In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson delivers a lecture recorded in Edinburgh, Scotland on October 28, 2018, titled The Topic of Truth. Dr. Peterson talks about the importance of telling the truth, and how to deal with the consequences of lying. He also talks about how important it is to tell the truth even in the most confusing situations, and why it s important to be honest with yourself. Episode 32 is brought to you by Daily Wire Plus, where you can get 10% off your first month with discount code: DEPRESSION10 at checkout. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and enter promo code: DECISION10 to receive $10 off your purchase when you enter the discount code DECISION. To learn more about our sponsor discount offer, visit bit.ly/TheTopicOfTruth and use coupon code: CROWN10 for $10 OFF your first purchase. Season 2 is available now. Subscribe to Daily Wire plus to receive 10% discount code "DEPRESSION" when you sign up! and receive $5 off the first month of Daily Wire PLUS when you become a patron! To find out more information about our upcoming free trial offer, click HERE. Thanks for supporting the podcast, click here. If you're struggling with Depression and Anxiety? Check out our new series, The Problem Solving It? or Depression and Depression: How to Overcome It All? Click here to apply for a FREE 30-day discount when you book a spot on DailyWire Plus and receive 20% off of your first box set of $50 or more! to receive a discount code, plus an additional $50 off your total discount when they receive the offer of $150 or more, and get a discount of $75 or more when you shop with the discount starts by clicking the offer starts in two days and receive a maximum number of days of your choice of $99 or more than $99, and receive two months get a maximum discount, and they get two months of VIP access to the offer? Learn more about the offer begins in-apparence, and can receive two days of VIP membership and receive an ad-only discount, they get the offer, they also get $25 or $75 and get an ad discount, plus they receive $25 and they receive two weeks of VIP discount?
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00:00:57.420Welcome to Season 2, Episode 32 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.
00:01:04.020I'm Mikayla Peterson, Dad's daughter and collaborator.
00:01:06.980Today's episode is a 12 Rules for Life lecture recorded in Edinburgh on October 28, 2018.
00:01:14.140I'll admit it, I had to Google how to pronounce Edinburgh.
00:01:18.080I haven't been saying Edinburgh, but I have been calling it Edinburgh-o, so that's embarrassing for me, but I figured I'd admit it.
00:01:25.400I've named this lecture, The Topic of Truth, which is why, partly, I admitted the whole Edinburgh thing.
00:01:32.940I really like this lecture. Telling the truth isn't easy, but it's easier than the repercussions that come from lying.
00:01:38.240I've had a hard time learning that, to be honest. I keep relearning it.
00:01:41.780That'll never stop, probably. Well, I hope it does one day.
00:01:44.900You know when you're in a situation and it's easier to not say something, or to change the story just a tiny bit?
00:01:50.480That doesn't seem to ever be a good idea, or a workout.
00:01:54.500It's scary to tell the truth, but it's worth it.
00:01:56.740Life can get really convoluted and confusing very quickly if you lie.
00:02:00.680I've been trying to sort out my life, which you would assume would be easier with a father like mine, but it's still not easy.
00:02:06.140I have a lot going on. Social media has been particularly vicious this month, with Dad's health problems and my relationship.
00:02:12.280I've been separated since June 2018, but just started talking about it recently.
00:02:16.060We co-parent my daughter, Scarlett. I just hired my ex as my business manager, and he helps me manage my dad as well.
00:02:22.660We're going out for dinner tonight. We're good friends, and life is complicated.
00:02:26.680But people like to throw judgments around and forget that people online are real people.
00:02:30.880The best thing you can do, I think, in response to that, is to be honest.
00:17:42.060The reason you have memory is so that you can extract information out from the past that you can use to guide yourself wisely in the present and the future.
00:18:09.800You abstract and extract out from your past what's relevant.
00:18:14.160And then you use that to guide you into the future.
00:18:17.280So, you're building a map as a, really, that's a really good way of thinking about it, is that what you do when you think is build a map.
00:18:24.300And the map is of the present and the future, but it's predicated on your experience of the past.
00:18:29.960And that's also very germane to tonight's topic about truth.
00:18:33.620Because, well, one of the things we might want to point out first is that, well, do you want an accurate map or not?
00:18:39.400Now, if you have an inaccurate map, it might tell you that a two-hour journey will only take ten minutes.
00:18:46.620And if a two-hour journey will only take ten minutes, and let's say it's all downhill, well, then you don't have to pack and you don't have to prepare and it's going to be a cakewalk.
00:18:56.440But the problem is, is when you go out to make the journey, you're going to find that it doesn't take ten minutes.
00:19:02.100And you're not going to be prepared and that's not going to be good.
00:19:05.200Even though it was lovely to contemplate the fact that it was going to be only ten minutes and downhill.
00:19:10.740So the question is, do you want your map to be accurate or inaccurate?
00:19:15.020And the answer to that is, well, how badly do you want to fall into a pit?
00:19:20.520Because that's the consequence of having an inaccurate map.
00:19:24.140So, first of all, you're not going to get to where you're going.
00:19:26.780You might not, where you're going might not even exist.
00:20:10.020And you're moving around because you have to get from where you are to where you're going.
00:20:13.200And you have to do that because, well, you have, you have, you have, there are things, important things that you need to accomplish.
00:20:20.360And to accomplish them, you have to move around.
00:20:22.540And to move around successfully, you have to know where you are and where you're going.
00:20:25.660And so, you better have your map laid out properly.
00:20:30.880And so, I would say, our deepest meditations, our deepest philosophical meditations, are actually meditations on the structures of the maps that guide us.
00:20:42.280And that's why, in the first book I wrote, I called the first book Maps of Meaning because I had understood how important maps were by that point.
00:20:52.880And also, their equivalence, in some sense, to stories.
00:20:58.120When you watch someone on the screen, say, act out a drama, you're seeing what their map is and what the consequences of manifesting that,
00:21:08.460and what are the consequences of manifesting that map in the world.
00:21:12.280And the map is complicated because, you know, we don't just map territory.
00:21:16.900Well, we do, but territory is more complicated than we think.
00:21:20.900We don't just map territory in the geographic sense.
00:21:24.220You know, the landscape, like you do when you're using a map in a car.
00:21:29.060Most of our maps are maps of ourselves and other people.
00:21:31.860And the reason for that is most of the territory that we have to contend with is actually made up of ourselves and other people.
00:21:39.120So, our maps are psychological in a sense, as well as geographical and practical.
00:26:49.980And then it'll do something like climb down the plant it's on, and then across the floor of the forest, and then up behind the spider, and then over top of it.
00:27:00.960And then it'll spin a little web, and it'll drop down on the spider, and then jump on it.
00:27:14.280It's impossible to imagine how it manages that.
00:27:17.420Or another thing it will do is, let's say the spider is sitting in the middle of a web.
00:27:21.880There's different parts of a web have different functions.
00:27:26.340Like, there's some parts of a web are sticky to trap insects, and some of them are not sticky so the spider can walk on them.
00:27:33.180And the hunting spider will come up to the web, and it'll pluck on the web fibers with its legs, that's what they're called.
00:27:47.680With its legs, its front legs, it'll pluck on them and mimic an insect in trouble.
00:27:52.520It's like it's playing a little harp, and the sound is insect in trouble, and then the spider in the middle of the web will come zipping over to find out about the insect that's in trouble, because it's going to eat it, and then the jumping spider jumps on it.
00:28:09.260It's like, it's just, it looks a lot like thinking, you know, but it's certainly not verbal thinking.
00:28:16.860Well, we don't think so, because it doesn't look like spiders can talk.
00:28:19.840So, as far as we know, or if they do talk, they're so smart, we don't understand what they're saying.
00:28:27.080But it looks like thinking, and it looks like the kind of thinking that animals do when they hunt.
00:28:32.280And I think the way to think about that is that that sort of thinking is the same sort of thinking you do when you play football, or when you play any team sport.
00:28:43.580You know, like, if you watch people play hockey, which is, of course, the best sport in the world.
00:28:49.840And then you see the speed of it first.
00:28:55.300And hockey is a very fast game, because you're not just running, you're skating, and you can really move around on skates.
00:29:03.100And so, and the entire landscape is changing constantly.
00:29:06.180And really what hockey is, like most sports of that type, is it's an abstracted form of hunting.
00:29:13.900You know, so you think, well, what's hunting among humans?
00:29:17.060Well, you get your bow and arrow or your spear, and we've been doing that for like two million years, a very, very long time.
00:29:23.640You get your spear, and then you get your guys, and then you go and spear something.
00:29:29.260And so what you have is a projectile, and you have a target, and you have a team.
00:29:34.340And so that's what you do when you're hunting.
00:29:36.380And when you're playing hockey, it's the same damn thing.
00:29:39.020You have a spear, except it's a hockey stick.
00:29:42.200And you have a projectile, and that's the puck.
00:29:44.420And you have a target, and it's the net, you know.
00:29:47.200But it's sort of the net, because someone's also guarding it, you know.
00:29:50.520So it's the animal for all intents and purposes, and we're pretty excited about this, because we're based on a hunting platform, and we like to see people hurl projectiles at targets.
00:30:01.580It's one of the things that really warms our hearts, is to see one of us really deftly hurl a nice projectile at a target, especially if it's moving.
00:30:10.420And we get real thrilled about that, you know.
00:30:12.340So if you're at your favorite sports event, and someone's playing football, and they make a particularly wonderful move, and get the ball in the net from, you know, 100 yards away, in some spectacular way.
00:30:23.380You're so thrilled that the primate got the projectile into the mammoth, that you leap up and have a little celebration.
00:30:30.080And then later you drink a tremendous amount of fermented beverage, and have a hell of a time about it, because it's like feast time.
00:30:44.760And it shows you how people abstract, too.
00:30:46.800You know, how there's some fundamental biological level there that's driving things, but that it's abstracted up.
00:30:53.520And so, you know, we've learned how to have competitive hunting matches as a great spectacle.
00:31:00.260And it's amusing, but it's partly because we like to see people sharpen their aim, and perform brilliantly in that dynamic situation.
00:31:11.560Anyways, in an athletic contest like that, people really, in some sense, people don't really have time to think, right?
00:31:19.020Because on a hockey, on a rink, everything's in flux.
00:31:25.720I mean, people are just moving non-stop, right?
00:31:28.120I mean, first of all, your team player is there, your team member's there, and then he's there, and then he's there.
00:31:32.660And there's another one behind you, and there's two over there, and the opponents are moving this way, and the goalie's shifting back and forth, and the time is running out.
00:31:39.280And it's like you're watching, not one thing, but you're kind of watching everything at once, and then you're figuring out how to position yourself in relationship to everything else.
00:31:48.700So it's a really complicated mapping exercise, a complicated, dynamic mapping exercise.
00:31:54.640But it's not thinking the way we would normally think about thinking.
00:31:58.480It's because you don't have enough time.
00:31:59.720Like, you don't have enough time, if you're playing hockey or any other fast-paced game, to think about all the possibilities that you might manifest in the next few seconds as you traverse through time and space.
00:32:11.220Because the time, you're not fast enough thinker to do that.
00:32:15.460And so in some sense, you seem to be thinking with your body.
00:32:18.780And we kind of know this is true, because here's an example.
00:32:21.900You know, if you're a pro tennis player, and someone, your opponent, winds up to serve at you, the ball goes so fast off their racket that you actually cannot see it before you hit it back, not consciously.
00:32:38.000So now your visual system is very complex.
00:32:40.620See, you think that when you look at the world, what happens is you see something, and then you react to it, like you consciously see it.
00:32:47.600But lots of times, things are happening so fast, that isn't how it works.
00:32:50.860What happens is that you've developed a tremendous amount of expertise.
00:32:55.440Maybe you've played tennis for 10,000 hours, so you're just an absolute bloody expert at it.
00:33:00.500And even as the person is winding up, you can tell by the angle of their racket and how they're holding their arm and where they're positioned on the court and the way they have their legs and how fast the racket starts to move, where that ball is going to go.
00:33:14.820And you're already there, ready to react before they even hit it.
00:33:21.080So, and it's because your eyes are actually reporting to your nervous system at multiple levels of nervous, well, your nervous system is a hierarchy.
00:33:29.980And the closer the hierarchy is to the direct visual input, the faster it can react, but the simpler it is.
00:33:37.840And so you use a lot of simple reflexive systems once you're an expert, so you can be super fast.
00:33:43.440And you don't have time to think about, well, you don't even have time to see the ball.
00:33:46.980You do see it, but that's, you only use the visual record of the ball to update your habitual and automatic skill if you make an error.
00:34:00.140Otherwise, it's pretty much all automatic.
00:34:02.940And that's part of the loveliness of watching someone who's a true expert do something, especially athletically, because they're so good at it, it's just instantaneous, right?
00:36:04.720If you're really enraged, it's super impulsive.
00:36:07.660And you'll do things, or maybe you'll hit someone, you know, and then think about it later.
00:36:12.620And it's like you're in the grip of something that's driving you forward.
00:36:16.640And the same thing might happen if you're hungry, or if you're thirsty, or if you're overwhelmed with sexual desire, or any of those sorts of things.
00:36:23.660That can make you impulsive, and it's because you're under the sway of a fundamental biological system that's really got one goal,
00:36:32.380and wants to attain that as fast as possible with the least amount of trouble, and taking the fewest number of other things into account.
00:36:42.500And again, that's something sort of akin to how animals react, because they're driven by those underlying biological systems to a great degree.
00:36:49.340Now, but human beings have a very complicated brain on top of those fundamental biological systems.
00:36:57.760And the reason that we have it, in part, is because, well, what do you do if you're hungry and angry?
00:37:04.600Or what do you do if you're hungry and tired?
00:37:06.560Or what do you do when fundamental biological motivations conflict?
00:37:13.000Or what do you do if, well, maybe you're starving and you need to steal something, but then you're going to go to jail.
00:37:17.900It's like, or you're going to get punished and hurt for it.
00:37:20.780So, it's highly probable that these single-minded drives that are part and parcel of your fundamental motivations and your emotions are going to produce conflict when considered over any reasonable span of time.
00:37:36.560And so, we've evolved a more complicated brain because, well, for example, we don't want to just not be hungry today.
00:37:42.060We also want to not be hungry tomorrow and next week and next month and next year.
00:37:47.500And at the same time that we're not hungry, we don't want to be too tired and we don't want to be too thirsty.
00:37:51.660And we don't want to be dying of exposure.
00:37:54.740And we want to get along with other people and we don't want to be killed.
00:37:57.400And so, to solve the problem of hunger, which is something that you could solve impulsively, to really solve it over the long run, you have to come up with an integrated, you have to come up with a way of integrating all those necessities into something harmonious that exists over a very long period of time.
00:38:14.940And part of the reason that we have a brain, like a complex brain, is to solve that problem.
00:38:20.000Not only do we have to fulfill our basic needs, let's say, we have to do it in a way that doesn't interfere so that each need doesn't interfere with each other.
00:38:29.540But also so that each need doesn't interfere with each other's need being fulfilled over long spans of time in a community that consists of all sorts of other people who are trying to do exactly the same thing.
00:38:43.940It's like, how many ways can you solve a set of problems that complex?
00:38:48.740And the answer is, well, not that many ways.
00:38:52.100And so, that's why, as far as I'm concerned, the moral relativists are wrong.
00:38:56.220Because there just aren't that many ways of setting up a society where each person in the society can get more or less what they want and need, so that families also function, so that communities function, and so that that works over a long span of time.
00:39:12.180A vanishingly small number of correct solutions.
00:39:18.060You know, you do something for me, I return the favor and I'm very careful about that because then we can trust each other and we can cooperate and that's a very good thing for the long run.
00:39:27.900And that's also predicated on honesty and truth, right?
00:39:30.960I mean, one of the things that you really like in people, whether you know you like this or not, is their ability to track reciprocity.
00:39:37.420You know, if you call a friend a couple of times to come over for dinner, and they come, you build up an expectation that they're going to call you a couple of times to come over for dinner.
00:39:50.300Now, you don't keep a telly, you know, unless you're obsessive.
00:39:53.240You know, bill, two dinners for bill, zero returns, X for bill.
00:39:58.360But you don't really need to do that because you do do that.
00:40:02.380We're so good at reciprocity tracking that it's unbelievable and we really don't like it when that's violated.
00:40:10.420And you don't have to violate that very often with people before they don't want to have much to do with you.
00:40:15.000And that's also part of the reason that you should be honest.
00:40:18.100It's like that reciprocity tracking, that ability to keep track of who you owe and why you owe them and what you owe is absolutely vital to successful social interaction over the long run.
00:40:32.080So reciprocity and honesty are both fundamental.
00:40:37.120And that's to treat someone else like you'd want to be treated yourself.
00:40:40.880A fundamental ethical rule that goes along with truth.
00:40:44.380And it's the fundamental rule of reciprocity.
00:40:46.360And it might be the fundamental ethical rule.
00:40:52.180It's partly, I think, because not only do you want to treat someone else as if they're you, let's say.
00:40:59.900You even want to treat yourself as if you're you.
00:41:02.580And you think, well, what the hell does that mean?
00:41:05.000And, well, this is what it means, is that you're not stuck with the you that's here right now.
00:41:09.900You're stuck with the you that's here right now and the you that's here tomorrow and next week and next month and next year.
00:41:15.120Like there's an infinite number of, or not an infinite, there's a very large number of yous extending out into the future.
00:41:21.860And they're quite different because they get older and maybe some of them are more ill than you are and, you know, they have different interests and all of that.
00:41:28.680So you're actually, you're actually a slice of a community across time.
00:41:35.060That's fundamentally what you are as an individual.
00:41:37.120And if you're going to act properly in your life, you have to act right now in a manner that takes care of that entire community across time, even though that community is just you.
00:41:47.320So even if it wasn't that you were being reciprocal with other people in order to get along, and you have to be, you at least have to be reciprocal with your future self to get along.
00:41:58.100Because otherwise, it's a downhill path, and unless you want to auger face down into the ground at some point, that's a bad path.
00:42:07.180So that's part of even being honest and reciprocal in relationship to yourself.
00:42:19.300Well, often we're driven by the same sort of fundamental motivations that drive animals, and we can think with our bodies the way animals do.
00:42:28.380But then we have this additional ability, which I believe is associated with this more complex computational problem, how best to set things up in the long run.
00:42:37.680And so we, who knows how this happened, but we could divorce our perception from our action.
00:42:45.500And so that's what, that looks like it's associated with the development of the cortex, especially the front part of the cortex, which is the part that you use for abstract thinking.
00:42:53.460You think, well, what does abstract thinking mean?
00:42:57.600And what it is, in some sense, is the same thing that you do with a video game.
00:43:02.140You know, when you're playing a video game, you have an avatar of yourself, and you place the avatar out in this fictional world, and then you run the avatar through a bunch of adventures, and you hope it lives.
00:43:12.380But if it doesn't, it's like, well, what the hell?
00:43:14.140You can just generate another avatar, right?
00:43:16.020And hypothetically, hypothetically, and perhaps even actually, you can learn from the adventures and misadventures of your avatar, and what you learn, you can incorporate into your life and act out.
00:43:28.180And so there's this old idea by Alfred North Whitehead.
00:43:32.500I believe he was the first person who formulated this.
00:44:37.060So, and, well, they're really hard on the terrain, those things.
00:44:41.300And anyways, anyways, the point, there's a point here.
00:44:45.280The point is that creatures tend to produce a very large number of variants of themselves, and most of them die.
00:44:54.860And so, typically, each mosquito manages to produce another mosquito, another successful mosquito.
00:45:01.380Obviously, if it was anything other than that, you'd get a geometric increase in mosquito mass, and soon the whole planet, very soon, the whole planet would just be one big cloud of mosquitoes.
00:45:14.640So, mosquitoes produce a lot of variants, and each of them is a little different genetically, because mosquitoes don't learn a lot, so almost all their variation is genetic.
00:45:23.540And now and then, one genetic variant of a mosquito, which is slightly different than the genetic variants of the other 10,000, is a trifle more successful, and doesn't perish.
00:45:35.420And so, that's how, that's really how the Darwinian process works.
00:45:38.640And it's actually why it seems to me that there is something that has to be correct about the Darwinian idea.
00:45:45.400So, the Darwinian idea is something like this.
00:45:49.180Things change in ways you can't predict.
00:45:51.420And because of that, you don't know what solution is going to work.
00:45:58.400And not only that, you can't know, because the unpredictability itself is unpredictable.
00:46:04.860So, things can really radically shift on you.
00:46:07.620And so, the best you can do is produce a bunch of variants, and then hope that one of them happens to match whatever is coming down the runway.
00:46:17.340And, and it is the case that things change unpredictably, although not entirely unpredictability, unpredictable, unpredictably.
00:46:26.420And it is the case that you can't completely see what's coming.
00:46:30.040So, the idea that there has to be random variation in order for things to survive has to be correct, because there's random variation in the environment.
00:46:39.180Now, I don't know if that's the whole story, but it's a very powerful argument for the necessity of something approximating Darwinian evolution.
00:46:46.920And, and, and I'm telling you that for a reason.
00:46:48.880And the reason I'm telling you that is because it's germane to how you think.
00:46:52.280So, what human beings have learned to do, and this is so cool, we're so smart, it's unbelievable, is that we can separate our perception from the actual world.
00:47:02.200And then we can perceive a fictional world.
00:47:05.500And the fictional world is like the real world, except not completely.
00:47:09.300It's the world in your dreams, for example.
00:47:11.080You know how it is, you go to sleep at night, and you dream, and you can dream up a whole bloody world.
00:47:16.040And it's so real that you think it's the real world.
00:47:18.780Like, how you do that is just beyond me, because you can't do that just sitting there.
00:47:23.520Some people have very powerful visual imaginations, but most people can't manage that.
00:47:27.900But you can recreate everything, fictionally.
00:47:31.800And then in your dreams, and this is partly why we dream, your dream, you, can do all sorts of crazy things.
00:47:39.120And, well, what happens if you die in a dream?
00:49:08.120And the reason you do that is because you get to show your child, on you, a fictional world that corresponds with the actual world in some interesting ways.
00:49:18.000And then, you can watch avatars of yourself, and those would be the actors, act out certain ways of apprehending and understanding.
00:53:30.460And those images have, like, they have sacred significance because they speak to you at a level that's underneath your articulated intelligence.
00:53:39.740There's something more there than you know, which is partly what makes it sacred.
00:53:45.020And so, and we're in great danger of losing that and assuming that it has no value because we don't fully understand it because it's mysterious.
00:53:53.260But it is mysterious because how to be good in the world is mysterious.
00:53:58.880It's as mysterious as how to be evil in the world or perhaps even more mysterious.
00:54:41.840And so, and I think the way that we operate as human beings is that what we see in front of us, what we actually perceive, isn't the present.