The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - The World is Your Oyster

00:00:00.940 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.

00:00:27.400 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.

00:00:41.800 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.

00:00:47.480 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:00:57.400 Welcome to Season 2, Episode 24 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.

00:01:02.900 I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's daughter, collaborator, manager, and currently on a week-long fast just to see what happens.

00:01:10.460 And I feel good. 83 hours in at the moment.

00:01:14.960 I've still been exercising, just living my life.

00:01:17.480 It's way easier than expected.

00:01:19.640 I've been doing fasting for the last three months, between 18 and 24 hours, 48 hours, and I swear the more I do it, the easier it gets.

00:01:29.920 I did a DEXA scan last week, which measures body fat accurately and muscle tissue and bone density, and we'll see what a week of salt water does to me.

00:01:39.120 I don't think it'll do a lot, to be honest, but that will be fun to put up on YouTube.

00:01:43.720 I'm not going to get into a weekly update about family, because honestly, things are still crazily up in the air.

00:01:51.840 We'll know more next week, and I'll update you then.

00:01:55.740 Something I learned recently that might be helpful, a random piece of information.

00:02:00.140 Did you know cold showers or cold water immersion lowers cortisol levels?

00:02:05.620 If you're having trouble sleeping, it should help with that too.

00:02:08.720 That's my tip of the day.

00:02:09.960 So that's about it for now.

00:02:11.340 Please enjoy this podcast, a 12 Rules for Life lecture from 2018, recorded in Winnipeg.

00:02:16.780 For you Americans who don't recognize Winnipeg, it's in the middle of Canada.

00:02:21.140 Nobody really visits there.

00:02:22.780 Will you pass through it if you drive from Toronto to Vancouver, though?

00:02:25.940 The places people do visit.

00:02:27.680 I'm just kidding.

00:02:28.600 Winnipeg, you rock.

00:02:30.380 I was able to title this week's episode, so I've titled it,

00:02:35.460 The World is Your Oyster.

00:02:37.780 Enjoy.

00:02:38.220 When we return, The World is Your Oyster, a 12 Rules for Life lecture by Jordan V. Peterson.

00:02:44.620 Thank you very much, all of you, for coming here tonight.

00:03:02.120 It's wonderful to see you all, and it's great to be in Winnipeg.

00:03:05.140 So I hope we have a fine time tonight.

00:03:07.640 I've been using these lectures as an opportunity, because they are an opportunity,

00:03:15.200 I mean, to have serious conversations with people.

00:03:18.840 It might be strange to think about a lecture as a discussion or a conversation,

00:03:22.880 but it is a conversation, you know, unless you're just reading it or working off pre-prepared notes.

00:03:30.080 You know, if you're just addressing the audience and you're watching everybody and listening to people,

00:03:36.000 listening to the watching individuals, but listening to the whole crowd as well,

00:03:39.760 and you can tell how people are responding, and you can see if people are following the arguments.

00:03:43.920 And so, you know, when you participate in a conversation, there's a lot of nonverbal participation as well.

00:03:49.020 You know, the way you hold your eyes and, well, the way you move.

00:03:53.340 I know when I've got the audience engaged, that it's silent.

00:03:59.500 Nobody rustles around, nobody moves.

00:04:01.240 You know, their attention is focused on the front, so I can tell when I'm in the right place,

00:04:05.960 so to speak, conceptually, and when everyone's on board.

00:04:09.620 And I get a chance to keep working on the ideas that I've been working on for 30 years in real time,

00:04:14.980 which I really like doing.

00:04:16.020 And so it's a chance to think on my feet.

00:04:19.140 And I'm going to talk a fair bit about the book tonight, about 12 Rules,

00:04:25.880 and a little bit about my other book, Maps of Meaning,

00:04:28.220 which I put out an audio version June 12th.

00:04:31.400 And if you found 12 Rules for Life useful,

00:04:35.180 then you might take a shot at listening to Maps of Meaning.

00:04:40.280 It's a hard book, but the audio version, I think, makes it more accessible.

00:04:46.020 So I'm going to run through those themes.

00:04:48.600 And then I was reading some poetry today, too, so I thought I might share that with you.

00:04:53.760 I'm sure you're thrilled about that idea.

00:04:55.520 But this is poetry written by Karl Marx.

00:04:59.220 I didn't know he wrote poetry.

00:05:00.860 And so I found, I stumbled across some of the poems that he wrote when he was a young man.

00:05:05.900 And, you know, I noticed with my book, my first book, Maps of Meaning, actually started as a poem.

00:05:11.400 It was about 20 pages long.

00:05:14.060 And I was trying to express some ideas I had about, well, I was kind of obsessed with the Cold War

00:05:20.060 and about what I knew about Nazi Germany, both of those things.

00:05:23.320 And they were plaguing me, along with questions about the meaning of life in the face of its suffering.

00:05:30.000 And I wrote a poem about it.

00:05:31.660 And then I noticed that often my undergraduates, who were really trying to wrestle seriously with an essay,

00:05:39.400 with an idea of, you know, if they were going to write about something that really gripped them personally,

00:05:43.420 is that sometimes they would start by writing poetry.

00:05:46.080 It was often very bad, the poetry.

00:05:47.820 But that wasn't really the point.

00:05:50.580 Like, what, and then at the same time, or along the same years, I suppose,

00:05:56.100 I also spent a lot of time trying to understand the role of art in art and literature,

00:06:02.180 in cognition, in human thinking.

00:06:04.300 Because obviously, obviously, engaging in artistic production,

00:06:10.060 including writing of such things as poetry, is actually a form of thinking, right?

00:06:14.540 I mean, you kind of get the idea, which is a misbegotten idea,

00:06:18.960 that what artists do is produce beautiful things.

00:06:22.060 And that's the purpose of art.

00:06:24.200 And it's not.

00:06:25.400 The purpose of art is to think.

00:06:27.680 And the productions are the secondary consequence of the thought process.

00:06:31.600 And they kind of encapsulate the thought process.

00:06:33.540 Like, what artists do, visual artists say, painters,

00:06:36.580 is they teach you how to see.

00:06:39.260 And they really do that.

00:06:41.160 That's what they do.

00:06:42.140 They're perceptual geniuses.

00:06:43.820 And when you look at their art, you learn how to look at the world.

00:06:47.600 You learn what's beautiful and what isn't.

00:06:49.340 And you learn what's remarkable about individuals,

00:06:52.080 and what's remarkable about landscapes, what's beautiful, all of those things.

00:06:56.060 And poetry is like that, too.

00:06:58.620 And so, when people wrestle with ideas,

00:07:02.640 they first encounter what they don't understand,

00:07:05.660 because that's what you have to think about.

00:07:07.440 You don't have to think about what you already understand.

00:07:09.660 You've managed that.

00:07:10.880 You have to think about what you don't understand.

00:07:12.400 And then thoughts have to have a birthplace,

00:07:15.080 because they don't just magically appear in your head with no preparation.

00:07:19.000 Like, that isn't how thinking works.

00:07:20.800 Thinking is very, very complicated.

00:07:22.500 And the first way that you encounter what you don't understand

00:07:26.140 is through imagination.

00:07:27.740 And that's the domain of art.

00:07:29.700 And what artists, real artists, do is they go out to the frontier,

00:07:34.860 and they reconceptualize perception using imagination,

00:07:38.380 and they lay the ground for fully articulated knowledge.

00:07:43.060 That's what artists do.

00:07:43.980 And poetry is a very interesting medium,

00:07:47.360 because it stands halfway between the image and the fully articulated word.

00:07:52.800 Because, of course, poetry is richly image-laden and also saturated in emotion.

00:07:59.820 And so, it's often the case if you're trying to express an idea.

00:08:03.280 Yeah, it's not always the case,

00:08:04.820 but it's often the case that if someone is trying to express an idea,

00:08:08.220 they'll do it in song, or they'll do it in poetry,

00:08:11.000 before they can express it as full-fledged philosophy.

00:08:14.680 And so, you're grappling with an idea,

00:08:16.840 and that manifests itself in being gripped by motivation and emotion.

00:08:21.300 And then that produces a burst of imagination,

00:08:24.000 and then that can be represented visually,

00:08:25.700 or it can be represented in poetry.

00:08:27.240 And then, maybe it can be represented in story.

00:08:29.820 And only after that can it be fully articulated.

00:08:32.480 And so, that's how thought works.

00:08:34.700 It goes from the absolute unknown itself to the relatively unknown.

00:08:38.740 That would be the domain of imagination and dream.

00:08:41.260 And then, from that, fully articulated verbal representations are extracted.

00:08:46.720 And that's actually how your brain works.

00:08:48.120 And your right hemisphere is involved mostly,

00:08:51.100 mostly, this is a bit of an oversimplification,

00:08:53.720 but it's close enough.

00:08:54.680 Your right hemisphere is involved in that initial imaginative grappling process

00:08:59.080 that's emotion-laden and image-laden.

00:09:01.880 And then, as you work on it,

00:09:03.700 and especially as you articulate it,

00:09:05.260 then your left hemisphere dominates more and more

00:09:07.480 in terms of the representations.

00:09:09.160 So, that's the process by which thought is generated.

00:09:11.660 That's also why you see that

00:09:13.120 artists are on the forefront of conceptual revolutions.

00:09:17.360 You know, like the Renaissance, for example,

00:09:20.700 which laid the groundwork for the emergence of the modern West,

00:09:23.760 was an artistic movement to begin with.

00:09:26.360 Right?

00:09:26.460 It was great artists, especially in northern Italy.

00:09:28.500 There was this absolute flowering of staggering art.

00:09:31.780 One of the things you saw, for example,

00:09:33.400 in northern Italy in the Renaissance was,

00:09:35.240 and this was when medieval times shifted to modern times,

00:09:38.160 is, you know, the religious images that medieval people used

00:09:41.040 were very iconic, right?

00:09:42.400 You look at medieval art.

00:09:43.440 It's very iconic.

00:09:44.520 It looks very old-fashioned to us,

00:09:46.580 12th and 13th century stuff,

00:09:48.220 before that even.

00:09:49.320 You know, it's almost cartoon-like.

00:09:52.200 And very, very iconic images of Christ, for example.

00:09:55.000 They're generic images, in a sense.

00:09:58.200 But as soon as the Renaissance hit,

00:10:00.200 then all of a sudden you saw these religious figures

00:10:02.180 become humanized.

00:10:03.200 So, they actually took on individual,

00:10:04.960 recognizable individual characteristics.

00:10:07.600 And there was a revolution in an idea that accompanied that,

00:10:10.760 because what it meant was that the divine images,

00:10:14.140 in some sense, were being brought to earth

00:10:15.620 and transformed into something that was much closer

00:10:17.960 to the individual, to the everyday individual.

00:10:22.140 And it was that idea that laid the groundwork

00:10:24.080 for the generation of the spread of democratic ideas,

00:10:28.180 at least in part,

00:10:29.000 the idea that each individual was important enough

00:10:31.780 to be regarded as the locus of political responsibility.

00:10:36.020 And that was all laid out by the artists first.

00:10:38.580 Like, they were grappling with that.

00:10:40.220 And that's why these paintings from northern Italy,

00:10:43.660 the Renaissance paintings,

00:10:44.580 they're so unbelievably valued by people.

00:10:47.240 You know, I was in this museum in New York,

00:10:49.800 and I don't remember which one it was,

00:10:51.540 a while back.

00:10:52.300 And it was quite a room.

00:10:54.260 There were paintings in that room

00:10:56.460 by great masters like Da Vinci and Michelangelo

00:10:59.460 and Botticelli,

00:11:00.760 and these great, great Renaissance artists.

00:11:04.040 There was probably,

00:11:06.060 maybe there was a dozen paintings in the room,

00:11:07.880 and each of those paintings would have been worth,

00:11:09.720 who knows, a quarter of a billion dollars.

00:11:11.380 So I was standing in this room

00:11:12.580 with like three billion dollars worth of paintings.

00:11:15.340 You know, and you think,

00:11:16.200 there's incredibly expensive artifacts

00:11:18.440 in an incredibly expensive building

00:11:20.680 on prime real estate

00:11:21.680 in the middle of the most expensive city in the world,

00:11:24.480 unbelievably highly valued,

00:11:26.540 and people from all over the world

00:11:27.920 making pilgrimages to see them.

00:11:29.920 It's like something's going on there, right?

00:11:31.360 That's not trivial.

00:11:32.900 There's no way you spend that much time and effort

00:11:35.200 and money, right?

00:11:36.920 Serious money, like dead serious money.

00:11:39.280 There isn't more expensive artifacts

00:11:40.820 that we know of than high quality art.

00:11:43.680 You know, paintings go for 200 million dollars.

00:11:45.780 It's like, what's going on with that, you know?

00:11:49.280 I mean, obviously,

00:11:50.020 there's status symbols to some degree,

00:11:51.520 but the question is,

00:11:53.380 why are they status symbols, you know?

00:11:55.140 And so, so anyways,

00:11:57.640 that's a bit of a, what would you call,

00:11:59.700 meditation on the utility of poetry.

00:12:01.620 Now, and so,

00:12:03.800 and so I'm going to start with a bit of a poem

00:12:06.640 from Shakespeare,

00:12:08.460 and there's a specific reason for it,

00:12:12.460 so I'll just read it.

00:12:13.480 It's just a fragment,

00:12:14.640 and most of you have probably heard this.

00:12:16.900 So it's from As You Like It.

00:12:18.920 All the world's a stage,

00:12:23.280 and all the men and women merely players.

00:12:26.400 They have their exits and their entrances,

00:12:30.420 and one man in his time plays many parts.

00:12:36.760 Well, that's worth taking apart.

00:12:40.120 You know, and Shakespeare, of course,

00:12:41.480 his writing is well regarded as close to immortal

00:12:44.740 as anything that human beings produce might be,

00:12:47.400 and the reason for that is that it's endlessly dense.

00:12:52.400 That's one way of thinking about it.

00:12:53.760 You can dive into it like you can

00:12:55.600 into anything profound and never come up again.

00:12:58.440 It's just connected to everything, you know?

00:13:01.340 And so, and he makes a set of propositions here,

00:13:03.900 and you can just zip by them, you know,

00:13:05.760 without really noticing what they are,

00:13:07.360 but it's helpful to notice what they are.

00:13:09.660 All the world's a stage.

00:13:12.140 Okay, well, that's a metaphysical presupposition, that,

00:13:14.580 and it's not a trivial one.

00:13:15.700 It might even be an ontological presupposition.

00:13:18.720 So ontology is the study of the structure of being.

00:13:21.940 And so Shakespeare's actually making an ontological argument.

00:13:25.060 He said, all the world's a stage.

00:13:28.180 Okay, well, so what does that mean exactly?

00:13:29.960 Because that's not the same as saying

00:13:31.500 the world is a, what would you say?

00:13:36.100 The world is fundamentally a material place.

00:13:39.260 That's a completely different claim.

00:13:41.440 The world is a stage.

00:13:42.840 That's a particular way of looking at the world.

00:13:44.520 And so what do you do on a stage?

00:13:46.520 Well, you play your part,

00:13:48.340 and each person plays their part.

00:13:50.460 And so there's something very technically very interesting about that claim

00:13:55.920 because what Shakespeare is suggesting

00:13:58.640 is that the world is best conceived of as a forum for action

00:14:02.680 because, of course, that's what the stage is for.

00:14:05.280 A stage is a place that you act things out.

00:14:08.780 And there's a secondary consideration that emerges out of that

00:14:12.020 is that, well, if the world's a stage and you play your part,

00:14:15.980 then what should your part be?

00:14:17.640 What's the proper part to play?

00:14:19.360 And you might say, well, maybe that's the fundamental question of life.

00:14:23.420 You're on the stage.

00:14:24.520 It's a drama of life and death.

00:14:26.120 That's clearly the case.

00:14:27.480 You play your part.

00:14:28.620 Well, two questions.

00:14:29.840 What is the part you're playing?

00:14:32.480 That's the first question.

00:14:33.920 One of the things I learned from Carl Jung,

00:14:35.640 which really shocked me, you know,

00:14:36.800 Jung said, everybody acts out a story.

00:14:39.640 A myth, actually.

00:14:40.620 That was his more fundamental claim.

00:14:42.360 So myth is like a fundamental story.

00:14:44.220 You act out a myth whether you know it or not.

00:14:47.480 Well, that's an interesting claim.

00:14:49.280 And his secondary claim was,

00:14:50.560 you should know which myth you're acting out.

00:14:53.240 Because it might not be one you would choose consciously.

00:14:56.600 Right?

00:14:56.760 You might be acting something out unconsciously

00:14:58.720 that's a tragedy, a catastrophe, or worse than that.

00:15:02.180 And you should understand what it is that you're up to.

00:15:04.580 You might think, well, I know what I'm up to.

00:15:06.120 It's like, no, you don't.

00:15:07.240 You're a complicated creature.

00:15:09.000 You're an unbelievably complicated creature.

00:15:10.740 And you are not transparent to yourself.

00:15:12.640 And it isn't necessarily the case at all

00:15:14.420 that you know what you're up to.

00:15:15.860 You know, and if your life is miserable

00:15:17.460 beyond your ability to tolerate it,

00:15:20.080 then it might be that you're playing the wrong sort of part.

00:15:23.060 Now, you know, I mean, people get unlucky.

00:15:24.740 And I'm fully aware of that.

00:15:26.580 I know that people can suffer dreadfully

00:15:31.400 through no fault of their own.

00:15:33.160 There's no doubt about that.

00:15:34.140 There's an arbitrary element to life.

00:15:36.020 But it's also certainly the case

00:15:37.200 that you can bring on yourself and others

00:15:39.440 a lot of misery that's unnecessary.

00:15:41.480 And that happens a lot.

00:15:42.660 And that's a part as well.

00:15:44.780 Okay, so the world's a stage.

00:15:46.980 Then the question might be,

00:15:48.180 and you play a part,

00:15:49.740 and you play a part whether you know what the part is or not.

00:15:52.400 Here's another idea.

00:15:54.000 Let's say you haven't written your part.

00:15:56.580 Well, then someone else has.

00:15:58.640 Or something else has.

00:16:00.840 And another thing I learned from Jung,

00:16:02.280 which really scared me as well,

00:16:03.760 once I started to understand the psychoanalysts,

00:16:05.860 you know, Jung said,

00:16:07.440 people don't have ideas.

00:16:09.480 Ideas have people.

00:16:11.840 And that was a very,

00:16:13.380 once I understood the psychoanalysts,

00:16:15.080 that became very terrifying.

00:16:16.620 Because like cognitive psychologists,

00:16:19.120 when they think about the brain,

00:16:20.160 they kind of use a computer model.

00:16:21.840 You're an information processor, right?

00:16:23.600 And you have modules,

00:16:25.860 cognitive modules there,

00:16:27.180 emotional modules for that matter.

00:16:28.940 But the psychoanalysts,

00:16:29.980 that isn't really the way they looked at the world.

00:16:31.660 The way they thought of your psyche

00:16:32.820 was that you're composed of a lot of different sub-personalities

00:16:36.500 and sub-beings.

00:16:37.980 And they're sort of,

00:16:38.840 they're aggregated together

00:16:40.100 into something with some unity.

00:16:43.740 And that's you.

00:16:44.700 But those sub-components of you,

00:16:47.520 those things are alive.

00:16:49.260 And they have a will.

00:16:50.480 And they have a desire to live.

00:16:52.160 Well, Nietzsche said,

00:16:52.980 every drive tends to philosophize in its spirit.

00:16:58.300 You know, and so you can be possessed in some sense

00:17:03.120 by elements of your being

00:17:04.680 that you don't have fully under control.

00:17:06.460 Now, you know that.

00:17:07.340 Everyone knows that.

00:17:08.120 Because you do stupid things when you get angry, right?

00:17:10.400 Or vengeful.

00:17:11.360 You know, you think,

00:17:11.880 oh my God, how could I do that?

00:17:13.260 How could I think that?

00:17:14.160 Or maybe you're having trouble controlling your diet

00:17:16.940 and you get upset,

00:17:17.640 you go to the refrigerator

00:17:18.360 and you eat like a quart of ice cream

00:17:20.100 and a loaf of bread.

00:17:21.860 That's what happens to people.

00:17:22.960 That's what happens to people with eating disorders.

00:17:25.200 And, you know, they go into kind of a trance

00:17:26.960 and they just eat everything.

00:17:28.760 And then they kind of come to

00:17:29.900 and they think,

00:17:30.560 what the hell was that?

00:17:32.420 That was the last thing I wanted to do.

00:17:34.100 And, you know, you do that if you're foolish in love.

00:17:36.220 And if you do that,

00:17:36.920 if you're possessed by a passion.

00:17:38.420 And it's very easy to become possessed

00:17:40.700 by elements of your own being

00:17:42.740 that you don't have fully under control.

00:17:44.720 And then some of those elements

00:17:46.960 are systems of ideas, you know,

00:17:49.640 that are in you.

00:17:51.380 That's Dawkins' idea of meme, essentially.

00:17:53.940 But he didn't take it

00:17:54.780 as far as the psychoanalysts took it.

00:17:56.600 Because a meme,

00:17:57.700 a system of ideas that's shared culturally,

00:17:59.920 can inhabit you like a being

00:18:01.980 and direct your actions.

00:18:03.700 And that's what happens in the case of ideology.

00:18:05.980 You know, people who have an ideology say,

00:18:08.320 this is what I believe.

00:18:09.700 It's like, oh no, no, no.

00:18:11.620 That thing has you in its grip.

00:18:14.360 And you're a puppet.

00:18:15.760 You think, I think this.

00:18:16.960 It's like, no you don't.

00:18:18.060 It thinks you.

00:18:19.980 That's what happens.

00:18:21.240 And you know that.

00:18:22.120 If you look at what happened

00:18:23.600 in places like Nazi Germany,

00:18:25.600 everyone wonders,

00:18:26.380 what the hell happened, man?

00:18:27.720 What happened there?

00:18:28.720 It's like, well, everybody got possessed

00:18:30.260 by a set of ideas.

00:18:32.340 Powerful ideas, right?

00:18:33.700 And they murderous ideas.

00:18:37.320 Genocidal ideas.

00:18:38.640 And you can't say so much

00:18:40.380 that the Germans had those ideas

00:18:41.860 as you can say that those ideas

00:18:43.380 had the Germans.

00:18:44.640 And the same thing with the Soviet Union.

00:18:46.180 The same thing with Maoist China.

00:18:48.000 Anytime you're under the sway

00:18:49.160 of an ideology,

00:18:50.340 something has you

00:18:51.180 and it's making you play a part.

00:18:53.880 And you might ask,

00:18:54.760 well, is that a part you want to play?

00:18:57.480 Hard to say.

00:18:59.220 Hard to say what you want.

00:19:01.280 So I'll read this little poem

00:19:03.000 from Marx now.

00:19:03.820 So it was interesting to me

00:19:06.820 for the reasons that I told you about.

00:19:09.260 That art, poetry is the birthplace of ideas

00:19:12.120 and ideas can possess you.

00:19:14.600 So I was like,

00:19:15.100 well, what was Marx up to exactly?

00:19:17.920 Well, maybe we can find out a little bit

00:19:20.220 by reading his poems.

00:19:23.120 His early poem when he was a young man.

00:19:25.260 It's called

00:19:25.620 Invocation of One in Despair.

00:19:29.840 So, a God has snatched from me

00:19:35.700 my all

00:19:37.640 in the curse and wrack of destiny.

00:19:41.100 All his worlds are gone beyond recall.

00:19:45.640 Nothing but revenge

00:19:47.000 is left to me.

00:19:49.960 On myself, revenge

00:19:51.680 I'll proudly wreak

00:19:53.000 on that being,

00:19:55.400 that enthroned Lord.

00:19:56.760 Make my strength

00:19:59.240 a patchwork of what's weak.

00:20:01.280 Leave my better self

00:20:02.660 without reward.

00:20:04.740 I shall build

00:20:06.660 my throne

00:20:07.760 high overhead.

00:20:09.520 Cold, tremendous

00:20:11.080 shall its summit be.

00:20:14.020 For its bulwark

00:20:15.260 superstitious dread.

00:20:18.240 For its martial

00:20:19.280 blackest agony.

00:20:21.980 Who looks on it

00:20:22.920 with a healthy eye

00:20:23.820 shall turn back,

00:20:24.980 struck,

00:20:26.380 deathly pale

00:20:27.240 and dumb,

00:20:28.280 clutched by blind

00:20:29.420 and chill mortality.

00:20:31.000 May his happiness

00:20:32.200 prepare its tomb.

00:20:35.500 And the Almighty's lightning

00:20:36.780 shall rebound

00:20:37.640 from that massive

00:20:39.100 iron giant.

00:20:40.200 If he brings

00:20:41.380 my walls and tower down,

00:20:43.460 eternity

00:20:43.940 shall raise them up.

00:20:46.360 Defiant.

00:20:48.240 It's a hell of a poem.

00:20:50.860 Literally.

00:20:51.420 Literally.

00:20:54.980 You know,

00:20:55.520 it reminds me,

00:20:56.540 and I haven't done

00:20:57.240 enough background research

00:20:58.220 to find out

00:20:58.800 if there's a connection,

00:20:59.580 it reminds me a lot

00:21:00.420 of the poetry

00:21:01.620 in Paradise Lost.

00:21:03.740 And Paradise Lost

00:21:04.760 is a very famous poem

00:21:05.860 and it's about

00:21:06.740 the rebellion

00:21:07.300 of Satan

00:21:07.840 against God.

00:21:09.580 And it's an attempt

00:21:10.560 by Milton

00:21:11.620 around

00:21:12.540 the canonical

00:21:14.700 Judeo-Christian

00:21:15.620 writings

00:21:16.120 that make up

00:21:16.980 the narrative

00:21:18.120 substructure

00:21:18.980 of our culture.

00:21:19.720 there's a cloud

00:21:20.980 of images

00:21:21.700 and stories

00:21:22.880 that are not

00:21:24.060 really written down

00:21:24.840 but they're just

00:21:25.400 part of our

00:21:25.940 cultural heritage.

00:21:27.580 The idea of hell

00:21:28.600 for example

00:21:29.140 is one

00:21:29.540 and really

00:21:29.980 the idea

00:21:30.360 of the devil

00:21:30.880 which is almost

00:21:31.540 discussed

00:21:32.200 not at all

00:21:32.760 in the biblical corpus.

00:21:35.960 Very, very,

00:21:36.720 very few references.

00:21:38.340 Almost none.

00:21:39.980 But there's this

00:21:40.920 cloud of ideas

00:21:41.820 about evil

00:21:42.440 and so forth

00:21:43.380 that have

00:21:44.220 aggregated themselves

00:21:45.600 in a poetic sense

00:21:46.920 and an imagistic sense

00:21:47.900 around this core

00:21:49.160 set of

00:21:50.160 narrative writings.

00:21:51.620 And what Milton

00:21:52.280 tried to do

00:21:52.820 was to

00:21:53.520 articulate all those

00:21:55.000 and that's why

00:21:55.480 he wrote

00:21:55.780 Paradise Lost

00:21:56.820 and it's about

00:21:57.420 the highest angel

00:21:59.540 in God's heavenly kingdom.

00:22:01.120 Something approximately

00:22:02.180 equivalent to

00:22:03.020 rationality

00:22:03.740 I would say.

00:22:05.460 Attempting to

00:22:06.160 displace

00:22:06.800 what's transcendent

00:22:07.980 with its own kingdom.

00:22:10.060 And doing that

00:22:10.800 at least in part

00:22:11.940 in revenge

00:22:13.720 against God.

00:22:14.720 It's something like that.

00:22:15.640 And this poem

00:22:16.220 really reminds me

00:22:17.440 of that.

00:22:17.760 And I don't know

00:22:18.700 if Marx was

00:22:19.340 reading

00:22:20.060 Paradise Lost

00:22:21.960 at that point

00:22:22.560 or not.

00:22:24.040 In some sense

00:22:24.840 it doesn't matter

00:22:25.380 because Paradise Lost

00:22:26.220 had such a walloping

00:22:27.340 impact on

00:22:28.140 European culture

00:22:29.300 that Marx would have

00:22:30.280 been familiar

00:22:30.820 with its themes

00:22:31.580 implicitly

00:22:32.660 from everything else

00:22:33.400 he read anyways.

00:22:34.880 But it's

00:22:35.880 quite a telling poem

00:22:37.240 because the person

00:22:38.480 who wrote it

00:22:40.320 is a very,

00:22:41.220 very angry,

00:22:42.500 desperately angry

00:22:43.440 and hopeless

00:22:45.140 and then

00:22:47.720 worse

00:22:48.180 out for revenge

00:22:49.160 and then worse

00:22:50.520 out to build

00:22:51.400 a structure

00:22:52.020 that would

00:22:52.440 extract that

00:22:53.320 revenge.

00:22:54.560 It's like,

00:22:55.440 well,

00:22:56.500 you know,

00:22:56.880 what happened

00:22:57.920 with Marx

00:22:58.460 is quite the

00:22:59.260 damn mystery

00:22:59.860 the way his ideas

00:23:01.480 unfolded in the

00:23:02.420 20th century.

00:23:03.200 It's not so obvious

00:23:04.060 why that happened.

00:23:06.520 And, you know,

00:23:07.580 there was the

00:23:07.920 cover story

00:23:08.580 and that was

00:23:09.360 the compassion

00:23:11.200 story,

00:23:11.700 the compassion

00:23:12.120 for the downtrodden

00:23:13.060 which is part

00:23:13.880 and parcel

00:23:14.260 of the Marxist

00:23:14.880 story.

00:23:15.980 And then there's

00:23:16.400 the,

00:23:17.220 well,

00:23:17.360 then there's

00:23:17.640 what happened

00:23:18.140 when that

00:23:19.260 hypothetical compassion

00:23:20.640 manifested itself

00:23:21.940 in the world

00:23:22.480 and that was

00:23:23.480 absolutely brutal.

00:23:25.260 It's brutal

00:23:25.760 beyond comprehension,

00:23:27.000 right?

00:23:27.380 At least 100

00:23:28.100 million people

00:23:28.820 died.

00:23:30.360 And we should

00:23:31.060 be clear about

00:23:31.940 what it meant

00:23:32.420 to die.

00:23:33.440 I was,

00:23:33.860 I was,

00:23:34.660 what it meant

00:23:35.220 to die under

00:23:36.180 communism.

00:23:38.900 I was

00:23:39.740 looking

00:23:42.100 online the

00:23:44.300 other day

00:23:44.680 for critiques

00:23:47.400 of capitalism

00:23:48.440 because it's,

00:23:49.760 it's common

00:23:50.360 now when

00:23:51.220 everybody,

00:23:51.920 when anybody

00:23:52.280 puts forth

00:23:52.880 an argument

00:23:53.360 about the

00:23:54.680 murderousness

00:23:55.200 of communism

00:23:55.840 and the stats

00:23:57.560 that are

00:23:58.180 associated with

00:23:58.840 that,

00:23:59.500 the 100

00:23:59.800 million deaths

00:24:00.640 for example,

00:24:01.420 that's from

00:24:01.820 the Black

00:24:02.220 Book of

00:24:02.600 Communism

00:24:03.080 which is a

00:24:03.480 very good

00:24:03.940 scholarly

00:24:04.920 reference.

00:24:05.220 about what

00:24:05.960 happened

00:24:06.280 in the

00:24:06.920 Soviet Union

00:24:07.400 and Maoist

00:24:08.280 China.

00:24:09.020 It's common

00:24:09.860 now that

00:24:10.280 people who

00:24:11.080 are attempting

00:24:12.340 to revive

00:24:13.160 the spirit

00:24:13.760 of Marxism

00:24:14.440 and there

00:24:15.180 seem to be

00:24:15.580 more of them

00:24:16.020 all the time

00:24:16.580 to make

00:24:18.820 counterclaims

00:24:19.480 that capitalism

00:24:20.140 killed just

00:24:21.100 as many

00:24:21.500 people.

00:24:22.940 And then

00:24:23.300 they,

00:24:24.040 usually the

00:24:24.760 stats are

00:24:25.140 something like

00:24:25.600 X number

00:24:26.400 of people

00:24:26.760 died of

00:24:27.180 starvation

00:24:27.700 and X

00:24:28.240 number of

00:24:28.600 people died

00:24:29.140 because they

00:24:29.820 had lack

00:24:30.340 of,

00:24:31.080 you know,

00:24:31.260 they didn't

00:24:31.640 have access

00:24:32.120 to clean

00:24:32.580 water,

00:24:32.900 they didn't

00:24:33.160 have access

00:24:33.640 to proper

00:24:34.920 medication.

00:24:35.700 And so,

00:24:36.380 I mean,

00:24:36.640 if you stack

00:24:37.320 up those

00:24:38.240 deaths beside

00:24:39.160 the deaths

00:24:39.700 that were produced

00:24:40.240 by the

00:24:40.540 communists,

00:24:41.080 then you

00:24:41.700 can,

00:24:42.080 you know,

00:24:42.620 you can even

00:24:43.740 the scales.

00:24:44.900 But it's quite

00:24:45.820 the piece of

00:24:46.360 logic as far

00:24:47.100 as I'm

00:24:47.380 concerned because

00:24:48.040 there's a big

00:24:49.100 difference between

00:24:49.860 the fact that

00:24:50.900 people die and

00:24:53.200 even the fact

00:24:53.800 that perhaps

00:24:54.380 they wouldn't

00:24:54.900 have to die

00:24:55.440 if other

00:24:55.780 people intervened

00:24:56.600 and saved

00:24:57.060 them and

00:24:57.880 actually killing

00:24:59.100 people.

00:25:00.280 Like,

00:25:00.400 that's,

00:25:00.800 seriously,

00:25:01.580 man,

00:25:01.740 that's a big

00:25:02.500 difference.

00:25:03.760 And like,

00:25:04.740 and one of the

00:25:05.520 logical flaws

00:25:06.200 there is like

00:25:06.600 everybody dies.

00:25:08.800 You can't blame

00:25:09.760 that on

00:25:10.260 capitalism.

00:25:11.400 Now,

00:25:11.620 you might be

00:25:12.060 able to say,

00:25:12.660 well,

00:25:13.100 you know,

00:25:14.360 capitalists could

00:25:15.400 have been better

00:25:16.060 at distributing

00:25:17.220 their resources

00:25:18.020 more effectively

00:25:18.880 so that more

00:25:20.300 people were

00:25:20.960 protected against

00:25:22.140 a mortality

00:25:23.240 that emerged

00:25:24.040 too soon.

00:25:25.780 And,

00:25:26.200 you know,

00:25:26.520 there's,

00:25:26.900 I suppose there's

00:25:27.600 some truth in

00:25:28.120 that critique

00:25:28.660 because none

00:25:30.140 of us are

00:25:30.580 perfect and

00:25:31.500 none of our

00:25:32.080 systems are

00:25:32.620 perfect and

00:25:33.220 perhaps it's

00:25:34.220 possible that

00:25:34.920 those who

00:25:36.100 over the last

00:25:36.820 hundred years

00:25:37.420 have generated

00:25:38.100 some excess

00:25:39.060 wealth could

00:25:39.620 have been more

00:25:40.080 intelligent and,

00:25:42.000 and what would

00:25:42.740 you say,

00:25:43.380 intelligent and

00:25:44.460 wise and

00:25:45.240 thoughtful and

00:25:45.980 far-seeing and

00:25:47.460 done better

00:25:48.660 with their

00:25:49.420 money than

00:25:50.020 they did.

00:25:51.900 Fair enough,

00:25:52.940 but that is

00:25:53.400 not the same

00:25:54.460 as lining

00:25:55.420 people up and

00:25:56.360 shooting them

00:25:57.060 and torturing

00:25:58.020 them and

00:25:58.600 actively killing

00:25:59.740 them and

00:26:00.320 that's what

00:26:00.880 happened with

00:26:01.480 the communists.

00:26:03.260 And so we

00:26:03.720 need a...

00:26:04.820 applause

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00:29:00.800 And so this moral

00:29:02.280 equivalence of the

00:29:04.640 communist system and the

00:29:06.160 capitalist system is, it's

00:29:08.300 preposterous.

00:29:09.780 Now, one of the things

00:29:11.080 that's also quite

00:29:11.960 interesting in that light is

00:29:15.520 what's been happening

00:29:17.280 economically around the

00:29:18.500 world, especially in the

00:29:19.680 last 15 years, because

00:29:21.840 things have really

00:29:22.620 transformed themselves in

00:29:24.460 very interesting ways.

00:29:26.440 So, you know, the wall

00:29:29.260 didn't fall until 1989,

00:29:31.460 right?

00:29:31.720 So really, that's when the

00:29:32.580 Second World War ended, as

00:29:33.840 far as I'm concerned, is in

00:29:35.060 1989.

00:29:35.680 You know, the dramatic part

00:29:38.620 of it ended in 1945, but

00:29:40.640 the Cold War raged until

00:29:43.680 1989, and that was an

00:29:46.460 extension of World War II.

00:29:47.820 And, you know, it was

00:29:48.920 constantly bubbling up all

00:29:50.200 over the world.

00:29:51.040 It bubbled up in Korea, and

00:29:52.180 it bubbled up in Vietnam, and

00:29:54.420 Cambodia, and throughout

00:29:56.000 Africa, and all through South

00:29:57.500 America, you know, as the

00:29:58.740 capitalists and the

00:29:59.520 communists fought for control

00:30:02.020 over people's psyches and

00:30:04.460 also their territories, and

00:30:05.860 that didn't really stop

00:30:09.000 until 1989.

00:30:10.820 And so, from then onward,

00:30:12.300 there wasn't the same

00:30:13.280 tremendous pressure from the

00:30:16.580 radical left to warp and

00:30:19.740 twist governments all over

00:30:21.600 the world into the

00:30:22.700 collectivist vision, let's

00:30:28.020 say.

00:30:28.180 And so, what's been the

00:30:31.000 consequence of that?

00:30:32.380 The removal of that

00:30:33.740 ideological pressure, or at

00:30:35.200 least the partial cessation

00:30:36.460 of that ideological pressure.

00:30:38.160 Well, there wasn't a lot

00:30:39.940 of...

00:30:43.020 There wasn't...

00:30:43.640 Things didn't change a lot

00:30:44.820 for a while after that, but

00:30:46.180 that's not surprising.

00:30:47.120 You know, when something

00:30:47.740 falls apart, well, there's

00:30:50.040 going to be a bit of a

00:30:50.680 catastrophe in its aftermath,

00:30:52.080 no matter what it is.

00:30:53.400 And then it takes a while for

00:30:54.680 the new situation to sort of

00:30:56.040 manifest itself.

00:30:56.920 And, you know, what's

00:30:58.520 been happening over the

00:31:00.080 last, let's say, since the

00:31:01.400 year 2000, it's only a

00:31:02.860 decade after the wall fell

00:31:04.680 down, what's been

00:31:05.540 happening since the year

00:31:06.400 2000 is actually quite

00:31:07.960 miraculous.

00:31:09.500 And so, let me lay that

00:31:10.820 out a little bit.

00:31:11.460 So, I first figured this

00:31:12.860 out.

00:31:13.080 I worked on a UN committee

00:31:14.240 about four years ago.

00:31:16.520 It was a committee set up by

00:31:17.820 the UN Secretary General to

00:31:20.220 produce a document that was

00:31:23.440 like maybe an overview of

00:31:25.120 something approximating

00:31:26.180 economic, sustainable

00:31:27.660 economic development,

00:31:28.980 whatever that means.

00:31:30.120 It's a hard thing to, what

00:31:31.440 is sustainable is really,

00:31:34.140 really hard to figure out.

00:31:35.340 But that was the idea.

00:31:36.520 And you can kind of see the

00:31:37.660 rationale for that.

00:31:38.520 It's like you don't want to

00:31:39.440 do something today that

00:31:40.460 completely screws you over in

00:31:42.020 a week, right?

00:31:43.300 You don't want to do

00:31:43.940 something in a year that

00:31:44.940 makes things worse five

00:31:46.100 years from now.

00:31:46.760 So, if you're sensible,

00:31:49.200 whatever you do today also

00:31:50.900 works tomorrow and next

00:31:52.420 week and next year and ten

00:31:53.640 years from now and maybe

00:31:54.940 works for you and your

00:31:56.160 family and your community

00:31:57.380 as well, all at the same

00:31:59.040 time.

00:31:59.540 And so, it's trying to

00:32:01.140 operate within that system

00:32:02.320 of multiple constraints that

00:32:03.660 you might regard as

00:32:04.820 something approximating

00:32:05.820 sustainable.

00:32:06.960 So, we were trying to

00:32:09.040 wrestle with that.

00:32:10.580 What would it be like?

00:32:12.000 What would it mean to have a

00:32:12.800 sustainable fishery, for

00:32:14.300 example, or maybe a

00:32:15.540 sustainable energy policy,

00:32:18.320 et cetera, et cetera, to

00:32:19.580 start thinking over some

00:32:20.900 reasonably long period of

00:32:22.200 time, which even in

00:32:23.460 itself is even a

00:32:24.280 complicated problem because

00:32:25.200 it's not obvious what

00:32:26.220 period of time you should

00:32:27.480 think over.

00:32:28.640 You might say, well, we

00:32:29.440 should think over a

00:32:30.260 thousand years because we

00:32:31.420 have the long-term vision.

00:32:32.580 It's like, you don't know

00:32:35.680 what it's going to be like

00:32:36.420 in ten years.

00:32:37.980 You know, at the rate of

00:32:38.740 technological

00:32:39.900 transformation right now is

00:32:41.360 so unbelievably extreme that

00:32:42.920 I don't think we can even

00:32:44.140 see very clearly ten years

00:32:45.720 down the road.

00:32:46.240 So, it's hard to plan for

00:32:47.240 like a thousand years.

00:32:49.100 You know, so, anyways,

00:32:50.720 that's all very complicated.

00:32:51.900 But we were producing this

00:32:54.740 document and I got the

00:32:56.160 opportunity to, first of

00:32:59.300 all, watch how a document

00:33:00.200 like that was produced.

00:33:02.200 You know, it's like, well,

00:33:02.920 who works on a higher-level

00:33:05.900 plan like that?

00:33:07.060 Well, all the people that

00:33:07.940 were on the committee were

00:33:08.820 former heads of states, the

00:33:10.860 people who were technically

00:33:12.880 appointed to the committee

00:33:13.920 and then they all produced

00:33:15.260 hierarchies of people

00:33:16.340 underneath them who

00:33:17.080 actually worked on the

00:33:17.960 document because there are

00:33:19.500 those people, like if you're

00:33:20.740 the ex-president of France,

00:33:22.500 you're busy.

00:33:24.100 You're busy.

00:33:24.980 Like, you're moving around,

00:33:26.020 man.

00:33:26.220 You're occupied all the time.

00:33:27.840 You don't have time to spend

00:33:29.100 two years thinking about a

00:33:32.400 new plan for sustainable

00:33:33.580 global development.

00:33:34.920 So, even though you might be

00:33:36.140 the figurehead on the

00:33:37.380 committee, you don't do any of

00:33:38.640 the work.

00:33:39.460 And so, it gets passed down

00:33:40.720 to the people that you're

00:33:42.160 associated with until it gets

00:33:45.020 to someone who will actually

00:33:46.240 do it.

00:33:47.320 Well, who are those people?

00:33:49.680 Well, they're usually,

00:33:51.520 sometimes they're academics,

00:33:52.700 sometimes they're political

00:33:53.740 bureaucrats.

00:33:54.780 They're people that, for one

00:33:55.800 reason or another, have a

00:33:56.600 little bit of extra time and

00:33:57.880 interest, but none of them are

00:33:59.380 trained to do this because no

00:34:01.320 one's trained to produce a

00:34:02.720 global plan for economic

00:34:04.020 sustainable development.

00:34:05.440 Nobody has that training.

00:34:07.100 So, none of the people doing

00:34:08.260 it know what the hell they're

00:34:09.080 doing.

00:34:10.180 So, and it's not that

00:34:12.460 surprising because it's a

00:34:13.280 complicated problem.

00:34:14.200 So, that was interesting to

00:34:15.340 watch.

00:34:15.860 And then we got the first

00:34:17.440 draft of the document and it

00:34:19.600 was awful.

00:34:20.580 It was awful.

00:34:21.260 It was like it was written in

00:34:22.080 1984.

00:34:23.000 It was a Cold War document.

00:34:24.220 It was North against South.

00:34:26.080 You know, the privileged North

00:34:27.480 against the underprivileged

00:34:28.480 South.

00:34:28.860 And it was capitalist against

00:34:30.300 socialist.

00:34:31.640 No sense that, you know,

00:34:33.160 that there could be

00:34:33.980 cooperation between those two

00:34:35.580 ends of the political

00:34:36.300 distribution.

00:34:37.260 No sense that the South was

00:34:38.880 not what it was in 1984.

00:34:40.640 I mean, the developing world

00:34:41.940 has developed a lot since

00:34:43.360 1984 and is developing

00:34:45.900 extraordinarily quickly.

00:34:47.880 And, you know, I mean, is

00:34:49.200 China more of an economic

00:34:50.480 powerhouse than the United

00:34:51.620 States?

00:34:52.380 Well, no.

00:34:53.520 But China plus India might be.

00:34:56.160 You know, I mean, the tide has

00:34:58.200 turned in many ways.

00:34:59.180 So, it was unbelievably

00:35:00.380 outdated.

00:35:00.960 So, we thought, well, we'd

00:35:02.380 rewrite the narrative and not

00:35:04.040 so much look for oppressors

00:35:06.020 and victims and all of that

00:35:07.380 horrible nonsense, but to see

00:35:09.540 if we could put together a

00:35:10.460 document that was predicated on

00:35:11.820 the idea that everybody could

00:35:13.420 work together in some loose,

00:35:17.480 what would you call it, some

00:35:20.940 loose association of goodwill and

00:35:23.400 that we could make things better

00:35:25.000 instead of just pointing to whose

00:35:26.940 fault everything was.

00:35:28.720 And so, we rewrote the

00:35:32.620 underlying narrative.

00:35:33.880 And that was interesting, too,

00:35:35.060 because one of the things I

00:35:35.980 learned, this is a rule that I

00:35:37.480 didn't write in 12 rules, but it

00:35:39.160 was one of the possible rules.

00:35:42.060 Opportunity lurks where

00:35:43.940 responsibility has been

00:35:45.420 abdicated.

00:35:47.220 So, one of the things you learn if

00:35:48.720 you do that sort of thing, that

00:35:50.860 sort of thing I was talking about,

00:35:51.800 is that if you actually do the

00:35:53.240 writing, then you win.

00:35:55.440 Because for someone to do

00:35:58.240 something about that, they would

00:35:59.340 have to do the writing.

00:36:02.540 And it's just easier just to take

00:36:04.420 what you've written than it is to

00:36:06.080 write a whole different thing.

00:36:08.500 And so, you might think, well, why

00:36:09.960 the hell do I have to do the

00:36:11.080 writing?

00:36:11.440 And the answer is, well, because

00:36:13.660 then you get to do the writing.

00:36:15.140 And it's an interesting thing, you

00:36:16.560 know, if you're at work, I mean, I

00:36:18.080 don't think that you should allow

00:36:19.300 people to take advantage of you.

00:36:20.480 I think that's a big mistake.

00:36:21.520 But, you know, if you're angry

00:36:23.140 because excess responsibility has

00:36:25.060 been dumped on you, you know,

00:36:27.040 independent of whether or not you're

00:36:28.320 being taken advantage of, that's a

00:36:29.660 different issue.

00:36:30.280 You might reverse that and think,

00:36:32.740 well, where the responsibility is,

00:36:36.140 that's where the authority is.

00:36:37.720 And if it happens to fall to you,

00:36:40.180 that makes you indispensable, man.

00:36:42.880 That gives you a stake in the game.

00:36:45.720 So, that was quite interesting.

00:36:47.640 So, I got a chance to read about,

00:36:50.000 I don't know, 200 books in the

00:36:52.220 months that I was working on this

00:36:54.240 document.

00:36:54.820 And most of those were books on

00:36:56.940 economic development, but also on

00:36:58.480 ecological matters, right?

00:37:01.080 So, I was interested in climate

00:37:02.640 change and overfishing and

00:37:04.360 deforestation and the demolition of,

00:37:07.020 like, what, decline in speciation,

00:37:11.660 extinction, you know, all the things

00:37:13.260 you hear about that are looming

00:37:14.440 catastrophes that bedevil the human

00:37:17.460 race and the planet, some of which

00:37:19.420 we're responsible for.

00:37:20.560 And I read a bunch, everything I

00:37:23.160 could get my hands on, including

00:37:25.120 books by people like Bjorn Lomberg,

00:37:27.240 who put himself forward as the

00:37:28.860 skeptical environmentalist.

00:37:29.960 I would highly recommend Bjorn

00:37:31.120 Lomberg, by the way.

00:37:32.160 He wrote a book called How to

00:37:33.580 Spend 75 Billion Dollars to Make

00:37:35.680 the World a Better Place.

00:37:37.020 And it's a really, really smart book.

00:37:42.680 Welcome to Season 2, Episode 24 of

00:37:45.420 the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.

00:37:46.740 I'm Mikayla Peterson, dad's daughter,

00:37:49.500 collaborator, manager, and currently

00:37:51.700 on a week-long fast just to see what

00:37:54.040 happens.

00:37:54.940 And I feel good.

00:37:57.220 83 hours in at the moment.

00:37:59.440 I've still been exercising, just

00:38:01.040 living my life.

00:38:02.460 It's way easier than expected.

00:38:04.380 I've been doing fasting for the last

00:38:06.720 three months, between 18 and 24 hours,

00:38:10.580 48 hours, and I swear the more I do it,

00:38:13.120 the easier it gets.

00:38:13.920 I did a DEXA scan last week, which

00:38:16.820 measures body fat accurately, and

00:38:18.840 muscle tissue and bone density, and

00:38:20.860 we'll see what a week of salt water

00:38:22.380 does to me.

00:38:23.620 I don't think it'll do a lot, to be

00:38:24.940 honest, but that will be fun to put

00:38:27.440 up on YouTube.

00:38:28.980 I'm not going to get into a weekly

00:38:30.640 update about family, because honestly,

00:38:33.340 things are still crazily up in the air.

00:38:36.360 We'll know more next week, and I'll

00:38:38.660 update you then.

00:38:40.220 Something I learned recently that

00:38:41.480 might be helpful, random piece of

00:38:43.380 information.

00:38:44.640 Did you know cold showers or cold

00:38:47.140 water immersion lowers cortisol

00:38:49.080 levels?

00:38:50.140 If you're having trouble sleeping, it

00:38:51.980 should help with that too.

00:38:53.240 That's my tip of the day.

00:38:54.460 So that's about it for now.

00:38:56.020 Please enjoy this podcast, a 12

00:38:57.880 rules for life lecture from 2018

00:38:59.660 recorded in Winnipeg.

00:39:01.260 For you Americans who don't

00:39:02.480 recognize Winnipeg, it's in the

00:39:04.560 middle of Canada.

00:39:05.660 Nobody really visits there.

00:39:07.280 Will you pass through it if you drive

00:39:08.660 from Toronto to Vancouver, though?

00:39:10.440 The places people do visit.

00:39:12.200 I'm just kidding.

00:39:13.100 Winnipeg, you rock.

00:39:14.880 I was able to title this week's

00:39:17.060 episode, so I've titled it,

00:39:19.960 The World is Your Oyster.

00:39:22.360 Enjoy.

00:39:23.340 When we return, The World is Your Oyster,

00:39:26.180 a 12 rules for life lecture by

00:39:28.280 Jordan V. Peterson.

00:39:29.100 Thank you very much, all of you, for

00:39:45.660 coming here tonight.

00:39:46.640 It's wonderful to see you all, and

00:39:48.180 it's great to be in Winnipeg, so I

00:39:50.560 hope we have a fine time tonight.

00:39:54.920 I've been using these lectures as an

00:39:57.800 opportunity, because they are an

00:39:59.260 opportunity, I mean, to have serious

00:40:01.660 conversations with people.

00:40:03.360 It might be strange to think about a

00:40:05.060 lecture as a discussion or a

00:40:06.700 conversation, but it is a

00:40:08.180 conversation, you know, unless you're

00:40:10.580 just reading it or working off

00:40:13.140 pre-prepared notes.

00:40:15.300 You know, if you're just addressing

00:40:16.700 the audience and you're watching

00:40:17.800 everybody and listening to people,

00:40:20.500 listening to the, watching

00:40:21.840 individuals, but listening to the

00:40:23.280 whole crowd as well, and you can tell

00:40:25.040 how people are responding, and you

00:40:26.540 can see if people are following the

00:40:27.780 arguments, and so, you know, when you

00:40:29.480 participate in a conversation, there's a

00:40:31.640 lot of non-verbal participation as

00:40:33.240 well, the way you hold your eyes, and

00:40:36.120 well, the way you move.

00:40:37.840 I know when I've got the audience

00:40:39.340 engaged, that it's silent.

00:40:44.000 Nobody rustles around, nobody moves.

00:40:45.740 You know, their attention is focused on

00:40:47.220 the front, so I can tell when I'm in the

00:40:49.400 right place, so to speak, conceptually, and

00:40:52.000 when everyone's on board.

00:40:53.940 I get a chance to keep working on the

00:40:56.180 ideas that I've been working on for 30

00:40:57.960 years in real time, which I really like

00:41:00.220 doing, and so it's a chance to think on

00:41:02.980 my feet, and I'm going to talk a fair

00:41:08.200 bit about the book tonight, about 12

00:41:10.000 rules, and a little bit about my other

00:41:11.840 book, Maps of Meaning, which I put out an

00:41:13.880 audio version June 12th, and if you found

00:41:17.220 12 rules for life useful, then you might

00:41:21.060 take a shot at listening to Maps of

00:41:24.100 Meaning, it's a hard book, but the audio

00:41:27.480 version, I think, makes it more

00:41:29.080 accessible, so I'm going to run through

00:41:32.440 those themes, and then I was reading

00:41:35.660 some poetry today, too, so I thought I

00:41:37.140 might share that with you.

00:41:38.300 I'm sure you're thrilled about that idea,

00:41:39.920 but this is poetry written by Karl Marx.

00:41:43.700 I didn't know he wrote poetry, and so I

00:41:46.720 found, I stumbled across some of the poems

00:41:48.500 that he wrote when he was a young man, and

00:41:50.580 you know, I noticed with my book, my first

00:41:53.480 book, Maps of Meaning, actually started as

00:41:55.380 a poem, it was about 20 pages long, and I

00:41:59.720 was trying to express some ideas I had

00:42:02.180 about, well, I was kind of obsessed with

00:42:03.960 the Cold War, and about what I knew about

00:42:05.880 Nazi Germany, both of those things, and

00:42:08.000 they were plaguing me, along with questions

00:42:11.320 about the meaning of life in the face of

00:42:13.880 its suffering, and I wrote a poem about it,

00:42:16.060 and then I noticed that often my

00:42:19.440 undergraduates, who were really trying to

00:42:22.120 wrestle seriously with an essay, with an

00:42:24.140 idea of, you know, if they were going to

00:42:25.660 write about something that really gripped

00:42:27.080 them personally, is that sometimes they

00:42:28.840 would start by writing poetry, and it was

00:42:30.840 often very bad, the poetry, but that wasn't

00:42:34.100 really the point, like, and then at the

00:42:36.820 same time, or along the same years, I

00:42:40.180 suppose, I also spent a lot of time trying

00:42:42.700 to understand the role of art in art and

00:42:46.080 literature, in cognition, in human thinking,

00:42:48.800 because obviously, obviously, engaging in

00:42:53.420 artistic production, including writing of

00:42:56.040 such things as poetry, is actually a form of

00:42:58.140 thinking, right? I mean, you kind of get the

00:43:01.000 idea, which is a misbegotten idea, that what

00:43:04.120 artists do is produce beautiful things, and

00:43:06.680 that's the purpose of art, and it's not.

00:43:09.380 The purpose of art is to think, and the

00:43:12.920 productions are the secondary consequence of

00:43:15.140 the thought process, and they kind of

00:43:16.700 encapsulate the thought process, like what

00:43:18.640 artists do, visual artists say, painters, is

00:43:21.340 they teach you how to see, and they really

00:43:24.700 do that, that's what they do, they're

00:43:27.060 perceptual geniuses, and when you look at

00:43:29.320 their art, you learn how to look at the

00:43:31.820 world, you learn what's beautiful and what

00:43:33.340 isn't, and you learn what's remarkable about

00:43:35.900 individuals, and what's remarkable about

00:43:37.560 landscapes, what's beautiful, all of those

00:43:39.860 things, and poetry is like that too, and so

00:43:43.480 it's, when people wrestle with ideas, they

00:43:47.420 first encounter what they don't understand,

00:43:50.180 because that's what you have to think about,

00:43:51.980 you don't have to think about what you

00:43:53.300 already understand, you've managed that, you

00:43:55.500 have to think about what you don't

00:43:56.400 understand, and then thoughts have to have

00:43:58.620 a birthplace, because they don't just

00:44:00.620 magically appear in your head with no

00:44:02.680 preparation, like that isn't how thinking

00:44:04.480 works, thinking is very, very complicated, and

00:44:07.000 the first way that you encounter what

00:44:09.700 you don't understand, is through

00:44:11.640 imagination, and that's the domain of art, and

00:44:14.460 what artists, real artists do, is they go

00:44:17.560 out to the frontier, and they

00:44:19.860 reconceptualize perception, and using

00:44:22.380 imagination, and they lay the ground for

00:44:25.140 fully articulated knowledge, that's what

00:44:28.000 artists do, and poetry is a very

00:44:29.760 interesting medium, because it stands

00:44:32.720 halfway between the image, and the fully

00:44:35.320 articulated word, because of course,

00:44:38.180 poetry is richly image-laden, and also

00:44:42.280 saturated in emotion, and so it's often

00:44:45.060 the case, if that you're trying to express

00:44:47.160 an idea, it's not always the case, but

00:44:49.420 it's often the case, that if someone is

00:44:51.080 trying to express an idea, they'll do it

00:44:53.200 in song, or they'll do it in poetry, before

00:44:55.780 they can express it as full-fledged

00:44:57.840 philosophy, and so it's, you're grappling

00:45:00.620 with an idea, and that manifests itself

00:45:02.780 in being gripped by motivation and

00:45:05.460 emotion, and then that produces a burst

00:45:07.500 of imagination, and then that can be

00:45:09.220 represented visually, or it can be

00:45:10.660 represented in poetry, and then maybe it

00:45:12.720 can be represented in story, and only

00:45:14.720 after that can it be fully articulated,

00:45:16.960 and so that's how thought works, it goes

00:45:19.600 from the absolute unknown itself to the

00:45:22.120 relatively unknown, that would be the

00:45:23.900 domain of imagination and dream, and

00:45:25.940 then from that, fully articulated

00:45:28.400 verbal representations are extracted, and

00:45:31.300 that's actually how your brain works, and

00:45:32.880 your right hemisphere is involved

00:45:34.640 mostly, this is a bit of an

00:45:37.320 oversimplification, but it's close

00:45:38.680 enough, your right hemisphere is

00:45:40.160 involved in that initial imaginative

00:45:42.460 grappling process that's emotion-laden

00:45:45.100 and image-laden, and then as you work

00:45:47.760 on it, and especially as you articulate

00:45:49.400 it, then your left hemisphere dominates

00:45:51.500 more and more in terms of the

00:45:52.540 representations. So that's the process by

00:45:54.980 which thought is generated, that's also

00:45:56.760 why you see that artists are on the

00:45:59.280 forefront of conceptual revolutions, you

00:46:02.160 know, like the Renaissance, for example,

00:46:05.180 which laid the groundwork for the

00:46:06.420 emergence of the modern West, was an

00:46:08.860 artistic movement to begin with, right,

00:46:10.940 it was great artists, especially in

00:46:12.260 northern Italy, there was this absolute

00:46:14.020 flowering of staggering art, one of the

00:46:16.620 things you saw, for example, in northern

00:46:18.300 Italy in the Renaissance was, and this was

00:46:20.060 when medieval times shifted to modern

00:46:22.320 times, is, you know, the religious images

00:46:24.240 that medieval people used were very

00:46:25.900 iconic, right, you look at medieval

00:46:27.680 art, it's very iconic, looks very old

00:46:29.720 fashioned to us, 12th and 13th century

00:46:32.280 stuff, before that even, you know, it's

00:46:34.480 almost cartoon-like, and very, very

00:46:37.560 iconic images of Christ, for example,

00:46:39.520 they're generic images, in a sense, but

00:46:42.960 as soon as the Renaissance hit, then all

00:46:44.960 of a sudden you saw these religious

00:46:46.200 figures become humanized, so they

00:46:47.920 actually took on individual,

00:46:49.480 recognizable individual

00:46:50.960 characteristics, and there was a

00:46:53.060 revolution in an idea that accompanied

00:46:54.860 that, because what it meant was that

00:46:57.640 the divine images, in some sense, were

00:46:59.260 being brought to earth and transformed

00:47:00.740 into something that was much closer to

00:47:02.760 the individual, to the everyday

00:47:05.560 individual, and it was that idea that

00:47:07.760 laid the groundwork for the generation

00:47:09.900 of the spread of democratic ideas, at

00:47:12.920 least in part, the idea that each

00:47:14.640 individual was important enough to be

00:47:17.820 regarded as the locus of political

00:47:19.800 responsibility, and that was all laid

00:47:21.800 out by the artists first, like they

00:47:23.280 were grappling with that, and that's

00:47:25.160 why people, these paintings from the

00:47:26.800 northern, from northern Italy, the

00:47:28.260 Renaissance paintings, they're so

00:47:29.460 unbelievably valued by people, you know,

00:47:32.240 I was in this museum in New York, and I

00:47:34.440 don't remember which one it was, a while

00:47:36.320 back, and it was quite a room, there

00:47:38.300 were paintings in that room by great

00:47:41.660 masters like da Vinci, and Michelangelo,

00:47:44.160 and Botticelli, and these great, great

00:47:47.200 Renaissance artists, there was

00:47:49.280 probably, maybe there was a dozen

00:47:51.540 paintings in the room, and each of

00:47:52.720 those paintings would have been

00:47:53.520 worth, who knows, a quarter of a

00:47:55.240 billion dollars, so I was standing in

00:47:56.720 this room with like three billion

00:47:58.100 dollars worth of paintings, you know,

00:48:00.040 and you think, they're incredibly

00:48:01.840 expensive artifacts, in an incredibly

00:48:04.300 expensive building, on prime real

00:48:05.900 estate, in the middle of the most

00:48:07.040 expensive city in the world,

00:48:08.960 unbelievably highly valued, and people

00:48:11.540 from all over the world making

00:48:12.720 pilgrimages to see them, it's like

00:48:14.640 something's going on there, right,

00:48:15.860 that's not trivial, there's no way

00:48:18.140 you spend that much time and effort,

00:48:19.860 and money, right, serious money, like

00:48:22.400 dead serious money, there isn't more

00:48:24.380 expensive artifacts that we know of

00:48:26.140 than high quality art, you know,

00:48:28.460 paintings go for 200 million dollars,

00:48:30.280 it's like, what's going on with that,

00:48:33.320 you know, I mean obviously there's

00:48:34.680 status symbols to some degree, but

00:48:36.060 that's, but the question is, why are

00:48:38.300 they status symbols, you know, and so,

00:48:41.320 so anyways, that's a bit of a, what

00:48:43.760 do you call, meditation on the utility

00:48:45.580 of poetry, you know, and so, and so,

00:48:49.420 I'm going to start with a bit of a

00:48:50.920 poem from Shakespeare, and there's a

00:48:56.040 specific reason for it, so I'll just

00:48:57.620 read it, it's just a fragment, and most

00:48:59.720 of you have probably heard this, so it's

00:49:02.400 from As You Like It, all the world's a

00:49:06.140 stage, and all the men and women merely

00:49:10.040 players, they have their exits and their

00:49:13.680 entrances, and one man in his time plays

00:49:18.140 many parts, well that's, that's worth

00:49:22.900 taking apart, you know, and Shakespeare of

00:49:25.740 course, his writing is well regarded as

00:49:28.080 as close to immortal as anything that

00:49:30.560 human beings produce might be, and the

00:49:32.660 reason for that is that it's, it's, it's

00:49:35.380 endlessly dense, that's one way of thinking

00:49:37.880 about it, you can dive into it like you

00:49:39.840 can into anything profound and never

00:49:41.580 come up again, it's just connected to

00:49:44.080 everything, you know, and so, and he

00:49:46.940 makes a set of propositions here, and you

00:49:48.840 can just zip by them, you know, without

00:49:50.440 really noticing what they are, but it's

00:49:52.460 helpful to notice what they are, all the

00:49:54.760 world's a stage, okay, well that's a

00:49:57.320 metaphysical presupposition that, and it's

00:49:59.400 not a trivial one, it might even be an

00:50:01.480 ontological presupposition, so ontology is

00:50:04.100 the study of the structure of being, and so

00:50:06.680 Shakespeare's actually making an

00:50:08.020 ontological argument, he said, all the

00:50:10.640 world's a stage, okay, so what does that

00:50:13.640 mean exactly, because that's not the same

00:50:15.560 as saying the world is, the world is, what

00:50:19.760 would you say, the world is fundamentally a

00:50:22.240 material place, that's a completely

00:50:24.460 different claim, the world is a stage,

00:50:27.340 that's a particular way of looking at the

00:50:28.740 world, and so what do you do on a stage

00:50:30.920 is, well, you play your part, and each

00:50:33.320 person plays their part, and so there's

00:50:37.360 something very technically very

00:50:39.280 interesting about that claim, because

00:50:40.700 what Shakespeare is suggesting is that

00:50:43.520 the world is best conceived of as a forum

00:50:46.520 for action, because of course that's what

00:50:48.720 the stage is for, a stage is a place that

00:50:51.100 you act things out, and there's a

00:50:54.160 secondary consideration that emerges out

00:50:56.240 of that, is that, well, if the world's a

00:50:58.940 stage and you play your part, then what

00:51:00.840 should your part be, what's the proper

00:51:02.840 part to play, and you might, you might

00:51:04.520 say, well, that, maybe that's the

00:51:05.780 fundamental question of life, you're on

00:51:08.480 the stage, it's a drama of life and

00:51:10.160 death, that's clearly the case, you play

00:51:12.340 your part, well, two questions, what is

00:51:15.140 the part you're playing, that's the first

00:51:17.700 question, one of the things I learned

00:51:19.360 from Carl Jung, which really shocked me,

00:51:21.160 you know, Jung said, everybody acts out a

00:51:23.240 story, a myth, actually, that was his more

00:51:25.760 fundamental claim, so myth is like a

00:51:27.600 fundamental story, you act out a myth,

00:51:29.600 whether you know it or not, well, that's

00:51:32.560 an interesting claim, and a secondary

00:51:34.500 claim was, you should know which myth

00:51:36.200 you're acting out, because it might not

00:51:38.620 be one you would choose consciously,

00:51:41.080 right, you might be acting something out

00:51:42.560 unconsciously, that it's a tragedy, a

00:51:44.460 catastrophe, or worse than that, and you

00:51:47.060 should understand what it is that you're

00:51:48.500 up to, you might think, well, I know what

00:51:50.180 I'm up to, it's like, no, you don't,

00:51:51.740 you're a complicated creature, you're an

00:51:53.840 unbelievably complicated creature, and you

00:51:55.500 are not transparent to yourself, and it

00:51:57.540 isn't necessarily the case at all that

00:51:59.080 you know what you're up to, you know, and

00:52:00.640 if your life is miserable, beyond your

00:52:03.360 ability to tolerate it, then it might be

00:52:05.480 that you're playing the wrong sort of

00:52:06.620 part, now, you know, I mean, people get

00:52:08.720 unlucky, and I'm fully aware of that, I

00:52:11.220 know that people who are, who, people can

00:52:15.000 suffer dreadfully through no fault of

00:52:16.920 their own, there's no doubt about that,

00:52:18.640 there's an arbitrary element to life, but

00:52:20.640 it's also certainly the case that you can

00:52:22.140 bring on yourself and others a lot of

00:52:24.420 misery that's unnecessary, and that

00:52:26.300 happens a lot, and that's a part as well.

00:52:29.200 Okay, so the world's a stage.

00:52:31.380 Then the question might be, and you play

00:52:33.320 a part, and you play a part whether you

00:52:35.880 know what the part is or not.

00:52:36.900 Here's another idea, let's say you

00:52:39.080 haven't written your part, well, then

00:52:41.420 someone else has, or something else has.

00:52:45.220 And another thing I learned from Jung,

00:52:46.780 which really scared me as well, once I

00:52:48.560 started to understand the psychoanalysts,

00:52:50.300 you know, Jung said, people don't have

00:52:52.520 ideas, ideas have people, and that, that

00:52:57.020 was a very, once I understood the

00:52:58.920 psychoanalysts, that, that became very

00:53:00.420 terrifying, because, like, cognitive

00:53:02.840 psychologists, when they think about the

00:53:04.340 brain, they, they kind of use a computer

00:53:05.660 model, you're an information processor,

00:53:07.940 right, and, and, and you have modules,

00:53:10.380 cognitive modules, they are emotional

00:53:12.180 modules for that matter, but the

00:53:13.800 psychoanalysts, that isn't really the

00:53:15.180 way they looked at the world, the way

00:53:16.420 they thought of your psyche was that

00:53:17.740 you're composed of a lot of different

00:53:19.800 sub-personalities and sub-beings, and

00:53:22.660 they're sort of, they're aggregated

00:53:24.220 together in, in, into something with

00:53:27.200 some unity, and that's you, but those

00:53:29.700 sub-components of you, those things are

00:53:32.680 alive, and they have a will, and they

00:53:35.120 have a desire to live, well, Nietzsche

00:53:37.020 said, every drive tends to philosophize

00:53:40.420 in its spirit, you know, and, and, and so,

00:53:44.600 so you can be, you can be possessed in

00:53:47.100 some sense by elements of your being that

00:53:49.340 you don't have fully under control, now

00:53:51.120 you know that, everyone knows that,

00:53:52.620 because you do stupid things when you

00:53:53.820 get angry, right, or vengeful, you know,

00:53:56.020 you think, oh my god, how could I do

00:53:57.520 that, how could I think that, or, or, or

00:53:59.520 maybe you're having trouble controlling

00:54:01.000 your diet, and you get upset, you go to

00:54:02.420 the refrigerator, and you eat like a

00:54:03.780 quart of ice cream, and a, and a loaf of

00:54:05.800 bread, that's what happens to people,

00:54:07.560 that's what happens to people with

00:54:08.740 eating disorders, and, you know, they go

00:54:10.460 into kind of a trance, and they just eat

00:54:12.240 everything, and then they kind of come

00:54:14.120 to, and they think, what the, what the

00:54:16.200 hell was that, that was the last

00:54:17.620 thing I wanted to do, and, you know, you

00:54:19.200 do that if you're foolish in love, and if

00:54:20.960 you do that, if you're possessed by a

00:54:22.380 passion, and it's very easy to become

00:54:24.720 possessed by elements of your own being

00:54:27.240 that, that you don't have fully under

00:54:28.820 control, and then some of those elements

00:54:31.460 are, are systems of ideas, you know, that,

00:54:34.400 that are in you, that, that's Dawkins'

00:54:36.760 idea of meme, essentially, but he didn't

00:54:38.900 take it as far as the psychoanalysts took

00:54:40.920 it, because a meme, a system of ideas

00:54:43.320 that's shared culturally, can inhabit you

00:54:45.680 like a being, and direct your actions, and

00:54:48.260 that's what happens in the case of

00:54:49.680 ideology, you know, people who have an

00:54:51.720 ideology say, this is what I believe, it's

00:54:54.360 like, oh no, no, no, that thing has you in

00:54:57.660 its grip, and you're a puppet, you think,

00:55:00.620 I think this, it's like, no you don't, it

00:55:02.780 thinks you, that's what happens, and you

00:55:05.980 know that, if you, you know, if you look

00:55:07.520 at what happened in places like Nazi

00:55:09.540 Germany, everyone wonders, what the hell

00:55:11.400 happened, man, and what happened there, it's

00:55:13.300 like, well, everybody got possessed by a

00:55:15.360 set of ideas, powerful ideas, right, and

00:55:18.200 they, murderous ideas, genocidal ideas, and

00:55:23.300 you can't say so much that the Germans

00:55:25.520 had those ideas, as you can say that

00:55:27.300 those ideas had the Germans, and the same

00:55:29.620 thing with the Soviet Union, the same

00:55:31.020 thing with Maoist China, anytime you're

00:55:33.140 under the sway of an ideology, something

00:55:35.140 has you, and it's making you play a

00:55:37.360 part, and you might ask, well, well, is

00:55:40.100 that a part you want to play? Hard to

00:55:42.620 say, hard to say what you want, so I'll

00:55:46.720 read this little poem from Marx now, so

00:55:49.260 it was interesting to me, for the reasons

00:55:51.900 that I told you about, that art, poetry

00:55:55.200 is the birthplace of ideas, and ideas can

00:55:58.140 possess you, so it's like, well, what was

00:56:00.040 Marx up to, exactly? Well, maybe we can

00:56:03.740 find out a little bit by reading his

00:56:06.700 poems, his early poem when he was a

00:56:08.760 young man, it's called Invocation of One

00:56:12.860 in Despair. So, a God has snatched from

00:56:19.880 me my all in the curse and rack of

00:56:24.300 destiny. All his worlds are gone beyond

00:56:27.580 recall. Nothing but revenge is left to

00:56:33.380 me. On myself, revenge I'll proudly wreak.

00:56:37.500 On that being, that enthroned Lord, make my

00:56:43.380 strength a patchwork of what's weak, leave

00:56:46.140 my better self without reward. I shall

00:56:50.760 build my throne high overhead, cold,

00:56:54.980 tremendous, shall its summit be. For its

00:56:59.140 bulwark, superstitious dread, for its

00:57:03.200 marshal, blackest agony. Who looks on it with a

00:57:07.700 healthy eye shall turn back, struck, deathly

00:57:11.340 pale and dumb, clutched by blind and chill

00:57:14.400 mortality. May his happiness prepare its

00:57:18.000 tomb. And the Almighty's lightning shall

00:57:21.640 rebound from that massive iron giant. If he

00:57:25.280 brings my walls and tower down, eternity

00:57:28.440 shall raise them up defiant. It's a hell of a

00:57:33.740 poem. Literally. You know, it reminds me, and I

00:57:41.380 haven't done enough background research to

00:57:42.940 find out if there's a connection. It reminds

00:57:44.440 me a lot of the poetry in Paradise Lost. And

00:57:48.380 Paradise Lost is a very famous poem. And it's

00:57:51.020 about the rebellion of Satan against God. And it's

00:57:54.520 an attempt by Milton, like around the canonical

00:57:59.200 Judeo-Christian writings that make up the

00:58:01.780 narrative substructure of our culture. There's a

00:58:05.040 cloud of images and stories that are not really

00:58:08.760 written down, but they're just part of our

00:58:10.440 cultural heritage. The idea of hell, for

00:58:13.280 example, is one. And really the idea of the

00:58:15.140 devil, which is almost discussed not at all in

00:58:17.800 the biblical corpus. Very, very, very, very few

00:58:21.940 references. Almost none. But there's this cloud of

00:58:26.020 ideas about evil and so forth that have

00:58:28.720 aggregated themselves in a poetic sense and an

00:58:31.680 imagistic sense around this core set of

00:58:34.660 narrative writings. And what Milton tried to do

00:58:37.320 was to articulate all those. And that's why he

00:58:40.100 wrote Paradise Lost. And it's about the highest

00:58:43.660 angel in God's heavenly kingdom. Something

00:58:45.880 approximately equivalent to rationality, I would

00:58:48.800 say, attempting to displace what's transcendent

00:58:52.480 with its own kingdom. And in doing that, at

00:58:55.900 least in part, in revenge against God. It's

00:58:59.300 something like that. And this poem really, really

00:59:01.380 reminds me of that. And I don't know if Marx was

00:59:03.840 reading Paradise Lost at that point or not. In some

00:59:09.140 sense, it doesn't matter because Paradise Lost had

00:59:10.900 such a walloping impact on European culture that

00:59:14.060 Marx would have been familiar with its themes

00:59:16.080 implicitly from everything else he read anyways. So,

00:59:19.680 but it's quite a telling poem because the person

00:59:22.980 who wrote it is a very, very angry, desperately

00:59:27.400 angry, you know, and hopeless and then worse, out

00:59:32.900 for revenge. And then worse, out to build a structure

00:59:36.520 that would extract that revenge. It's like, well, you

00:59:41.100 know, what happened with Marx is quite the damn

00:59:43.960 mystery. What, the way his ideas unfolded in the

00:59:46.920 20th century. You know, it's not so obvious

00:59:48.560 why, why, why that happened. And, you know, there

00:59:52.160 was the cover story, and that was the, the

00:59:55.300 compassion story, the compassion for the

00:59:56.940 downtrodden, which is part and parcel of the

00:59:59.040 Marxist story. And then there's the, well, then

01:00:01.960 there's what happened when that hypothetical

01:00:04.500 compassion manifested itself in the world. And

01:00:07.700 that was absolutely brutal. It's brutal beyond

01:00:10.640 comprehension, right? At least a hundred million

01:00:12.940 people died. And we should be clear about what

01:00:16.600 it meant to die. I was, I was, uh, what it meant

01:00:19.720 to die under communism. I was, uh, looking online

01:00:28.540 the other day, um, for critiques of capitalism

01:00:32.940 because it's, it's common now when everybody, when

01:00:36.520 anybody puts forth an argument about the

01:00:39.180 murderousness of communism and the stats that

01:00:42.580 are associated with that, the hundred million

01:00:44.640 deaths, for example, that's from the Black Book of

01:00:47.100 Communism, which is a very good scholarly

01:00:49.400 reference about what happened in the Soviet Union

01:00:51.900 and Maoist China. It's common now that people who

01:00:55.600 are attempting to revive the spirit of Marxism, and

01:00:59.500 there seem to be more of them all the time, uh, to

01:01:02.820 make counterclaims that capitalism killed just as

01:01:05.780 many people. And then they, the, usually the stats

01:01:09.520 are something like X number of people died of

01:01:11.680 starvation and X number of people died because

01:01:14.200 they had lack of, you know, they didn't have access

01:01:16.620 to clean water. They didn't have access to, to

01:01:19.080 proper medication. And so, I mean, if you stack up

01:01:22.460 those deaths beside the deaths that were produced by

01:01:24.900 the communists, then you can, you know, you can, you

01:01:27.940 can even the scales. But it's quite the piece of

01:01:30.860 logic as far as I'm concerned, because there's a big

01:01:33.600 difference between the fact that people die, and even

01:01:37.940 the fact that perhaps they wouldn't have to die if other

01:01:40.280 people intervened and saved them, and actually killing

01:01:43.680 people. Like, that's, seriously man, that's a big difference. And

01:01:48.340 like, and one of the logical flaws there is like, everybody

01:01:51.920 dies. You can't blame that on capitalism. Now, you might be

01:01:56.520 able to say, well, you know, capitalists could have been better

01:02:00.600 at distributing their resources more effectively, so that

01:02:04.340 more people were protected against a mortality that emerged

01:02:08.540 too soon. And, you know, there's, I suppose there's some

01:02:12.240 truth in that critique, because none of us are perfect, and

01:02:16.020 none of our systems are perfect. And perhaps it's possible that

01:02:19.420 those who, over the last hundred years, have generated some

01:02:22.960 excess wealth, could have been more intelligent, and, and what

01:02:27.080 would you say? Intelligent, and wise, and thoughtful, and

01:02:30.460 far-seeing, and done better with their money than they did. Fair

01:02:36.860 enough. But that is not the same as lining people up, and

01:02:40.860 shooting them, and torturing them, and actively killing them. And

01:02:44.860 that's what happened with the communists. And so, we need a...

01:02:48.600 And so, this moral equivalence of the communist system and the

01:03:03.240 capitalist system is, it's preposterous. Now, one of the things

01:03:08.120 that's also quite interesting in that light is what's been

01:03:13.920 happening economically around the world, especially in the last

01:03:17.000 15 years. Because things have really transformed themselves in

01:03:21.500 very interesting ways. So, you know, the wall didn't fall till

01:03:27.080 1989, right? So really, that's when the Second World War ended, as

01:03:30.900 far as I'm concerned, is in 1989. You know, the dramatic part of it

01:03:35.880 ended in 1945, but the Cold War raged until 1989. And that was an

01:03:43.520 extension of World War II. And, you know, there was constantly

01:03:46.560 bubbling up all over the world. It bubbled up in Korea, and it

01:03:49.320 bubbled up in Vietnam, and Cambodia, and throughout Africa, and all

01:03:54.060 through South America, you know, as the capitalists and the

01:03:56.560 communists fought for control over people's psyches, and also their

01:04:02.100 territories. And that didn't really stop until 1989. And so, from then

01:04:08.880 onward, there wasn't the same tremendous pressure from the radical

01:04:14.020 left to warp and twist governments all over the world into the

01:04:19.740 collectivist vision, let's say. And so, what's been the consequence of that?

01:04:28.920 The removal of that ideological pressure, or at least the partial

01:04:32.920 cessation of that ideological pressure? Well, there wasn't a lot of...

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01:06:32.200 There wasn't, things didn't change a lot for a while after that, but that's not

01:06:35.960 surprising. You know, when something falls apart, well, there's going to be a bit

01:06:39.920 of a catastrophe in its aftermath, no matter what it is. And then it takes a while

01:06:43.860 for the new situation to sort of manifest itself. And, you know, what's been

01:06:48.100 happening over the last, let's say, since the year 2000. It's only a decade

01:06:52.560 after the wall fell down. What's been happening since the year 2000 is actually

01:06:56.780 quite miraculous. And so let me lay that out a little bit. So I first figured this

01:07:02.260 out. I worked on a UN committee about four years ago. It was a committee set up by

01:07:07.220 the UN Secretary General to produce a document that was like maybe an overview

01:07:14.220 of something approximating economic, sustainable economic development, whatever

01:07:18.640 that means. It's a hard thing to, what is sustainable is really, really hard to

01:07:24.240 figure out. But that was the idea. And you can kind of see the rationale for that.

01:07:27.940 It's like you don't want to do something today that completely screws you over in a

01:07:31.560 week, right? You don't want to do something in a year that makes things worse

01:07:35.160 five years from now. So if you're sensible, whatever you do today also works

01:07:40.960 tomorrow and next week and next year and 10 years from now, and maybe works for you

01:07:45.180 and your family and your community as well, all at the same time. And so it's

01:07:49.880 trying to operate within that system of multiple constraints that you might

01:07:53.420 regard as something approximating sustainable. So we were trying to wrestle with

01:07:59.580 that. What would it be like? What would it mean to have a sustainable fishery, for

01:08:03.700 example, or maybe a sustainable energy policy, et cetera, et cetera, to start thinking

01:08:09.580 over some reasonably long period of time, which even in itself is even a

01:08:13.700 complicated problem because it's not obvious what period of time you should

01:08:16.900 think over. You might say, well, we should think over a thousand years because we

01:08:20.840 have the long-term vision. It's like you don't know what it's going to be like in

01:08:25.980 10 years. You know, at the rate of tech, the rate of technological

01:08:29.500 transformation right now is so unbelievably extreme that I don't think we can even

01:08:33.540 see very clearly 10 years down the road. So it's hard to plan for like a thousand

01:08:37.280 years, you know. So anyways, that's all very complicated. But we were producing this

01:08:44.160 document and I got the opportunity to, first of all, watch how a document like

01:08:49.880 that was produced. You know, it's like, well, who works on a higher level plan like

01:08:55.940 that? Well, all the people that were on the committee were former heads of states,

01:08:59.420 the people who were technically appointed to the committee. And then they all

01:09:04.360 produced hierarchies of people underneath them who actually worked on the

01:09:07.380 document. Because there are those people, like if you're the ex-president of

01:09:11.160 France, you're busy. You're busy. Like you're moving around, man. You're occupied

01:09:16.440 all the time. You don't have time to spend two years thinking about a new plan for

01:09:22.500 sustainable global development. So even though you might be the figurehead on the

01:09:26.780 committee, you don't do any of the work. And so it gets passed down to the people

01:09:31.000 that you're associated with until it gets to someone who will actually do it.

01:09:36.740 Well, who are those people? Well, they're usually, sometimes they're academics,

01:09:42.100 sometimes they're political bureaucrats. They're people that, for one reason or

01:09:45.560 another, have a little bit of extra time and interest. But none of them are trained

01:09:49.140 to do this. Because no one's trained to produce a global plan for economic

01:09:53.440 sustainable development. Nobody has that training. So none of the people doing it

01:09:57.820 know what the hell they're doing. So, and it's not that surprising because it's a

01:10:02.700 complicated problem. So that was interesting to watch. And then we got the

01:10:06.640 first draft of the document. And it was awful. It was awful. It was like it was

01:10:11.160 written in 1984. It was a Cold War document. It was North against South. You know, the

01:10:16.220 privileged North against the underprivileged South. And it was capitalist

01:10:19.140 against socialist. No sense that, you know, that there could be cooperation

01:10:24.040 between those two ends of the political distribution. No sense that the South was

01:10:28.280 not what it was in 1984. I mean, the developing world has developed a lot since

01:10:32.780 1984 and is developing extraordinarily quickly. And, you know, I mean, is China

01:10:39.020 more of an economic powerhouse than the United States? Well, no. But China plus India

01:10:44.760 might be, you know, I mean, the tide is turned in many ways. So it was unbelievably

01:10:49.700 outdated. So we thought, well, we'd rewrite the narrative and not so much look for

01:10:54.380 oppressors and victims and all of that horrible nonsense, but to see if we could

01:10:59.280 put together a document that was predicated on the idea that everybody could

01:11:02.840 work together in some loose, what would you call it, some loose

01:11:11.040 association of goodwill and that we could make things better instead of just pointing

01:11:15.540 to whose fault everything was. And so we rewrote the underlying narrative. And that

01:11:23.540 was interesting, too, because one of the things I learned, this is a rule that I didn't write

01:11:27.360 in Twelve Rules, but it was one of the possible rules. Opportunity lurks where

01:11:33.360 responsibility has been abdicated. So one of the things you learn if you do that sort of

01:11:39.680 thing, that sort of thing I was talking about, is that if you actually do the

01:11:42.640 writing, then you win. Because for someone to do something about that, they would have

01:11:49.000 to do the writing. And it's just easier just to take what you've written than it

01:11:55.060 is to write a whole different thing. And so you might think, well, why the hell do I

01:11:59.940 have to do the writing? And the answer is, well, because then you get to do the

01:12:03.840 writing. And it's an interesting thing, you know, if you're at work, I mean, I don't

01:12:07.640 think that you should allow people to take advantage of you. I think that's a big

01:12:10.480 mistake. But, you know, if you're angry because excess responsibility has been

01:12:14.640 dumped on you, you know, independent of whether or not you're being taken advantage

01:12:18.540 of, that's a different issue. You might reverse that and think, well, where the

01:12:24.080 responsibility is, that's where the authority is. And if it happens to fall to

01:12:28.220 you, that makes you indispensable, man. That gives you a stake in the game. So that

01:12:35.440 was quite interesting. So I got a chance to read about, I don't know, 200 books in

01:12:40.840 the months that I was working on this document. And most of those were books on

01:12:46.340 economic development, but also on ecological matters, right? So I was

01:12:51.260 interested in climate change and overfishing and deforestation and the

01:12:55.500 demolition of, like, what, decline in speciation, extinction, you know, all the

01:13:02.460 things you hear about that are looming catastrophes that bedevil the human race

01:13:07.180 and the planet, some of which we're responsible for. And I read a bunch,

01:13:11.860 everything I could get my hands on, including books by people like Bjorn

01:13:16.060 Lomborg, who put himself forward as the skeptical environmentalist. I would highly

01:13:19.760 recommend Bjorn Lomborg, by the way. He wrote a book called How to Spend 75

01:13:23.940 Billion Dollars to Make the World a Better Place. And it's a really, really smart

01:13:28.080 book. So, and that's not very much money, by the way, because there's like 7 billion

01:13:32.080 of us, so that's like, what, 75, 10 bucks each. It's just nothing, you know. Mostly

01:13:38.600 what he found was that we shouldn't be concerned about things like climate

01:13:41.400 change, and we shouldn't even be concerned about overfishing, which is a

01:13:44.300 real problem, or deforestation, or any of that. What we should really be concerned

01:13:48.060 with is getting enough nutrition and health care to small children. That the return on

01:13:57.520 that, from an economic perspective, is 250 to 1. And it kind of makes sense, right?

01:14:02.240 Because, you know, out there in the developing world, there's a lot of

01:14:05.100 potential geniuses, let's say. You know, and I'm not trying to elevate geniuses to

01:14:10.300 a point of, what would you say, value among ordinary people. That's not the point

01:14:14.780 I'm making. The point I'm making is that, you know, now and then a genius comes

01:14:19.600 along who offers something to the world that's so absolutely remarkable that

01:14:24.420 everyone is better off for it. And you don't know who that's going to be. It

01:14:28.300 could be any one of those little tiny kids, right? They all have brains. They're

01:14:32.020 all unbelievably complicated creatures. And the fact that they're not all being,

01:14:37.260 what would you say, encouraged. They don't all have the minimal resources

01:14:43.400 necessary to manifest at least their physiological peak is a real catastrophe

01:14:48.720 for everyone. And that's also why the return on investment for early childhood

01:14:55.220 care is so absolutely high. And what Lombard did was say, well, he took a bunch

01:14:59.240 of economists, some Nobel winning, prize winning economists, he took the UN goals.

01:15:04.540 There's about 150 UN development goals, which is way too many. 150 goals is no goals,

01:15:09.960 right? If you have 150 goals, it's like, I'm not talking to you. I'm certainly not

01:15:14.720 working with you. It's like, you have 150 goals. Like, if you have, if you have like

01:15:19.400 two goals, or if you at least have a hierarchy of goals, this is the most

01:15:24.380 important thing. This is the second most important thing. The third most important

01:15:27.760 thing. Well, then we could work together, but 150 goals, you're just a chaotic mess.

01:15:32.420 And the UN actually had 150 goals, and they would not prioritize them because as soon

01:15:38.800 as they prioritized one goal over another, they annoyed the people who had the

01:15:42.140 secondary goal. So why is that goal more important than my goal? Well, some goal has

01:15:47.460 to be more important because we can't do all these things at once. Well, you're not

01:15:51.420 sacrificing my goal. Well, then we can't do anything. Well, that's okay, as long as

01:15:55.580 you don't sacrifice my goal, right? So that's, that's the stasis. And so what

01:15:59.820 Lombard did, because he's smart, is that he took teams of economists, some of them were

01:16:05.200 Nobel prize winning economists, and he said, okay, here's the deal. You've got a finite pot of

01:16:09.940 money, 75 billion. It was 50 to begin with, but he updated it because, you know, time,

01:16:15.420 times went on and inflation knocked the value of the currency down a little bit. And he

01:16:19.860 said, okay, here's the deal. Take these 150 UN goals and analyze them economically and

01:16:27.980 figure out where you get the most bang for the buck. It's like, we're not going to be able

01:16:31.340 to do all 150. We don't have infinite resources. We have finite time. We have finite resources.

01:16:36.500 Prioritize. And so, and the best way to prioritize, use money to prioritize, not because it's such a

01:16:43.760 great way of prioritizing, but because we don't have a better way of doing it. So you can only use

01:16:48.300 the best thing you have at your disposal, no matter how bad it is. And money isn't perfect, but

01:16:53.380 it has its utility. It's a universally accepted standard of value. That's something. And so he said,

01:17:01.840 well, rank order, rank order, the priorities in terms of return on investment, justify how you

01:17:07.140 do the calculations. Then he had all 10 teams do that. And then he averaged across the teams and

01:17:12.780 came up with a final ranking. It was pretty smart, eh? It's like, well, we might as well take our

01:17:17.540 resources and do the most we can with them in the shortest period of time. And so, and what he found

01:17:23.200 out, I think four of the top 10 goals had to do with the improvement of early childhood health around

01:17:28.600 the world. So that was quite cool. It's like, well, what should you be concerned about? Climate

01:17:32.900 change? Doesn't look like it. First of all, you don't know what the hell to do about it. Like, what

01:17:37.380 are you going to do about it? And not only that, the measurement error in climate change is so large

01:17:42.820 50 years out that even if you did whatever it is that you think that you should do now at whatever

01:17:48.620 cost, you wouldn't be able to tell 50 years from now if what you did had any effect because the

01:17:54.100 measurement error is so high that it's going to wash out in the measurement. Now, I'm

01:17:58.540 not saying we shouldn't be concerned about the climate. That's not my point. My point is we

01:18:02.920 don't know what to do about it. And there's a bunch of other problems that we have that are really

01:18:06.600 pressing that we do know what to do about and we could solve them. And so we could solve them

01:18:10.860 effectively and we know how to do it. And well, okay. So, more importantly, more importantly,

01:18:19.000 reading Lomburg, a variety of other people too, and there's been about 10 books published in the last

01:18:23.920 10 years all documenting the same thing. Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now is one of them. And

01:18:29.040 Hans Rosling, who's a great data visualizer, Scandinavian guy, just wrote another book,

01:18:34.300 Facts. I can't remember the name of the book, unfortunately, at the moment, but it's Hans Rosling.

01:18:39.480 And Matt Ridley has written a book as well like this. And there's a number of them. And

01:18:45.280 there's an organization online that tweets constantly, humanprogress.org. And then Matt

01:18:53.060 Ridley does This World in Data. And these people are doing empirical analysis of the rate of economic

01:18:59.700 growth around the world. And since the year 2000, we have been getting richer worldwide at a rate that's

01:19:08.720 absolutely unprecedented in the history of mankind. There's nothing to compare it to. And no one knows.

01:19:15.020 The World in Data people, or was it, was it human, I think it was human progress, did a poll in the

01:19:22.400 United States. So, here's a fact, okay. So, one of the millennia goals, millennium goals, was to have

01:19:28.940 the number of people in absolute poverty between the year 2000 and 2015. Because that's a major league

01:19:36.280 goal, right? Because people have been poor forever. And not just a little poor, like seriously starving

01:19:43.760 poor. There were famines, major famines, in developed countries in Europe in the 20th century.

01:19:50.360 In places like Sweden. In places like Italy. And not just after World War II. Like famine was the norm.

01:19:56.260 And you know, in 1895, the average person in the Western world lived on less than a dollar a day in

01:20:02.340 today's money. Which is less than half of the current UN criteria for absolute poverty. And so that was

01:20:09.500 everyone, man. Everyone up to 1895 was so goddamn poor, you cannot even imagine it. Right? And suffered

01:20:17.280 everything that went along with that. Right? Terrible mortality in childbirth. Right? Terrible mortality for

01:20:23.360 babies. Also for mothers. Right? Very low probability of reaching an old age. You are unbelievably

01:20:30.000 likely, if you were a kid born around, you know, a 10-year-old in 1895, very likely to lose one parent

01:20:36.660 before the age of 10. And pretty damn likely to be without both of them by the time you were 15.

01:20:41.580 And there were hardly any people that were well off. And even the ones that were well off, it's like,

01:20:47.080 they weren't that well off, man. They didn't have toilets. Right? I mean, and everybody laughs about

01:20:52.980 that. It's like, no, no, you don't get it. They didn't have toilets. That's a big problem. And they

01:20:59.040 didn't have central heating. And they didn't have air conditioning. It's like, central heating's a bit...

01:21:03.960 Well, you Canadians. You're all Canadians. You know what it's like. Central heating, man. Yeah.

01:21:08.520 That's good. It stops you from dying for like six months of the year. It's a big deal, you know.

01:21:14.360 And they didn't have refrigeration. You should try living without a refrigerator for a week. You think

01:21:19.480 you're poor. It's like, you're not poor. You have a refrigerator. You're rich, man. That's a...

01:21:24.700 And it's not some little ratty refrigerator that costs you like a year's salary and has one cubic foot

01:21:29.860 of space in it, which was what the first refrigerators were like. It's a great big

01:21:33.380 bloody refrigerator. You can put a whole moose in it. And so, and you think, well, everybody's got a

01:21:38.800 refrigerator. It's not a big deal. It's like, just because everyone has it doesn't mean it's not a

01:21:43.820 big deal. It's a really big deal. You know, and I think it was the people at Human Progress wrote a

01:21:49.700 little essay a while back pointing out that you're probably better off as a member of the, say,

01:21:56.880 you're barely in the middle class. You're probably better off than John Rockefeller was in 1895.

01:22:02.680 So you're better off as a member of, you know, just kind of an entry member, entry-level member of the

01:22:08.620 middle class now than the richest person in the world in 1895. So that's really something to think

01:22:15.220 about. And so, okay, so that's how poor everyone was in 1895. And man, we've been getting richer like,

01:22:21.480 like nobody's business since then. It's been this exponential curve. You know, and some parts of the

01:22:26.220 world got richer first, but, and some people got richer first, but you got to think that through.

01:22:30.980 It's like, well, of course, some countries got richer first. What do you expect? Everybody's

01:22:35.680 going to become, go from not rich at all, absolutely poor. They're just going to make one leap,

01:22:41.540 everyone, all 7 billion people are all of a sudden going to be rich. It's like, that isn't going to be

01:22:45.960 how it works. Some countries were going to get rich first. And within those countries, some people were

01:22:51.640 going to get rich first. But now you think about, you think about the rate of technological advancement

01:22:56.840 that's upon us. You know, it was probably what, 15 years ago, 10 years ago that big screen TVs came

01:23:03.000 out. And when they first came out, they were like, you know, you got a 50 inch TV. It was a status symbol,

01:23:08.240 probably cost you $15,000, something like that. And you know, you got to have one and you got to have

01:23:14.000 one if you were rich. But it was like, four years later, five years later, they're basically free.

01:23:22.540 Right? I mean, how many screens have you guys thrown out in the last five years? Right? It's

01:23:28.620 like, oh no, my screen is this thick. Well, first of all, it was this thick. Oh no, my monitor is too

01:23:33.140 thick. Better throw that away. Well, now it's this thick. Oh no, that's too clunky. Now they're this

01:23:38.220 thick. It's like, they're so cheap, you can just throw them away. And now everybody has a 65 inch

01:23:43.340 screen. And you wouldn't have had those if the rich people wouldn't have had them first. That's

01:23:47.140 the other thing that's kind of interesting about rich people that no one ever thinks about. It's

01:23:50.380 like, rich people are necessary to buy expensive things first. Because otherwise you can't produce

01:23:57.700 a market, you know? Like the people who built the large screen TVs had to sell the first ones for

01:24:02.640 like $25,000 each. So that they could get so cheap that everybody could have them for free. And so this

01:24:09.340 is something I've been thinking about with regards to inequality is that, you know, one of the

01:24:14.820 advantages to making some people, to giving some people large pools of cash or to allow them to

01:24:20.840 accrue that or to encourage them to accrue that is so that when a new consumer product enters the

01:24:25.620 market at a high cost, there's actually a market for it so that the people who produce it can generate

01:24:30.340 enough of them to saturate the wealthy market so they can drive down the price so that everybody else

01:24:34.780 can have them. So what if it was the case that the price all of us pay to have cool things is that

01:24:40.120 there has to be rich people? I mean, it seems, I'm not sure about this. It's an idea that I've been

01:24:45.280 just toying with over the last few months, but it's not obvious to me that it's false. And like,

01:24:50.000 who cares if you have to wait four years for your damn 50-inch flat screen TV? It's not like you're

01:24:54.520 sitting there without a refrigerator. You've got a refrigerator, you know? So, okay, so everybody was

01:25:02.040 bloody dirt, horribly dirt poor in 1895, even in the developed world where, you know, things were

01:25:07.420 better than they were in the rest of the world because in the, it was horrible in the West, but

01:25:12.400 it was absolutely brutally catastrophic everywhere else. And so, and then, you know, this technological

01:25:18.240 miracle occurred and a lot of that's a consequence of free market principles. A lot of it, a huge amount

01:25:23.740 of it. And so, well, you know, we started to get rich and we got richer and richer and richer and

01:25:28.640 richer. And then the gap between the West and the rest of the world grew. And, you know, that allowed

01:25:34.560 for us to criticize ourselves to some degree. It's thought, well, maybe what the West is doing

01:25:39.400 is exploiting everyone and that's why we're rich. And, you know, there's a certain amount of truth to

01:25:44.200 that because no system is perfect. And when you produce a corporation or a government or there's a

01:25:50.900 certain amount of exploitation that's bound to go along with it because no human structures are

01:25:55.920 without their imperfections. But, but in the final analysis, the, the West is rich because

01:26:02.520 it's extracted resources and made the rest of the world poor argument is not correct because

01:26:07.560 everybody started brutally poor. And not only that, everybody started brutally poor and almost

01:26:15.500 everybody suffered under tyrannical governmental structures. And so the baseline for human existence

01:26:22.560 is starvation and catastrophe under the yoke of tyranny. And whenever that isn't happening, it's a

01:26:29.120 bloody miracle. And so you can't just put that at the foot of some system. You can't say, well, that's a

01:26:35.060 consequence of capitalism or the West. It's like, no, it's not. That's the default condition of

01:26:39.480 existence. It's way easier to starve under tyranny than it is to be wealthy and freedom. It's way more

01:26:45.760 likely. And the fact that anybody got to the point where they were free and then also wealthy, it's like

01:26:50.840 we should just be, we should just be constantly amazed beyond comprehension that anything like

01:26:57.560 that ever happened even once. And the cool thing is it's happening everywhere. So the millennium goal

01:27:03.620 for the UN was to have the number of people in absolute poverty from the year 2000 to the 2000,

01:27:08.480 2015. And we did it three years earlier. Think about that. That's half as many people were in absolute

01:27:18.080 privation over a 12-year period. Here's the projection. By the year 2030, there won't be anybody

01:27:24.860 on the planet who's absolutely in poverty. Right? That's 12 years from now, we'll have been done with

01:27:31.420 that. And so that's just, it's just, I can't figure out why that isn't a headline every day.

01:27:38.280 300,000 more people no longer in poverty. Right? That'd be a good headline to wake up to.

01:27:44.720 Here's something that's cool. The child mortality rate in Africa

01:27:49.240 is now the same as the child mortality rate in Europe in 1950. That's how narrow the gap has

01:27:57.180 become. That's a 60-year gap. That's all that's left between the least developed part of the world

01:28:02.680 and the most developed part of the world. So, and the rates of death of women in childbirth have

01:28:09.180 absolutely plummeted around the world. And more and more people have access to fresh water. And

01:28:13.760 more and more people have access to vaccines. And more and more people have access to food.

01:28:19.560 We have enough food for everyone. And here's something else. You know, we're going to overpopulate

01:28:23.500 the planet. We're all going to die. It's like, no, we're not. That's wrong. We're going to peak at

01:28:28.880 9 billion. That's what the demographic projections indicate. Because what seems to have happened,

01:28:33.660 and no one guessed this, all you have to do to bring population under control is educate women.

01:28:39.300 As soon as you educate women, instead of having eight children, you know, four of whom die,

01:28:44.580 they have two children, both of whom survive. Or they have 1.5 children. It's not even replacement.

01:28:50.260 So not only are we going to peak at 9 billion sometime in the next 40 years, but then the population

01:28:56.040 is going to decline precipitously. In 50 years, the big problem will be that there aren't enough people.

01:29:01.060 So when we have enough food to feed all those people, like we're going to have to

01:29:04.820 be careful and continue doing what we're doing, but we have enough food for everybody.

01:29:10.940 And so, and not only that, we're becoming more productive in our ability to generate food all

01:29:15.440 the time. So not only do we have enough already, but food is getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper,

01:29:20.600 and all things considered of higher quality. You know, now that doesn't mean that the quality

01:29:26.100 couldn't be improved, but compared to potato peelings, you know, and gruel, and dirty water,

01:29:36.380 which was like the standard diet for people for a very long period of time, we're not doing

01:29:41.380 too bad. So, okay, so back, we'll go back to Shakespeare. All the world's a stage, right? So what I was doing

01:30:07.380 in some sense with that part of the lecture was setting the stage. You know, you think, well,

01:30:15.200 if you're going to play your part, you should know what the stage is. Like, where are you exactly?

01:30:19.940 What's going on around you? And it's hard to say, you know, and it's very easy to be pessimistic, and I

01:30:25.460 think we're, oh, the human progress people also polled Americans to find out how many people knew that

01:30:32.000 the rate of poverty had fallen by half between the year 2000 and 2012, and 95% of Americans have no idea

01:30:38.500 that that happened. So, and I suspect most of you didn't know that, and I suspect that there's a

01:30:45.460 substantial percentage of you who doubt whether it was actually true, you know, and question, well,

01:30:50.240 were they gerrymandering the definition of absolute poverty? And it's an arbitrary definition, but

01:30:56.040 you've got to define it in some manner, and no matter how you define it, it fell by half.

01:31:02.760 So that's a great thing. So, but people don't know. Why don't they know? I don't know the answer

01:31:11.880 to that. Like, part of me thinks, maybe there's a couple of things going on. One might be, I think

01:31:17.860 one of the things that happened since the 1970s was that the prosperity of the developing world

01:31:25.080 was purchased at the relative expense of the North American and European working class.

01:31:31.740 Because one of the things that you've seen happen since 1970, there's some arguments about this,

01:31:36.340 because your money buys higher quality items now. So even if you have the same amount of money as

01:31:41.800 you did in 1970, the things you can buy are better. So even if you have the same income,

01:31:47.260 it might be that you're richer now. But it's hard to calculate those things. But independent of that,

01:31:52.600 working class wages have remained pretty flat since the 1970s. You know, and the bargain with

01:31:57.160 the working class in North America and in Europe was something like, work hard, and your children

01:32:01.820 will have a better life than you do. And maybe even your future self will be better off than you are

01:32:06.280 now. But that's kind of flatlined. And there's a lot of reasons for it. And so I think what that's

01:32:12.300 done is produce a certain amount of disenchantment in the West that the radical leftist types have

01:32:18.640 been capitalizing on. And so even though all around the world things are getting better at a rate that's

01:32:24.980 so fast that you probably couldn't improve it if you tried, the West seems to be at odds with itself

01:32:31.880 about its moral, what would you say, its morality and its vision and the propriety of its mode of

01:32:41.380 operating in the world. And, you know, I think that's a catastrophe, actually. Because as far as I can

01:32:50.040 tell, the reason that this economic miracle is taking place, and has started, say, since the year 2000,

01:32:55.840 is because the damn radical leftist collectivists lost in 1989. They stopped mucking up the planet.

01:33:04.280 Increasingly, governments around the world are experimenting with free market solutions and a certain

01:33:08.620 amount of freedom. And as a consequence, people are getting rich way faster. You know, that's what happened

01:33:14.400 in China. You know, what happened in China, you know how the open market started to develop, was a bunch of

01:33:21.000 farmers met in secret, collectivized farmers, who were producing nothing and starving as a consequence,

01:33:26.880 met in secret and decided that they were going to parcel out their collective plots privately. And the

01:33:32.600 punishment for doing that was death when they started to do it. But they met clandestinely in secret and

01:33:38.300 they parceled out their plots. And they all decided that you could keep what you grew. And all of a sudden,

01:33:43.980 man, they were producing food like mad. And of course, the authorities got curious about that and

01:33:50.380 found out what they were doing. And, you know, you and began to do what you'd expect the communist

01:33:57.120 totalitarians to do. But they needed the damn food. And so they decided, weirdly enough, to leave these

01:34:06.220 people alone and to encourage that kind of experimentation. And that was the genesis of the origin of the free

01:34:12.660 market experiments in China. It was just a couple of farmers who, you know, took it upon themselves to

01:34:17.620 risk their own lives to try to do something that was actually productive. And so the communists

01:34:24.120 introduced free market principles into the Chinese system. And, well, the rest is history. You know

01:34:28.860 what's happened to China over the last 40 years. It's just, it's a miracle beyond comprehension. Same

01:34:34.060 with South Korea, right? Which was, South Korea was an unbelievably poor place and underdeveloped.

01:34:40.280 And now it's an economic powerhouse. And India, which is completely ungovernable. I mean,

01:34:44.940 you know, we have trouble in Canada with two languages. It's like, I think there's 300 languages

01:34:49.420 in India, right? And an absolute plethora of religious beliefs and an immense population. I mean,

01:34:55.420 it's a complicated place, man. And nonetheless, India, it's like, it's cruising. There aren't people

01:35:01.660 starving. Or if there are, there's a lot fewer than there were, you know? And in China, well,

01:35:06.340 people don't starve. There's, there's plenty of food for everyone in China. It's like,

01:35:10.960 what a miracle that is. Who would have ever guessed that was going to happen? And so we have

01:35:15.960 every reason to be optimistic. And so, all right. So let's say that sets the stage. What's the stage?

01:35:22.080 We're in a world that could continue to radically improve if we don't do anything stupid and muck it up.

01:35:28.820 Right? And so, the thing about this, this poem I read of Marx is like, there's dark motivations in

01:35:35.200 that, you know? Marx pretty much lays out his desire to demolish and destroy. He's vengeful. He wants to

01:35:41.420 tear things down. And I see that as a threat in the West, you know? We don't have, we don't, our

01:35:48.380 institutions, many of our institutions don't seem to either understand what we have or appreciate it or be

01:35:53.920 humbly grateful for it or to regard it as the miracle that it is. And that's very, very dangerous

01:36:00.200 because, because it is a miracle. And it's a particular kind of miracle. And it's this, it's

01:36:06.140 the sort of miracle that I was trying to, I was trying to lay out in dramatic terms, at least in

01:36:11.320 part in 12 Rules for Life. It's like, well, why does, why does what we do in the West work?

01:36:17.820 Well, I think the first reason is, and this is what I think we got really right, and I think

01:36:24.920 in the West we articulated this more comprehensively than had ever been articulated in the history of

01:36:31.500 the world. What's the primary level of analysis when you're trying to understand the structure of

01:36:38.220 reality? Well, that's Shakespeare's point. All the world's a stage and every individual comes out and

01:36:43.780 plays his or her part. That's the right level of analysis. The individual. You set up your society

01:36:50.480 predicated on the idea that the individual is of ultimate value. And that's, to some degree,

01:36:57.240 that's a matter of rights. And here's, here's something I think we've done wrong, technically

01:37:01.860 speaking, in our political systems, probably in our international development as well. When we're

01:37:06.280 talking about the primacy of the individual, we concentrate on rights. But I think that's wrong.

01:37:12.660 I think what we should do is concentrate on responsibility instead. And so.

01:37:24.560 Okay, so it's interesting. So it's interesting, you know, you might ask yourself, well, why would

01:37:29.180 everyone clap about that? You know, well, it's really a serious question because rights, I mean,

01:37:34.380 hey man, that's what you get to do. Like the world's your oyster. It's like, so, well, so why don't

01:37:38.800 clap about that? Well, responsibility, that's a whole different story. It's like, that's a burden

01:37:43.540 for you, man. It's like, get out there and do your part. There's important things for you to do.

01:37:48.520 There's a heavy weight on you. And you need to bear up underneath it. It's like, well, why would you

01:37:53.540 clap about that? Well, it's a good, because, and I'm asking this seriously, because one of the things

01:37:58.640 I've noticed, this has really blown me away. I can't really come to terms with it, is that I've been

01:38:03.880 trying to figure out why what I've been talking about has resonated with people. And there's a

01:38:08.620 technical reason. The technical reason is these new media forms like YouTube and podcasts have

01:38:14.320 enabled long form, like global long form philosophical discussion. That's never happened

01:38:20.340 before, right? TV, you get six minutes or 30 seconds, right? And so if you have a complicated

01:38:26.160 message, you have to soundbite it to 30 seconds or maybe to six minutes. With YouTube and podcasts,

01:38:32.500 you can talk about complicated things for a very long time. And it turns out that people

01:38:36.340 are, want that. Interestingly enough, there's a huge market for that. We're smarter than we

01:38:42.180 thought. Our technologies made us look stupider than we are. So, and I think part of the reason

01:38:48.800 that what I've been doing is successful is because I've been fortunate enough to be an early adopter

01:38:54.320 in a new technological space that was relatively uninhabited. And so that's a useful thing to know.

01:38:59.600 But the other thing that I've noticed, because at the beginning of this talk, I said, you know,

01:39:04.860 I'm always watching individuals when I'm speaking with them, but also listening to the crowd. And one

01:39:09.980 of the things I've noticed is that whenever I talk about responsibility, especially and its relationship

01:39:15.020 with meaning, the crowd goes completely silent. And it's happened in every single venue that I've

01:39:20.280 talked to. And it's a reflection of the fact, the same, it's reflecting the same thing that drove you

01:39:26.100 to applaud when I talked about responsibility. It's like, I think we've talked about rights for so

01:39:30.400 long in the West that we're exhausted by the discourse. And we need the corrective because

01:39:35.920 there are no rights without responsibilities. They're the same thing. Your rights are my

01:39:40.160 responsibilities. They're the same thing. And, and, but there's something that's more,

01:39:44.040 that's deeper, I think, than that. And this is, this is, I think, the other issue that's struck a chord

01:39:51.620 with people. The stage I set, said, you know, you can't lay the suffering of the world at the West,

01:40:01.200 at the feet of the West, because the suffering of the world is built into the structure of the world.

01:40:04.940 Starvation, death, brutality, all of that, that, that's, that's the easy default. That's the state

01:40:12.300 of the world. And it takes tremendous work to, to, to produce a counterposition to that, to make sure

01:40:19.540 that everyone has enough, and to make sure that our institutions are, are free and, and flourishing.

01:40:24.660 That's hard. And so, so it's hard to do it practically, but it's also hard to do it psychologically,

01:40:31.520 because if the state of the world, the fundamental bottom level of reality is something like

01:40:37.440 suffering, I think it's suffering tainted with malevolence, it's something like that,

01:40:41.520 then you also need something psychological to set against that. Or you end up in a situation like

01:40:46.360 Marx, you know, where he's outraged at the structure of the world and desires to wreak havoc and take

01:40:51.180 revenge as a consequence, which he seems to have done extraordinarily effectively. If you don't have

01:40:56.760 that meaning, then it's very difficult to, to reconcile yourself to the conditions of existence,

01:41:02.680 right? Because even if you're fortunate, and as we all are, even if you're fortunate, your life is

01:41:08.280 still very hard, you know, you're, you're, you're fragile in all sorts of ways, so is your family,

01:41:12.720 you're going to face the death of the people that you love, and, and yourself for that matter, and,

01:41:16.400 and there's going to be some bloody rough times along the way, and they'll be rough enough so that

01:41:20.060 they'll make you feel like shaking your hand at the sky and just asking what the hell's going on,

01:41:24.600 you know, and so you need something to set against that, you need a meaning to set against that, to

01:41:29.860 justify your life in the face of that suffering, and I think that that's why people are happy about

01:41:37.100 the discussion of responsibility, because it's actually not rights that give your life meaning,

01:41:43.440 it's responsibility, and, and to know the connection between responsibility and meaning,

01:41:49.340 especially once you know the connection between meaning and the antidote to suffering,

01:41:54.160 it's like, well, what's the antidote to suffering? Well, it isn't lack of suffering, man,

01:41:59.580 because that ain't happening, so, I mean, you can stave it off, and the less starvation, the better,

01:42:05.840 let's say, but fundamentally, there's an eradicable amount of suffering that's going to be associated

01:42:10.100 with your life, well, you need something to set against that, something that, it's a vision that's

01:42:15.480 sufficiently noble to make the suffering worthwhile, something like that, even to yourself,

01:42:20.660 to stop you from becoming bitter, and then you think, well, where do you find that meaning? It's

01:42:24.800 not in your rights, your rights allow you to do whatever you want, and doing whatever you want is

01:42:31.180 actually, that's sort of what an impulsive teenager does, you know, just do whatever you want, it's like,

01:42:37.440 no, that isn't how it works, you can tell that by looking at people that you admire, or even looking

01:42:43.860 at yourself when you admire yourself in those rare moments that you might dare to do that,

01:42:47.600 you know, it's like, well, who do you look up to? Well, you certainly don't look up to people that

01:42:53.080 don't take care of themselves, for starters, like, if someone has to take care of you as a grown man,

01:42:58.820 it's like, that's, I mean, unless you've been cut off at the knees, you know, unless some terrible

01:43:03.420 tragedy has befallen you, you're just not living up to your responsibility, and your cost, you're not

01:43:08.920 who you could be, and you're taking from someone else, no one admires that, unless you're a psychopath,

01:43:14.140 no one admires that, well, that's what psychopaths do, and so, you know, they might find that admirable,

01:43:19.500 but no one else does, and they're relatively rare, and they're generally not very successful, so it's

01:43:23.960 a bad strategy, so, well, you have to keep running away if you're a psychopath, because people figure

01:43:29.580 out who you are, and then they won't have anything to do with you, so if you're a psychopath, you're a

01:43:33.540 nomad, and, and, you know, you can go around being a parasite, and it sort of works, but not really,

01:43:39.500 and so, it's, it's not the attitude to, to found a whole state on, let's say, or a family, or a relationship

01:43:45.540 with yourself, and so, you admire people spontaneously that take responsibility for themselves, but then,

01:43:52.540 that's not all of it, you know, the people you really admire, you think, well, he's a good man, or she's a good

01:43:58.300 woman, and, and not only, you know, is she, is she sensible, and, and, and secure in herself, but she's got

01:44:05.880 something left over for her family, so she's conducting her life responsibly, and taking care

01:44:11.720 of her family, it's like, good for her, and under difficult circumstances, and then, maybe you meet

01:44:16.700 someone who's even gone a little farther than that, and they kind of got their own life under control,

01:44:20.900 and they've got their family's life put in pretty decent order, and then they have a little left over

01:44:26.320 for the community, right, so they're out there trying to do decent things, and, you know, most of the people

01:44:31.060 that I've met, not everyone, but most of the people that I've met, who have excess wealth, and I've met

01:44:36.340 a lot of people like that now, especially in places like Silicon Valley, most of those people spend a

01:44:41.600 substantial amount of time trying to figure out what good things they could do with their excess

01:44:45.640 money, and it isn't because they're good people, exactly, although sometimes that's the reason, it's

01:44:51.260 because it's actually, if you have money, well, what are you going to do, how many yachts do you need,

01:44:56.580 one is more than enough, you don't even want to have one, actually, because they're more trouble

01:45:01.280 than they're worth, but if you have one, you certainly don't need two, it's like, what are you

01:45:05.680 going to do, well, maybe you could do something useful with your money, you know, maybe there's

01:45:10.580 people that, whose careers you could help foster, maybe there's a business that you could build,

01:45:14.680 there's some, some major problem in the world that you could try to solve, Bill Gates, you know,

01:45:19.660 he's trying to kick the slats out of the five biggest transmissible diseases, that's a hell of a

01:45:24.900 thing, maybe we should give him 60 billion dollars, it's like, which we already did, it's like, you

01:45:30.200 know, but he gave us these personal computers in return, which wasn't such a bad trade, and now he's

01:45:34.940 off there trying to get rid of malaria, well, if the cost of getting rid of malaria is that Bill Gates

01:45:40.380 has to have 60 billion dollars, it's like, that's a pretty good, that's a pretty good bargain, and he's

01:45:44.860 actually making headway, you know, we'll probably get rid of polio in the next couple of years, if the

01:45:48.840 bloody Islamic terrorists would stop harassing people who are doing vaccinations, we'd already have that

01:45:54.080 done, but we might be able to get rid of the five big transmissible diseases in the next 15 years,

01:45:59.380 that'd be a hell of an accomplishment, and so, you know, you, you've got the responsibility for you,

01:46:04.880 you've got responsibility for your family, if you want it, you've got responsibility for your community,

01:46:09.120 and you can have people finger wagging at you, saying, you know, you should take your, you should

01:46:13.500 take your responsibility seriously, and that just produces a kind of, who are you to tell me what to

01:46:20.060 do, sort of response, you know, and, and, and I think that's where the conservatives have fallen

01:46:24.440 down, the classic conservatives, because they get a bit finger waggy, and, and, and fundamentalist about

01:46:29.660 the whole thing, and, but it, you can make a much better case, you can say, look, life's rough, man, for

01:46:35.240 you and everyone else, and you could do something about that, you, like, you couldn't do everything

01:46:40.440 about it, but you could, you could definitely do something about it, and you could certainly make it a

01:46:44.520 hell of a lot worse, that's in your power, so you can make it worse for you, and for everyone else,

01:46:49.700 that's, you've got that, if you want it, you could at least not do that, that would be something,

01:46:56.640 and then, well, that would be something, like, you could just refrain from making things worse,

01:47:01.520 that'd be a nice start, but then you could really push yourself a bit, and think, no, no,

01:47:05.380 I'm actually going to aim to make things better, I'm going to take, and, and the way I'm going to do

01:47:10.100 that is to take responsibility, so here's, there's a couple of great ideas that the West has,

01:47:15.160 so the first idea is, the individual is sovereign, there's something divine about each person,

01:47:21.320 there's a locus of ability in each person, that's so valuable, that the integrity of the state itself

01:47:27.920 should be founded on recognition of that, and that, that is one of the great and miraculous human

01:47:35.380 ideas, to think that's the case for everyone, is, it's amazing that anybody ever came up with that

01:47:41.820 idea, and, and, and even more amazing that we basically all share that idea, and that we founded

01:47:46.320 our state on it, and that it works, it works, you found a state on that idea, it works, and then

01:47:50.900 associated with that idea is that that sovereign individual has a sovereign ethical responsibility,

01:47:56.780 twofold, one is to work diligently to eliminate unnecessary suffering in the world, you certainly do

01:48:04.700 that if you're taking care of your family, right, I mean, you want to protect your children from undue

01:48:09.460 suffering, not from everything, not from challenge, certainly, but from, from base misery, you know,

01:48:16.200 and that, the same for you, and perhaps the same for your community, and the other thing to do is to

01:48:21.740 constrain malevolence, right, to work to eradicate evil in you, first in you, first and foremost in you,

01:48:30.920 that's a big enough job, man, you constrain it in yourself, you'll start to constrain it everywhere

01:48:35.680 else, you wrestle with that in yourself, and so that's, that's expressed in the New Testament

01:48:40.300 story of, at least in part of Christ encountering Satan in the desert, right, and, and what, foregoing the

01:48:46.820 temptations of power in order to constrain malevolence, but it's portrayed as a psychological drama, and so that's

01:48:52.920 responsibility, it's like, well, the world is a bitter place in many ways, and the bitterness is made worse by the

01:48:58.620 malevolence of you, and everyone else, and, and so what do you, and, and then that can drive you to despair,

01:49:03.840 certainly, drive you to madness, right, and worse, it can drive you to murder, it can drive you to genocide,

01:49:10.700 it can drive you to torture, like, and it does, and it's not surprising, well, what do you do about that,

01:49:16.100 and you do an about face, and you think, the world is characterized by suffering and malevolence,

01:49:22.020 but the meaning, there's meaning to be had, and the meaning to be had is in the responsibility, and the

01:49:27.800 responsibility is to alleviate the suffering, and constrain the malevolence, and that, that, that puts an aim in

01:49:33.720 your life, and weirdly, this is so strange, this is the strange part of it, is that if you turn around and you

01:49:39.420 adopt that responsibility, despite its daunting nature, voluntarily, then that instantly produces the meaning that works as a

01:49:46.580 medication against the suffering, even if you don't dispense with the suffering, it's like, at least you have a

01:49:51.340 challenge that's worth living for, right, Nietzsche said, he who has a why can bear any how, it's like, so,

01:50:00.720 and I'll end with this, I figured something out the other day, and it took me like 30 years to figure this

01:50:06.000 out, so, some of you, some of you have watched my lectures, and you know, I lecture about Pinocchio, for

01:50:13.180 example, and there's a deep mythological idea in Pinocchio, and the idea is that you should, you should

01:50:18.680 rescue your father from the belly of the beast, it's something like that, and so I've been thinking about that, it's like, well,

01:50:26.320 why would the spirit of your father be lying latent in the belly of a beast, what, what possible sense would that make, and you all

01:50:32.920 know this is true, you know this, because you watch things like Pinocchio, and you watch a puppet, marionette, who's being pulled by

01:50:39.820 strings that aren't his, descend to the depths of chaos, and rescue his father, and that makes sense to you, who knows

01:50:46.700 why, but it does, and you watch the Lion King, and you see the same thing with Simba, because when he undergoes his

01:50:52.500 maturation transformation at the end of the movie, he follows the shaman down into the depths of the jungle path, and

01:50:58.260 looks in the reflective pool into the depths, and then sees his father echoed in the sky, and his father tells him to remember

01:51:04.840 who he is, and that's fine with you, you, you gather that, it, it makes sense archetypally, the question is why, okay, so

01:51:11.880 here's, here's a, here's an idea, so you need to confront challenges, that's how you grow, that's how you become

01:51:19.040 stronger, the clinical evidence for that is clear, then you can think of the notion of challenge itself, so that's also

01:51:24.980 part of the stage setting, the notion of challenge itself is that you, you stand on the abyss, and you face the abyss, right, and

01:51:30.860 that's your own death, for that matter, that's the suffering, and the malevolence of the world, the darkness of the

01:51:35.900 world, and in the darkness, you see a terrible monster, and that's a thing that will take you down, and then you go

01:51:41.800 down there into it, and what happens when you get inside it, is you find the spirit of your dead father, and what

01:51:46.940 does that mean? Well, one of the things we know is that if you face things, you get stronger, now it's partly

01:51:54.160 because you learn, now you, you never learn without difficulty, right, because you have to, you learn by

01:51:59.500 facing challenges that you haven't yet faced, and so it's difficult, you get more informed as you face

01:52:05.240 challenges that you haven't faced, so there gets to be more to you, you get to be more like a complete

01:52:10.520 human being, right, you get to be more like the embodiment of the ancestral spirits, it's something

01:52:15.620 like that, by, by, by challenging yourself, so your question is, well, what would you become if you face the

01:52:21.240 ultimate challenge properly, we'd become the ancestral father, it's something like that, but

01:52:26.240 there's something even more remarkable about this, so one of the things that biologists have figured

01:52:30.620 out, neurologists and geneticists have figured out in the last 10 years, this is so cool, if you go to

01:52:37.480 somewhere that you haven't been, so you challenge yourself, new genes, genes that haven't been turned

01:52:43.460 on in your brain turn on, and they code for new proteins, and they make new structures, and so part of your

01:52:49.260 potential, because you have potential, whatever the hell that means, part of your potential is locked in

01:52:55.220 your genetic code, and it won't turn on until you put yourself in a situation of challenge, and so you

01:53:01.640 actually transform physiologically as a consequence of facing things voluntarily, you turn, you turn

01:53:07.640 parts of you that aren't on, on, and so the question might be, well, if you face a little challenge,

01:53:13.740 parts of you turn on, and you learn, if you face a bigger challenge, even more of that happens, you

01:53:20.120 know that if you go to the gym, the heavier the weights you lift, the more you start to develop,

01:53:23.960 assuming you're careful, and it's not that mysterious, the question would be, well, who would you be if

01:53:29.740 you faced the ultimate challenge, and the answer to that would be, well, you would be everything you

01:53:34.420 could be, and the question then would be, well, who would you be if you could be everything you could

01:53:38.840 be, and the answer to that would be, you would be the person that could tolerate the tragedy of being,

01:53:43.520 that's who you'd be, you'd be the person who would take responsibility for that, you'd be the person

01:53:48.340 that would constrain the malevolence in your own heart, and work for the betterment of being,

01:53:53.280 that's who you would be, that's why your father is to be found in the bottom of the abyss. Thank you.

01:53:59.260 What do you think, man? 45 done. Now, what do we got? Like, another 40 coming, 16 stops in Europe.

01:54:17.120 The revolution has begun, huh?

01:54:19.160 Yeah, 40 more cities, probably, something like that, or maybe more over the next six months.

01:54:26.440 Lots, lots of cities. What are you going to do in August? You're going to relax a little bit?

01:54:32.900 Yeah, I think so, I think so. I've got, I've got a talk in Regina on the 14th, and one in Saskatoon

01:54:39.720 on the 16th, so it's this leg that's finished, but I don't have any other public talks during that

01:54:44.640 period of time until September 5th, and then we start going down the east coast, right, because we've got

01:54:48.600 20 cities lined up along the east coast, smaller cities. Partly, what I'm going to do is,

01:54:56.440 I was just figuring this out today, I had the great honor of being asked to write the introduction

01:55:04.520 to the 50th anniversary version of the Gulag Archipelago, which is going to be published

01:55:10.540 in 2000, in the fall.

01:55:12.520 And so, I finished that, I finished that today and got it off, so that was, that was good. And I heard

01:55:25.000 from the Solzhenitsyn family this week, and they were very happy with the introduction, so that was a

01:55:29.880 big deal, because it was a daunting task to write something that vaguely deserved to be associated with

01:55:39.160 a book like that. And one of the things we're going to do to publicize, I suppose,

01:55:46.520 the existence of the new version, it's also the 100th anniversary of Solzhenitsyn's birth this year,

01:55:54.440 and so those two things dovetailed very nicely, is I'm going to read the introduction as a YouTube

01:56:00.040 video, and I'm going to make a, I'm going to put images with it. So I'm going to spend, I think that'll be

01:56:05.400 fun, because I like editing video, it's really challenging and interesting, and so I'll put

01:56:09.560 together a little documentary and get that ready for release in November, and I think that would be

01:56:13.720 a relatively, I wouldn't call it entertaining thing to do for the next while, but it'll be very engaging.

01:56:19.400 And we're, we're working on getting the videos out from the Sam Harris talks, and so that should

01:56:27.480 happen in the next little while. We're trying, trying to figure out how to distribute them properly,

01:56:34.920 and, and what to do with them, and I'm going to New York tomorrow, and I'm going to speak to,

01:56:41.400 I'm going to be on, PBS invited me, which is quite strange, because the liberal left media has had

01:56:48.120 nothing to do with me, except the odd, well, more than odd hit piece, and you know, they're basically

01:56:55.640 continuous, but I'm going to be on Frontline tomorrow, next day, and then on a Fox show after

01:57:00.760 that, so that's New York. And I'm working on negotiating the contract for my next books,

01:57:07.640 as well, this month, so. You do realize the question I asked you is, how do you relax?

01:57:13.240 Well, you know, I really, I really enjoy this tour, but it's, you know, there's no time for error,

01:57:23.640 there's no space for, for mistakes, and my wife and I have been touring, and she's been extraordinarily

01:57:29.480 helpful, and keeping everything on track, so just not having that responsibility for travel,

01:57:37.400 and, and this, at the end of the day, will be relaxing, and I'm less, I'm also less stressed

01:57:44.920 about the media noise around me, because, you know, for a long time, it's gone, it's gone like this,

01:57:53.240 and I've never been sure if I was going to get taken out by something like that New York Times piece,

01:57:57.960 but so far, I haven't been taken out, and it doesn't look like, I will never say that.

01:58:07.400 It isn't obvious that the situation is getting worse for me.

01:58:23.560 Someone, someone I know says, choose your words carefully. I think we just saw it right there.

01:58:28.040 Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah, don't tempt fate, that's for sure.

01:58:30.520 All right, you know I'm starting with this one, because it has come up at every Canadian.

01:58:34.760 Stop, when will you run for prime minister?

01:58:45.800 Actually, it came up in America too, but...

01:58:47.960 It did, yeah. Yeah, it did. They're going to inflict, they're going to inflict me on,

01:58:52.680 on all, on unsuspecting Canadians.

01:58:55.080 A, it isn't clear I'm qualified. It isn't, I haven't had a political career. I'm not a professional

01:59:04.280 administrator. There's a trillion things I don't know about how to run something complicated,

01:59:09.000 like a modern economy. So that's, and it would be a daunting learning curve. B, I can't speak French

01:59:15.960 very well. C, I have all these other things that I'm doing that seem to be important. And maybe they're,

01:59:24.520 they're more, maybe I'm more suited for them. I mean, one of the things I'm working on right now,

01:59:28.680 some of you know this perhaps, is that I wanted to build something approximating an online university.

01:59:35.080 And so I hired some people to do that recently. There's three of us, three people hired, very,

01:59:39.240 very smart kids, very technologically savvy, man. They can solve problems like it's just nobody's

01:59:45.240 business. It's really something to see. And we want to build a universal education system,

01:59:52.040 not a university, but something broader than that, because we thought there's no sense restricting it to

01:59:57.080 the age range that would be in university. There's, there's just no reason to do that. So we want to

02:00:03.000 build a universal education system that will provide a high quality university equivalent education

02:00:10.440 for something between one-tenth and one-one-hundredth the cost with no administrative overhead and with

02:00:16.760 and, and more importantly, we're going to set it up so that it will be impossible to mess with the

02:00:30.520 grading scheme. No ideological interference with the grading scheme. None.

02:00:35.640 And so that project is, perversely enough, actually ahead of schedule, which really

02:00:48.360 staggers me, because we've only been working on it for about three months full-time, but we're a year

02:00:54.600 ahead of where I thought we'd be at this point. And so that's very exciting, and, and I'm very interested

02:00:59.720 in devoting a substantial amount of time to that. And so there's all these projects that I would have to

02:01:04.200 put on hold if I decided to do something political, and it isn't obvious to me that that would be

02:01:11.240 smart. So I think I'll just keep doing what I'm doing, at least for the foreseeable future.

02:01:23.160 For the record, I think we can all agree if Trudeau can do it, he can do it, right?

02:01:26.360 I'm going to drag you into this thing, kicking and screaming one way or another.

02:01:37.160 Yeah, I don't know if that was a compliment, by the way.

02:01:39.000 Any advice for a parent navigating their children through the digital age?

02:01:49.960 Yeah, that's a tough one, man. Well, I, I've had some friends who, with teenagers,

02:02:02.520 and they've run into vicious trouble because of what's happened with their kids online. Like,

02:02:06.520 just absolutely horrible trouble. You know, because a kid can get in trouble online in ways that,

02:02:12.600 well, so can adults, obviously. But imagine if you were 13. Imagine this, eh? And you wrote down

02:02:19.800 what you thought and let everybody know. It's like, that's bad enough, man. Don't do that.

02:02:25.960 And then you wrote it down in a way that could never be erased.

02:02:31.560 And then everything you did was recorded so you could never forget it for the rest of your life.

02:02:37.000 Jesus, that's so dismal, man. Like, the best thing about being 13 is that you get to forget it.

02:02:42.600 So, I don't know. I've been, I've been talking to my friends and the people who have been affected

02:02:49.880 by this, trying to figure out what to do. And it's really hard because, you know, you can't,

02:02:55.960 your kids, teenagers, they're pretty sad little specimens if they don't have a smartphone,

02:03:03.720 you know, in the broader culture. So, it doesn't look like something that's, that's easy to deny them.

02:03:10.040 They also don't pick up the technological prowess then. And that's a mistake because, like,

02:03:14.280 you better know how to use one of these things because otherwise you're just gone. You're lost.

02:03:18.680 But the technology is so dangerous. So,

02:03:26.840 you know, when I talked to my kids about experimenting with illicit substances,

02:03:31.320 I said, look, you're probably going to experiment, but if you're stoned, I don't want to know it.

02:03:41.720 So, if you're experimenting, you better keep yourself under control well enough so I can't

02:03:46.280 tell that you're screwed up because otherwise you're not handling it properly. And so, well,

02:03:52.760 that seems to me to be about, right, like, what the hell are you going to do? You're going to say,

02:03:55.840 don't experiment. It's like, I mean, we're going to make pot legal. It's already 95% there. So,

02:04:06.160 it's, it's pretty hypocritical to give that advice. But you can help your kids. The rule's got to be

02:04:11.440 something like, don't do so, don't do something so damn stupid that you ruin the rest of your life.

02:04:16.640 Right? That's the fundamental rule with regards to playing with fire. And maybe you can help your

02:04:21.760 kids, maybe you can help make your kids sensible enough so that they won't make any fatal errors

02:04:28.320 playing with complicated technology. You know, but I'm just as happy that my kids are old enough now so

02:04:35.600 that they're not facing this. The world was pretty digitized when they were, because they were 24 and 26,

02:04:40.880 you know, 10 years ago, social media was still around, but not like it is now. So,

02:04:50.960 don't have any easy answers for that, unfortunately.

02:04:56.000 Do you think you moved Sam Harris at all during your four talks?

02:05:03.520 Oh yeah, I think so. But I think he moved me too. You know, I mean,

02:05:08.720 Harris is not an unreasonable guy. He's a very articulate spokesperson for a particular perspective,

02:05:14.800 a powerful perspective. The materialistic atheist perspective is an unbelievably powerful perspective.

02:05:20.880 So, and he's very good at articulating it. And Sam's heart is in the right place, as far as I'm

02:05:27.280 concerned. Like, the reason that he wants to ground ethics in facts is so that we have a solid ethical

02:05:33.840 structure. You know, I just don't think that, I don't think that the answers that he provides

02:05:41.040 are sufficiently, I think they're low resolution and they don't have sufficient poetic power.

02:05:50.880 And that's a big problem. Because he overvalues rationality. And I don't think we should undervalue

02:05:59.840 it. I'm certainly a fan of the enlightenment. I mean, I'm a scientist. I use rational means all

02:06:05.760 the time. And I try to be very clear in what I write and say. But rationality is embedded in the body.

02:06:15.680 And the body is something that's far more complicated than mere rationality. And it requires poetry and

02:06:21.040 art. And it requires narrative. And it requires wisdom and dance and music and art. And all of those

02:06:29.040 things that the rationalists tend to think of as mere epiphenomena of something more fundamental. And they're

02:06:34.400 wrong. They've got it backwards. And so, it isn't that I fault Sam for why he's doing what he's doing.

02:06:43.360 He would like to see the sum total of suffering in the world reduced. And he's terrified of religious

02:06:49.520 fundamentalism. And no wonder. But I don't think that the answer provided by the materialist atheists

02:06:56.560 has the motivational potency to serve as a bulwark against nihilism or totalitarianism.

02:07:04.960 And so, that's why we differ. And we had a real conversation. You know, it lasted 10 hours,

02:07:11.920 four sessions, 10 hours. And, you know, we hit each other, I would say, as hard as we could. You know,

02:07:19.920 also noting that we were trying to work towards the same end, which was clearer discourse. And

02:07:25.520 and some development of some vision about how to proceed with this terrible problem of meaning.

02:07:33.040 But it wasn't like he didn't listen. You know? I mean, it was a real conversation. And I think we're

02:07:41.280 both more articulate than we were before the conversation. Like this thing that I talked about

02:07:48.240 tonight, why the father is in the belly of the beast. I don't think I would have figured that out

02:07:52.160 if I wouldn't have talked to Sam for 10 hours. And like, I'm really happy I figured that out. That's a,

02:07:57.440 that's, that blew me away when I finally realized why that image existed. It's, that's really

02:08:02.400 something. You know? And that's, that's why it's useful to engage with people who are of good faith,

02:08:08.480 who have opinions that are different from yours. That's thinking. That's what thinking is. And

02:08:14.880 thinking gets you places, places you need to go. So it was definitely worthwhile. And yes,

02:08:20.080 I think we were both moved by it. And I think the audience was as well. So.

02:08:27.360 We know some of your heroes who are long gone. Do you have any living heroes?

02:08:32.240 Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

02:08:50.880 Living heroes is rough because it takes a long time to figure out if someone's a hero.

02:08:55.040 You know? I mean, I have people that I respect and scientists, particularly, and lots of great

02:09:00.240 scientists. But it takes a long time to establish a reputation, like a real reputation. And so,

02:09:05.280 usually by the time you do, you're dead, which is kind of unfortunate. And so, so, but Ali, for sure.

02:09:12.160 I mean, I thought her book, Infidel, was a staggering piece of work. And she's insanely brave.

02:09:19.360 You know? And now and then you see these people that, you know, Douglas Murray's like that. Murray,

02:09:23.760 he's got a spine of steel, that guy. It's really something to meet him because he's very affable,

02:09:28.640 eagle-less guy, you know, not arrogant, soft-spoken. But if he has his mindset on something,

02:09:41.840 there is no move in him. And it's really something to meet people like that. You know,

02:09:46.000 they're quite rare. Lindsay Shepard, the girl from Wilfrid Laurier, I certainly admire her. I mean,

02:09:55.200 she's young. She's just a kid, really. You know, early 20s. And the university brought everything

02:10:01.600 it had to bear on her. And she basically crossed her arms and said, I'm not moving. And then didn't.

02:10:09.920 And that's good for her, man. Impressive.

02:10:22.480 Oh, man, there's a lot of good stuff here.

02:10:27.760 Boxers or briefs?

02:10:28.720 He asked me this before. I told him, the reason I wear pants is so that I don't have to answer that

02:10:38.400 question. Don't point at me. These are the questions there. I know. And that one comes up a lot.

02:10:47.360 Is there one public policy that you could enact in Canada that you think might fix things?

02:11:03.200 No, not one. No, it's too complicated. And besides, you don't fix things. That isn't how things work.

02:11:11.120 You know, what you do is you look at a problem. And then the deeper, the more you look at it,

02:11:18.160 the more micro problems you see that it's made of. Right? Because, you know, there's this old

02:11:24.960 story that if you cut off the head of a hydra, then six more heads grow. Well, that's the world.

02:11:30.160 That's why that's a hero myth. It's like, you face a problem, and you find out that it's a whole set of

02:11:34.880 problems. And then you look at each problem, and you see that's a whole set of problems. That's the

02:11:38.800 problem with ideology, because ideology says, we can solve all those problems at once. It's like,

02:11:43.440 no, you can't. You don't even know what the damn problem is. It's like, the problems are

02:11:47.440 really complicated. They're really, really, really, really complicated. And so, you know,

02:11:53.280 I would have, I would have a method. I liked Lomberg's method. It's like, okay, well,

02:11:58.080 the first thing we would do is say, well, what are the problems? You know, what are the big problems

02:12:03.680 facing Canada? The gender wage gap? That's not one of them. Okay. So,

02:12:14.080 despite, despite the fact that it was referenced, the gender was referenced 385 times in the federal

02:12:20.800 budget, you know. So, well, what are the problems? Well, that's, that's a hard problem. And I'm not

02:12:26.160 being dismissive about that, or treacherous intellectually. There's a man named Hans Isaac,

02:12:32.880 who wrote a great book called Genius. And he, he's a great psychologist, was the world's most

02:12:36.880 cited psychologist for a long time. One of the things he pointed out was that the most difficult

02:12:41.440 cognitive problem is to formulate the problem properly. Because if you formulate a problem

02:12:49.120 properly, you're a fair ways to solving it. So, the first question would be, it's like, well,

02:12:54.240 what are the problems that confront us as a nation? Well, what you do is you'd, you'd do some

02:12:59.760 information gathering to find out. You'd have people, experts, and common people. Everyone's

02:13:05.440 like, well, what are the problems? What, what's wrong with us that we could fix? Well, then you'd,

02:13:10.960 you'd gather a nice conglomeration of problems. And you'd think, okay, well,

02:13:19.040 how would we rank order these problems? And could we generate sets of solutions to them? And then could

02:13:24.080 we test different solutions to see if they would work? So, I would say that the way to solve complex

02:13:29.520 problems is to have a complex problem-solving methodology. And social scientists, scientists

02:13:35.760 in general, have a complex problem-solving methodology. Specify the problem, generate

02:13:40.960 hypotheses about how it might be solved, test a variety of variants to see which ones work, specify

02:13:46.880 your outcome measures properly. That's how things should be handled. And so, I would never think that

02:13:52.240 there is one thing that could be done. Because that's, that isn't how the world works, man. It's,

02:13:59.920 it's, problems are complicated. They're high resolution. And generally, what you do is solve

02:14:05.120 micro-problems partially. But if you do a bunch of that, things get better. Like, it works. Incremental,

02:14:10.320 and that's, you know, that's one of the lessons in 12 rules for life, is don't underestimate the utility

02:14:15.200 of incremental improvement. It's, you, because it starts to compound. So, it's okay to focus on

02:14:22.240 a problem and decompose it into a micro-problem until you, you're biting off exactly as much as you

02:14:27.040 can chew. Fix that. Then you'll be able to fix the next thing, and then you'll be able to fix the next

02:14:31.680 thing. And so, it's a method. And, and it would be application of that method that would be the solution to the

02:14:38.160 problem. Yeah. This is interesting. As a therapist, have you ever been in therapy?

02:14:54.080 No. Well, look. Yet, it's complicated. Because, um, I would say the answer to that is yes and no.

02:15:03.360 No. Uh, one of the things I learned from reading Carl Jung, Jung said, um,

02:15:11.840 moral effort is a substitute for therapy. Something like that. Well, that's because

02:15:17.040 therapy is actually a moral process. Why? Well, because you go to a therapist because

02:15:22.560 your life isn't what it could be by your own proclamation, right? And that might be a physical

02:15:29.840 thing. You might be ill, and that has to be sorted out because people get sick. And, you know,

02:15:35.440 there's lots of variants of depression and other disorders, too, that are

02:15:39.760 mostly a consequence of physical illness of one form or another. And so, that has to be sorted out.

02:15:45.040 But then, people make strategic errors, and they don't have a well-developed vision for their life

02:15:49.680 and all of that. So, you help people through that. And, you know, I did a lot of analysis of my own

02:15:54.880 dreams and a lot of writing and thinking about things. And so, um, and I have a lot of communication

02:16:02.080 with my wife and my friends as well. My wife in particular, I would say. And that's been deeply

02:16:09.520 therapeutic in the rough sense. I mean, in the harsh sense, because, you know, we really have a

02:16:16.560 close relationship, but it's a combative relationship. You know, like, she doesn't

02:16:22.000 stand for any nonsense. And neither do I. And so that, and her less than me, even, I would say.

02:16:28.640 Which is a good thing. It was funny. The kids used to come over to our house,

02:16:32.160 you know, when they were teenagers. And we liked that. We liked our teenagers, oddly enough. And, um,

02:16:38.320 we liked having their friends over. But there was a rule in our house, and all their friends knew it,

02:16:43.600 which was, you are welcome here. Really. But if you do something stupid, and we never have to see

02:16:49.040 you again as a consequence, that's perfectly okay with both of us. And so, and when the kids first

02:16:56.160 came over, they were, first came over and didn't know the house very well, they were mostly afraid

02:17:00.720 of me. But after they'd been there for about a month, they were mostly afraid of Tammy.

02:17:08.080 So that's therapy, man. That's a relationship, right?

02:17:10.480 Yeah. Yeah, it is. Because you, you, you're, you're stupid and ignorant. And so is your partner.

02:17:15.200 And if you bash yourself against each other long enough, you both get tempered a bit.

02:17:19.440 And maybe you're, you're a little smarter than, a little wiser than you might otherwise be. Because

02:17:23.920 you had to take that other person into account. And they had to take you into account. And you have

02:17:28.080 to solve difficult problems together. And, and so that's been good. Like, we fought a lot.

02:17:32.880 Hard fights, and, and, and vicious fights, often. But productive. You know, because

02:17:37.920 the goal of the fight was to not to have to have the fight again.

02:17:42.960 And, and those are hard fights, man. Because sometimes they're about deep things. Problems

02:17:48.160 in life. Problems that you're carrying forward as a flawed personality. Problems that are part

02:17:53.600 and parcel of your being because of your screwed up family. You know, because you carry multi-generational

02:17:59.360 pathology forward with you. Um, and so that relationship has been very therapeutic, I would

02:18:06.480 say. So, as I said, yes and no.

02:18:10.160 Tami's here, by the way. Give it up for Tami. She's here somewhere.

02:18:12.720 Oh, I like this one. Yeah, well, one thing about that too. Like, because we, we put each other

02:18:27.760 through the mill, I would say. And to some degree, because life also did that. Our daughter was very

02:18:33.200 ill for a long time. And so that was challenging. Um, we've been able to do what we've been doing for

02:18:40.480 the last 60 days. Like, we've had a very intense schedule and under very stressful circumstances.

02:18:45.920 And we don't, we're fortunate in that we're not carrying so much excess relationship baggage with

02:18:53.600 us that that is compromising our ability to do this. And so that's, that's been extraordinarily helpful.

02:19:00.640 The, the combat, you know, that straightens things out is, it's, it's, it's tense and it's conflictual.

02:19:07.520 And people avoid that sort of thing all the time. And they're really, it's okay. It doesn't matter.

02:19:10.800 We don't have to fight about that. It's like, that's such a lie. It's like, yes, you do. You

02:19:15.040 have to, you have to, you have to fight about it. You have to straighten it out. And people avoid that

02:19:19.280 like mad. And then the disagreements accumulate. Then they turn into a terrible monster and they eat

02:19:24.800 you. And then you're in divorce court for like 15 years, scrapping over your kids while you give

02:19:29.120 your lawyers $300,000. And then, then you have the fights you didn't have, you know, and it's,

02:19:35.520 it's expensive and horrible. Yeah. It's, I mean, I've seen plenty of this. I'm a therapist. I've seen

02:19:39.920 plenty of this. When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

02:19:55.520 Well, it varied. I mean, I remember, I don't know if I should tell you this, but I'm going to anyways,

02:20:01.920 because I told a reporter this at Toronto Life and he made a, you know, he, he didn't treat it

02:20:10.000 kindly, let's say. He was kind of a son of a bitch that time. Well, it's funny because he was kind of

02:20:17.960 a gifted writer. He could actually write, but he didn't have any confidence in his own ability or

02:20:22.080 that of his audience. So he would tell a story about me, which was like an accurate story.

02:20:25.780 And then he would write like a paragraph about what you should think about what you just read,

02:20:31.700 which isn't what you do if you're a good writer, right? What you do is you just tell the story and

02:20:35.400 you let your audience make up their own mind. But he couldn't do that. He'd tell the story,

02:20:39.280 which he could do. He did his research. And then he'd say, well, here's how you should think about

02:20:43.560 this if you were a good person. It's like, so when he wrote this piece, which I wasn't very happy

02:20:48.480 about, because I was very, I think, kind to him and welcoming and honest. And, you know, he wrote

02:20:55.020 this nasty little piece. And I wrote to him, I said, you know, you're, you, you, you perverted

02:21:01.600 your own talent because you're actually a pretty damn good writer. And yet you didn't have enough

02:21:05.020 confidence in your ability or that of your audience to separate the wheat from the chaff.

02:21:09.560 You had to tell them what good thinking people should think. Anyways, when I was a kid,

02:21:14.720 one of the first political memories I have is, is Robert Kennedy's assassination. And I followed

02:21:24.340 that. I think it was only about six when that happened. I might even have been younger, but I

02:21:27.680 think it was six because it was quite shocking. And I remember his funeral and there were hordes

02:21:34.960 of people at his funeral. And I thought, I'll have a funeral like that. And I don't really know what to

02:21:39.940 make of that because it was a hell of a thing for a six-year-old kid to think, you know? So I don't

02:21:44.900 know where that thought came from. And, but, but it is an early memory. And he, he assumed, he assumed

02:21:51.280 that that meant that I was narcissistic. And I don't really think that's the issue. It's like Kennedy

02:21:55.760 was shot. That's not exactly the sort of thing that you'd hope for. So, so, but I always had some

02:22:02.500 sense, I suppose, that I was going to be involved in large scale enterprises of one form or another.

02:22:12.860 And I worked for the NDP when I was a kid from the time I was 13 till the time I was 16. I ran for

02:22:18.000 vice president of the Alberta NDP when I was 14. And, and I wrote my own speech despite what people

02:22:25.640 thought. And so I, I, I, I thought about a political career for a long time. I thought

02:22:33.700 about a scientific career. And then I decided that I was going to work as a psychologist. And all those

02:22:40.320 things have come true to some degree. I mean, there's a political element to what I've, I've been

02:22:44.320 doing sort of secondarily, but that's, that, well, that's, that was sort of the scope of my ambition

02:22:54.200 when I was a kid. So I think it was partly my father's doing, you know, because my father was

02:23:01.000 unbelievably, my father is unbelievably good with little kids. He, he's really, he's got a gift for

02:23:08.040 it, you know. And I think that I've learned that from him because I really like little kids and we

02:23:14.080 get along great. I get along with little kids right away. I get along with teenagers too. And my dad

02:23:18.440 wasn't so good about that. He didn't really trust teenagers. But, um, one of the things my father

02:23:25.400 instilled in me or allowed to develop in me was he had an unshakable confidence that I could do

02:23:32.220 whatever I set my mind to. And he completely believed that. Now he was a harsh guy, man. Like

02:23:38.160 he had high standards and it was a weird, weird living with him because he thought that I could do

02:23:43.980 whatever I set my mind to, but nothing I ever did was good enough. Well, it's a funny, it's a really

02:23:50.740 funny crucible, you know, because on the one hand, it's extremely encouraging. And on the other hand,

02:23:55.740 it's hard because you never, you never, you never good enough. And, but, you know, maybe that's not a

02:24:02.940 bad combination. It, it might be that, because you need judgment in your life and how, who knows how high

02:24:09.320 you should set the standards. It's like, what makes you think that what you're doing is good enough?

02:24:13.720 Maybe you could do better. So should I be on the side of you that's doing good enough? Or should I

02:24:19.360 be on the side of you that could be doing better? And he was, he was a disagreeable, my dad, he's still

02:24:24.800 alive. He's a disagreeable guy. You know, he's not currying favor. It's like, and there's some, that's an

02:24:31.380 admirable trait, even though it's got its harsh side. So, because it would have been a relief to me

02:24:36.240 as a kid to have been able to do something that was good enough, you know. And I'm not complaining

02:24:43.700 about this. It's genuine mystery to me. But that was certainly offset entirely by his belief that I

02:24:52.020 could do whatever I set my mind to. So he gave me a kind of unshakable fundamental confidence, I would

02:24:58.400 say. And, and it, that's been a great gift to me. And one of the things I've seen too is, one of the things

02:25:04.120 that people tell me a lot in this tour, they thank me for the encouragement, you know, because I am

02:25:11.700 lecturing to people and suggesting that they could be more than they are, and that that's really part of

02:25:16.220 them. And many, many people thank me for that. And one of the things I've realized is that not being encouraged

02:25:24.380 sufficiently is the norm. And I can't say that was my lot. I was encouraged sufficiently. So that was,

02:25:32.540 that was a great gift that I had from my parents.

02:25:36.380 Way to go, Dad.

02:25:37.220 Well, I just want to say to you guys, if you think Jordan has affected you, try traveling the world

02:25:52.780 with him for two and a half months, and having him look at you while he's answering a lot of these

02:25:57.780 questions. And I've said it to you privately, but I am a better person now than when we started this

02:26:03.940 thing. And I think it's important.

02:26:06.000 No, there was lots of room for him.

02:26:07.320 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:26:12.360 Sorry, Dave, you set yourself up for that one, man.

02:26:14.780 I taught him a little comedic timing, too. So give and take. Really, this has been the,

02:26:20.580 as we end this leg of it, and now we're going to take a month off. This has been just the,

02:26:25.740 I mean, professionally, the thrill of my life. But personally, it's been, it's moved me, truly.

02:26:30.180 It's moved me, and I thank you for that. And on that note, I'm going to get out of the way

02:26:34.520 and make some noise for Jordan Peterson, everybody.

02:26:44.600 If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up Dad's books,

02:26:48.620 Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 Rules for Life,

02:26:52.800 and Antidote to Chaos. Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the

02:26:57.160 Jordan B. Peterson podcast. See jordanbpeterson.com for audio, ebook, and text links,

02:27:02.820 or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. Also, subscribe to his email list if you're on

02:27:07.880 his website. I really hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please leave a rating at

02:27:12.880 Apple Podcasts, a comment, a review, or share this episode with a friend. Next week's episode is

02:27:18.420 another 12 Rules for Life lecture from Regina, Saskatchewan, recorded on August 14th, 2018.

02:27:24.600 We're still making our way through the 12 Rules Canadian Tour. Hopefully, you're enjoying it.

02:27:30.080 Talk to you next week. More updates then. Hopefully, good ones.

02:27:34.260 Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson,

02:27:40.660 on Facebook, at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram, at Jordan.B. Peterson.

02:27:46.920 Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events,

02:27:53.680 and my list of recommended books can be found on my website, JordanBPeterson.com.

02:27:59.640 My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their pasts,

02:28:04.420 understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future,

02:28:09.700 can be found at SelfAuthoring.com. That's SelfAuthoring.com.

02:28:14.700 From the Westwood One Podcast Network.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - September 01, 2019

The World is Your Oyster

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