The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Responsibility is the Key to Meaning

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 the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. I'm Mikayla Peterson, Dad's daughter and collaborator.

00:01:04.840 This is a podcast from Irving, Texas, recorded on October 11th, 2018.

00:01:09.840 Not much of an update this week, to be honest. Hopefully we'll have good things to tell you guys next week.

00:01:14.960 For now, remember to eat healthy. Exercise once you're healthy enough. It will help you get healthy if you're not too sick.

00:01:22.340 Try out an infrared sauna, use cold immersion therapy, or take a cold shower in the morning, and avoid doctors and pharmaceuticals if you can.

00:01:32.740 If it's life and death, go ahead, but otherwise do so at your own peril.

00:01:36.580 I've named this podcast Responsibility is the Key to Meaning. Enjoy.

00:01:45.580 Responsibility is the Key to Meaning, a 12 Rules for Life lecture by Jordan B. Peterson.

00:01:50.200 Give it up for Jordan Peterson, everybody.

00:02:17.240 You can tell you're in Texas.

00:02:20.200 Well, thank you very much.

00:02:27.220 It's very nice.

00:02:30.880 So, as Dave pointed out, this is, we've been on tour for quite a long time, and this is the last city, American city, that, for now, anyways, that I plan to speak at.

00:02:45.840 I guess I'm in L.A. in December, but I'm not going to count that.

00:02:50.300 So, my wife and I have traveled to, I think, 85 cities since February, something like that, and talked to about 250,000 people, I guess.

00:03:07.540 Yeah, it's, yeah, it's a lot of people, it's amazing, really, and it's surprising that so many people are interested in, I would think, deeper psychological ideas, you know, and that there's a public audience for that.

00:03:27.080 It's really quite remarkable, and it's been a real privilege to do this, I would say.

00:03:33.440 I've enjoyed it a lot.

00:03:34.760 It's been unbelievably positive, you know, like, not the whole experience.

00:03:39.800 But these lectures have been unbelievably positive, you know, as far as I can tell, the majority of people who come aren't really coming for political reasons, and that's just as well, as far as I'm concerned, because I'm not really interested in the final analysis in political ideas.

00:04:03.280 I'm interested in them as ideas, but I'm not really interested in them politically, I'm more interested in psychological development.

00:04:13.400 I'd much rather concentrate on the development of the individual, and that's underneath politics in some sense, because, you know, almost everything is nested inside something else, and our political system depends on the integrity of the individual.

00:04:33.280 It's predicated on the idea that the individual citizen, not consumer, but citizen, is the foundation of the state, so that sovereignty inheres in the individual, which is a really daring idea, a crazy idea in some sense, sovereignty that inheres in everyone.

00:04:57.560 And one of the prerequisites for having that work is that the people in whom sovereignty inheres are as together and honorable and honest and decent and responsible as they can possibly be.

00:05:15.960 Because otherwise, well, if the foundation isn't solid, and if the individual is the foundation of the state, then obviously the state isn't solid, and I believe that the state in some sense is the kingdom of the dead.

00:05:29.640 And the reason I say that is because it's something that's bequeathed to us, and it's bequeathed to us by those who lived in the past, all our institutions and our infrastructure for that matter, all the tried and true ways that we do things, aren't our inventions any more than our languages are invention.

00:05:53.340 It's something that is something that is something that is something that is something that is a gift to us from our ancestors, let's say.

00:05:59.420 But the problem with our ancestors is that they're all dead, and dead people can't speak or see, and so that means that it's up to the living to serve as the eyes for the dead.

00:06:10.700 That's one way of thinking about it, it's a very old idea, and to see and speak for the dead, and so that means that you're responsible as an individual to keep your eyes open and your tongue sharp, and your words aligned, and your house in order.

00:06:28.480 Because according to the great myth that our culture is predicated on, the integrity of the society, the integrity of the future end of society depends on you.

00:06:45.080 And I think that's true.

00:06:46.680 So, Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, when he was reflecting on the horrors of communism, he pointed out that the Christian idea, Judeo-Christian idea, was that every single person was a center of the universe.

00:07:07.900 That's how the universe is constructed, in some sense, is that every conscious creature, every self-conscious creature, let's say, is a center.

00:07:18.700 And it's not easy for us to understand how something could be built so that it could have multiple centers, because of course we tend to think that, the way we think, is that something has one center.

00:07:28.760 But reality is very, very complicated, and it could easily be built so that it has as many centers as there are people.

00:07:36.520 And that's a crazy idea, in some sense, but it really seems to work.

00:07:46.260 And so, everyone is, in some strange sense, a center.

00:07:49.860 I've thought about that from the perspective of networks.

00:07:53.980 I think it's a way of approaching that idea and making it comprehensible.

00:07:57.860 You know, if you think of yourself, if you think, well, there's seven billion people, and you're just one of them.

00:08:03.980 Well, in some sense, you can get away with anything, because what the hell do you matter if there's seven billion people?

00:08:09.860 It doesn't really matter what you do.

00:08:11.680 If you think of all those people as isolated units, and maybe you think of your, you think of a line of them, seven billion long,

00:08:18.140 you stretch around the entire world, and just take one person out of that, it doesn't seem to make any difference at all.

00:08:23.000 And I think that that's not an accurate way of thinking.

00:08:28.280 Partly, it's depressing, in some sense, because it means that your existence is without significance.

00:08:36.500 But it's also a relief, in a perverse way, because it's a relief to be insignificant, perversely,

00:08:43.580 because it means that it doesn't matter what you do.

00:08:46.080 And if it doesn't matter what you do, well, it doesn't matter what you do, and that's kind of sad.

00:08:52.000 But on the other hand, if it doesn't matter what you do, it doesn't matter what you do.

00:08:57.520 That's kind of a big advantage, if you're looking for an excuse to do whatever the hell you want.

00:09:03.720 And so, it's better to understand that we're all nodes in a network,

00:09:09.200 and, you know, you can think about this arithmetically.

00:09:14.300 You know, during your life, you'll have the opportunity to affect a thousand people deeply, I would say,

00:09:20.620 for better or for worse, and each of those thousand people will affect a thousand people.

00:09:24.940 So that's a million people, one person removed from you, and a billion two people removed.

00:09:31.340 And we know how formal networks work, AI networks, computational networks,

00:09:36.720 is the misbehavior of a single node can produce tremendous instability in the system.

00:09:43.160 And so, we're networked, and more than ever, now.

00:09:47.540 And so, what that means, I believe, is that what we do for evil or for good

00:09:54.700 is amplified, really, beyond our understanding.

00:09:59.360 And I think that is the way the world is constituted.

00:10:02.800 It's something that our great religious stories insist upon, you know,

00:10:07.100 that each person is related to the absolute in some manner,

00:10:11.820 and has some divine significance as a locus of consciousness.

00:10:18.380 I've thought a lot about consciousness, too, trying to understand what it is.

00:10:22.200 You know, it seems to me that it's something that I try to develop a fair bit in 12 Rules for Life.

00:10:26.660 You know, I don't think that we're driven mechanically like clockwork or in a deterministic way.

00:10:37.100 I mean, we're deterministic machines to some degree,

00:10:41.200 and we're limited in the scope of our ability.

00:10:44.460 But I don't believe that we're driven like a clock is driven.

00:10:47.560 I don't think there's any evidence that we are, not any compelling evidence.

00:10:50.840 I think instead, we're creatures that confront potential.

00:10:56.400 We're not driven by the past.

00:10:58.040 We're creatures that confront potential.

00:10:59.920 And the potential is the future.

00:11:02.000 Potential is the great expanse of what could be.

00:11:05.180 You know, and when you wake up in the morning,

00:11:08.520 and your consciousness re-emerges from the darkness that had enveloped it,

00:11:12.640 you confront the day.

00:11:14.880 And you confront the possibilities of the day.

00:11:16.900 And for better or for worse, you know, that can be an exciting proposition.

00:11:21.080 All those opportunities that are lying there for you to take,

00:11:24.320 or it can be a daunting challenge if things aren't going so well in your life.

00:11:28.280 But in any case, it seems that what you confront is an expansive possibility of potential.

00:11:36.400 And that it's up to you to decide how that potential is going to manifest itself.

00:11:41.460 I mean, we seem to hold ourselves responsible in that manner.

00:11:45.120 You know, very often in life, it seems like you can go to the right or you can go to the left.

00:11:51.540 You have a choice.

00:11:53.000 You can make this reality manifest itself or this reality.

00:11:56.120 You're not omniscient.

00:11:57.060 You don't necessarily know what's going to happen.

00:11:59.080 But you have some sense of it.

00:12:00.720 And you can at least intend something, even if it doesn't turn out that way.

00:12:05.320 Right?

00:12:05.560 You can see how things might unfold.

00:12:07.440 And you can decide, well, I'm going to act in this manner because I want this outcome.

00:12:11.940 And sometimes that works.

00:12:13.500 And that's a very strange thing because what it means, and I think this is right.

00:12:18.820 I think that what it means is that you're the mechanism by which the potential that constitutes the future manifests itself as the reality that constitutes the present and the past.

00:12:29.560 And I actually think that's in keeping with our physical models of reality.

00:12:34.040 But I'm not going to go into that because, well, no one should ever talk about quantum physics in my estimation.

00:12:41.040 Unless they're a quantum physicist, and I'm definitely not that.

00:12:44.140 But I do think that each of us confronts potential and casts that into reality.

00:12:53.200 And so that also, that's one of the reasons that I believe that our fundamental stories insist that each of us has a transcendent value.

00:13:02.000 We have transcendent value in our role as co-creators of being itself.

00:13:10.700 And so that's a daunting responsibility.

00:13:13.700 And then it gets worse, actually, because I think the manner, the valence of what you produce when you confront the potential of the future is dependent on the ethics of your choice.

00:13:28.320 So, for example, if you decide to live nobly and truthfully, if you decide to lift your eyes above the horizon and establish a relationship with a transcendent goal and live in truth and attempt to make things better rather than worse,

00:13:44.400 then the choices that you make take the potential that lies in front of you and turn it into something that's good.

00:13:50.620 And if you decide, by contrast, to work for the demolition of things and for pain and destruction, then what you bring into being is not good.

00:14:01.340 And I became convinced of that, at least in part, not by looking at what was good, but by looking at what was evil, I would say.

00:14:09.680 I spent a lot of time studying what happened in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union and with some side journeys into Maoist China and so forth.

00:14:21.700 But those were the two primary areas of my focus.

00:14:24.260 And what I learned from that was that the horrors of the totalitarian state are to be laid primarily at the feet of the citizens of those states who refuse to take ethical responsibility for their actions and inactions.

00:14:38.100 More importantly, their inactions, actually, generally speaking, their complicity, but also their sins of commission.

00:14:46.500 And since it seems to me that what happened in Nazi Germany and also in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959 in particular was about as close to hell as anything could actually be without actually being hell,

00:15:00.500 then the idea that you can bring something approximating hell into being as a consequence of your faulty and malevolent moral choices seems to be to be factual.

00:15:12.660 It seems to be accurate.

00:15:14.960 And so that's actually optimistic.

00:15:17.440 It was optimistic discovery, so to speak, for me, because it also meant that if you were capable of making things that terrible, that it was also possible that you had the corresponding power to make things good.

00:15:32.960 It's not easy to understand exactly how you might manifest that self, but avoiding hell is something.

00:15:39.120 That's a start and determining that you're going to work to make things better rather than to make them worse with every opportunity that you have.

00:15:48.040 It's not an easy thing because you get bitter and you get resentful and you get hostile and you get angry and, you know, you might get to the point where you shake your fist at the sky itself and curse the fact that there is something rather than nothing.

00:16:00.180 Life can put you in a position like that, but it's not good.

00:16:03.440 It's not good, and it makes things worse, and they can be really bad, and it's better to work towards something that's good.

00:16:11.920 It's our responsibility to do that, and I think we can do that, and I think that that works for us psychologically because it gives us something worthy of pursuing while we suffer through our limited lives.

00:16:26.040 And I also think that it alleviates the problem because we're the sorts of creatures who, if we chose to choose the good, could actually make things better.

00:16:38.520 And I think we have been making things better.

00:16:40.900 I mean, we're stumbling along and we don't know everything, but there's a lot of good news afoot in the world, even though you wouldn't know it given the terrible polarization that seems to have gripped us in recent years.

00:16:54.520 Because, you know, I read the other day, for example, now more than half, hypothetically, we passed this threshold last week, more than half the world's citizens are now middle class.

00:17:06.760 So that's absolutely amazing, you know, and we cut the rate of absolute poverty in the world by 50% between the year 2000 and the year 2012.

00:17:17.200 So that's absolutely beyond comprehension.

00:17:19.140 The UN now projects, according to their current economic analysis, that absolute poverty, given their current definition, which is $1.90 a day, which is not very much money,

00:17:32.780 but is a lot more than the dollar a day that the typical person lived in all through the Western world in 1895, by the way.

00:17:40.700 If that's your threshold for absolute poverty, then there won't be anybody in the world that's below that threshold by the year 2030.

00:17:46.400 We'll have completely obliterated absolute poverty.

00:17:50.080 It's like, wow.

00:17:56.280 You know, and that's not all the good news.

00:17:59.920 There's more good news.

00:18:00.840 We're probably going to peak out at about 9 billion people.

00:18:03.800 You know, for years, everybody's met, not everybody.

00:18:06.300 Many people have been prophesying that we're all going to die of starvation in an overpopulated nightmare, and that seems wrong.

00:18:19.080 We're going to add about 2 billion more people, and at the rate at which fertility is declining as women become educated,

00:18:27.120 because it turns out if you educate women, then their family size shrinks unbelievably rapidly in one generation,

00:18:33.360 to below replacement, actually, which might be a problem, but it's probably a problem we don't have to worry about, like, tonight.

00:18:39.100 But it looks like we're going to peak out at something approximating 9 billion,

00:18:43.900 and it also looks like we're not going to have real trouble feeding that many people,

00:18:47.920 because we're getting better and better at feeding people all the time with less and less land.

00:18:51.740 And so one of the examples of that, for example, is, you know,

00:18:55.460 there's now more forest in the northern hemisphere than there was 100 years ago,

00:18:59.620 because a lot of marginal farmland has been returned to forest.

00:19:02.780 So, and then it also turns out, this is really cool, and not what you'd expect.

00:19:09.260 How do you get people to care about the environment?

00:19:13.160 Well, you don't stop them from developing.

00:19:15.620 You don't put the brakes on economic development.

00:19:18.560 What you do is you try to get the poor people to be rich as fast as you can,

00:19:22.000 because as soon as you get them up above about $5,000 a year in gross domestic product on average,

00:19:27.660 then they start caring about the environment.

00:19:29.100 And so, when people are real poor, then they have to, well, eat everything in sight

00:19:34.800 and burn everything that will burn just so they don't die.

00:19:38.740 And that turns out to be a very inefficient medium to long-term strategy.

00:19:42.840 If you can get them up to the point where, you know, tomorrow is secure, at least to some degree,

00:19:47.820 then they start being absolutely consumed with day-to-day necessities

00:19:52.340 and can start thinking that, well, we should take care of things in the longer run a little bit, if we can.

00:19:58.660 And so, you know, there's more forest in China than there was 30 years ago.

00:20:03.020 And that's really something, you know.

00:20:05.360 And, of course, starvation in China is essentially a thing of the past, as it is in India and almost everywhere in the world.

00:20:11.840 You know, the only place that we really have starvation anymore is places where it's used as a political weapon.

00:20:17.400 There's more obese people now than there are hungry people by a large margin.

00:20:21.040 We could go out and have a party in the street about that, right?

00:20:24.000 That would be a lovely party.

00:20:25.800 More fat people than starving people.

00:20:28.660 Another milestone accomplished.

00:20:31.520 And really, it certainly is.

00:20:34.000 And so, that's a lot of...

00:20:36.280 You never hear about these things, you know.

00:20:39.600 I kind of keep track of them.

00:20:41.140 I follow people who are studying these sorts of things.

00:20:43.860 And I learned about them about five years ago.

00:20:46.320 I was working for this UN committee.

00:20:48.380 It was producing a report for the Secretary General on sustainable economic development over the next few decades.

00:20:53.820 And I got the manuscript to begin with, with the people that I was working with in Canada.

00:20:59.600 There were people all over the world who were working on this.

00:21:01.960 It was interesting, you know, because the members of the committee were all heads of state.

00:21:06.040 And so, they were appointed to the committee.

00:21:07.600 But heads of state, former heads of state, they're so busy, they don't actually do anything.

00:21:12.080 They just fly to places and meet with people.

00:21:14.360 They're just...

00:21:14.800 They don't exist in some sense.

00:21:16.900 Their schedules are so packed up that they don't have an extra time to sit on a committee.

00:21:21.200 So, they just push the responsibility down the bureaucratic hierarchy until someone shows up who's got some spare time.

00:21:28.280 And that's the person who does it.

00:21:30.020 And that was, in some sense, how I got on the committee.

00:21:35.360 But it was interesting to work on it because it also became clear right away that nobody who was writing the document really knew what they were doing.

00:21:42.140 And the reason for that was, well, who the hell would know that?

00:21:46.580 Like, there isn't a school that you can go to, with very, very few exceptions, that teaches you, let's say, planetary ecology, economics, and political management on a global scale.

00:22:00.100 Right?

00:22:00.340 How do you deal with that?

00:22:01.500 Well, we don't know.

00:22:03.440 So, people stumbled through it.

00:22:04.840 And, well, so we were stumbling through it.

00:22:07.020 And the first thing that became evident was that the narrative of the report was, like, stuck in 1985.

00:22:16.760 It was all, like, capitalists against, well, I suppose, the rest of the planet.

00:22:22.620 The North against South.

00:22:23.740 It was all this antagonistic sort of Cold War nonsense that was really done with by, in some sense, done with technically by 1989.

00:22:32.480 Hadn't been updated.

00:22:33.460 And, you know, business, a lot of the report had business being the enemy of government.

00:22:39.360 And, God, it was just clueless as far as I was concerned.

00:22:42.820 So, we rewrote the underlying narrative and predicated on the idea that, you know, there are people of goodwill operating at sort of every level of organization.

00:22:53.940 Not everyone, obviously, but most people.

00:22:56.040 And that business and government could cooperate.

00:22:57.960 And that, more or less, we'd like everybody to have more money.

00:23:01.480 And if they were healthier, that would be good.

00:23:02.980 And if we didn't eat every creature on the planet while we're trying to get our act together, that might be for the best as well.

00:23:09.680 You know, we tried to make the document something that was just sensible.

00:23:13.120 And I read, like, I don't know how many, many, many books, hundreds of books while I was working on this.

00:23:18.580 And it was so strange because the more books I read about it, the more optimistic I got.

00:23:22.760 I thought, wow, things are way better than I thought they were.

00:23:26.480 We're making headway on so many things you can hardly believe it.

00:23:29.340 We're pushing back disease in Africa.

00:23:31.720 Like, Africa is actually starting to boom.

00:23:36.340 You know, so that's, you know, the life expectancy in Africa is now the same as it was in Europe in 1952.

00:23:42.420 I mean, that's not much of a gap, man.

00:23:45.600 And that's happened over the last, basically, over the last 50 years.

00:23:49.160 That's really something.

00:23:50.320 And same with child mortality rates.

00:23:52.300 They've fallen to, basically, to European levels in the 1950s.

00:23:55.480 And, you know, that's an accelerating curve.

00:23:57.460 It's getting better and better, faster and faster.

00:23:59.460 So, so, well, so that was all quite surprising.

00:24:08.880 I mean, there were some things I stumbled across that I thought were really bad.

00:24:13.540 What we're doing to the oceans is really bad.

00:24:15.780 Taking all the fish out of the oceans, the way we're doing it, is unbelievably stupid.

00:24:19.940 And hopefully we'll stop.

00:24:21.140 But it's a technical problem to some degree because no one owns the fishery resources.

00:24:25.540 Everybody takes everything they can get.

00:24:27.140 And it's a very bad long-term management problem.

00:24:29.640 But there are places, like Iceland, seems to have got that under control.

00:24:33.020 And there are places around the world that are building or establishing marine preserves, you know, that are protected.

00:24:40.220 And that seems to be working.

00:24:41.600 And maybe there'll be more of that.

00:24:43.800 There's at least some movement in the right direction.

00:24:46.280 But all things considered, there's never been a better time to be alive.

00:24:51.900 And there's way more promise that sits in front of us right now than there ever has been in the entire history of the human race.

00:24:58.140 And so, yeah, I know.

00:24:59.860 It's like, what the hell?

00:25:01.860 Who expected that?

00:25:03.360 I think we got stuck in the West to some degree in a Cold War nightmare, you know?

00:25:08.360 Because from 1945 to 1989, and not all of you are old enough to remember this, but lots of you are.

00:25:14.720 I mean, most people were 50% convinced that we were going to end it all in a nuclear catastrophe.

00:25:21.900 And, man, it sure looked like that, because the Russians were building tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.

00:25:26.980 And the Americans were building tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.

00:25:30.160 And the weapons got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

00:25:32.680 You know, one of the things, you know, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, that was a fission bomb.

00:25:40.220 That was the first generation of atomic bomb.

00:25:42.480 And it was bad, right?

00:25:43.680 It was the biggest explosion in human history, the Hiroshima explosion.

00:25:48.040 And it was tiny compared to the fission bombs that emerged in the aftermath of Hiroshima.

00:25:55.140 Because it was just a beginner's bomb, you know, so to speak.

00:25:58.900 And, you know, the next generation, the hydrogen bombs, some of you know this, they're fusion bombs.

00:26:04.260 So it's a different atomic reaction.

00:26:06.760 You know that a hydrogen bomb uses an atomic bomb as its trigger.

00:26:10.200 So it was hydrogen bombs that we were producing.

00:26:15.420 And I think that made everybody very, very paranoid and gloomy and pessimistic about the future of the human race.

00:26:22.500 And it isn't clear that we've shaken that off, really.

00:26:25.920 You know, who knows how long it takes to shake something like that off.

00:26:28.620 It set the tone for our self-conception for a very long period of time.

00:26:32.140 But, you know, now it looks to me like you could make a case that we have an unlimited expanse of potential emerging in front of us.

00:26:39.640 And that we could defeat many of the ancient enemies of mankind over the next two or three decades.

00:26:45.820 If we were careful and we stayed our course and we didn't do anything foolish.

00:26:53.560 Now, you know, God willing and with some luck and all of that.

00:26:57.000 I mean, it's not all rosy.

00:27:01.280 There's a lot of us and who knows how we might destabilize things.

00:27:07.000 But my sense is, well, life has always been tenuous, that's for sure.

00:27:14.080 Always.

00:27:14.640 And for most people, far more tenuous than it is now.

00:27:18.680 And so, you know, most of us can, we're going to live to be in our 80s at least.

00:27:23.780 You know, I think we're adding, if I remember correctly, even in the West,

00:27:26.600 I think we're adding four months a year to our life expectancy.

00:27:33.400 As soon as you hit a year a year, then you don't die.

00:27:36.280 Right?

00:27:36.640 Four months a year is a lot.

00:27:39.000 And, you know, people keep thinking there's going to be an upper limit, but we keep pushing that limit.

00:27:42.880 So, who knows what's possible.

00:27:45.680 So, anyways, you know.

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00:30:35.420 In today's chaotic world, many of us are searching for a way to aim higher and find spiritual peace.

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00:31:51.500 I've looked at all that and looked at the totalitarian catastrophes of the 20th century

00:32:00.000 and tried to figure out what might be done to rectify that propensity,

00:32:05.600 that totalitarian propensity and the malevolence that goes along with it.

00:32:09.400 And my sense from reading all that I read was that the best way forward was to concentrate on strengthening people at an individual level.

00:32:20.580 That it was fundamentally a psychological issue, not a political issue.

00:32:24.600 I would say that politics is nested inside of psychology, just like the state is predicated on the integrity of the individual.

00:32:32.840 So you have to attend to the integrity of the individual if you truly want to fortify the state.

00:32:38.560 And so when I wrote my first book, which was called Maps of Meaning,

00:32:42.060 which is a very difficult book, but is now available on audio for those of you that like 12 Rules for Life

00:32:49.020 and would like to go underneath and deeper, you could give that book a shot.

00:32:53.920 It's hard, but if you found 12 Rules worthwhile, then you might find that worthwhile.

00:33:02.720 And then I wrote 12 Rules, and the fundamental reason for that was to lay out a set of principles, I suppose,

00:33:10.800 that was oriented towards fortification of the individual.

00:33:15.200 And part of that was insistence upon insistence that the great idea of individuality that is at the bedrock of the Western conception of reality

00:33:30.540 is correct, it's right, it's the greatest idea that mankind has ever had, the sovereignty of the individual.

00:33:39.380 And that that sovereignty is not associated so much with rights as we insist upon in our comparative immaturity right now,

00:33:48.920 but on something deeper, which is responsibility.

00:33:53.320 And that's a better foundation than rights.

00:33:56.720 You might think, well, you want your rights because then, well, your rights are like a privilege in some sense,

00:34:01.640 and who doesn't want privilege?

00:34:02.820 It's like, well, I don't know if you want privilege precisely.

00:34:09.500 Maybe you want a struggle.

00:34:10.840 Maybe you want a battle.

00:34:12.280 Maybe you want an adventure.

00:34:14.140 Maybe you want something difficult to do that you can grapple with.

00:34:17.860 Maybe that's what you need in order to justify your life, to yourself even, as well as to other people.

00:34:22.820 And I believe that.

00:34:23.780 I believe that people are built for a load, a voluntary load, and that the heavier the load that you take on voluntarily,

00:34:29.920 the better things work, including directly for you.

00:34:33.660 And so the idea of individual sovereignty isn't nested in the world of rights precisely.

00:34:39.040 Those are, the rights are more like preconditioned for you to take on your responsibility.

00:34:43.720 The state, you have rights so that the state, the rights demarcate how the state can interact with you.

00:34:49.200 It puts a limit on what the state can do, but the reason for that isn't so that you can have your privilege, so to speak.

00:34:54.760 I hate that word.

00:34:55.500 It's been ruined, but it's the best one I can use at the moment.

00:34:58.580 It's so that you have the opportunity to manifest your responsibility.

00:35:03.580 You think, well, why would you do that?

00:35:05.040 It's because, well, that's what gives your life meaning, is to take on a responsibility.

00:35:11.800 And I don't think we've really understood this that well.

00:35:15.080 When we talk about responsibility, and we don't that much, when we talk about responsibility, we tend to talk about it as a duty.

00:35:23.780 And that's fair enough, you know, but that's not precise enough.

00:35:29.780 It's different than that.

00:35:31.120 It's that your responsibility is what gives your life meaning.

00:35:34.980 And you need your life to have meaning, because life is very difficult.

00:35:37.960 It's bounded by suffering, and it's tainted by malevolence.

00:35:42.500 And so, if you don't have something worthwhile to do in the face of that, then it corrupts and destroys you, and then you make things worse.

00:35:51.060 And that's not good.

00:35:52.260 You need an antidote to that.

00:35:54.320 And the antidote seems to me to be responsibility.

00:35:57.340 And I think there are multiple levels of evidence that support that.

00:36:00.500 Like, one of the things we know in the clinical realm, for example,

00:36:03.280 is that if you want to make people more courageous, which, by the way, is how you treat them if they're anxious.

00:36:09.840 You don't make them less anxious.

00:36:11.880 You make them more courageous.

00:36:14.200 That's different.

00:36:15.840 What you do, it's really...

00:36:17.280 And it's the same with children.

00:36:23.960 You don't protect your children and shelter them and make them safe.

00:36:27.760 Because life isn't safe.

00:36:29.880 And so what you do is you make them courageous and competent.

00:36:32.680 Because they can take that with them wherever they go.

00:36:35.460 And that requires a certain amount of bravery on your part.

00:36:37.700 Because you have to tolerate watching your children as they expose themselves to necessary risk.

00:36:42.480 And you have to have faith that something in them will develop to take on those risks.

00:36:46.760 So you have to back off.

00:36:48.380 You know, and you have to let them stumble in the world to the degree that's necessary

00:36:52.100 in order to learn how the world is constituted.

00:36:54.400 And that takes courage as well.

00:36:56.760 And so, responsibility is the key to meaning.

00:37:01.860 And I don't think we got that right.

00:37:03.160 I don't think psychologists got that right.

00:37:04.900 The ones that came closest, in some sense, were the people who talked about self-actualization.

00:37:09.660 That started to happen in the 1950s.

00:37:11.340 That you should develop yourself to the degree that that's possible.

00:37:15.660 That there's a responsibility in that.

00:37:19.560 And that that's the proper pathway forward.

00:37:21.700 But I think that that got turned into something that was too self-centered.

00:37:26.760 And narrowly and impulsively selfish.

00:37:29.220 It isn't self-actualization.

00:37:31.940 It's bearing the responsibility for proper being itself.

00:37:37.100 That's a better way of thinking about it.

00:37:38.780 Now, that might force the best out of you.

00:37:41.200 And that's a form of self-actualization.

00:37:43.060 But you don't want to put the cart before the horse.

00:37:45.040 You know perfectly well that you develop by pushing yourself beyond where you are now.

00:37:51.980 Everyone knows that.

00:37:53.000 That's what you do when you go to the gym.

00:37:54.160 You lift heavier weights, right?

00:37:55.860 You want to push yourself beyond where you are.

00:37:59.480 And you do that by adopting an ever-increasing burden of responsibility.

00:38:04.220 And that's what gives your life meaning.

00:38:05.600 And that also improves the world as such.

00:38:08.300 It doesn't make things just better for you psychologically.

00:38:10.800 It actually works practically.

00:38:12.220 And so, you know, if you're a clinician and you're trying to help people overcome their anxiety,

00:38:20.680 what you do is you tell them to turn around and face their fears.

00:38:28.140 If they're moving forward on a pathway and obstacles emerge and the obstacles paralyze them with terror,

00:38:33.180 and so they cease moving forward and retreat and look for somewhere safe,

00:38:38.360 they shrink and the thing that terrifies them grows.

00:38:41.200 And if they move ahead instead, if they decide that they're going to confront those obstacles to their development

00:38:46.520 that terrify them forthrightly, then they grow and the obstacles shrink.

00:38:50.680 And that's the encouragement that goes along with proper clinical intervention.

00:38:55.540 And it's something that virtually all clinicians agree on.

00:38:58.660 It's not an object of dispute.

00:39:01.700 Everyone who's a well-trained clinical psychologist or psychiatrist knows this.

00:39:08.320 And it's been learned over a hundred years.

00:39:10.600 It's been distilled.

00:39:12.060 It's so interesting to see this safe space culture, say, emerge on college campuses.

00:39:17.360 Safe spaces and microaggressions and victim theory, oppression, oppressed narrative theory, all of that.

00:39:25.800 If you wanted to design a system that would harm people's mental health and discourage them,

00:39:31.200 you couldn't do a better job than designing that system.

00:39:33.580 It's exactly antithetical.

00:39:35.460 You know, one of the things that I'm embarrassed about, I would say, as a practicing psychologist,

00:39:45.720 is that my professional organizations haven't come out and denounced that culture

00:39:50.660 as the appalling, what would you call it, the appalling surreal antithesis of what it claims to be.

00:39:59.720 Because if they had any courage, they would have done it five years ago.

00:40:03.040 You know, Lukianoff, I think, George?

00:40:06.400 I don't remember.

00:40:07.560 Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt just wrote a book called The Coddling of the American Mind.

00:40:11.240 And Lukianoff had the misfortune of being in treatment for depression, cognitive behavioral therapy.

00:40:19.800 Now, he's not a psychologist, but he underwent this treatment.

00:40:23.420 And what he learned was that if you go through cognitive behavioral therapy,

00:40:29.260 then you're taught to confront the things that are destroying you, making you anxious,

00:40:34.980 producing emotional pain, to confront them and face them, right?

00:40:38.280 And to strategize in the face of that suffering and that that's the road to cure.

00:40:47.940 And in The Coddling of the American Mind, he said,

00:40:49.700 well, isn't this the opposite of what's happening at the universities?

00:40:53.820 And the answer to that is, well, absolutely.

00:40:56.000 And what's embarrassing to me is that it took someone who had been a client of a psychotherapist

00:41:02.700 to point out that there was something wrong with the safe space culture

00:41:07.980 rather than the hypothetically august professional bodies themselves

00:41:12.300 that should have been all over this a long while back,

00:41:14.560 given that it's the core, it's one of the core features of successful psychotherapy.

00:41:19.900 One would be turn around, voluntarily confront the obstacles that stand in your path.

00:41:25.760 Rule one.

00:41:27.500 Rule two, get your story straight.

00:41:30.720 That's rule two.

00:41:31.680 And those two things, those are the hallmark of successful psychotherapy.

00:41:36.760 But they're also the hallmark of a successful communicative relationship.

00:41:41.340 And it has to be the same thing.

00:41:43.000 I mean, why would it be that the pathway to health within a therapeutic situation

00:41:47.300 would be any different than the pathway to health in life

00:41:49.740 or the pathway to health in a healthy relationship?

00:41:52.320 How could those not be the same thing?

00:41:53.960 And, you know, when you're trying to raise children and you're trying to raise good children,

00:41:58.140 well, you encourage them to go out into the world and take necessary risks, right?

00:42:02.480 To make new friends, to go out in the playground and confront the strange children

00:42:05.820 and, you know, to not hide, to go out in the world.

00:42:10.860 And you also encourage them to tell the truth, right?

00:42:14.840 And that way they can keep their story straight and the family story straight.

00:42:18.160 We all know this.

00:42:19.140 It's part and parcel of how people learn and develop.

00:42:22.020 And you facilitate that in therapy and it works to the degree that people are capable of learning,

00:42:27.240 which is a fair degree.

00:42:29.280 So, 12 rules for life is about, well, it's a justification for all of that.

00:42:34.340 For that responsibility and that courageous conduct in face of the terrors of life.

00:42:41.000 No escaping the terrors of life.

00:42:43.480 It's an all-in game, right?

00:42:45.280 Life is bounded by suffering and contaminated by malevolence and it's fatal.

00:42:50.580 You bet your life on your conduct.

00:42:53.140 You don't have a choice.

00:42:54.460 But you have a choice about what you would bet your life on.

00:42:57.240 And maybe what you need to do is to figure out something worth betting your life on.

00:43:00.980 Because that justifies your life.

00:43:03.500 That's the justification for it.

00:43:05.220 And I don't see another way out.

00:43:06.800 I don't see another realistic justification.

00:43:09.120 It has to be something like, well, you've got this catastrophic mortal burden.

00:43:13.400 The burden of being a self-conscious creature.

00:43:15.560 The knowledge of your own finitude and mortality.

00:43:18.020 And the only thing you have to set against that is the worthiness of your pursuit.

00:43:22.520 And you can have that.

00:43:25.680 And then you get to have your cake and eat it too in a perverse way.

00:43:28.520 And this is a very difficult thing to understand.

00:43:30.340 So in rule 12, I'm going to try to go through the rules backwards.

00:43:34.700 Rule 12 is pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.

00:43:38.260 And it's a fairly simple little phrase.

00:43:40.780 And I thought about it a lot when I was dealing with my daughter.

00:43:44.840 Who was very ill when she was a child and a teenager.

00:43:47.660 Although she's much better now.

00:43:50.660 You know, one of the things that really tests your sanity.

00:43:53.820 The integrity of your marriage and your belief in the goodness of being itself.

00:43:58.500 Is to interact with a child who's ill and in pain and deteriorating as well.

00:44:03.500 That's about, I don't know if that's as bad as it gets.

00:44:06.700 Because God, things can get bad.

00:44:09.300 But it's bad enough.

00:44:11.980 And so my family, my wife and I and my children as well.

00:44:17.760 Had to learn how to deal with that and to think it through.

00:44:20.780 And, you know, I thought it through to some degree.

00:44:23.820 When my son was young, you know, two or three, three or four.

00:44:28.700 Very cute age.

00:44:29.940 So very fragile age.

00:44:32.120 I mean, little kids are fragile.

00:44:33.600 They get hurt.

00:44:34.580 You know, they fall down.

00:44:35.780 And they get pushed over.

00:44:37.400 And they fight with other kids.

00:44:39.220 And, you know, they're...

00:44:41.000 And they get sick.

00:44:41.960 And they're very fragile.

00:44:43.560 And, of course, that is very disturbing if you're a parent.

00:44:47.260 But then you might think, well, what's the alternative to that exactly?

00:44:50.720 You know, because one of the things most people have a soft spot in their heart for little kids.

00:44:55.540 Especially if they're reasonably behaved little kids.

00:44:58.700 You know, they're very cute.

00:45:00.300 And they're very active.

00:45:01.320 And they're really engaged in the world.

00:45:02.780 And, you know, your heart goes out to them.

00:45:05.240 And so that's interesting is that they're attractive.

00:45:09.300 You know, as beings, they're very attractive.

00:45:11.960 And one of the things that's so fun about being a parent that you really don't know until you're a parent

00:45:16.140 is that your children reward you with their existence for your care of them.

00:45:22.140 And you can't really know that until you have your own kids.

00:45:24.560 Because you're kind of blind to other people's kids.

00:45:27.660 But you're not blind to your own kids.

00:45:29.240 Because if you love them, you can see what they're like.

00:45:31.040 You can see how remarkable it is that they exist.

00:45:33.600 And the fact that their existence is remarkable is the payment that they give you for the care you have to take of them.

00:45:40.640 And they rejuvenate you, you know.

00:45:42.260 It's like when you're old and all you see is memory.

00:45:45.360 You don't see the world anymore.

00:45:46.520 You just see your own memories.

00:45:47.760 Because that's what happens to you as you get older.

00:45:50.420 A child comes along and they see the world with unstructured eyes.

00:45:55.840 And so they wake you up again to the wonder of the world.

00:45:58.740 And you can see it through their eyes.

00:46:00.580 And that's why, you know, it was so interesting when we first had our daughter, Michaela.

00:46:05.460 She was the first granddaughter on my side of the family.

00:46:08.580 We take her up to northern Saskatchewan where we had these...

00:46:11.540 My family has a number of cabins up there on this lake that's way the hell out in the middle of nowhere.

00:46:17.880 You know, she would be out in the middle of all these older people.

00:46:21.540 Most of them were older, over 60, over 65.

00:46:24.080 Not my wife and I, but my parents and my extended family and their friends.

00:46:31.140 And she'd be in the middle of them.

00:46:32.920 And all the adults would just watch her, you know, non-stop.

00:46:36.080 Just like people sitting around a campfire.

00:46:38.900 Exactly.

00:46:39.300 And there's a relationship between those two things, too.

00:46:42.580 Because a campfire is one thing that you don't see from memory.

00:46:46.300 I don't know what it is.

00:46:47.140 We're very attracted to fire, us carnivorous...

00:46:50.640 What do you call?

00:46:52.480 Carnivorous fire-starting apes.

00:46:54.100 That's what we are.

00:46:54.860 We're absolutely attracted to fire.

00:46:56.940 We can't not look at it.

00:46:58.120 We can't not play with it.

00:46:59.240 And it's a part of the world where our memory doesn't mask our perceptions.

00:47:06.300 And so there's something magical about fire.

00:47:08.440 We see it maybe like children see it.

00:47:11.160 And then we see children.

00:47:12.700 And we see children like children are on fire.

00:47:15.000 And we watch them because they're so fascinating.

00:47:16.820 And you see them so deeply engaged in what they're doing.

00:47:19.420 And you remember that the world is a magic place.

00:47:22.460 You know, and that's really something to see.

00:47:25.520 And it's the counterpart to their fragility.

00:47:29.600 If they were adults, then that magic wouldn't be there.

00:47:33.180 Now, they wouldn't be as fragile.

00:47:34.480 And that would be a plus because they wouldn't be hurt.

00:47:36.440 But the magic, some of the magic would be gone.

00:47:39.400 And there's a magic in fragility.

00:47:41.140 And so, well, I thought with my son.

00:47:42.800 It's like, all right, well, it's a foolish little thought exercise.

00:47:45.760 But let's say I don't want him to get hurt.

00:47:47.480 I don't want him to get hurt.

00:47:49.000 So, well, what do you do with a three-year-old?

00:47:51.600 And you could do anything you wanted and so that he couldn't be hurt.

00:47:54.500 It's like, well, he's not two foot tall anymore.

00:47:57.880 And then he's like 20 feet tall, right?

00:48:00.040 And maybe he has bones of titanium, right?

00:48:02.280 And he has an artificial intelligence for a brain.

00:48:05.040 And if a part falls off, well, you just pick up another part and you screw it on.

00:48:08.580 It's like he's replaced by some sort of, what, immortal mechanical perfection.

00:48:14.020 And this is no joke because it certainly might be that we're building precisely such things

00:48:18.840 in an attempt to replace ourselves because we're terrified about our own fragility.

00:48:23.180 It could easily be that.

00:48:25.120 And so that, what would you call it, ambition might be lurking in the back of our minds

00:48:33.400 because we can't cope with our own mortality.

00:48:35.680 And no wonder.

00:48:36.220 But you think, well, okay, so you replace him part by part until there's nothing but something

00:48:40.880 that can't be destroyed under any circumstances whatsoever.

00:48:44.280 But the problem with that is that there's no kid left, right?

00:48:49.040 It's that you can't get the magic.

00:48:51.960 You can't dispense with the fragility and keep the magic.

00:48:56.160 Okay, well, that's worth thinking about.

00:48:57.800 That's worth thinking about for a long time, right?

00:48:59.940 You can't dispense with the magic.

00:49:01.600 You can't keep the magic if you dispense with the fragility.

00:49:05.440 Now, here's an old idea.

00:49:07.320 It's one of the most profound ideas I've ever encountered.

00:49:10.200 It really, it burned itself into my imagination when I first encountered it.

00:49:14.560 I think I read it in Carl Jung.

00:49:17.160 But it's not his idea.

00:49:18.560 It's an old Jewish idea.

00:49:19.980 And it's an idea that emerged as a consequence of meditating on the nature of God.

00:49:25.140 And so, and this has nothing to do in some sense with whether or not you believe in God.

00:49:29.260 Just put that aside for a moment.

00:49:31.600 It's not the point.

00:49:33.760 The point, there's a different point that this zen-like cone mystery presents.

00:49:43.020 So, it's, so one of the great questions, one of the great questions, unsolved questions,

00:49:47.760 is why is there something rather than nothing?

00:49:50.660 Why is there being itself?

00:49:52.400 Why does anything exist?

00:49:54.400 Perhaps non-existence would be better.

00:49:56.960 We're tempted by that.

00:49:58.060 For example, if we become suicidal, we're tempted by that thought.

00:50:02.160 Things are so terrible that perhaps it would be better if they didn't exist at all.

00:50:05.600 It's a very dark road that idea takes you down, by the way.

00:50:09.400 The darkest of roads.

00:50:10.400 But it's a comprehensible temptation under certain circumstances.

00:50:15.000 So, here's the idea.

00:50:16.260 Take a being with the classical attributes of God.

00:50:19.840 Omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence.

00:50:23.980 You can do anything and be anything.

00:50:25.540 You can be anywhere.

00:50:26.580 You're everywhere at once.

00:50:27.560 You can be anything you want.

00:50:29.200 You have unlimited power.

00:50:30.260 What do you lack?

00:50:36.260 Limitation.

00:50:39.180 Right.

00:50:40.640 So, why is there something rather than nothing?

00:50:43.600 Because limitation has advantages over totality.

00:50:47.900 There's advantages to it.

00:50:50.480 Well, what's the consequence of limitation?

00:50:52.600 Suffering.

00:50:53.740 That's one consequence.

00:50:56.440 No being without suffering.

00:50:59.240 Maybe that's the rule.

00:51:00.740 There cannot be being without suffering.

00:51:02.680 You might say, well, then there shouldn't be being at all.

00:51:05.200 Because the suffering is too much.

00:51:07.460 Fair enough.

00:51:08.280 It's a powerful argument.

00:51:09.620 But maybe there's an alternative.

00:51:11.160 Maybe there's a mode of being that justifies the suffering.

00:51:15.240 So that you can have the being.

00:51:16.860 So that you can have your cake and eat it too.

00:51:18.780 And I would say that the great religious tradition that underlies our civilization is an attempt to determine what pathway in life allows for being.

00:51:29.460 And its fragility to exist at the same time that it can be transcended.

00:51:33.900 And it's something like this.

00:51:35.460 It's something like to accept the strictures of the limitation.

00:51:39.220 To embrace it.

00:51:40.220 To embrace it.

00:51:41.180 I saw this.

00:51:42.180 I'll give you an image that's associated with this.

00:51:44.860 I was in Australia in February, I believe.

00:51:49.280 And I went to this Orthodox Christian cathedral.

00:51:53.640 The Orthodox Christians like me for some reason.

00:51:56.500 And so they keep inviting me places.

00:51:58.300 And so I went to this cathedral.

00:52:00.720 And there was a painting.

00:52:01.980 A medieval painting.

00:52:02.880 Because the Orthodox types really like medieval iconography.

00:52:05.740 And so it was a medieval painting.

00:52:07.380 Tripditch.

00:52:08.160 Three paintings in a sequence.

00:52:10.080 And the middle one had a picture of Christ.

00:52:12.720 Looked like it was painted like in the 13th century.

00:52:14.960 But it wasn't.

00:52:15.860 It was modern.

00:52:16.800 And there was a cross in front of him.

00:52:18.980 And he was stepping up to it on a set of steps.

00:52:21.360 And inviting people to come along.

00:52:23.820 And so I looked at that.

00:52:25.040 And I thought, oh, I know what that image means.

00:52:27.960 Some of it.

00:52:28.920 You never assume that you know what an image like that means in its totality.

00:52:31.960 But it means something that you can understand.

00:52:34.600 Or someone wouldn't have made it.

00:52:35.700 And there'd be no communicative intent.

00:52:37.260 It has meaning.

00:52:38.560 You wouldn't build a whole damn church around it if there was nothing to it.

00:52:41.940 It's a lot of effort to put into guarding an image like that.

00:52:46.160 That no one can fully comprehend.

00:52:49.180 But what it meant in part was.

00:52:51.820 The gateway to proper life is through acceptance of the vulnerability of being.

00:52:55.840 It's an invitation.

00:52:57.100 Right?

00:52:57.740 Well, you're limited.

00:52:58.700 And you're going to suffer.

00:52:59.580 So what are you going to do about that?

00:53:00.880 You're going to avoid it.

00:53:01.960 Are you going to turn away from it?

00:53:03.080 Or are you going to turn around and embrace it?

00:53:05.420 And what if it was the case that to the degree that you embraced it,

00:53:08.040 you would simultaneously transcend it?

00:53:10.460 It could easily be the case.

00:53:12.660 It looks like it's the case if you look at it purely from the clinical perspective.

00:53:16.120 Because it turns out that if you get people to turn around and face the things

00:53:20.020 that terrify them into a corner, then they develop.

00:53:23.320 And they get to be more than they are.

00:53:25.320 We don't know the limits of that proposition.

00:53:28.220 You know, if you were willing to accept everything that was terrifying about your situation as the necessary price for being.

00:53:37.880 If you could drop all the resentment that was associated with that and justify it as it is.

00:53:42.620 I'm not trying to make a case that this is a straightforward thing to do because the suffering is real.

00:53:47.920 Well, then maybe that's the best pathway forward to transcending it.

00:53:52.200 And maybe even to some degree rectifying it.

00:53:54.960 Because one of the things that's so interesting is that not only do people who turn around and confront difficult problems

00:54:00.360 gain psychologically, but they often solve the problems.

00:54:03.920 And God only knows how many problems we could solve if we were all in, all of us,

00:54:08.780 instead of running at 51% committed to the good and 49% scattered everywhere in the wind.

00:54:16.600 You know, it's amazing what people can accomplish when they're single-mindedly pursuing something.

00:54:21.440 They're really, really unstoppable.

00:54:24.220 And so if there were many, many people who were unstoppable in that matter,

00:54:29.240 who knows what we could create out of the possibility that's in front of us.

00:54:34.340 And so, well, so that's part of the meditation on rule 12.

00:54:38.800 It's like, and you think about it, you actually like limitation.

00:54:42.280 Well, one of the things we know, for example, I've done a fair bit of work, published work on creativity.

00:54:47.780 And I know the literature on creativity quite well.

00:54:50.180 And creativity is a gift, by the way.

00:54:52.040 Not everyone is creative, far from it.

00:54:54.180 And it's just as well because most creative people fail dismally at everything they do.

00:54:58.620 So it's not something to be fervently wished for.

00:55:01.680 Most creative ideas are catastrophic failures, and they take the person who has the idea out with them.

00:55:08.440 Now, they're necessary because now and then you have a creative idea that's so damn good, it just wins everything.

00:55:14.400 But it's a high-risk, high-stakes bet.

00:55:17.600 And most of the time you fail.

00:55:19.360 And so it's okay that everyone isn't creative because it's a very risky enterprise.

00:55:23.660 If you want a creative solution to a problem, it actually turns out that putting more constraints on your pursuit produces more creativity than putting less constraints on it.

00:55:35.480 I'll give you a funny example.

00:55:37.220 You could look this up if you wanted to, if you don't have anything better to do.

00:55:40.140 So, you know what a haiku is, a Japanese poem?

00:55:43.780 It's ridiculous, eh?

00:55:44.800 It's like, you can only have three lines.

00:55:47.280 It's what, why three?

00:55:48.420 Couldn't you say more in 50?

00:55:50.120 It's like, yeah, but it's three.

00:55:52.300 It's three.

00:55:52.920 You're going to play the haiku game.

00:55:54.140 And then each sentence has a certain number of syllables.

00:55:58.640 And if you don't follow the rules, then you don't get to write a haiku.

00:56:02.000 That's it.

00:56:02.480 You've got to accept the limitations.

00:56:04.660 So, and so there's this funny archive online, which I think is just exactly what human beings are like.

00:56:10.640 So there's this, there's this archive online called the Spam Haiku Archive.

00:56:15.740 And it's not the kind of spam that you get in your email.

00:56:18.980 It's like the lunch meat, you know, the pink lunch meat.

00:56:22.580 And there are 15,000, the last time I looked, 15,000 haikus about spam in this archive.

00:56:31.440 And that's what people are like.

00:56:34.220 It's like, okay, well, you know, it's not bad enough to write a haiku.

00:56:37.740 Anyone can do that.

00:56:38.780 It's like, no, we're going to make it about the least poetic object we can possibly conceive of.

00:56:44.120 And they're unbelievably witty and comical.

00:56:46.900 And, you know, there's a game in that.

00:56:49.380 It's right.

00:56:49.780 And the game is, well, let's limit ourselves to some extreme and ridiculous manner.

00:56:55.060 And find in that limitation a wealth of possibilities that wouldn't otherwise exist.

00:56:59.360 And it's so perverse, you know, you think, well, why are people vulnerable?

00:57:02.740 And I don't know if this is a justification for the vulnerability of being.

00:57:06.380 Perhaps it is.

00:57:07.160 Maybe it's a justification for being.

00:57:09.140 It's so strange that perversely, when you impose limitations on yourself that are stringent,

00:57:15.380 you open up a world of possibilities that wouldn't otherwise exist.

00:57:18.840 It's like, well, think about chess, for example.

00:57:21.980 There's a lot of chess games, like possible chess games.

00:57:25.060 There's many, many of them.

00:57:28.240 And, you know, you might think, well, isn't it just kind of arbitrary that you can only

00:57:32.060 move a knight in an L shape?

00:57:33.780 Like, wouldn't it be better if just all the pieces were queens?

00:57:38.840 It's like, no.

00:57:41.760 It wouldn't be better.

00:57:43.040 Because you couldn't play chess then.

00:57:45.300 And that's so strange.

00:57:46.600 It's like, this is what you're saying.

00:57:48.000 You're saying, you take the pieces of the chess game and you make them less limited, which

00:57:54.960 is what you do if you transform them all into queens, and then the game is destroyed.

00:58:01.240 So, what's up with that?

00:58:03.460 How can more be less?

00:58:06.240 And I don't know the answer to that exactly.

00:58:08.460 Like, I don't understand it precisely.

00:58:10.420 But it's clearly, you know, when you're playing a video game, you incarnate yourself in another

00:58:16.880 world, and it has slightly different rules.

00:58:19.920 And you think, well, that's entertaining.

00:58:21.160 Let's jump into a world that has different constraints and see what possibilities emerge

00:58:25.760 as a consequence.

00:58:27.080 And you do that voluntarily.

00:58:28.480 It's like, and, you know, I actually think there's something deeply metaphysical and profound

00:58:35.380 about that, because the closest simulations we have to reality are video games.

00:58:42.600 And, you know, we think of video games as just games.

00:58:45.420 But there are simulations.

00:58:47.300 And the simulations, it's a huge industry.

00:58:50.460 And, you know, and the demand for reality in simulation is one of the things that drives

00:58:57.280 computational power forward.

00:58:59.780 There aren't many things that we need, the vast computational power that we continue to

00:59:04.700 develop to do.

00:59:06.060 But one of the things we need that computational power to do is to make ever more real simulations

00:59:12.720 in game space.

00:59:13.980 And so then we make these universes that emerge online, and we pop ourselves into avatars,

00:59:20.820 you know, and we take on limitations that we wouldn't otherwise have, and experience worlds

00:59:27.080 of possibility that we wouldn't otherwise have.

00:59:29.120 And how do, since we're trying to simulate reality when we're making those games, how do

00:59:34.520 we know that that's not an accurate simulation of reality?

00:59:37.800 Maybe it is.

00:59:38.760 There's something necessary about limitation.

00:59:41.820 So then you embrace limitation.

00:59:44.280 You say yes to it to the degree that you can, and that requires courage.

00:59:48.540 It's the same as the picture that I just described to you.

00:59:52.420 It means that you have to willingly accept your mortal limitations with all the horror that

00:59:58.600 that entails.

00:59:59.760 And there isn't anything you can do that's more courageous than that.

01:00:03.800 You know, it's like embracing your own death.

01:00:06.100 Death as a precondition for being.

01:00:08.600 And that could easily be the case.

01:00:10.280 And I mean, I don't know if people could even manage that, because it's a lot to ask.

01:00:14.080 But it does appear that that is the pathway forward.

01:00:17.500 It really does appear that way.

01:00:19.060 And it might turn out, too, that you discover that there's a lot more to you than you thought,

01:00:23.140 because maybe you're strong enough to actually do that.

01:00:25.860 And if you found out that you were strong enough to do that, well, then maybe a lot of

01:00:29.020 the sting out, the sting in it would disappear.

01:00:32.080 It's possible.

01:00:33.100 You know, you know already that if you do something, Nietzsche said, he who has a why can bear any

01:00:40.760 how.

01:00:42.020 And so, you know, you have to stumble forward in life with the burdens that you've been cursed

01:00:47.200 or blessed with, I suppose.

01:00:48.820 And the best way to stumble forward under those conditions is to do something that's

01:00:53.940 tremendously worthwhile.

01:00:55.560 Think, yes, that was worth it.

01:00:57.080 Because that's what you want to think when you're doing something, or when you're finished

01:01:00.200 it.

01:01:00.680 While you're doing it, you want to think, this is worthwhile.

01:01:03.200 And what do you mean?

01:01:04.120 It means it justifies the sacrifices that I'm making.

01:01:07.180 There's something about the process that I'm engaged in that justifies the sacrifices that

01:01:11.140 I'm making.

01:01:12.800 Well, that's what you need for your whole life.

01:01:14.300 You need something for your whole life that justifies the sacrifice of your life.

01:01:19.540 And maybe that's within your grasp.

01:01:21.120 And I do believe that that's to be found through the adoption of responsibility.

01:01:25.600 And the responsibility for you, responsibility for your family, responsibility for your community.

01:01:31.120 But at a more fundamental level, it's responsibility to put yourself together so that when you encounter

01:01:36.580 the potential that lies in front of you, you make the decisions that transform that potential into

01:01:42.000 the best possible reality.

01:01:43.960 And I think we're all doing that.

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01:03:13.760 And I think we hold each other accountable for that.

01:03:17.080 We hold ourselves accountable for that.

01:03:19.080 And we hold the people around us accountable for that.

01:03:21.420 Because, you know, you tell yourself,

01:03:24.760 if you're looking back at your life with regret,

01:03:28.540 you think, there was so much potential there that I didn't use.

01:03:32.060 And now it's gone.

01:03:33.180 And that fills you with sorrow.

01:03:34.580 And if you have children and you think,

01:03:36.780 well, my children aren't living up to their potential,

01:03:38.640 then you're not happy with them, you know?

01:03:40.400 You want to shake your fist at them or your finger at them.

01:03:42.720 Say, look, you're not...

01:03:43.760 You want to shake them.

01:03:44.720 You want to say, look, you're...

01:03:45.860 I know there's more to you.

01:03:47.280 I want you to live up to your potential.

01:03:49.740 Well, and it outrages you ethically,

01:03:52.460 unless you're jealous of your children,

01:03:54.180 which is a very bad idea.

01:03:55.680 It outrages you ethically that they're not doing everything they could.

01:03:58.920 You can see the wonderful person that's there.

01:04:01.080 You know, you have privileged access to that as their parent.

01:04:03.780 You could see what they could be.

01:04:04.960 And then it hurts your soul when they deviate from what you believe you've seen that they could manifest.

01:04:11.720 And so this is deeply embedded in us in an ethical sense.

01:04:16.280 And it's part of our dialogue with our conscience.

01:04:19.020 We hold ourselves accountable when we don't live up to our potential.

01:04:22.620 When we don't interact with what's in front of us and bring what's best forward.

01:04:26.160 So, you know, I did these biblical lectures last year.

01:04:33.320 Yeah, thank you.

01:04:34.820 I'm going to...

01:04:35.660 I'm hoping I'll get back to them in September.

01:04:37.700 That's the plan.

01:04:38.560 I want to do...

01:04:40.460 I want to start lecturing about Exodus, which is a story I absolutely love.

01:04:43.760 It's an absolutely amazing story.

01:04:45.620 It's unbelievably deep.

01:04:47.380 And like the stories in Genesis.

01:04:49.100 I was very interested, especially in the opening of Genesis.

01:04:51.920 Because I do believe that...

01:04:53.800 See, I believe that our political system is nested inside a story.

01:04:59.100 It has to be.

01:04:59.920 Just like your waking consciousness is nested inside a dream.

01:05:03.660 You have to dream.

01:05:05.060 You cannot live without dreaming.

01:05:07.640 You'll lose your mind if you don't dream.

01:05:10.180 You have to dream.

01:05:10.940 And no one really knows why.

01:05:12.460 The psychoanalysts made a lot of progress in determining why, I think.

01:05:15.680 Especially Carl Jung.

01:05:16.700 But in any case, it's the case that your linear, articulated, waking consciousness is dependent

01:05:25.380 for its integrity on the dream.

01:05:28.760 And we don't know what the dream is.

01:05:30.640 It's images and it's stories and it's artistic endeavor.

01:05:35.380 And it's the great narrative of humanity.

01:05:38.680 It's the stories that structure what we don't yet understand.

01:05:43.320 It's like there's a buffer between what we know and can say and what we don't know at all.

01:05:49.620 And that buffer is filled by the dream.

01:05:52.760 And for better or worse, the dream that our culture is embedded in is a religious dream.

01:05:57.980 And the religious dream is old.

01:05:59.780 It's very old.

01:06:00.620 And it's something that's evolved.

01:06:02.940 It's not something that people thought up in any real sense.

01:06:06.420 Any more than you think up what you dream.

01:06:09.060 Dreams happen to you.

01:06:10.240 And the religious revelations that underlie our culture happen to us.

01:06:17.040 And we did what we could to make them coherent and to lay them out.

01:06:20.220 It doesn't mean we understand them.

01:06:21.520 But it doesn't matter.

01:06:22.420 Because they're still, they're the buffer ground between what we understand completely

01:06:27.920 and what we don't understand at all.

01:06:31.420 It's the great dream of mankind.

01:06:35.220 The religious substructure.

01:06:36.360 And I was very interested in the stories at the beginning of Genesis.

01:06:41.640 Because they're very, very old.

01:06:43.400 Who knows how old they are?

01:06:45.200 God only knows how old they are.

01:06:46.620 They're very, very old.

01:06:47.640 And obviously they're unforgettable.

01:06:49.580 Because we didn't forget them.

01:06:51.340 And so there's some, well, it's something to think about.

01:06:53.760 Stories don't survive for thousands and thousands of years by accident.

01:06:57.460 At the very least, they're adapted to our memory.

01:07:00.560 Right?

01:07:01.740 Obviously, the stories that survive are those that are adapted to our memory.

01:07:05.080 So they fit us like a, like a key fits a lock.

01:07:08.580 It doesn't mean we can understand them.

01:07:10.160 And so I tried to understand the, the first part of Genesis for a very long period of time.

01:07:15.560 And there's a series of propositions in the, in the book that I think are extremely interesting.

01:07:20.900 And so let me lay them out.

01:07:23.880 So the first are the characters and, or the, or the, or the elements of reality.

01:07:27.840 That's a more real, a more accurate way of, of putting it.

01:07:31.720 What, what are the fundamental building blocks of reality?

01:07:35.220 As, as consciously experienced.

01:07:37.380 That, that's a better way of thinking about it.

01:07:39.380 This isn't a materialistic idea.

01:07:41.280 It's, it's a different kind of idea.

01:07:43.700 It's, it's, it's, it's the fundamental elements of experience.

01:07:46.620 Not the fundamental elements of material reality.

01:07:48.880 It's a different idea.

01:07:50.920 Genesis presents, presents this notion.

01:07:53.020 And it's echoed in mythology all around the world.

01:07:55.040 The same sort of substructure.

01:07:56.580 I wrote a lot about this in Maps of Meaning.

01:07:58.940 Finding out about these things from people like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell and Eric Neumann.

01:08:03.280 These great mythological scholars of the 20th century.

01:08:06.820 So, in Genesis you have three elements of experience.

01:08:11.980 You have whatever God is.

01:08:14.280 You have whatever God's word is.

01:08:17.220 And you have whatever that operates on.

01:08:19.920 And whatever it operates on is the tohu vabohu.

01:08:22.600 It's, it's potential.

01:08:24.000 It's chaotic potential.

01:08:25.280 It's something like that which could be.

01:08:27.960 But isn't.

01:08:29.340 And I think that's the same potential you confront when you wake up in the morning.

01:08:32.800 You talk, you think about the future.

01:08:34.480 So what's the future?

01:08:36.080 Well, you can't hold it.

01:08:37.100 You can't touch it.

01:08:37.820 It has no weight or no mass.

01:08:39.460 It has no presence.

01:08:40.720 It isn't real.

01:08:41.760 It's only potential.

01:08:42.900 But potential is some kind of, it's the reality that isn't yet.

01:08:48.000 And it, it's, it, there isn't any way of gripping it any tighter than that.

01:08:52.680 Because it isn't but could be.

01:08:54.520 And that's, that's what it is.

01:08:56.100 It's, it's what isn't but could be.

01:08:58.100 And that's what you confront always.

01:09:00.660 That's what you're grappling with.

01:09:02.040 And, and that's portrayed on, on the large scale in the initial parts of Genesis.

01:09:07.300 You have God.

01:09:08.100 God's a paternal structure.

01:09:10.360 It's, it's, he's, it's the same thing as the structure that you are except on the large scale.

01:09:16.040 And then that uses a process.

01:09:18.220 And that's the word.

01:09:19.480 To encounter the, the chaos and transform it into reality.

01:09:24.240 And so, and what does that mean?

01:09:26.120 I mean, and, and, and, and, and, remember this is the fundamental story of our culture.

01:09:30.340 It means that your, your ability to, to, to use your communicative, your, your conscious

01:09:38.080 and communicative intent truthfully is what, is what can be used to take the potential that

01:09:45.860 lies in front of you and cast it into being.

01:09:47.980 So the word is communicative intent, but it's also the truth.

01:09:52.760 It's both of those in, in, in the opening chapters of Genesis.

01:09:56.200 It's communicative intent and truth.

01:09:58.180 And so you use communicative intent and truth to encounter potential and turn it into reality.

01:10:05.500 And so that's what God does.

01:10:07.300 And then every time he does that day after day in the, in the, in the narrative, then

01:10:11.840 he steps back and says that it's good.

01:10:14.920 And so here's the hypothesis.

01:10:17.480 Well, that's the first thing.

01:10:18.760 He says that it's good.

01:10:19.640 And then the next thing that happens is that another proposition is laid forth.

01:10:23.180 And that proposition is that man and women alike are made in the image of God.

01:10:27.520 So the first part of the story is a description of what constitutes God.

01:10:32.240 God is a structure that uses truthful communicative intent to extract habitable order out of chaos.

01:10:38.060 And then to the degree that, so if what's being used to encounter potential is truthful,

01:10:45.640 then the reality that arises is good.

01:10:48.620 It's an ethical proposition.

01:10:50.480 And it's really interesting.

01:10:51.540 I think it's a, it's, it's the deepest of ethical propositions.

01:10:54.980 So here's what it means.

01:10:56.220 It means something like,

01:10:57.100 there isn't any better way to transform what could be into what is than to do it with truth.

01:11:06.520 Period.

01:11:07.920 And it's a very weird thing to contemplate because, you know,

01:11:10.960 well, we clap and we're happy about this, but we're not.

01:11:14.460 Because lots of times telling the truth gets you in real trouble.

01:11:19.200 Right?

01:11:19.680 It's easier to circumvent the truth.

01:11:21.900 And at least you think, well, I'll deal with it later.

01:11:23.820 It's like, no, you won't.

01:11:24.980 Because it'll be way out of hand later.

01:11:27.100 If you don't deal with it right now,

01:11:28.220 you take the easy way out because you don't want the conflict in the present.

01:11:31.160 I'm not saying that you should run around getting yourself in trouble.

01:11:33.640 But people aren't that careful with what they say.

01:11:36.460 And they're not that careful with how they act.

01:11:38.800 And it's partly because they think they can get away with it.

01:11:41.060 Or because they don't want to withstand the conflict that,

01:11:43.840 that utilizing the truth in the moment would produce.

01:11:47.180 And I don't mean you get to tell the truth just to hurt people's feelings.

01:11:50.060 Like, that's, that's not the truth.

01:11:52.100 It's partial truth used as a perverse weapon.

01:11:55.020 And the truth is much more complex than that.

01:11:57.800 But the proposition in the story of Genesis is that if you use,

01:12:01.920 if you confront potential with the truth,

01:12:03.900 then the reality that you produce as a consequence is good.

01:12:08.020 And that's a hell of a thing to think about.

01:12:10.100 And I do believe that it's the case.

01:12:12.000 I mean, I do believe that we tell people that we love that they should exist in the truth.

01:12:16.820 You don't tell your children that they should lie about everything and their life will go very well.

01:12:20.860 Unless you're a bloody psychopath, you know.

01:12:23.740 And you're oriented very, very much towards producing something approximating hell.

01:12:28.900 And even if you don't live out the truth yourself,

01:12:31.080 if you're attempting to advise someone that you care about,

01:12:34.020 then you try to put them on the straight and narrow path.

01:12:36.800 And so we all know at the base of our being that the proper way of interacting with potential is with truth.

01:12:42.940 And the proposition in the, in the first chapter of Genesis is that

01:12:46.860 the reality that's produced as a consequence of facing potential with truth is good.

01:12:52.920 And that could be.

01:12:53.760 And so that, that's a guideline to how to live in limitation.

01:12:57.480 You have limitation.

01:12:58.800 And that puts potential in front of you.

01:13:00.500 But, and, but the price that you pay for that is suffering and the possibility of malevolence.

01:13:05.580 And the question is, well, how do you maintain the possibility without falling prey to the suffering

01:13:11.280 or degenerating through the malevolence?

01:13:13.700 And the answer is, you confront the potential with truth.

01:13:17.120 And I think that that's, I think it's true.

01:13:19.680 I think it's right.

01:13:20.720 I think it's accurate.

01:13:22.020 And I think also that, I also think that we know this, although not consciously enough.

01:13:27.640 And the reason I think we know it is because we set up our entire societal structure,

01:13:33.520 particularly in the West.

01:13:35.040 But the ideas are spreading everywhere very rapidly.

01:13:37.560 Particularly in the West, we set up our society in the following manner.

01:13:42.140 What's of sovereign importance in the West?

01:13:46.360 The individual.

01:13:47.600 Period.

01:13:48.720 The end.

01:13:49.780 Even religiously speaking.

01:13:52.160 You know, we have a divine individual at the center of our mythological conception.

01:13:55.920 I'm not speaking religiously.

01:13:58.120 I'm speaking anthropologically or psychologically.

01:14:01.200 You can leave the metaphysics behind.

01:14:02.940 You don't have to, but you can.

01:14:05.140 The idea is that the individual is at the center.

01:14:08.840 And why?

01:14:09.820 Because the individual is the thing that confronts potential and transforms it into reality.

01:14:14.240 And the reality that is manifest is a consequence of the nature of the ethical choice of the individual.

01:14:19.780 And it's on that that the ship of state sails forward or founders.

01:14:25.780 The question is, do we believe that?

01:14:27.360 It's like, well, is there another way of conceptualizing how we've structured our society?

01:14:32.380 I can't see it.

01:14:34.560 We hold these truths to be self-evident.

01:14:37.460 All men are created equal.

01:14:39.400 Are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.

01:14:42.180 Well, what's the equality exactly?

01:14:45.220 I mean, it's not like we're all the same because we're not.

01:14:47.980 There must be something fundamental that's associated with being human that's the foundation for that equality.

01:14:54.240 That value that puts you not above the law, but at least beside the law that keeps the state at bay from you.

01:15:01.740 Well, what else can it be than your willingness to contend with potential itself

01:15:06.820 and to determine the course of the unfolding of reality to decide whether you're going to tilt things towards heaven or towards hell

01:15:16.920 because you've got both choices?

01:15:20.060 It's necessary to understand that.

01:15:21.700 It's terrifying to understand that because it means that everything you do that you don't do properly

01:15:26.760 tilts and shifts things in a direction that if you had any sense, you would not want to go.

01:15:32.520 And that's a horrifying realization, and it's no wonder people shy away from it.

01:15:38.940 But the cost of shying away from that is to casually engage in that sort of behavior.

01:15:44.420 And I think, and I learned this from Jung as well, is we're too technologically powerful for that now.

01:15:49.860 We don't have a buffer.

01:15:51.180 We have to get our act together.

01:15:53.260 And because we're at this cusp of power in some sense where we can change everything,

01:15:58.520 change everything, and if we're sensible enough, maybe we'll change everything so it'll be radically better.

01:16:04.600 And if we're not sensible, then maybe we'll change everything so it will be radically worse.

01:16:08.580 And we got a taste of that already in the 20th century.

01:16:11.380 It would be lovely not to revisit that.

01:16:14.880 And so I wrote 12 Rules for Life and Maps of Meaning because I discovered some of these things,

01:16:19.560 and they struck me very deeply.

01:16:21.160 You know, they changed the way that I looked at the world.

01:16:23.020 They terrified me into being very careful with what I said.

01:16:26.300 And that's been extremely useful.

01:16:29.380 And so it's been a great privilege, by the way, to be able to go on this tour

01:16:33.380 and to talk to everybody about this and to talk to all of you tonight about it.

01:16:37.180 And so...

01:16:38.100 So I studied the most horrifying things that I could find for a very long period of time.

01:16:53.620 And the consequence of that was that it made me optimistic.

01:16:59.780 You know, there's an old alchemical dictum that I learned from reading Carl Jung.

01:17:04.700 Insterquilinus infinitur.

01:17:06.380 It means, that which you most want to find will be found where you least want to look.

01:17:11.120 And it's the same idea as rescuing your father from the belly of the beast.

01:17:15.720 The deeper and darker that you...

01:17:17.280 The deeper and darker the place that you look in, the brighter the light that shines at the bottom.

01:17:22.120 And the reason for that, as far as I can tell, is because we are capable of transcending the hell

01:17:27.700 that we are also capable of producing.

01:17:30.060 That's within our grasp.

01:17:31.340 And so, the lectures, as far as I'm concerned, from my perspective,

01:17:35.920 are an invitation that everyone that I'm communicating with,

01:17:38.860 an invitation to everyone that I'm communicating with,

01:17:41.340 to aim up instead of down and to understand that that is your role in the world.

01:17:45.520 You're making the choice with every decision you make

01:17:47.600 between moving things towards heaven or moving them towards hell.

01:17:51.340 And that's meaning.

01:17:52.420 It's a meaning that will imbue your life with the significance that's necessary

01:17:55.920 and help to rectify what's wrong with the world.

01:17:58.180 And I think I'll leave it at that for the time being.

01:18:10.540 Thank you very much.

01:18:24.080 Keep it going for Jordan Peterson, everybody.

01:18:28.180 I mean, I think I can speak for everybody in this room,

01:18:39.140 but I felt that tonight.

01:18:41.080 You guys felt that?

01:18:43.280 I'm not kidding.

01:18:44.080 I mean, this guy, every single one of these shows that we've done,

01:18:47.140 you know, 60-some-odd shows, every one is different,

01:18:49.700 but he seriously just brought it.

01:18:52.040 So, let's bring him back out.

01:18:54.020 Jordan Peterson.

01:18:54.540 Jordan Peterson.

01:18:58.180 I mean, you seriously brought it tonight.

01:19:09.040 Were you planning that all day after 60-some-odd shows?

01:19:14.260 And, you know, because we do have a little bit of a break now before we go to Europe.

01:19:18.520 Well, it isn't really the way I planned it.

01:19:22.000 It didn't go the way I planned it.

01:19:23.820 That happens fairly frequently.

01:19:25.500 You know, I'll prepare a talk backstage, but then that isn't what happens.

01:19:30.540 And I think it's probably, but I still have to do the preparation.

01:19:37.200 If I don't do the preparation, the talk doesn't go well.

01:19:40.260 So, I have to do the preparation and then leave it behind.

01:19:42.820 It's something like that.

01:19:44.580 And I think maybe, you know, I was a little more emotional maybe tonight,

01:19:51.540 because this is the end of, I mean, we've done 80,

01:19:54.440 you and I have done 60 cities, I believe,

01:19:56.500 but that so far it's been 85 and this is kind of the end of it.

01:20:00.240 It's not, I'm going to Australia in February and then Europe again in March,

01:20:04.980 but this is an ending.

01:20:08.900 It's an ending of the North American section of this.

01:20:11.280 And it's been quite an overwhelming experience to do that much traveling

01:20:15.280 and to talk to so many people with that degree of seriousness and serious intent.

01:20:20.280 And so, you know, it's, and it's a relief too, to be finished for a while, I think.

01:20:25.100 And so, well, so that all came together, I suppose, to influence what I said tonight.

01:20:35.300 All right, let's, let's start with a good one then.

01:20:41.440 Will you move to America and run for president of the United States?

01:20:45.060 That job makes people old.

01:20:56.820 Well, it's a very nice suggestion, but it's obviously impossible.

01:21:03.300 So I don't have to think about it.

01:21:04.920 Thank God.

01:21:07.140 Thank you for that literal answer.

01:21:08.940 How do scientists avoid their own biases?

01:21:20.020 Oh, by competing with other scientists.

01:21:23.520 I mean, you, well, look, there's a couple of answers.

01:21:27.540 So this is what I tell my graduate students.

01:21:30.720 Look, there's lots of things that we've discovered in psychology that aren't real.

01:21:37.200 Lots of them.

01:21:37.980 Now, that's true in science in general, right?

01:21:42.140 Because people make mistakes.

01:21:44.660 Now, okay, so here's the problem.

01:21:48.240 So if you're a graduate student and you're moving to get your PhD and then maybe you want

01:21:52.420 to have an academic career, you have to amass a list of research publications.

01:21:58.220 And in order to publish something, you have to have discovered something.

01:22:01.220 So if you don't discover something, you don't publish.

01:22:03.620 And then no matter how hard you work, you fail.

01:22:05.580 So the reward system isn't set up exactly right because it rewards publication and not truth.

01:22:12.860 And so, and it's tricky.

01:22:16.080 Let me give you an example.

01:22:17.300 So I had this graduate student who worked really hard.

01:22:19.500 Here was the project.

01:22:20.760 We were trying to predict academic performance.

01:22:23.420 Grades.

01:22:23.820 And we already knew that you could predict with IQ and quite, quite well.

01:22:27.860 And you can predict with conscientiousness, which is a big five trait.

01:22:31.300 And so you can pick up about 45 to 50 percent of the variation in grades with IQ and conscientiousness.

01:22:38.800 And maybe you could predict more accurately.

01:22:41.020 And maybe that would be useful for selecting students, for example.

01:22:44.240 So we used this questionnaire that tested, that assessed people's values.

01:22:49.300 That was very well documented.

01:22:51.540 A lot of work, decades of work had gone into it.

01:22:53.800 And we thought, well, we'll give people IQ test and we'll give them a test of conscientiousness.

01:22:59.020 And then we'll give them the value assessment.

01:23:01.020 And we'll see if we can use values to pick up a little bit of what's left over.

01:23:04.820 And we gave them a very thorough IQ test because we wanted to let IQ do its job.

01:23:09.920 And we gave them a very good conscientiousness test.

01:23:12.420 So we set up the study properly.

01:23:14.020 And when my student ran the study, he found there were 12 values that were being assessed.

01:23:18.500 And two of them helped predict grades.

01:23:22.580 Publication.

01:23:24.060 Okay, but by that time, I already knew that just because you found something once didn't mean it was true.

01:23:29.160 So I said to him, you can't publish it, you have to replicate it.

01:23:33.120 When he replicated, it didn't work.

01:23:35.480 So then we replicated it again.

01:23:36.920 It didn't work.

01:23:38.340 That was like two and a half years.

01:23:40.580 Done.

01:23:42.080 Right?

01:23:42.440 And he never got his PhD.

01:23:43.760 Now, there were other reasons.

01:23:45.580 But that was a big part of it.

01:23:46.940 It was very demoralizing to him.

01:23:48.600 And I could have said, well, publish the first paper.

01:23:52.060 So, now, so then you think, well, who the hell is going to be a scientist under those conditions?

01:23:57.060 Because the more honest you are, the less likely that you're going to be able to publish something.

01:24:03.680 That's rough, man.

01:24:04.960 Especially when, like, it's a lot of work to do a study.

01:24:07.440 A lot.

01:24:10.640 It's a year and a half to do a, of solid work to do a study and publish it.

01:24:14.740 Minimum.

01:24:15.100 Okay, so then why not cheat?

01:24:19.000 But, or more, it's more subtle than that.

01:24:21.660 So imagine that you have a set of data.

01:24:24.420 It's stacks and stacks of numbers in a spreadsheet.

01:24:26.700 And there's lots of ways you can analyze it.

01:24:29.300 And some of those analysis are going to look better than others.

01:24:32.340 Now, you remember, your whole damn career is on the line.

01:24:35.640 So you might think, well, how can you stop yourself from being biased towards doing precisely those analysis that are going to produce the results you want?

01:24:43.480 But, I mean, even if you're an honest person, if you're an honest person, you would understand that you would have that bias.

01:24:50.940 Because there's a lot riding on this, man.

01:24:53.000 And your whole future.

01:24:55.560 So what did I tell my students?

01:24:57.120 I said, look, guys, this is what you've got to understand.

01:25:00.400 If you discover something that isn't there, you could spend the next 15 years of your life studying it.

01:25:09.020 Right?

01:25:09.460 So do you really want to do that?

01:25:10.640 Not only that, if you publish it, then other people will spend the next 15 years of their life studying it.

01:25:15.460 And maybe that's okay, because those are other people.

01:25:18.360 Obviously, it's not okay.

01:25:19.880 But you know what I mean.

01:25:20.760 I mean, it's more distant.

01:25:25.940 It's like, establish a falsehood, tangle yourself up, and devote your life to its analysis.

01:25:31.580 That's on your epitaph.

01:25:32.680 I studied a phenomenon that did not exist.

01:25:36.320 Right.

01:25:37.240 Okay, so that's one way that you can avoid your bias.

01:25:40.040 It's like, you've got to be afraid of the right thing.

01:25:42.200 You want to fail in the short term?

01:25:44.060 That's a real problem.

01:25:45.100 You want to risk failure in the short term?

01:25:47.380 You be honest.

01:25:48.280 You do your data analysis.

01:25:49.340 It doesn't work.

01:25:49.960 You scrap the study.

01:25:50.880 That hurts.

01:25:51.800 It doesn't hurt as much as wasting 20 years of your life.

01:25:54.480 And getting more and more crooked with each repetition.

01:25:58.540 Right?

01:25:59.120 Until there's nothing left of your scientific integrity at all.

01:26:01.920 And then nothing left of your integrity.

01:26:04.020 It's a terrible, terrible outcome.

01:26:06.020 So I try to terrify my students into abandoning their bias.

01:26:10.800 But, well, because it's the only reliable way of getting rid of your bias.

01:26:14.740 To be afraid of the pitfalls that it will throw up in front of you.

01:26:18.380 And then, of course, science formalizes this as well.

01:26:20.880 It's like, you know, we published a paper in a journal called Psychological Review on the relationship between entropy, which is the tendency of things to deteriorate across time, to randomize across time, and anxiety.

01:26:33.200 Because I think anxiety is a response to emergent entropy.

01:26:36.680 And we wrote that paper for two years, and then it was reviewed.

01:26:40.400 I think it went through 19 separate review processes.

01:26:44.560 And each time, three people assessed the paper.

01:26:46.960 And basically the response, if you submit a scientific paper, here's why a scientist has a party.

01:26:52.420 They never do, by the way.

01:26:53.440 But if they were going to have a party, this would be why.

01:26:55.880 They submit a paper to a journal, and then they get a letter back, like three months later, four months later.

01:27:02.200 So you've put a year and a half into it.

01:27:04.400 And the paper says, there's three opinions, usually.

01:27:08.000 And then the editor summarizes the opinions.

01:27:10.760 And here's the summary.

01:27:12.640 Everything about your stupid experiment sucked.

01:27:15.580 And we don't think you're very smart.

01:27:17.840 But if you do these 25 difficult things, and you do them better than what you already did,

01:27:22.560 there's a tiny chance that we would allow you to resubmit the paper.

01:27:26.060 Then you go out and have a party, because that constitutes good news in the scientific world.

01:27:30.280 So, and I mean, I'm not saying that scientists have it any harder.

01:27:34.700 Like, if you write a screenplay, good luck to you, man.

01:27:39.440 Like, you just don't have a chance of ever having that do anything.

01:27:43.420 It's the problem with creativity, right?

01:27:45.580 It's like, even if it's a really good screenplay, the probability that that will be made into a play,

01:27:51.140 like, and that the play will be successful, or it'll be made into a movie,

01:27:54.440 it's like, no, no, you're way more likely to be struck by lightning while you're asleep in your bed.

01:28:02.080 So, I know, the default position is rejection.

01:28:06.160 So, okay, so, so, so, but that's also how scientists control for bias.

01:28:11.360 It's like, it's, you can't just publish a paper.

01:28:14.320 It's hard.

01:28:14.960 You have to send it out for people who are very, very skeptical to destroy before it reaches the light of day.

01:28:22.140 And in disciplines that are, that still have some integrity, you can game the peer review system,

01:28:28.820 and that's really happened in the humanities, in my estimation, terribly.

01:28:32.180 You can game the peer review system, but it's not gamed in science 90% of the time.

01:28:39.600 And so, you work against your own bias by being terrified of producing a false positive result,

01:28:45.640 because then you waste your life.

01:28:47.160 And then other people control your bias in the competition for publication.

01:28:51.160 And that means that, you know, there's this replication crisis in social psychology.

01:28:57.480 Some of you may know about, some of you may not.

01:28:59.780 Many of the great findings in social psychology haven't replicated when people have put them to the test.

01:29:05.460 And everybody's all shorted out about that.

01:29:07.180 It was like, only 30% of the classic social psychology papers replicate it.

01:29:11.920 I read that, and I thought, wow, 30%.

01:29:14.880 I would have bet on 5%.

01:29:16.880 Because it's really hard to discover something.

01:29:19.320 And like, even if you do it rigorously, in an unbiased way, and you're subject to peer review,

01:29:23.500 and you use proper scientific methodology,

01:29:25.880 the probability that you'll discover something genuine and real that's new is really low.

01:29:31.480 It's really hard.

01:29:32.560 And if we're batting 0.3, that's great, as far as I'm concerned.

01:29:37.440 You know, think about this in other domains.

01:29:40.080 It's like, what's the probability, you start a new business, what's the probability it'll fail?

01:29:44.280 It's like 19 out of 20.

01:29:46.700 It's going to fail.

01:29:47.920 It doesn't mean you shouldn't start a business, because we need businesses.

01:29:51.300 But almost everything you do is likely to fail, at least in its first iteration.

01:29:56.620 So the fact that there's failure in science is like, well, of course there is.

01:30:02.760 It's very hard to get things right.

01:30:04.140 And so, but it's worth it, man.

01:30:06.340 If you can get something right, then, you know, that's the other thing I tell my students.

01:30:10.120 Don't underestimate the utility of getting something right if you can actually do it.

01:30:14.120 Like, we produced this program that helps people write about their future.

01:30:19.280 It's called the Future Authoring Program.

01:30:21.220 And it's at selfauthoring.com, if you're interested.

01:30:25.120 And I looked at the literature to try to find something that was solid,

01:30:30.180 that people could do for themselves, that would be of utility for them.

01:30:32.940 And so I scoured the literature, because it's very hard to find an intervention

01:30:38.120 that is self-applied, that is likely to work.

01:30:44.280 And then we tested it.

01:30:45.300 And if people do the Future Authoring Program when they're in university,

01:30:48.220 they're 30% more likely to stay in university.

01:30:50.580 It's a huge effect.

01:30:52.240 And so thousands of people have done this now, thousands of university students,

01:30:55.780 and they're 30% more likely to stay in university.

01:30:58.380 So that's a huge impact, because we got, we think we got something right.

01:31:01.900 We replicated it three times, in three different, once in, at McGill University,

01:31:06.560 with high-achieving, Ivy League-type students,

01:31:10.880 once at a business school in Holland, with thousands of undergraduate business students,

01:31:16.720 and once in a, like a vocational college, community college.

01:31:21.760 And it had the same effect in all three places.

01:31:24.860 And so, and then, well, now we can distribute it online,

01:31:26.900 and thousands of people can do it.

01:31:28.040 So if you can get something right, the payoff is massive.

01:31:30.840 And so that's another reason to try not to be biased,

01:31:33.560 because you might hit gold, you know.

01:31:35.960 And so that's worth, that's worth being extremely skeptical and cautious about.

01:31:41.980 So I always told my graduate students,

01:31:44.320 you think you found something?

01:31:45.680 Go do the analysis again, and see if you can make it go away.

01:31:48.600 Do the analysis six or seven different ways,

01:31:51.040 because there's different ways.

01:31:52.360 Statistics isn't an exact science.

01:31:54.600 It's an investigative technique.

01:31:56.520 Go back and do your analysis, and see if you can make your result disappear.

01:32:00.220 If you can't make it go away,

01:32:02.340 you still probably don't have anything,

01:32:04.020 but the probability is slightly higher.

01:32:07.140 Yeah.

01:32:10.120 Just to be clear, we're not getting to all the questions.

01:32:13.220 Today.

01:32:16.420 Oh, I like this one.

01:32:18.040 Who is your go-to source that you trust for news?

01:32:26.980 One guy like CNN back there.

01:32:35.500 That's a great question.

01:32:36.920 Well, for a long time it was The Economist magazine.

01:32:40.940 You know, I like The Economist.

01:32:42.700 I like The Atlantic Monthly for a long time,

01:32:45.240 but I don't really care for it now.

01:32:47.040 It's got social justice trouble.

01:32:50.600 Bad social justice trouble.

01:32:52.200 Even though they do publish some essays now and then.

01:32:54.920 Quillette I like.

01:32:56.140 Quillette's pretty good.

01:32:57.440 Quillette's pretty good.

01:32:59.400 You know, I mean,

01:33:00.140 fairly diverse range of topics.

01:33:02.800 I believe that they're oriented in the right direction.

01:33:06.560 But in terms of mainstream news,

01:33:10.520 man, you can't trust the CBC in Canada.

01:33:13.160 You could trust the CBC for a long time,

01:33:15.080 until about five or six years ago.

01:33:17.260 And then all of a sudden, that was gone, man.

01:33:19.080 It was gone.

01:33:20.400 And so, the major news networks in the U.S.,

01:33:24.200 I don't pay any attention to them.

01:33:25.360 I never watch CNN.

01:33:26.380 I never watch NBC.

01:33:28.120 I don't even remember the rest of them.

01:33:29.460 CBS?

01:33:30.040 Does that even still exist?

01:33:31.940 It's like,

01:33:33.060 I've been treated well by Fox.

01:33:36.720 You know?

01:33:37.380 So,

01:33:38.320 and ignored by the other media,

01:33:40.500 except MSNBC.

01:33:41.820 And of course,

01:33:42.260 they took out a terror.

01:33:44.260 They did an absolute,

01:33:45.600 MSNBC did the worst piece on me

01:33:49.540 of any journalist.

01:33:51.020 And that is an intense competition.

01:33:54.660 You have to be,

01:33:55.660 in order to win that competition,

01:33:58.100 you have to be incompetent and malevolent,

01:34:01.940 both at the same time.

01:34:03.640 And they managed that.

01:34:09.560 What do you think it says about Fox,

01:34:11.380 that they're the only ones that put us on?

01:34:13.400 I mean,

01:34:13.600 I've got Tucker coming on my show next week.

01:34:15.260 I can't get any of those guys.

01:34:18.500 Well,

01:34:18.940 that's easy.

01:34:19.540 It says that you're in the basket of deplorables

01:34:21.960 along with me.

01:34:23.920 Hey.

01:34:25.660 We're in good company.

01:34:28.760 That's all right.

01:34:31.640 I love my son,

01:34:33.300 but do not want to attend his gay marriage ceremony

01:34:35.980 due to my beliefs.

01:34:37.620 I've expressed my love and support,

01:34:40.260 but it feels dishonest to attend.

01:34:43.080 Help.

01:34:45.040 Oh,

01:34:45.480 God.

01:34:47.620 Hey,

01:34:48.100 it's our last night for a while,

01:34:49.400 you know?

01:34:57.020 Okay.

01:34:57.640 Well,

01:34:58.040 look,

01:34:58.420 I'm not going to tell you what to do.

01:35:00.600 And the reason for that is that

01:35:02.220 I don't know what you should do.

01:35:05.560 If you're a clinician,

01:35:07.140 I'm a clinician,

01:35:08.220 and there's a rule

01:35:10.160 if you're a clinician

01:35:10.960 and one of the rules is,

01:35:12.460 there's a number of them,

01:35:13.240 one of the rules is

01:35:14.000 do not steal people's destiny from them.

01:35:17.800 And so,

01:35:18.280 what I would do

01:35:19.240 if you were sitting down with me

01:35:21.360 to solve this problem

01:35:23.940 is

01:35:24.260 we would lay out

01:35:26.440 the argument on both sides

01:35:28.140 in as much detail as possible

01:35:30.080 so that we really understood the landscape

01:35:32.780 and then we would also have a discussion

01:35:34.380 about

01:35:34.780 what it is

01:35:36.160 that you want to have happen.

01:35:38.960 So,

01:35:39.500 what do you envision

01:35:40.160 as the future

01:35:40.860 that you want to bring into being?

01:35:42.800 And,

01:35:43.480 you know,

01:35:43.940 you could make a case that

01:35:45.100 you could sacrifice

01:35:47.340 your principles

01:35:48.620 even at the cost

01:35:50.020 of your

01:35:50.600 psychological well-being

01:35:52.240 to show support

01:35:53.420 for someone that you love

01:35:54.620 or you could say,

01:35:57.120 well,

01:35:57.380 you have deeply rooted convictions

01:35:58.720 and you feel that your son

01:35:59.960 has picked a path

01:36:00.840 that isn't appropriate

01:36:01.640 and you're not going to be complicit

01:36:04.060 in that decision.

01:36:05.500 I mean,

01:36:05.800 those are basically the positions,

01:36:07.260 right?

01:36:07.520 And I'm absolutely not

01:36:09.920 making a case

01:36:11.380 for one of those positions

01:36:12.300 against the other

01:36:12.940 in your particular case

01:36:14.300 because I don't know

01:36:15.320 the particulars of your situation.

01:36:17.900 I think that it's necessary

01:36:19.480 under those circumstances

01:36:20.580 to ask yourself

01:36:21.560 very hard questions,

01:36:22.800 though.

01:36:22.980 It's like,

01:36:23.620 what makes you so sure

01:36:25.780 that your motives

01:36:26.660 are 100% pure?

01:36:29.880 You know,

01:36:30.360 because the case you're making

01:36:31.380 is that the reason

01:36:32.120 that you won't attend

01:36:33.000 the ceremony

01:36:33.760 is because

01:36:34.360 of a commitment

01:36:35.740 to a certain kind

01:36:36.900 of moral integrity

01:36:37.680 on your part.

01:36:38.840 And that could be the case.

01:36:40.080 I mean,

01:36:40.440 maybe that's true.

01:36:42.820 Maybe it's 100% true.

01:36:45.460 Maybe it's 80% true.

01:36:47.020 Maybe it's 50% true.

01:36:48.660 I don't know,

01:36:49.280 but I would say

01:36:49.840 that you should

01:36:50.420 investigate the possibility

01:36:52.120 that there are other motivations

01:36:53.300 than the one that you stated

01:36:54.440 because almost everyone

01:36:56.120 in complicated situations

01:36:57.820 is suffering

01:36:59.560 from a multiplicity

01:37:00.860 of motivations.

01:37:02.220 And God only knows

01:37:03.040 what's motivating you.

01:37:04.720 It might be only

01:37:05.480 what's good,

01:37:06.020 but it might not be,

01:37:06.840 and you need to figure that out

01:37:07.880 because to the degree

01:37:08.800 that you're motivated

01:37:09.540 not to attend

01:37:10.260 by motivations

01:37:11.460 that you are not willing

01:37:12.380 to understand,

01:37:13.040 this will not work out well.

01:37:15.440 So,

01:37:15.980 that's...

01:37:16.560 What is one skill

01:37:24.340 that you think

01:37:25.020 everyone should master

01:37:26.300 in their lifetime?

01:37:28.860 Negotiation.

01:37:31.100 And people are very bad at it.

01:37:33.900 They're really,

01:37:34.460 they're really

01:37:35.020 unbelievably bad at it.

01:37:36.500 It's actually quite a miracle

01:37:38.140 how terrible people are

01:37:39.380 at negotiation.

01:37:41.520 And so,

01:37:42.280 to negotiate,

01:37:43.520 to negotiate,

01:37:45.600 the first thing

01:37:48.020 you have to do

01:37:48.920 is you have to figure out

01:37:49.500 what you want

01:37:50.120 or need and want,

01:37:51.640 let's say.

01:37:52.600 And that's hard enough

01:37:53.880 because

01:37:54.240 what are you going to do?

01:37:56.100 Admit it to yourself?

01:37:57.760 What you want?

01:37:59.080 Highly unlikely.

01:38:00.980 I mean,

01:38:01.200 first of all,

01:38:01.660 if you make what you want

01:38:02.740 clear to yourself,

01:38:03.460 then you know

01:38:04.000 when you're failing.

01:38:05.340 That's annoying.

01:38:07.040 So,

01:38:07.520 one of the rules

01:38:08.040 I'm writing about

01:38:08.880 in my new book,

01:38:10.920 which is called

01:38:11.800 12 More Rules for Life,

01:38:13.500 how creative,

01:38:15.600 one of the rules is

01:38:18.140 don't hide things

01:38:19.380 in the fog.

01:38:21.380 And one of the reasons

01:38:22.560 that people don't make

01:38:23.720 what they want

01:38:24.460 clear to themselves

01:38:25.480 is because

01:38:26.020 if you make what you want

01:38:27.320 or need

01:38:28.120 clear,

01:38:29.040 then you can tell

01:38:29.980 when you're deviating

01:38:31.000 from the proper path.

01:38:32.580 And that's painful.

01:38:33.440 So if you leave

01:38:34.040 your future foggy

01:38:35.280 and unarticulated,

01:38:37.320 then you can't tell

01:38:38.420 when you're failing.

01:38:39.960 Well,

01:38:40.260 good luck negotiating

01:38:41.160 under those circumstances

01:38:42.200 because you don't know

01:38:42.920 what to ask for.

01:38:43.900 You know,

01:38:44.780 and then if you're

01:38:45.340 negotiating with your wife

01:38:46.580 and you want something,

01:38:48.200 then you have to admit

01:38:49.020 to her

01:38:49.600 what it is that you want

01:38:51.020 and then she can use

01:38:52.080 that as a weapon.

01:38:53.900 Well,

01:38:54.280 and you'll do the same

01:38:55.020 to her.

01:38:55.560 It's not like

01:38:56.760 that's the particular

01:38:57.640 curse of women,

01:38:58.740 but the problem

01:38:59.660 is that if you

01:39:01.100 let someone else

01:39:02.740 know what you want

01:39:03.640 or need,

01:39:04.120 then you reveal

01:39:04.840 your vulnerability

01:39:05.520 to them.

01:39:06.740 And so you really

01:39:07.260 have to trust them

01:39:08.140 in order to do that

01:39:09.020 and maybe you're not

01:39:09.680 willing to do that,

01:39:10.520 but then you're not

01:39:11.020 going to get what you

01:39:11.640 want or you need.

01:39:12.440 So there's another

01:39:13.380 barrier to negotiation.

01:39:15.840 It's really hard,

01:39:17.640 you know,

01:39:17.920 but it's a strange thing

01:39:19.120 because if you're careful

01:39:21.040 and you decide

01:39:22.680 what it is that

01:39:23.540 you need

01:39:24.600 and you ask for it,

01:39:27.440 you overwhelmingly

01:39:28.500 increase the probability

01:39:29.980 that you will get it.

01:39:31.260 Well,

01:39:31.480 first of all,

01:39:32.040 it's,

01:39:32.480 I tweeted this,

01:39:34.140 I tweeted something

01:39:35.140 out the other day.

01:39:35.800 you're much more likely

01:39:38.320 to hit a target

01:39:39.040 if you aim at it

01:39:40.000 and I got,

01:39:41.360 and then I put

01:39:41.900 the future authoring

01:39:42.640 program,

01:39:43.180 you know,

01:39:43.420 there and I got

01:39:44.520 the,

01:39:45.320 what you'd expect

01:39:46.220 from Twitter,

01:39:48.120 which was,

01:39:48.780 you know,

01:39:48.980 some nice responses

01:39:50.200 and some responses

01:39:52.500 like,

01:39:52.800 well,

01:39:52.920 could you possibly

01:39:53.700 say something

01:39:54.620 more obvious?

01:39:55.760 It's like these

01:39:56.600 Twitter geniuses

01:39:58.060 will look at a

01:39:58.760 statement like that

01:39:59.560 and think,

01:40:00.120 oh,

01:40:00.360 well,

01:40:00.620 that's so obvious,

01:40:01.640 it doesn't need

01:40:02.140 to be said at all.

01:40:02.900 It's like,

01:40:03.580 no,

01:40:03.860 that's not right.

01:40:05.140 People don't aim.

01:40:07.460 They don't aim.

01:40:09.320 They don't let

01:40:09.980 themselves know

01:40:10.680 what they want

01:40:12.320 or need

01:40:12.660 because it means

01:40:13.400 coming to terms

01:40:14.040 with their own

01:40:14.460 vulnerability

01:40:14.880 and it is definitely

01:40:16.240 the truth

01:40:16.720 that you won't

01:40:17.200 hit a target

01:40:17.660 if you don't

01:40:18.080 aim at it

01:40:18.540 and it's also

01:40:19.140 the truth

01:40:19.560 that it's very

01:40:20.640 difficult to

01:40:21.480 specify the target

01:40:22.480 and aim.

01:40:23.640 It's terrifying

01:40:24.500 but I do know

01:40:26.560 from,

01:40:27.760 from,

01:40:28.860 I would say,

01:40:30.100 vast experience

01:40:31.260 dealing with

01:40:31.860 many,

01:40:32.680 many people

01:40:33.320 that

01:40:34.700 if you aim

01:40:36.980 at something

01:40:37.420 you will at

01:40:39.440 least move

01:40:40.140 towards it,

01:40:40.960 at least that

01:40:41.860 and at least

01:40:42.900 in moving

01:40:43.920 towards it

01:40:44.420 you might find

01:40:44.940 something even

01:40:45.520 better to aim

01:40:46.100 at

01:40:46.400 and so

01:40:48.100 negotiation

01:40:50.500 but you start

01:40:51.480 with yourself,

01:40:52.120 you negotiate

01:40:52.520 with yourself,

01:40:53.340 what is it

01:40:54.120 that you want

01:40:54.640 and need?

01:40:55.320 Can you even

01:40:55.900 admit that to

01:40:56.540 yourself?

01:40:58.340 And it's very

01:40:58.900 difficult because

01:40:59.520 you have to come

01:41:00.060 to terms with

01:41:00.560 your vulnerability

01:41:01.080 to do that.

01:41:02.700 And so,

01:41:03.740 and then,

01:41:04.180 you know,

01:41:04.380 there's another

01:41:04.860 impediment.

01:41:05.820 Like let's say

01:41:06.460 we've had a

01:41:07.300 relationship for a

01:41:08.000 while and we've,

01:41:09.060 you've thrown a

01:41:09.860 thousand darts at

01:41:10.660 me and I've

01:41:11.140 thrown a thousand

01:41:11.700 darts at you

01:41:12.280 and we've pulled

01:41:12.740 some of them out

01:41:13.300 but not all of

01:41:14.040 them and so

01:41:14.840 we're a little

01:41:15.500 on the edgy

01:41:16.060 side around

01:41:16.660 each other

01:41:17.120 and so

01:41:17.920 if I let you

01:41:19.860 know what I

01:41:20.280 want you might

01:41:20.880 give it to me

01:41:21.560 and then I'd be

01:41:22.660 forced to think

01:41:23.220 that you were

01:41:23.640 okay and I

01:41:24.940 don't want to

01:41:25.280 think you're

01:41:25.600 okay because

01:41:26.140 I'm full of

01:41:26.700 darts from

01:41:27.480 like our last

01:41:28.240 thousand

01:41:28.980 unresolved

01:41:30.000 conflicts

01:41:30.620 and so I'm

01:41:31.560 not even going to

01:41:32.000 let you know

01:41:32.360 what I want

01:41:32.840 because then

01:41:33.300 you'd give it

01:41:33.740 to me and

01:41:34.140 then I'd have

01:41:34.600 to like you

01:41:35.220 and that would

01:41:35.600 be annoying.

01:41:36.160 I thought we'd

01:41:38.760 been doing

01:41:39.020 just fine

01:41:39.680 but

01:41:40.060 boxers,

01:41:45.700 briefs or

01:41:46.160 freeballing?

01:41:54.580 I think we

01:41:55.380 went through

01:41:56.180 this at one

01:41:56.660 point.

01:41:56.940 I think I

01:41:57.340 told you once

01:41:58.200 that that's why

01:41:58.960 I wear pants

01:41:59.840 so that I

01:42:01.180 don't have to

01:42:01.820 discuss that

01:42:03.140 particular

01:42:03.820 question.

01:42:06.160 All right,

01:42:08.280 we've only

01:42:08.580 got time

01:42:09.080 for one

01:42:10.060 more.

01:42:10.800 I think this

01:42:11.220 is kind of

01:42:11.740 fitting to

01:42:12.380 end this

01:42:13.780 leg of the

01:42:14.160 tour.

01:42:15.940 Can you

01:42:16.300 describe a

01:42:17.180 potential

01:42:17.700 ideal human

01:42:18.940 society

01:42:19.760 a hundred

01:42:20.780 years from

01:42:21.420 now?

01:42:23.580 Let's make

01:42:24.080 it shorter,

01:42:24.520 ten years

01:42:24.920 from now.

01:42:28.140 Hillary

01:42:28.660 Clinton is

01:42:29.340 president.

01:42:32.260 You're

01:42:32.820 trying to

01:42:33.080 get us

01:42:33.360 killed?

01:42:33.960 What are

01:42:34.140 you doing?

01:42:35.560 Oh.

01:42:37.120 And then

01:42:37.640 we're

01:42:37.860 finally all

01:42:38.520 civil to

01:42:39.100 one another

01:42:39.600 as a

01:42:39.960 consequence.

01:42:51.160 Ten years

01:42:52.040 from now.

01:42:55.880 Well,

01:42:56.620 it would be

01:42:57.560 good if

01:42:58.000 Africa was

01:42:59.040 richer.

01:43:01.840 That's a

01:43:02.440 reasonable,

01:43:03.940 probable event,

01:43:04.820 reasonably

01:43:05.140 probable event.

01:43:06.160 we've

01:43:08.720 eradicated

01:43:09.520 the five

01:43:10.000 major

01:43:10.500 communicable

01:43:11.180 diseases,

01:43:12.120 including

01:43:12.460 tuberculosis.

01:43:13.760 That could

01:43:14.700 happen.

01:43:17.880 We've

01:43:18.680 taken

01:43:19.020 whatever

01:43:19.900 steps are

01:43:20.420 necessary to

01:43:21.120 eradicate

01:43:21.640 child malnutrition.

01:43:23.320 That's

01:43:24.060 inexpensive and

01:43:24.920 could happen.

01:43:27.440 We've

01:43:28.240 decided to

01:43:29.660 be proper

01:43:30.340 stewards of

01:43:30.940 the ocean.

01:43:32.120 That would

01:43:32.840 be good.

01:43:33.200 and the

01:43:34.380 fish are

01:43:34.680 coming back

01:43:35.280 in their

01:43:36.220 plentiful

01:43:36.620 numbers.

01:43:37.360 That would

01:43:37.980 be good.

01:43:42.160 We have

01:43:43.120 harnessed the

01:43:43.900 capacity of

01:43:45.020 our online

01:43:46.020 technology to

01:43:46.840 provide everyone

01:43:47.620 in the world

01:43:48.160 with access to

01:43:50.020 an infinite

01:43:51.700 library of

01:43:52.520 educational resources

01:43:53.540 so that people

01:43:55.140 can learn

01:43:55.560 whatever they

01:43:56.180 want for

01:43:57.540 virtually no

01:43:58.360 cost,

01:43:58.940 unbelievably

01:43:59.520 efficiently.

01:44:03.440 And we've

01:44:04.300 managed to

01:44:04.980 integrate our

01:44:07.240 materialist

01:44:08.300 scientific view

01:44:09.180 with its

01:44:10.060 religious

01:44:10.520 underpinnings.

01:44:11.920 That's all

01:44:12.640 within our

01:44:13.080 grasp.

01:44:17.300 That would

01:44:17.860 be pretty

01:44:18.120 good if we

01:44:18.580 could do

01:44:18.820 that in

01:44:19.120 ten years.

01:44:19.860 But God,

01:44:21.060 the sky's

01:44:21.420 the limit.

01:44:22.040 And maybe

01:44:22.420 we have

01:44:22.920 50 colonies

01:44:23.740 on Mars

01:44:24.280 because Elon

01:44:24.920 Musk has

01:44:25.380 been successful.

01:44:26.120 That'd be

01:44:30.100 cool.

01:44:30.920 That'd be

01:44:31.380 worth doing.

01:44:32.160 This is where

01:44:32.560 Peterson and I

01:44:33.280 smoke a blunt

01:44:33.880 on stage.

01:44:34.400 You guys

01:44:34.680 cool with

01:44:35.020 that?

01:44:38.480 All right,

01:44:39.040 well, as

01:44:40.080 we're wrapping

01:44:40.460 up the

01:44:40.880 American tour,

01:44:41.600 I just want

01:44:42.000 to tell you

01:44:42.600 that this

01:44:43.780 has been the

01:44:44.420 professional

01:44:44.880 thrill in my

01:44:45.460 career, but

01:44:46.100 actually the

01:44:47.240 personal thrill.

01:44:47.920 I am a

01:44:48.480 better person

01:44:49.180 because of

01:44:49.680 this.

01:44:49.980 Because for

01:44:50.720 you guys

01:44:51.060 that are

01:44:51.280 sitting here

01:44:51.680 getting this,

01:44:52.240 imagine doing

01:44:52.780 this 60

01:44:53.320 times and

01:44:54.280 having him

01:44:54.700 stare at

01:44:55.180 you at

01:44:56.000 the end

01:44:56.420 for 40

01:44:57.000 minutes.

01:44:57.640 It's pretty

01:44:58.800 intense.

01:44:59.360 I'm a better

01:44:59.780 person because

01:45:00.420 of you and

01:45:00.740 I'm honored

01:45:01.100 that you

01:45:01.460 included me

01:45:02.000 in this.

01:45:03.660 Let's go

01:45:04.280 take over

01:45:04.700 Europe in

01:45:05.160 a couple

01:45:05.380 weeks.

01:45:06.540 I'm going

01:45:07.020 to get out

01:45:07.360 of the way.

01:45:07.700 Give it up

01:45:08.020 for Jordan

01:45:08.400 Peterson,

01:45:08.960 everybody.

01:45:09.480 Thank you.

01:45:13.540 Thank you,

01:45:14.200 everyone.

01:45:14.740 It was a

01:45:15.180 great pleasure

01:45:16.740 to be here.

01:45:18.040 Thank you

01:45:18.560 very much

01:45:18.980 for coming

01:45:19.400 out.

01:45:19.760 It was a

01:45:20.360 lovely place

01:45:20.960 to end this

01:45:21.500 tour.

01:45:21.960 Good night

01:45:22.880 to you all.

01:45:25.180 If you

01:45:26.140 found this

01:45:26.520 conversation

01:45:27.040 meaningful,

01:45:27.760 you might

01:45:28.080 think about

01:45:28.480 picking up

01:45:28.900 Dad's

01:45:29.280 books,

01:45:29.740 Maps of

01:45:30.180 Meaning,

01:45:30.540 The Architecture

01:45:31.100 of Belief,

01:45:32.000 or his

01:45:32.280 newer bestseller

01:45:32.960 Twelve Rules

01:45:33.600 for Life,

01:45:34.140 An Antidote

01:45:34.580 to Chaos.

01:45:35.640 Both of

01:45:35.960 these works

01:45:36.440 delve much

01:45:36.960 deeper into

01:45:37.520 the topics

01:45:38.020 covered in

01:45:38.600 the Jordan

01:45:38.940 B.

01:45:39.160 Peterson

01:45:39.400 podcast.

01:45:40.460 See

01:45:40.640 JordanBPeterson.com

01:45:42.060 for audio,

01:45:42.880 e-book,

01:45:43.220 and text links,

01:45:44.380 or pick up

01:45:44.920 the books at

01:45:45.320 your favorite

01:45:45.660 bookseller.

01:45:46.600 I really hope

01:45:47.100 you enjoyed

01:45:47.500 this podcast.

01:45:48.720 Thanks everyone

01:45:49.220 for tuning in

01:45:49.960 and all of

01:45:50.400 positivity recently.

01:45:51.860 Talk to you

01:45:52.320 next week.

01:45:52.820 Follow me on

01:45:53.800 my YouTube

01:45:54.360 channel,

01:45:55.160 JordanBPeterson,

01:45:56.520 on Twitter,

01:45:57.480 at JordanBPeterson,

01:45:59.140 on Facebook,

01:46:00.380 at DrJordanBPeterson,

01:46:02.360 and at Instagram,

01:46:03.380 at Jordan.B.Peterson.

01:46:05.820 Details on this

01:46:06.860 show,

01:46:07.680 access to my

01:46:08.520 blog,

01:46:09.400 information about

01:46:10.200 my tour dates

01:46:11.060 and other events,

01:46:12.120 and my list of

01:46:12.880 recommended books

01:46:13.900 can be found on

01:46:14.920 my website,

01:46:16.060 JordanBPeterson.com.

01:46:17.780 My online writing

01:46:19.120 programs,

01:46:20.060 designed to help

01:46:20.740 people straighten

01:46:21.480 out their pasts,

01:46:22.880 understand themselves

01:46:23.840 in the present,

01:46:24.760 and develop a

01:46:25.500 sophisticated vision

01:46:26.520 and strategy for

01:46:27.400 the future,

01:46:28.180 can be found at

01:46:28.960 selfauthoring.com.

01:46:31.020 That's

01:46:31.380 selfauthoring.com.

01:46:34.420 From the

01:46:34.860 Westwood One

01:46:35.700 Podcast Network.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - September 29, 2019

Responsibility is the Key to Meaning

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