Aim at a Star - A 12 Rules for Life Lecture
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 50 minutes
Words per Minute
182.77814
Summary
Dr. Jordan 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 B. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. This is a podcast from Rochester, New York, recorded on September 5th, 2018, titled Aim at a Star, a 12 Rules for Life Lecture. I m Mikayla Peterson, and I ve been on the road for two weeks. It seems like a long time, although it seems like it has only been a short amount of time. I thought I d update you on what s been going on in the past couple of months. I m here to give you guys a little update on what's been happening in my life and what's going on with me and my family. I hope you ll enjoy it. -Mikayla -J.B. Peterson . J. B. ( ) (J. Peterson ( ) ( ) . ( ( . ) ( . . . . (J.) (J ) (J) (J). (A.B.) (K. B.) (A) (P) (K) (P). (K.) (K). (A.) (P.) (T) (R) (S. (A). (T). (P. (C) (C.) ) (D) (Alyssa) (M. ( ) ) (P)? (P (R). (S) (B.) (S(A) (Q) (Z) (D). (Q). ( ) & (Q.) (Q)? (I) [A) & (S)? (A ) (B) (E) (F) (I hope you like it?
Transcript
00:00:00.960
Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480
Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740
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.
00:00:20.100
With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420
He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360
If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780
Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460
Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420
Welcome to Season 2, Episode 26 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.
00:01:04.480
I'm Mikayla Peterson, dad's daughter and collaborator, eldest child, and basically the backbone of this family.
00:01:11.400
Nah, that's actually mom, who, speaking of which, is still doing better and better.
00:01:16.300
I'm fasting again. I swear I don't have an eating disorder.
00:01:34.660
Don't just drink regular water or you will feel terrible.
00:01:39.400
And if you're on a ketogenic diet, that'll make it easier.
00:01:41.760
If you're not on a ketogenic diet, you should be.
00:01:47.780
Hey, mom, isn't it cool that I found out my body fat percentage was a little bit high and I did a week-long fast and I lost 10 pounds?
00:01:55.960
You know, I was like looking, kind of looking for a pat on the back, I guess, for having self-control.
00:02:01.440
Because doing a week-long fast is kind of intense.
00:02:04.260
And she was like, yeah, that's what happens when you fast for a week.
00:02:10.700
I gave up looking for a pat on the back anyway.
00:02:15.380
If you are a boss and you only eat meat, fasting is even easier.
00:02:19.260
I'm literally transforming into a lion, if you're interested at all.
00:02:23.140
I'm doing Instagram and Facebook and YouTube lives throughout this fast, 8.30 p.m. ET usually.
00:02:30.360
I'm also writing a how-to guide for the diet for people who want to get fitter or feel better or people with autoimmune disorders or mood disorders
00:02:38.380
and exactly what it is we do, what to expect when you get on it.
00:02:42.200
They'll be up for subscribers on ThinkSpot or available on my website, but I'll keep everyone posted.
00:02:46.620
If you haven't heard of ThinkSpot, it's the social media platform Dad's involved with that won't be unnecessarily censored.
00:02:54.500
It has a ton of functionalities I haven't seen anywhere else, like podcast annotation.
00:02:58.540
Head over to ThinkSpot.com and sign up to see what it's all about.
00:03:05.580
And the first people who signed up will be allowed in.
00:03:09.200
An intellectual platform that won't be censored.
00:03:14.700
This is a podcast from Rochester, New York, recorded on September 5th, 2018, titled
00:03:53.000
It seems like a long time, although it's strange.
00:03:56.980
It's basically since January that this seems like normal life, weirdly enough.
00:04:02.920
So, it's nice to be back and it's good to be here.
00:04:06.140
I thought I might update you a little bit about what I'm up to, apart from doing this tour.
00:04:13.560
So, my wife and I, Tammy, she's somewhere in the audience, ensconced somewhere in the audience.
00:04:18.460
She's been traveling along helping me out and making sure I don't do anything too dreadfully stupid along the way.
00:04:24.040
Which is one of the reasons that you should marry someone sensible, or at least more sensible than you, if you can find someone more sensible than you, who would marry you.
00:04:36.380
That's why I think it was Nietzsche who said that, that being loved by someone should immediately disenchant you with them.
00:04:47.000
He said, I'd never belong to a club that would have me as a member.
00:04:53.700
Anyways, we've been traveling around and I think we've gone to 65 cities so far.
00:05:04.560
I only really had two talks in August, both in Central Canada and Saskatchewan.
00:05:09.120
And so, I've had a chance to step back a little bit and think.
00:05:16.960
And the reason I'm telling you that is because I'm devoting the money from that Patreon account, or some of the money from that Patreon account, to a project that you might be interested in.
00:05:25.740
So, I've hired some people to work on an online university.
00:05:29.100
We've sort of expanded the scope of it, though.
00:05:31.920
We want it to be kind of a universal education system.
00:05:36.080
So, I've hired three really smart people, young people.
00:05:43.300
So, that's pretty cool because projects are never ahead of schedule.
00:05:48.580
Part of what we're trying to do is we've used Wikipedia.
00:05:52.620
We've mapped Wikipedia to kind of get a sense of the general knowledge structure.
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You know, because Wikipedia covers almost everything.
00:05:59.340
And it's not exactly easy to tell what the structure of knowledge is.
00:06:03.600
But the work is already done with Wikipedia, essentially.
00:06:05.900
And there are maps of Wikipedia that sort of lay out the structure of knowledge as such.
00:06:10.720
And we're trying to figure out how we can build accreditation processes, accreditation and questioning processes, to go along with the knowledge structure that's associated with Wikipedia.
00:06:24.060
So, imagine that if you're interested in a topic like solar radiation or something like that.
00:06:29.860
Maybe you can think of a more interesting topic than that.
00:06:32.220
But for some reason that popped into my head that you'd be able to go to the site and you could find a 30-second video on solar radiation.
00:06:40.640
And like a five-minute video and a 15-minute video and a half-an-hour video.
00:06:43.960
Depending on the level of resolution that you wanted to, the level of resolution for the knowledge that you wanted to develop.
00:06:52.380
And that each of the educational materials would be set up in a competitive manner.
00:06:57.840
So that people could submit 30-second videos and five-minute videos and 15-minute videos.
00:07:02.080
And then they'd compete for popularity so that the good ones would rise to the top.
00:07:05.940
We want to set up a platform where we can devote most of the money that the platform generates to the people who are doing the content creation.
00:07:13.020
Because then, hopefully, we could foster a whole infrastructure of content creators.
00:07:18.040
And then we want to associate that with a questioning process.
00:07:24.480
And this might apply to anything that you do on the web.
00:07:28.560
So that you could watch whatever you're watching that would teach you something.
00:07:32.460
And you could pick whatever time frame you have to learn something.
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You know, so maybe you want to take a 30-second break.
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And then you'd get three or four questions that would test your knowledge of that.
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And then all the questions you got right would be stored so that you'd have a bank of what you already knew.
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And all the questions you got wrong would be stored so they could be represented to you.
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And we're going to associate all the questions that you get wrong with a source.
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That would tell you how to answer the question that you got wrong.
00:08:01.940
And so one of the things we've thought about is, you know, most of the time in education.
00:08:09.520
Like maybe you do real well on the test and that's good.
00:08:13.960
And then every time you get something wrong, it's like you get whacked on the head with a stick.
00:08:17.940
And there's some utility in being whacked on the head with a stick.
00:08:20.540
But it's not the best, necessarily the best educational technology, let's say.
00:08:25.860
But imagine that you could take a multiple choice test and every time you got something wrong,
00:08:30.500
all that happened was that you were instantly provided with the information that would enable you to determine why it was that you got it wrong.
00:08:37.400
So you would never have to get it wrong again because that's really the point, right?
00:08:40.760
And so those are the ideas that we've been working on for about the last three months, I guess.
00:08:48.420
We're trying to figure out how to teach people to write online.
00:08:51.500
Like teaching people to write is really hard because it's so difficult to grade essays, especially if they're bad.
00:08:59.660
A student will write an essay and hand it in to me and I think, Jesus, you know, it'd be a lot easier just to burn this and write another essay.
00:09:06.520
It'd be easier than grading it, you know, because you think, here's how you can make a mistake.
00:09:11.640
These are the mistakes you can make if you're a bad writer, okay?
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And so often what people will do is use a word that they don't understand.
00:09:20.320
So it's a large word and they don't know how to use it colloquially.
00:09:23.420
But it sounds like a word that someone intelligent would use.
00:09:28.460
And that works if the person that you're writing to doesn't know the word any better than you do or maybe even worse.
00:09:36.740
But if they know it better than you do, it's actually not a very good trick.
00:09:42.700
Then you can put it in a badly constructed phrase.
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And then you can jumble up the phrases so that you don't make a good sentence.
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And so then you can put the sentences in random order so that your paragraphs are just broken haphazardly.
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Then you can sequence the paragraphs badly so that your argument doesn't make any sense.
00:10:01.240
It helps if you throw in contradictions as well.
00:10:05.100
And then you say something completely different, the other page.
00:10:07.760
That's what postmodernists actually teach their students to do.
00:10:16.460
And then to top it all off, you can make your whole essay not really come to any point.
00:10:24.600
And if you have a spectacularly bad essay, then it fails at every single one of those levels of analysis.
00:10:31.120
And then it's just a hell of a thing to grade because it's, well, what did I do wrong?
00:10:39.220
So we're trying to figure out how we could teach people to write online.
00:10:44.340
And, you know, we thought maybe we could set up competitive writing exercises so someone could write a paragraph and submit it.
00:10:50.500
And then somebody else could try to write a better paragraph.
00:10:55.340
And then someone could write a better paragraph.
00:10:57.040
And then you could see how the paragraphs would develop.
00:10:59.200
You could do that at the sentence level as well.
00:11:01.080
Well, we thought maybe we could also break books up into paragraphs and then present people with paragraphs that would be informative.
00:11:08.120
But then have them summarize the paragraphs and have those rated by other people and have other people submit better paragraphs.
00:11:13.860
And we'd like to introduce an element of competition into the writing process.
00:11:18.380
Because that's another thing that I think can make acquiring information exciting.
00:11:25.560
So you'd be able to track your progress in all these different knowledge domains.
00:11:29.700
And you'd be able to compete with other people to see how good you could become, say, at writing.
00:11:34.860
We want to do the same thing with people's ability to speak.
00:11:37.820
So they should be able to upload videos and have them rated in the same way.
00:11:45.040
And so that's one of the projects that I'm working on.
00:11:49.600
I'm working on another project with a friend of mine in L.A.
00:11:53.760
And what he's trying to do is to see if he can pull the Democrats back to the center, somewhat to the center and away from the radical leftists.
00:12:02.960
And so we're actually having a fair bit of success with that, as far as I can tell.
00:12:06.820
He's trained about 22 different Democratic candidates in elections across the country.
00:12:12.740
And his experience has been, which is quite interesting, is that he's talked to, I think, 85 candidates at different levels of government across the United States in the Democratic Party.
00:12:21.520
And he hasn't found one person who's genuinely interested in identity politics if they're talking one-on-one.
00:12:30.460
Because, and it might be, because we don't know what tiny minority of people are really committed to the radical view of the Marxist postmodernists.
00:12:39.820
Even in the universities, it's not an overwhelming majority.
00:12:42.600
It's quite a very noisy and well-organized and reprehensible minority.
00:12:47.200
But in general population, it's a much smaller percentage of the population.
00:12:51.160
And so it might be, and I think this is actually the case, that people are much more moderate in their views than you might think.
00:12:59.500
But they're afraid to express moderate views because they're worried that they'll be attacked by the people who are immoderate and silenced one at a time.
00:13:09.480
I've talked to the Conservative Party leaders, particularly in Canada.
00:13:13.000
And our Conservatives are sort of like your moderate Republicans or maybe your centrist Democrats.
00:13:18.520
Like Canada's entire political spectrum is sort of shifted to the left and sort of mashed into the middle.
00:13:24.760
Although we do have Democratic Socialists in the form of the NDP.
00:13:30.260
But the Conservatives are quite afraid to be Conservative and to espouse Conservative viewpoints
00:13:36.060
because they're afraid they'll be targeted as individuals and mobbed.
00:13:39.520
You know, and they have reason to be afraid of that, I would say.
00:13:42.320
Although, if you're a Conservative and you're afraid, it's like you're done, right?
00:13:48.520
So, anyways, we're trying hard to figure out a way to pull the Democratic Party,
00:13:56.480
either to pull it back to the centre or to indicate that it's actually more centrist than you might think
00:14:03.640
given the way that it presents itself and the way it's being covered.
00:14:06.940
And one of the things he's realised is that there's no real central messaging apparatus in the Democratic Party
00:14:16.360
And maybe because of that, the more radical types have, because you have to have a story,
00:14:22.760
have filled the void where there was no story with their story.
00:14:28.680
And then the other thing I've been thinking about with regards to that,
00:14:31.600
and I've talked to a lot of people in the media to find out if this might be true,
00:14:34.660
is, you know, we've really got this sense that things are polarising.
00:14:37.360
And I think there's some truth of that in the West.
00:14:40.460
But I think that part of the reason that things might be polarising
00:14:43.160
isn't necessarily because people have become more polarised in their political attitudes,
00:14:46.900
but because as the classic media is dying, which it definitely is, and very, very rapidly,
00:14:54.560
first of all, they're getting rid of their fact checkers.
00:14:56.600
That actually turns out to be a big problem if you're supposed to be, you know, reporting facts.
00:15:04.200
and they're subject to much more competition from online writers and online video sources.
00:15:10.380
And so it seems to me that what they're likely doing as they spiral towards death,
00:15:15.560
more or less inevitably, because of the technological transformations,
00:15:19.300
is that they're more and more tempted to use clickbait headlines
00:15:24.720
and to exaggerate the degree of extremism on both ends of the political spectrum.
00:15:30.200
And I think that's warping the entire political dialogue.
00:15:33.320
So the other thing that we're trying to do is to get mainstream politicians
00:15:37.440
who are issues-oriented to talk with people in the intellectual dark web,
00:15:43.040
to get them online where they can do long-form interviews,
00:15:47.380
Because maybe you want to find out if your politicians can actually generate a coherent conversation for two hours, right?
00:15:54.020
That might be a precondition for electing them.
00:16:00.780
So, because one of the things I've been struck by over the last couple of years,
00:16:08.580
is the hunger that exists in the general population for complex, long-form philosophical discussion.
00:16:17.220
You know, I put up a series of biblical lectures a year ago,
00:16:20.580
and they're 15 lectures long, and they're long lectures,
00:16:23.780
and they're fairly dense, I would say, like most of my lectures.
00:16:27.020
And yet people, like I think the first one has two and a half million views,
00:16:31.020
something like that, which is, it's on the first sentence of Genesis.
00:16:36.720
It's watching a two-hour lecture on the first sentence of Genesis.
00:16:41.240
It's like, if you presented that as a business plan to a media company,
00:16:47.360
So, but it's the case that people are paying attention, you know?
00:16:51.140
And they're watching on YouTube, but they're listening on podcasts as well.
00:16:54.940
And the podcasts have also opened up this long-form forum, right?
00:16:58.280
Because you're exercising, you're doing the dishes,
00:17:01.040
or you're driving your truck, or whatever you're doing.
00:17:05.620
It turns out that people will listen, and they'll listen to complex material.
00:17:08.520
So, the other thing that I think might have happened over the last 30 years
00:17:11.760
is that we've all convinced ourselves that we're stupider than we really are.
00:17:16.040
And the reason we've done that is because we've been communicating with each other
00:17:21.420
And broadcast television is really narrow in its bandwidth
00:17:25.780
Like a minute of broadcast television 20 years ago was, or even now,
00:17:31.480
And so if you had a message, you had to compress it into this ridiculous form,
00:17:36.580
And you also had to assume that your audience was composed of clueless people
00:17:42.740
Because you couldn't assume that your audience had seen anything else you'd ever done.
00:17:47.280
It was like presenting to someone with Alzheimer's disease.
00:17:50.220
So, you know, no attention span in Alzheimer's disease
00:17:53.120
is sort of the ideal TV audience in some sense.
00:17:56.760
Or not the ideal audience, but the inevitable audience given the technology.
00:18:01.040
When all of a sudden we have these long form technologies that enable,
00:18:05.920
well, they take the bandwidth limitation off audio material and video material.
00:18:11.040
And it turns out, well, people are way smarter than we thought.
00:18:14.900
And hopefully, I'm hoping that the political dialogue in the next decade,
00:18:19.780
let's say, will be, those who engage in the political dialogue
00:18:27.920
So I talked to Joe Rogan a couple of times about this,
00:18:48.160
And he said, well, some of his guests sort of ran out of steam at 45 minutes.
00:18:54.020
And then other people can go on and on for, you know, the whole three hours
00:19:00.900
And so it seems to me that that would be a good test, again,
00:19:03.940
for anybody who's seeking complex political office.
00:19:06.940
It's like, can you handle yourself in a spontaneous interview for three hours?
00:19:10.600
Or do you have to be handled so that everything that you say is pre-crafted
00:19:34.440
I think this one has a white cover, the 12 Rules,
00:19:37.500
and I think the next one will have a black cover.
00:19:39.200
And so that'll be kind of a chaos and order thing.
00:19:48.620
And I've had the opportunity in all of these lectures
00:19:53.900
I'm going to do that a little bit more tonight.
00:19:56.120
So, and I'm off to speak at about 60 more cities,
00:20:15.420
And then I'm going to edit my book for four months,
00:20:17.860
and then I'm going to do a biblical series on Exodus,
00:20:35.580
through a tech incubator process in January and February
00:20:40.100
and see if we can get that company really, really rolling.
00:20:42.820
There's lots of people who are interested in it.
00:20:48.000
And that'll probably happen in San Francisco or L.A.
00:21:05.620
who are loosely associated with what Eric Weinstein called
00:21:14.120
And I'd like to bring together musicians and comedians and thinkers.
00:21:21.580
And I had a debate with, four debates with Sam Harris,
00:21:25.580
and two of those are up on my YouTube channel now,
00:21:27.780
and the other two will be there in mid-September.
00:21:33.520
and so it looks like there's public interest in that kind of thing,
00:21:43.380
intelligent, issues-oriented politicians, political people,
00:21:47.560
who are also capable of delivering a gripping speech
00:21:51.660
and an informative speech to include them in the mix.
00:21:56.020
So we'd like to make that a major cultural event.
00:22:00.760
And my son is getting married in the end of September,
00:22:20.440
And so I'm going to try to do that again tonight.
00:22:29.280
and rule 1, which is stand up straight with your shoulders back.
00:22:32.440
And I'm going to try to weave them together a little bit.
00:22:44.820
and think, okay, there's some problem I'm addressing.
00:22:48.080
And I'm always working on some set of problems.
00:22:49.960
I'm always thinking about some set of problems.
00:22:52.860
It's like, what's the problem that I'm trying to address tonight?
00:23:00.120
this is a good thing to know if you have to write something,
00:23:03.700
because what are you doing writing if you don't have a problem to solve?
00:23:06.960
It's the same if you're engaged in anything creative.
00:23:26.140
and associate it with the idea of precision in speech,
00:23:32.800
because I've been thinking a lot about hierarchies.
00:23:35.620
And I think that's partly because of all the chapters in my book,
00:23:49.120
that the people who are particularly critical of what I'm doing
00:24:26.680
can you already think of a stupider question than that?
00:24:30.320
I don't even know what to think about a question like that.
00:24:33.220
It's like, yeah, that's exactly what I thought.
00:24:49.840
regardless of their level of biological complexity,
00:25:23.100
or at least that's a very common form of organization,
00:59:14.920
you've transmuted it into something like a form of ethical behavior
00:59:19.040
how can we organize ourselves tribally so that we can hunt effectively together
00:59:25.320
because yeah we're going to hunt tomorrow but then we're going to hunt next week and we're
00:59:28.900
going to hunt next year and we're going to hunt a year from now and our children
00:59:32.460
are going to hunt with us and so it isn't just one hunt it's many many hunts and
00:59:36.840
so then we have to organize our tribe so that when we hunt we split the food up so that the
00:59:42.240
group stays coherent enough so that we can continue the hunt across time
00:59:46.860
well then you can just you don't have to use your imagination very hard to understand
00:59:56.440
one thing i've lectured about fairly extensively is the idea of the emergence of morality from
01:00:02.480
like you should play a game to win now most games have a point and a name which is another
01:00:08.000
indication i think of our fundamental hunting background right because you think about all
01:00:12.660
the things we do for entertainment they're very hunting like you know so basically what what a
01:00:18.560
basketball team is doing with the basketball is hunting down the hoop with the ball and so when
01:00:23.820
everyone's into that they organize themselves into little hunting teams and they compete and it's
01:00:28.340
so exciting that everybody will sit in the audience and watch that and then we're really
01:00:31.360
excited when we see someone do something that's particularly athletically spectacular but we're
01:00:37.140
also impressed when we see someone do something athletically spectacular in a way that's of
01:00:42.380
maximal benefit to the rest of the team or that maybe even transforms the whole game right because
01:00:47.240
that's even better than you see a great athlete who's a great sportsman and then you think that's
01:00:51.140
a great person it's like that's a good idea it's like that's the person who's got a name but who's
01:00:56.560
transmuted the aim as well so that they modify the entire structure of the cooperative game so that
01:01:02.160
it becomes a better game and that's a better aim and that makes you a better hunter think well why
01:01:07.120
does it make you a better hunter it's like well do you want food today or do you want food for the
01:01:10.940
rest of your life and so here's a rule if you're going to be a good hunter share what you kill
01:01:16.160
now that's something and then you think well what are you hunting then you're hunting reputation
01:01:21.920
reputation all of a sudden instead of hunting animals you're hunting reputation it's like oh
01:01:25.980
you can trust him man you go for a hunt with him you get a little more than your fair share
01:01:31.080
so then everybody lines up to hunt with that guy and then well he's he's set perhaps for the rest of
01:01:37.340
his life and maybe even if he's old or maybe he's having an off day all those people with whom he's
01:01:42.100
hunted with properly think you know we owe him something and they're very concerned about maintaining
01:01:47.980
their reputation as well so you can see how i see i've become very interested in the emergence of
01:01:53.600
ethics from the biological substrate and one of the things that happened when i was discussing
01:01:59.280
the relationship between facts and values with sam harris like harris has got an an interesting
01:02:05.060
problem to solve see harris wants to ground ethics in something that isn't just arbitrary opinion
01:02:13.720
and so that's why he makes a strong case that you can derive values from facts that's his his
01:02:20.200
motivation and he has other motivations like he would he would rather that people didn't suffer
01:02:24.800
any more than necessary and if you act ethically maybe that's associated with the amelioration of
01:02:29.520
suffering and if you can ground that in something solid then we can come to agreement about how we
01:02:34.240
should all act to ameliorate suffering good you know that all seems reasonable but the grounding of
01:02:40.020
value in fact is very very difficult you don't get from the array of facts to the world of values
01:02:45.880
without very complex intermediary stages and so what i've been trying to puzzle out is what those
01:02:51.220
intermediary stages are so that that's the hunting story it's like you think about how the idea of an
01:02:56.860
aim is transmuted and so let me let me give you a further transmutation of that so remember the story
01:03:03.380
of pinocchio and so so geppetto has an aim right and it's it's it's turned into a cosmological aim
01:03:12.060
interestingly enough because what you see at the beginning of the movie is geppetto produces a child
01:03:17.500
essentially who's a marionette not autonomous pulled motivated and moved by forces that are beyond his
01:03:24.840
control voiceless wooden-headed and naive right but full of possibility well what that and born one of the
01:03:32.520
things that's interesting about the pinocchio movie if you remember how it opens most how many of you
01:03:36.780
have seen how many of you haven't seen that okay so virtually everybody's seen that so you know what
01:03:41.720
i'm talking about when the book when the movie opens there's a book and the cricket is showing you
01:03:45.920
the book jc is the cricket right and so that's southern u.s slang for jesus christ by the way so in
01:03:52.440
pinocchio jesus christ is a cricket which is very peculiar and to say the least even though you'll swallow it
01:03:59.000
so to speak without even noticing he shows you a book so you're being taught by a cricket named
01:04:03.980
jiminy cricket who's an analog of jesus christ to look at a leather-bound book and in the picture
01:04:09.860
there's a nativity scene with a star and that's when pinocchio is born so that ties that means that
01:04:15.540
there's an association between pinocchio and the divine hero and the divine hero is always threatened
01:04:20.940
at birth like moses was uh and and and and and pinocchio is of course a wooden-headed naive puppet
01:04:27.780
who's a marionette right he's nothing at birth but he could be something and so then geppetto puts a
01:04:34.600
mouth on him so to give him a voice and then goes to bed and has a wish dream like and that and that's
01:04:42.300
when the movie becomes even more deeply symbolic but what geppetto does is wish on a star now stars are
01:04:48.400
very interesting from a metaphorical perspective because a star is something that glimmers in the
01:04:54.840
night right it's a source of light in the darkness and if you go outside and you look up in the stars
01:05:00.800
then you're you're confronting infinity in some sense and it's actually been a real catastrophe for
01:05:06.620
people i think to be enveloped in light pollution because one of the primordial experiences of mankind
01:05:11.500
is to go out at night and to look up into the vastness of space and to confront infinity right i mean
01:05:18.120
you could do that every night and now it's like two stars in a kind of an orange sky but but so so
01:05:23.840
the star is also associated with infinity and then it's associated with the idea of lifting your eyes
01:05:30.040
above the horizon you know so if you have a proximal goal then you're not very noble-minded but if you
01:05:34.860
have a distal goal that forces you to lift your eyes above the horizon then you have a noble goal
01:05:40.160
it's like a meta goal and a meta goal is a goal that enables you to achieve all sorts of sub goals at
01:05:45.080
the same time right so if you have a good goal for your life it means that pursuing that goal will
01:05:51.040
help you in a bunch of ways simultaneously and that's what you want if you're going to aim at
01:05:56.200
something you might as well aim at something that works in a large way across a large scale of time
01:06:01.720
and so what you might say is that the thing that you should aim at most is the way that you should
01:06:06.720
act that would solve the most problems at the same time over the longest period of time for the
01:06:10.560
largest number of people it's something like that and i do think that our ethical systems and i think
01:06:15.820
this is coded in our religious stories essentially our ethical systems are attempts using our dreamlike
01:06:21.940
intuition to build up structures of ethics that have exactly and to provide us with aims that have
01:06:26.700
exactly that purpose even though we don't necessarily understand what we're doing because
01:06:31.160
it's so complicated but anyways geppetto has an aim and what he does is aim at a star now you think too
01:06:37.340
the other thing about stars is that human beings have always used stars to orient themselves in the
01:06:41.580
world to actually find direction right because well once people figured out the north star they mapped
01:06:47.460
the constellations they figured out the north star which was a stable point at night they could orient
01:06:52.080
themselves in space and once they figured out how the stars changed across the seasons then they
01:06:57.760
could orient themselves in time so it's actually the case that if you consult the stars you can orient
01:07:01.900
yourself in time and space and so that's another reason why you might look to the heavens and so
01:07:06.280
that's why geppetto wishes upon a star and what he does when he wishes upon a star is that he hopes
01:07:10.860
that the thing that he's created can become genuine can become autonomous and real and that's the
01:07:17.240
highest of aims and that's exactly right and so then this this transformation story that's associated
01:07:24.220
with pinocchio is a story of of that coming to be right pinocchio has to fight against deceit
01:07:29.720
because that's a major temptation that's why his nose grows he has to fight against being a neurotic
01:07:34.460
victim because the cat and the fox convince him to shirk his duties because he's sick and he needs a
01:07:40.340
holiday on pleasure island it's like his university advertisement essentially are you sick and
01:07:45.340
victimized come to pleasure island our university will allow you to extend your adolescence for four
01:07:50.660
years with no responsibility and all you have to do is sacrifice your entire financial future to
01:07:55.200
our administrators what a deal so pinocchio has to go through these these sequence of temptations
01:08:10.780
right and he turns into a brain jackass as a consequence of his pleasure seeking victimization
01:08:16.200
it's like jesus you just can't make this stuff up it's absolutely amazing that that was coded in a movie
01:08:21.280
like 70 years ago so and then strangely enough the the in the in the climax scene he has to go to the
01:08:28.620
bottom of the world to rescue his father from a whale right and that's the thing that transforms him
01:08:34.260
finally into an autonomous individual and it's a very strange thing too and i did figure out more about
01:08:39.160
what that meant in the last few weeks so thought so here's a cool this is so cool this really took me
01:08:44.620
like 30 years to figure out that why in the world would your father be resting in a beast at the
01:08:51.160
bottom of the abyss what could that possibly mean and this is a bit of a side trip but that's okay
01:08:56.380
we'll take it anyways um we know that you grow in strength in proportion to your willingness to
01:09:03.400
voluntarily confront sequential challenges okay everybody follows that right and that's what you
01:09:08.340
do with a kid if you want to make the kid grow it's like well here's a little challenge
01:09:11.380
you can't do it yet or if you do do it it's going to stretch you out right it's a bit beyond your
01:09:16.820
capacity it's in the zone of proximal development that's a that's a uh uh what would you say a a way
01:09:24.960
of being that was characterized by a russian psychologist named vygotsky what he observed was
01:09:29.460
that adults tended to speak to their their infant children at a level of linguistic complexity that was
01:09:35.440
slightly above their level of comprehension and they did that automatically so when you're training
01:09:40.760
your child to talk which you do unconsciously you talk to them using vocabulary that's a little
01:09:45.660
more complex they can actually understand and that pulls them along that's the zone so that's
01:09:51.080
where the idea of the zone comes in you're in the zone it's the zone of proximal development
01:09:54.420
you're optimally challenging yourself and that's where the meaning is okay so we know that if you
01:09:59.260
optimally challenge yourself you develop and then the question is well what do you develop into
01:10:03.780
and the answer to that is something like well you develop into what you could be
01:10:07.840
and the question is well what could you be and the answer to that is something like well you could
01:10:14.160
be the full revelation of your potential and some of that's ancestral potential because you're actually
01:10:19.240
in some sense you're three and a half billion years old right because life is continuous and so
01:10:25.960
there's potential locked inside of you in all sorts of different ways and the way that you call that
01:10:31.540
potential forward is by challenging yourself and say well how much should you challenge yourself
01:10:37.560
and the answer that might be well it depends on what you want to call forward the more you want
01:10:42.640
to call forward out of yourself the more you should challenge yourself okay so what's the ultimate
01:10:47.600
challenge what's to look into the abyss and so what's the abyss well maybe that's mortality that that would
01:10:55.120
be part of it maybe that's malevolence as well let's say suffering and evil that'll do the trick
01:11:02.020
that's the abyss and what's in the abyss is the predator that lurks so what happens if you gaze
01:11:08.680
forth rightly on the predator in the abyss that lurks and this is the theme of pinocchio
01:11:12.800
you discover your ancestral father why because if you voluntarily take on the heaviest load that you
01:11:20.420
can possibly bear then you'll call forth from within you that which you could be and that's equivalent
01:11:26.340
to the ancestral father and that's the story of pinocchio it's like just i was so happy to figure
01:11:31.660
that out i couldn't figure that i thought what the hell's going on here why is the father trapped in
01:11:36.300
the belly of the whale it's a fire-breathing dragon in pinocchio why does that make sense because it does
01:11:41.160
make sense to us well that's why it's like and then it's and it's a very optimistic idea right because
01:11:47.640
if you go down to the depths as far as you can go down to the depths of suffering and evil
01:11:52.860
you can find out who you are and what you find out is that you're the thing that can transcend
01:11:57.980
suffering and malevolence and so that that's so interesting too because it's it's an inversion
01:12:03.240
of pessimism you know because you might say well if you're thinking that life has no point no aim
01:12:08.220
has no meaning the reason you think that is because of suffering and evil essentially because if those
01:12:13.420
didn't exist you wouldn't be questioning it's like well what the hell is going on here it's like
01:12:17.440
well life is rife with suffering and and it's made worse by malevolence and that makes things seem
01:12:22.800
pointless i know there's other reasons why they might seem pointless but those are major reasons
01:12:26.620
it's like well what should you do about that run from it no it gets bigger and you get smaller turn
01:12:32.100
and face it voluntarily what happens you discover your ancestral father in the belly of the beast
01:12:37.620
and that means that you start to become who you could be and then the question is who could you be
01:12:41.800
and the answer is you could be the thing that transcends suffering and malevolence and so it's so
01:12:46.620
interesting that's the same and i think that's the same in some sense is wishing on the star because
01:12:50.860
that's the light that beckons in the darkness right that's the ultimate light that beckons in
01:12:54.880
the darkness and so if you don't pull away from the darkness if you can confront it it's your worst
01:13:01.640
fear carl jung said in sterquilinus inventur he derived that from the alchemical literature what you
01:13:07.160
want most will be found where you least want to look that's the hero story in and of itself why
01:13:12.580
because what you can be will not reveal itself unless you challenge yourself out maximally and then the
01:13:18.640
question is well what is it that can reveal itself within you and the answer to that is
01:13:21.920
terrible as suffering and malevolence is and i would say that's it's ultimately terrible in some
01:13:27.840
sense there's something in you that's more powerful than that and so out of that terrible pessimism and
01:13:33.900
that's the pessimism that can be generated by by forthright contemplation of the terror of hunger
01:13:39.100
and privation and the absolutely cataclysmic consequences of human malevolence the more you
01:13:44.420
understand that the more you understand that that's something that you can not only face but
01:13:48.840
also transcend and by transcend i mean two things i mean fix i mean deal with i mean lesson right
01:13:55.760
because you can you can reduce suffering and you can constrain malevolence and you can start with
01:13:59.680
yourself and so you can do it practically but also it works psychologically because there isn't anything
01:14:04.500
more meaningful than that and so that's the proper aim that's the proper aim and so that's what you hunt
01:14:10.640
for if you're a real hunter is that proper aim right that's what you're taking aim at and that's a bit
01:14:16.600
of a description of how that great ethic of aim and meta aim emerged from those that underlying biological
01:14:24.180
platform how it's how it's written into us in some sense so thank you
01:14:30.240
good thing we've got john along yeah that whole on thing man that's a that's a killer
01:14:47.560
i'm an old pro my friend an old pro uh all right well before we dive into any of these since you know
01:14:54.240
we did about 45 shows together or so and we took about a month and a half off here
01:14:58.020
and uh it's good to be back right like you seemed like very sharp jordan peterson tonight
01:15:04.420
what what does jordan peterson do when he's not working eat steak
01:15:09.920
i spend lots of time with my family really that's mostly what i'm doing right what well that's really
01:15:17.800
mostly what i've done ever since i've had kids and got married i would say is you know although i
01:15:22.260
spend a bunch of time with my parents i spend a bunch of time with tammy's family
01:15:25.360
um her sister is going to be traveling with us for the next while i spend a lot of time with my
01:15:32.240
kids i have a new granddaughter she's 13 months old so it's good to spend time with her um
01:15:37.560
and i spend a lot of time i spent quite a bit of time writing i think i've written
01:15:43.820
10 000 words or something like that in the last month and some of that i've you know i've been laying
01:15:49.040
out some of what i've been thinking about tonight that's all being woven in one way or another into
01:15:54.220
the next book i didn't get a real chance to talk about hierarchies tonight which is too bad i mean
01:16:00.040
hierarchy is the way that those meta aims are instantiated in a social context right they're
01:16:04.680
not hierarchies of power they're hierarchies of competence that's a very important thing to know
01:16:09.560
too and so that's something i really want to work out more and more because a lot of the critique of
01:16:14.880
our society especially from the radical left is that western society is a corrupt tyrannical
01:16:20.680
patriarchy something like that based on power it's like well it's not corrupt compared to most
01:16:26.380
cultures and to all cultures throughout history it's actually pretty damn honest it's actually not
01:16:31.700
based on power except when it becomes corrupt it's based on competence competence is the ability to do a
01:16:37.420
job that needs to be done well jobs that need to be done ameliorate suffering and constrain malevolence
01:16:43.500
and so everyone agrees that they need to be done so the idea that hierarchies in and of themselves are
01:16:49.960
are um what would you call them need to be torn down and replaced by completely flat structures is
01:16:57.160
it's an insane idea it's an it lit it's it it it is absolute it's based on an absolute misapprehension
01:17:04.000
of the way the world works of course for the post-modernists there's no actual world so it doesn't matter
01:17:08.580
but so those are the sorts of so what i've done in my time off is spent a lot of time with my family
01:17:14.820
um i've done quite a lot of swimming and a bit of canoeing and uh some reading and a fair bit of
01:17:23.240
writing and a lot of thinking and clarification trying to weave all these things together you know
01:17:28.700
because i'm trying to get everything to come together in this sort of musical way and i'm hoping
01:17:34.460
in my next book so the plan is i want to make the next book i write better than this book i just wrote
01:17:39.360
because i don't want to publish it otherwise it's got to be better and it should extend the thinking
01:17:44.780
that i've done and and make it more elegant and more beautiful and more coherent and more useful all
01:17:50.040
of that and so i i'm thinking all the time about how that might be done and and some of that you know
01:17:56.700
some of that i went through tonight so and that went pretty well i think so jordan peterson swimming
01:18:02.620
sounds like a great youtube channel what do you think when did jordan peterson become a middle-aged
01:18:10.560
male fashion icon um well i'm just reading them i could tell that story well you know
01:18:20.720
in when i when i decided to do this tour so what happened last year is that i did these biblical
01:18:31.980
lectures and we decided to rent a theater to see what would happen and what happened was everybody
01:18:39.160
came to the theater and there was about 500 seats and it sold out all 15 and i thought oh that's
01:18:43.820
pretty interesting who would have guessed that then i went to london and my publishers penguin in london
01:18:50.440
rented a theater of i think 500 600 something like that it sold out in like two minutes so they
01:18:56.180
rented another one of 1500 and it sold out virtually instantly and then i was invited to amsterdam and
01:19:03.540
it sold out and i thought oh that's weird um it looks like i could rent a theater wherever i wanted to
01:19:13.000
and it would sell out and i thought well that's interesting better do something about that and then
01:19:20.280
when i so so and at the same time caa creative artist agency so there's this agency in la called
01:19:26.940
creative artist agency and they represent they represent most of the people that you'd be
01:19:32.280
familiar with in the entertainment world and fortunately they contacted me at about the same
01:19:38.840
time because i think i rented a theater in la by myself and that didn't go that very well yeah that
01:19:43.620
was the orpheum well it didn't go so well with the people i was renting because i phoned them up i said
01:19:47.340
well i'm a professor from toronto and i'd like to rent your theater they thought like we've got a
01:19:53.520
crooked narcissist on the line here you know so so they were very skeptical about about that and and
01:19:59.740
of course i didn't have the connections to do the rentals property and all properly and all that but
01:20:03.560
they did rent it to me and it did sell out so that worked fine but caa showed up and also live nation
01:20:09.300
who's been organizing this tour and so we we talked and started selling venues or renting venues and
01:20:18.580
they were the tickets were going quickly and so then i thought oh that's interesting i'm going to be
01:20:24.780
able to go around the world and talk to people and i thought well i better do that right and i thought
01:20:30.980
well i should probably dress properly and so then i was i was reading my my 12 rules for life book
01:20:39.340
um for penguin well reading it aloud i actually knew what it said since i've written it and everything
01:20:46.300
although you'd be amazed at why you forget you know but jordan reads me a chapter of the book every
01:20:51.840
night before the show it's very nice it's how dave goes to sleep at night so so anyways i was reading
01:20:58.840
it out loud for for audible and uh the guy that was the sound engineer or the no he was the voice coach
01:21:05.640
so he would listen and then if i made a mistake he would tell me and i'd reread it he was very well
01:21:10.520
dressed and i thought oh look he's very well dressed he probably knows something about clothes
01:21:15.180
it was quite market you know so i talked to him a bunch about about clothes and he recommended this
01:21:20.400
place in toronto and so i went there and i let them i they let them provide me with two suits which
01:21:28.480
were way too expensive and i just felt terrible about it i thought jesus you should nobody in their
01:21:32.520
right mind should ever buy a suit for that much money that's just completely insane but i thought
01:21:37.280
no way man i'm gonna it was a nice suit my daughter liked it everybody approved of it i thought no i'm
01:21:43.620
i'm trying to do this right i'm gonna do everything i possibly can to do this as right as i can i thought
01:21:50.140
well i'm gonna be in front of a hundred thousand people it's like buy buy a good suit so i did i bought
01:21:55.840
a couple of them and i bought a couple more and it was actually a good idea i would have never
01:22:00.480
guessed it but but i did write in my rules you know the original list of 40 dress like the person
01:22:06.980
you want to become and so that seems right so that's the story man this is a new one for the occasion
01:22:17.840
i just so what do you think is it good yeah one of the things one of the things that's been fun
01:22:24.320
is that a lot of people who come to these talks the young guys younger guys especially dress up and
01:22:29.460
so i've seen lots of people in suits and that's pretty fun it's like look at that people are
01:22:33.940
dressing like adults they've been dressing like like 10 year olds that have been inflated with a
01:22:39.100
bicycle pump since 1967 so you go to washington that's exactly what it looks like you see the 10
01:22:46.340
year olds they've got shorts on and ugly t-shirts and then their dads exactly the same except pumped up
01:22:52.680
with a bicycle pump yeah so you know i mean washington is a very hot swamp so it's not surprising but
01:22:59.840
still it's not i think it's a mistake i think it's a mistake for people to dress like children
01:23:05.860
you didn't think you weren't going to get a serious answer there did you
01:23:16.920
the real question is did you get your shoes in rochester because i did okay those are nice man
01:23:22.640
there you go can you talk about what it means to be ideologically possessed is there some kind of
01:23:30.080
diagnostic that i can use to tell whether i'm possessed by an idea that is not my own
01:23:36.300
i i don't know if there's a diagnostic you can use yeah yeah there is there is so there's well
01:23:46.540
there's i was thinking about it two ways one was it's very difficult to listen to someone who's
01:23:52.620
ideologically possessed because it gets droney very quickly and the reason that it's not interesting is
01:23:58.620
because well it's it's it's not interesting you can hear it from everyone like i'll give you an
01:24:03.580
example i went and saw john cleese at uh in toronto and i really wanted to go see john cleese i think
01:24:09.960
he's damn funny i really liked monty python when i was a kid and well an adult too and you know and
01:24:15.240
they made some amazing movies and it was interesting to listen to him talk when he talked about the life
01:24:20.800
of brian and about uh um the killer rabbit and all those sorts of things and and you know those were
01:24:27.400
stories that only john cleese could tell and so they were fascinating because he brought all of his
01:24:33.460
accrued wisdom and his wit and he conjoined that with his personal experience and he said things
01:24:38.720
that no one else could say and so he was fascinating but then he talked about trump for 10 minutes and it
01:24:43.780
was like john cleese talking about trump is actually no more interesting than any of you talking about
01:24:49.580
trump it's just it's just not interesting and it's because he moved out of the domain of the
01:24:57.260
conjunction of his personal experience and his and his genius let's say and into the ideological domain
01:25:04.180
and it could have been anyone it it didn't have to be john cleese saying those things it could have
01:25:09.460
been anyone and you can tell that in many political discussions it's like i could just replace this
01:25:14.700
ideologue with this other ideologue and they'd say the same thing i really learned to become aware of
01:25:19.980
that from reading solzhenitsyn's gulag archipelago because he talked a lot about he had a moral
01:25:24.860
conundrum when he was locked in the gulag concentration camps and the conundrum was
01:25:30.060
what do you do with the communists because now and then frequently really radical communists would
01:25:36.740
get thrown into the camps because of course under stalin well under the communists in general
01:25:41.540
everybody got thrown into the camps communists socialists students you if you were human
01:25:48.160
it's camp for you buddy and so and you know being thrown into a camp was no joke and you think well
01:25:55.340
you get imprisoned unjustly the proper response should be compassion but then these radical communists
01:26:04.320
would get thrown in and they would still be radical communists and so socialists didn't know what to do
01:26:08.240
with them it's like are you a perpetrator are you a are you an innocent victim you're some weird amalgam
01:26:16.180
of both so how do i treat you and his answer was like a perpetrator until you wake up and you stop
01:26:24.860
spouting the nonsense and you start coming to grips with the reality of your life and you start making
01:26:29.580
you start you start being a personal like individual right someone that because one of the things i
01:26:36.500
noticed as a clinician is i really loved being a clinical psychologist it was as good as being
01:26:41.120
engrossed in a great novel and sometimes the con but sometimes the conversations would get dull and my
01:26:47.280
attention would wander and i think oh i'm doing this wrong if my attention is wandering then i'm doing it
01:26:52.520
wrong because if i'm actually talking to this person and we're on the thin path of truth then it'd be
01:26:59.500
absolutely engrossing and that was the case if you're speaking and you're boring yourself
01:27:06.400
and you feel weak and stupid and ashamed and like you're sacrificing your good name and that
01:27:14.760
people's attention is being distracted it's like it might be that you're not there and if you're not
01:27:23.000
there then something has control of your voice right remember in pinocchio that pinocchio is turned
01:27:28.620
into brain jackass just before he's enslaved just be that's the risk of enslavement that's the next
01:27:34.720
thing because when he becomes a full jackass then he's packed off to this salt mines i think by the
01:27:40.280
dark fascist slave drivers that are in the background it's very very uncanny that part of the movie but
01:27:47.600
it's exactly right so one of the something i've suggested to people online is listen to what you're
01:27:57.820
saying and if it makes you weak stop saying it and you can feel it i learned this from carl rogers as
01:28:05.060
well because rogers was very interested he's a clinician very interested in this idea of something
01:28:10.860
like psychophysiological integrity and so he believed that if you were having a conversation
01:28:17.920
with someone that was therapeutic and so it was treading this thin line of truth then you were sort
01:28:22.660
of lined up physically and mentally all of you was pointing in the same direction like a piece of
01:28:28.320
music points in the same direction and that you could feel when there was disharmony and that was
01:28:33.920
a sign that you weren't being genuine and i think that's true and you can really learn to feel that
01:28:39.580
and it's it's an uncanny thing to learn though because and i've had students report this to me too
01:28:45.100
when i first started to learn that i noticed that i felt weak when i talked about 95 of the time
01:28:53.220
because almost everything i said was false in some way you know maybe i was trying to appear smart or i
01:29:00.760
was trying to win an argument or i was trying to demonstrate what i knew i guess that's the same as
01:29:05.960
trying to appear smart there was some ulterior motive that was driving my speech instead of just the
01:29:12.880
requirement to say what appeared to be true and so i've practiced since i was about 25 24 to only say
01:29:22.440
things that i believe to be true and and and then to see what happens right and well and those are the
01:29:30.560
sources that was partly from reading solzhenitsyn partly from reading jung because jung believed that
01:29:34.540
psychotherapy in its fundamental essence was a moral endeavor an ethical endeavor and partly from reading
01:29:40.980
rogers who was a good practical guide to this sort of the psychophysiology of of speech so how much of
01:29:49.500
that do you feel when you're doing these talks when you're really in the groove because i can notice on
01:29:53.540
certain nights when i think you're really like tonight and we haven't been doing this for a while i felt
01:29:57.720
like you were really really sharp but there are moments where it like really tightens up yeah well
01:30:02.220
moments when i see you exploring well there's other things too like it you know the the depth that you
01:30:07.980
can reach is also dependent to some degree on your state of mental and physical health you know and
01:30:13.260
so i haven't been at my sharpest this whole tour you know tonight was parts of tonight were good i was
01:30:19.760
i was cooking tonight you know i things were snapping along pretty nicely and
01:30:24.480
but i think i think some of it's because like i've the last two years have been very
01:30:34.000
um challenging let's say and i've got very deep into the social media world and some of that's not
01:30:43.100
been very good for me i've really pulled back from twitter in the last month twitter is really toxic
01:30:47.820
man it's it's rough and so um i think i think putting a bit of a barrier between myself and
01:30:57.280
and the constant barrage of unbelievably vitriolic comments is surprise surprise is somewhat useful
01:31:06.480
like it's taken me a long time to figure out what to do because you know i have 800 000 twitter followers
01:31:11.240
and so you think well you have some responsibility to communicate with all those people because that's
01:31:15.180
a lot of people and maybe there's some good that can come out of it and like these new technologies
01:31:19.360
are very very complex spaces spaces to negotiate and how much you should be in them and how much
01:31:25.400
you should be out of them is very difficult to determine but i pulled myself back a reasonable
01:31:30.300
amount in the last month and we haven't been traveling as much and so i think i got some rest and so
01:31:35.060
i'm probably a little more alert and with it than i have been and maybe less stressed by and you know
01:31:42.100
you said you were gone for a month but probably there's been a bunch of hit pieces written and
01:31:45.960
they're actually starting to dwindle you know and more of the pieces like there was a piece written
01:31:51.120
about me the other day in politico and it was pretty positive it was they didn't muck about with it they
01:31:55.320
mostly wrote what i said in the interview and the atlantic came out with a pretty positive piece and i was
01:32:01.160
on dr oz yesterday by the way um so we taped three podcasts yesterday so we talked for about four hours
01:32:09.120
so i was pretty much done by the end of that um it was a it was more of a marathon than rogan and
01:32:17.100
i'm going back on the 12th to do a live show with him and so that's an entry point into a much more
01:32:24.820
mainstream audience essentially his his demographic is basically women over 50 and so i wouldn't say
01:32:31.460
that's a group that has been assiduously following me but it's nice group to be able to communicate with
01:32:38.640
and so the the hopefully the tide is turning right we'll see we'll see
01:32:47.760
well here's a good segue from uh women over 50 you can change someone's life right now as a 13 year
01:32:59.860
old what is the best piece of advice to give me to ensure that i maintain a stable healthy life
01:33:07.480
you want to yell for a second so jordan can kind of look at you
01:33:11.080
clap twice if it's you there we go all right there you go well i can basically localize you in the
01:33:18.860
i i don't think that you can ever be given a better piece of advice than to tell the truth
01:33:27.640
and if you could start if you could start practicing that now then you might get really
01:33:40.860
good at it and then you'll be really something because there's nothing more impressive than
01:33:45.880
someone who's articulate who can tell the truth that and there's nothing more potent than that
01:33:51.660
now what that means is you might have to take some knocks in the short term because you know people
01:33:56.940
aren't necessarily that happy when you point out things that everybody knows to be true but that
01:34:03.180
no one wants to talk about now but i would also caution you like it's not an easy thing you can't
01:34:08.640
just blurt out what you think that's not the same thing as telling the truth right because you have
01:34:13.120
to orient yourself right in the world you have to be aiming at something you have to be aiming at
01:34:17.220
something good you want to have you want things to be better than they are and then use truth in
01:34:23.600
the service of that so it's like truth in the service of love i think those are the fundamental
01:34:27.520
elements of christian ethics by the way is there's some relationship between truth and love and love
01:34:32.040
is the desire for things to be better than they are and that's that's not an easy desire you know
01:34:36.980
because people get vengeful and and and vicious and malevolent and cruel and they want harm
01:34:43.280
they want to produce harm to themselves and to others and it's a universal human tendency it's a
01:34:48.200
very difficult thing to constrain so you have to want things to be better and then you have to use
01:34:53.440
truth in the service of that but those are if you can manage that if you can start when you're 13 man
01:35:00.340
that'd be something you know because there's there's a lot of call for adolescents to be false
01:35:05.900
to go along with the crowd and all of that and you have to be you have to be socialized you have to
01:35:10.920
make friends like it's important to figure out how to fit in but you don't want to sacrifice your
01:35:15.340
soul to fit in you want to retain it and so watch what you say watch what you write be careful with
01:35:25.180
your language watch how you communicate and and tell the truth that's the best thing you got going for
01:35:31.540
you you think about it if you tell the truth then you have reality on your side that's a good that's a
01:35:41.520
what does it say about the state of the world that the world seems to need you right now
01:36:04.660
i wouldn't say it's me like you have to be very careful this is something i learned from carl jung
01:36:13.040
for exactly it's exactly relevant to this question he wrote a paper called relations between the ego
01:36:20.580
and the unconscious and it's it's a very strange paper like many of the things that carl jung wrote
01:36:26.500
and it's about the danger of ego inflation and so you know i've been rose to notoriety or
01:36:36.320
public i'm a known public figure let's say and what i say has a certain amount of influence and
01:36:49.440
but you see that's not that's not the right way of thinking about it
01:36:56.820
well you don't if you're a musician you don't if you're a musician and you're playing
01:37:02.660
a great piece you don't attribute the music to you precisely you know
01:37:06.660
it's like you're part of something maybe you're you're part of how that is expressed
01:37:12.060
so i'm i'm part of the process by which archetypal ideas are expressed but i am not the ideas
01:37:19.760
and to confuse yourself with the ideas is to court insanity
01:37:24.780
hitler confused himself with the ideas that's a bad idea
01:37:29.940
it's like you know here's another way of thinking about it i wrote about this in 12 rules
01:37:36.220
every superhero has a has a what do you what do you call that it's like peter parker and spider-man
01:37:44.740
what is it it's well no no his his his his his alter ego right well you don't know who the alter
01:37:51.020
ego is you don't know if it's peter parker or spider-man right but there's no spider-man without
01:37:54.980
peter parker there can't be and there's no superman without clark kent like and there's
01:38:00.300
actually a psychological truth there so that's the relationship between the ego and the self
01:38:04.340
okay and the self is the superordinate it's it's it's that which you could be if you were everything
01:38:11.160
you could be and there's something divine about it in in a real sense it's the sum total of human
01:38:17.180
potential insofar as that can be manifested in an individual so it's it's it's it's like the genie
01:38:22.720
that's another way of thinking about it because genie is is associated with the root word for
01:38:26.460
genius and that's it's like the brahman and the atman in hindu philosophy so there's the there's the
01:38:34.080
you that's just you and then there's the you that's that's that's that's part of the divinity of being
01:38:40.520
human and you need both of those and you want to identify with the first one not not the not the
01:38:47.200
divinity of human part you want to identify with you you're you these other things can make
01:38:53.520
themselves manifest through you in some sense but you do not take you have to keep yourself
01:39:00.060
separated jung used the the image of the earth and the sun the earth should not fall into the sun
01:39:06.100
it rotates around the sun that's like the proper relationship between you and and god in some sense
01:39:11.760
it's like there's there's a relationship there but that doesn't make you god and you have to never
01:39:19.460
forget that right it's you have to keep that that's humility you're you're faulty and flawed and you make
01:39:27.600
mistakes and you keep your damn feet on the ground and if you don't you're going to get you're going
01:39:31.740
to get flattened and this is another thing that keeps my feet on the ground is like the degree to which
01:39:37.580
you will be flattened is proportionate to the danger of the game that you're playing
01:39:41.680
right and so i've been very careful i'm careful with what i say i try to be very careful and i try
01:39:47.940
not to put myself in situations where i'm unlikely to be careful so um and the reason for that is that
01:39:57.200
i'm not interested in being flattened and that's a that's a high probability event and so well so i don't
01:40:04.740
think that people need me what everyone needs is to reunite with the the father in the abyss let's
01:40:14.900
say that's what everybody needs and i'm trying to do that for myself and i'm communicating that to
01:40:21.260
everyone else to the best of my ability but it's part of a universal pattern and that pattern isn't me
01:40:27.480
not personally you know it's it's transpersonal and so you you stay away from that it's like you
01:40:33.440
don't you can cook something on a fire but you don't dance in the fire you know you burn that way
01:40:39.980
and that's that's not good so what do you think about the part of us that wants to be flattened
01:40:45.340
because as you were saying this i was thinking about about two years ago when milo was at the peak
01:40:49.700
of his success he said to me after we finished an interview he said dave this won't last forever i'm
01:40:56.880
going to destroy myself oh yeah and i knew he was telling me the truth yeah it was inevitable
01:41:01.040
you could see that with milo i felt really bad when that happened actually because i watched him
01:41:06.080
and i thought there's just no way this person can exist he's too full of contradictions like no one
01:41:11.680
can pull that off there's just too many a gay english jew flamboyant trickster darling of the
01:41:20.840
republicans it's like no one can pull that off yeah yeah and you know and then he
01:41:26.840
he'd been and and he and there were things about him that weren't ironed out and that's what brought
01:41:31.960
him down because he talked about what happened to him when he was a kid right he got seduced by
01:41:37.300
someone much older and in a position of authority and he didn't want to play himself off his victim
01:41:41.980
and and good for him but jesus he was 14 now when milo looked at that i listened to what he said very
01:41:48.900
very carefully and with the clinician's eye he said well i was i was a willing participant
01:41:55.220
it's like fair enough i can see why you don't want to play the victim card
01:42:02.400
but you were 14 and now you're 30 and you're still you haven't separated yourself from the 14 year old
01:42:13.680
you haven't you don't see that 14 year old from the perspective of an adult it's like something
01:42:19.280
i'll tell you a story a funny story a strange story it's not funny at all it's a strange story
01:42:23.920
so i had this client years ago and she came i only saw her once and she came in to see me and she said
01:42:30.520
i was sexually abused by my brother when i was five and so she told me what happened and i'd kind of
01:42:39.080
built this image of her brother in my imagination while she told the story and i thought 16 17 something
01:42:45.980
like that she didn't tell me how old she was she just said she was a kid i said well how old were
01:42:50.700
you she said well i was i was four i think she said i said well how old was your brother well he was six
01:42:57.280
and i thought oh well i know how to deal with this to some degree it's like
01:43:02.240
you weren't sexually molested by your brother you were two very badly supervised children
01:43:09.660
right because part of her was still four and a six-year-old is an adult for a four-year-old
01:43:16.780
but a six-year-old isn't an adult you know and it was so it was such an interesting interchange
01:43:22.060
because she walked away better now i'm not saying she was that it fixed what had happened to her
01:43:26.260
because it didn't but the memory of being assaulted by someone in authority is much ameliorated when
01:43:36.660
you're 30 and you realize that one of you was four and the other was six it's a whole different story
01:43:42.740
you know but you you can't have that story until you're 30 and it's so weird too because she the past
01:43:49.420
changed on her it's like well how can the past change it's fixed it's like well it's not as fixed as
01:43:54.660
you think it's like what happens now can change the past so strangely milo is like and he talked
01:44:02.720
about this and then people went after him for for justifying child sex with children something like
01:44:09.020
that which i thought was i thought that was really unfair because i thought i could see how confused he
01:44:14.420
was ethically and then he also said well this sort of thing is relatively common practice in the
01:44:19.000
homosexual community you know the relationship between an older guy and a younger guy and so like that
01:44:23.700
was just the combination of those two things you know making making because it sounded like it
01:44:30.600
sounded a like a justification for pedophilia and be like an assault on the gay community well that
01:44:35.780
just sunk him and people were waiting to take him down but i thought it was terribly unfortunate
01:44:40.580
in some sense because he's a remarkable person you know for all his strange for his all his
01:44:47.440
strangeness he's a remarkable person and what happened to him when he was a kid hurt him and
01:44:52.460
bent him up and he doesn't know how or why and and that certainly was part of what drove him to take
01:44:58.680
himself down when he said that himself i mean he said that after he had those initial experiences that
01:45:04.360
he just was drugs and alcohol for the next six years or whatever i don't remember the exact parameters of
01:45:11.760
the story so yeah all right one more unfortunately only time for one more let me get a good one here
01:45:22.240
all right we'll help one other person out right now how would you deal with the dragon who happens
01:45:31.680
to be my roommate who refuses to clean his room or do the dishes or take out the trash or mow the lawn
01:45:45.200
you want a better one oh um i don't know that's not a bad question it's the but i don't think it's
01:45:56.100
the right question the right question might be what are the circumstances that require you to put up
01:46:02.500
with that it's like because the first thing i would do if we were sitting down talking is i would say well
01:46:07.840
can you change them no can you move well that's the next thing to do is like let's walk through
01:46:16.600
what it would take you to move because sometimes the best solution is just to get away because some
01:46:22.680
people another rule that i've been working on is um don't rescue someone who doesn't don't try to
01:46:29.760
rescue someone who doesn't want to be rescued and be very careful about rescuing someone who does
01:46:34.020
like maybe you have a roommate who doesn't want to make things better and then there's nothing you
01:46:40.520
can do about that except example and one manifestation of that example might be just leave you know if
01:46:50.380
you've if you're being treated unfairly then you have an ethical obligation to alter the situation
01:46:58.600
so that you're no longer the recipient of injustice you have an ethical duty to yourself to do that now
01:47:05.700
maybe there are things in your life that make it impossible for you to leave at the moment
01:47:09.240
and but then i can't really offer you any generic advice because what we'd have to do is sit down and
01:47:15.860
figure out i'd have to do a much more detailed analysis of your living situation and your interactions
01:47:22.100
with your roommate to find out the entire story and to start thinking about a strategy that might
01:47:28.120
um that might aid you in your in your negotiations like is it maybe you just can't negotiate i'm not
01:47:35.580
saying that's true by the way because i don't know who you are maybe you can negotiate like mad but
01:47:39.980
there's no way i can tell from the question where the locale of the problem is but the first
01:47:46.540
thing i would explore is like what the hell are you doing there you know leave if you can move
01:47:52.600
somewhere else and and that's just that's the simplest perhaps the simplest solution to the
01:47:57.920
problem perhaps not well on that note i'm on that happy note on that happy note the guy's looking
01:48:06.500
for a new roommate right now anyone looking to uh anybody got an extra room someone who's easy to push
01:48:11.860
around haha he's getting funnier sorry i didn't i didn't mean that but i couldn't resist uh well
01:48:22.020
i'm thrilled that we're kicking this thing up again and we got now we have like another 50 stops and i
01:48:26.260
think we have about 16 in europe and and this thing is truly truly worldwide it's it's awesome and i'm
01:48:32.160
and i'm psyched to be part of it and on that note i'm going to get out of the way and guys make some
01:48:36.480
noise for jordan peterson everybody thank you everyone it was a pleasure to be in rochester
01:49:07.140
if you found this conversation meaningful you might think about picking up dad's books maps of meaning
01:49:15.280
the architecture of belief or his newer bestseller 12 rules for life an antidote to chaos both of these
01:49:20.280
works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the jordan b peterson podcast see jordan b peterson
01:49:25.720
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01:49:30.980
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or share this episode with a friend if you didn't enjoy it keep it to yourself we're still at five
01:49:42.460
stars even though i'm the one doing the intros and the extras next week's episode is another 12 rules
01:49:47.700
for life lecture from westbury new york recorded on september 6th 2018 talk to you next week thanks for
01:49:54.220
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01:50:01.700
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01:50:10.780
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01:50:16.900
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01:50:23.520
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01:50:29.220
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