienced as utter chaos
01:22:48.120is proportionate to the level of the value hierarchy that that anomalous event is construed or experienced to disrupt.
01:22:58.120And you really see this happening in people who are depressed.
01:23:02.120Because you might think... here's another way of thinking about it.
01:23:05.120You might think, well, am I a good cook? You're asking yourself. You fail at cooking something.
01:23:11.120So you think, well, am I capable of completing a meal? And you might say, well, if all you've done is set the table badly,
01:23:20.120probably the right thing to do is to learn how to set the table and not to question your ability to complete a meal.
01:23:27.120So then you might say, okay, well, when should you move up one level of abstraction?
01:23:33.120We might say, well, imagine there's five things that you need to do at this level in order to successfully complete that level.
01:23:39.120So you have to cut vegetables, you have to set the table, you have to do the dishes in order to complete a meal.
01:23:45.120And so you break six dishes, you burn the soup, and I don't know... but you set the table properly.
01:31:11.120It can mean I should drop this course.
01:31:14.120It can mean I should major in a different subject.
01:31:17.120It could mean maybe I shouldn't be in university.
01:31:19.120It could mean maybe my future plans have been formulated badly.
01:31:23.120It can mean my future plans have been formulated badly because I don't understand myself very well and I've been telling lies about my past.
01:37:32.120There's a definite cost to moving up the abstraction hierarchy.
01:37:36.120But the reason that a sufficient anomaly places you in chaos is because it makes all sorts of things that you've already considered alive again.
01:37:44.120And that can be extraordinarily chaotic.
01:37:54.120And, you know, your life, your whole life is a sequence of those things at a micro level and at a macro level.
01:38:00.120You know, every time you encounter something you don't understand, you have to retool the framework of interpretation that you were using prior to encountering that.
01:38:10.120Now, sometimes it's just a small modification.
01:38:12.120Like, at least in principle, when you're in a class and you're learning things, you're undoing what you already knew and sewing it back together constantly.
01:38:22.120But it's at a small enough level so that maybe it only feels exhilarating.
01:38:27.120You're releasing just enough novelty to activate your exploratory systems because there's value in the information, but not enough to knock you flat.
01:38:37.120And, you know, one of the things that's interesting about the whole safe space phenomena is that people differ in the threshold that they have with regards to the receipt of anomalous information.
01:38:49.120You know, and if you're, especially if you're a naive person and a sheltered person, to be exposed to anything that has a hint of real malevolence in it might be enough to destabilize you quite badly.
01:38:59.120And that's a real problem if you're pursuing, well, education in history or literature because history and literature is nothing but a sequence of absolute, you know, moral catastrophes thrown at you one after the other.
01:39:11.120So you have to be pretty solid to be able to withstand that.
01:39:21.120So you collapse from your stable state into an unstable state, and that's where everything comes up to haunt you.
01:39:28.120Now, it can really be bad in a chaotic state because this often also happens to people who are depressed, but it can happen to people under normal circumstances, too.
01:39:38.120It's like, well, let's say you've been happily married or you think you were happily married, and then one day you come home and your partner is gone.
01:39:47.120Well, then what do you think? Well, you think malevolent predator, that's one thing. You think useless you, that's another thing.
01:39:58.120You think the past is unstable, the present is unstable, and the future is unstable, that's another thing.
01:40:05.120But then things can really get out of hand, so then you're just in chaos, let's say.
01:40:09.120But then you start thinking at 3 o'clock in the morning about all the stupid things you've done in your life that led you to this point.
01:40:16.120And that can just take you completely apart, because, you know, if you go back over your past experiences, it's easy for you to remember, because people do remember these things, where you made errors, right?
01:40:28.120And maybe you're not torturing yourself to begin with about the specific errors that you made in that relationship, although you probably will.
01:40:35.120You know, you'll think, oh, well, you know, I kind of knew this was coming.
01:40:39.120And then your mind will say, well, you kind of knew when it started.
01:40:42.120And then it'll tell you, well, maybe you should have done this back then, and you actually knew it.
01:40:46.120And you'll think, yeah, I actually did know it, and I didn't do it.
01:40:49.120And then that'll trigger off a whole host of other memories about just exactly what you knew and didn't act on.
01:40:55.120And that'll trigger off a bunch of other memories about stupid things that you've made and mistakes that you've hidden and make you question just exactly what sort of creature you are and how all your moral insufficiencies defined by yourself have led you to this dismal state.
01:41:11.120And there's very little difference between that and hell.
01:41:15.120And so there's a mythology of the underworld, right?
01:41:17.120The underworld is partly a place of chaos.
01:41:20.120And that's a place where people go when things fall apart.
01:41:22.120But part of that is there's a subdivision in chaos that's hell.
01:41:26.120And that subdivision is the place that you go when you take yourself apart because of your recognition of your own moral failings.
01:41:32.120Now, that can be useful because maybe you have some things to learn, and likely you do, but it can also be something that's so devastating that you just can't recover from it.
01:41:42.120So, because you may conclude, well, the reason my relationship collapsed precipitously is because I'm so blind and malevolent that there's absolutely no hope for my recovery.
01:41:53.120And, you know, sometimes that's actually true.
01:41:56.120So, distinguishing, you never know, right, is when things happen to you that aren't what you want or expect.
01:42:03.120It's an open question how much you're responsible for it.
01:42:06.120Now, a conscientious person under those circumstances will just take themselves apart.
01:42:10.120Because the conscientious person is liable to presume that if something bad happens to them, it's because they did something wrong.
01:42:19.120If something bad happened to you because you did something wrong, and you can learn what you did wrong and fix it, then the bad thing won't happen to you again.
01:42:28.120So, hooray. It's a wonderful way of thinking.
01:42:30.120But it's very tricky, because there is a random element to life, and sometimes you get knocked flat by circumstances that are really beyond any reasonable person's control.
01:42:41.120And this happens to conscientious people, for example, when they get laid off en masse at work.
01:42:46.120You know, their company starts to fail.
01:42:48.120A thousand people are laid off sort of arbitrarily.
01:42:51.120Some of those people are truly industrious and conscientious.
01:42:55.120Even though there is very little relationship between their work habits and the consequences for their job continuity, they'll go home and brood about it and take themselves apart.
01:43:05.120And those are the people who end up catastrophically depressed, because they can't stand not being in a situation where they're functional and productive.
01:43:16.120So, you know, it's a cognitive response that can be very useful.
01:43:20.120But it's actually only useful when it is what you did that resulted in that end, and not merely the blind random forces of nature happening to focus on you.
01:43:32.120And that's also a problematic issue, too, because, you know, there's actually some relief in concluding that it's your fault.
01:43:41.120Because the alternative is that it just happened, right?
01:43:45.120And that means that there are whole swaths of terrible things that might happen to you that are completely beyond your control.
01:43:51.120So it's not like deciding that you weren't at fault leaves you sitting pretty.
01:43:57.120It just says, well, you weren't brought to your knees because of your own stupidity and malevolence.
01:44:03.120Instead, you were brought to your knees by the absolute uncaring forces of society and nature.
01:44:08.120It's like, well, that's not much of a consolation, I wouldn't say.
01:44:14.120Although sometimes it's exactly the right thing to conclude.
01:44:17.120And it is part of, I think, being mature to understand that you are prey to random forces.
01:44:23.120And you need to be able to distinguish between when you're at fault from something and when something just happened to you.
01:44:29.120And I would also say that the right rule of thumb is to start with the assumption that something just happened to you.
01:44:37.120And only then start to investigate the degree to which you had something to do with it.
01:44:42.120Situational analysis first. Personal analysis second.
01:51:44.120Well, I'll tell you the whole story much later in the course.
01:51:47.120But I want to give you an overview of it now.
01:51:49.120But then there's this really strange idea that developed over the course of the development of not only Christianity,
01:51:56.120but Judaism and a number of other religions that fed into the mainstream of Christian ideas, including Zoroastrianism.
01:52:03.120There's an idea that emerged across a very long period of time that the snake in the garden was the same as Satan, the source of all evil.
01:52:12.120And I've been trying to figure out for the longest period of time why in the world the manifestation of what's essentially a representation of a predator.
01:55:56.120And that's why there's an association between the snake in the garden and this great series of mythologies about the existence of evil itself.
01:56:03.120It's a consequence of our continued capacity to abstract.
01:56:07.120We started using the predator detection system to detect snakes and maybe, you know, predatory cats and maybe birds of prey and all that.
01:56:15.120But that didn't solve the bloody problem.
01:56:17.120Because just because you hid from the predatory bird today didn't mean the bloody thing wasn't going to be back tomorrow.
01:56:23.120And tomorrow starts to matter as you get smarter.
01:56:26.120And then once you're on that pathway and you're starting to think abstractly about the predator, the nature of what constitutes the predator starts to become...
01:56:35.120Because you're trying to solve it across all situations simultaneously, it starts to become very much more abstract.
01:56:42.120And it ends up being something like a personality.
02:04:39.120It's like, okay, we have our leader, who's the person at the top of the dominance hierarchy, and defines the nature of this particular structure.
02:10:02.120And it was an elaboration of precisely this theme.
02:10:04.120It's what you've thrown away as of little value to you.
02:10:08.120And maybe what you hate and hold in contempt and fear is exactly what you have to face if you want to go down to the place where the transformations occur.
02:11:36.120He's basically, for all intents and purposes, God the Father.
02:11:39.120And his pet, his close ally, is the thing that can die and that transforms.
02:11:45.120Well, you can see the echoes of Christian thought in that, but that isn't exactly right.
02:11:50.120It's that Christian thought and the mythological substructure upon which the Harry Potter volume is based are drawing from the same underlying pool of ideas and symbols.
02:32:58.120And so what you're trying to do when you go beyond your knowledge structure is to look for new regularities in the environment that you can map and incorporate them into your structure.
02:33:07.120But that domain of latent information, that's chaos itself.
02:33:12.120And that's what's symbolized by the dragon of chaos.
02:34:46.120You're a shape-transforming wizard that's doing its best to keep up with the continual transformation of that which you do not yet understand.
02:34:55.120And I think there's absolutely no difference between that, by the way, and this thing that women chase in their pornographic fantasies.
02:35:09.120There's this capacity for what's normal to transform into something that's extraordinarily aggressive, and to manifest mastery as a consequence of that.
02:35:18.120So it's the transforming spirit, and it can transform itself without bound, and certainly in directions that aren't socially acceptable, let's say.
02:35:29.120There's a line you want to be able to push.
02:35:32.120And that's, again, why in the Harry Potter stories, Harry, first of all, is touched by evil, and second is always breaking rules.
02:48:29.120Because Seth is the embodiment of destruction and malevolence.
02:48:32.120And no matter how conscious you are, if you encounter that, even voluntarily, the probability that it's going to damage your consciousness is extraordinarily high.
02:53:50.120If you found this conversation meaningful, you might consider picking up Dad's books, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos.
02:53:59.120Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
02:54:04.120See jordanbpeterson.com for audio ebook and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.
02:54:10.120Remember to check out jordanbpeterson.com slash personality for information on his personality course.
02:54:16.120I really hope you enjoyed this podcast.
02:54:18.120If you did, please let a friend know or leave a review.